Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

When the human’s soul had been torn from his body, it left behind more than just an empty vessel. It left a treasure trove of words, ripe for the taking. As her soul settled into his stolen flesh, she found the human tongue to be a curious thing, the organ was blunt and clumsy compared to her own forked, flickering one, yet the words it could produce were delicate and powerful. They came to her as naturally as breath.

With a single invocation, she could call down the very power of the human gods. A barked command would send his neophytes scurrying to obey.

And within the dusty recesses of the human abbey, trapped in parchment, lay the voices of the dead. Words that defined the world, categorized its threats, detailed her kind and many others in detail, and the cunning devices and spells needed to destroy them. The humans had written their will across the world, forcing the 'monsters' into the dark. She found kobolds under the section marked 'vermin'.

But the most precious word of all? Lytar. A name. Female kobolds rarely deserved naming, other than as 'you' or perhaps, 'breeder' if the males felt generous. But 'Lytar' was someone; a paladin of reverence.

Nobody questioned the words or actions of Paladin, no matter how clumsy her entry into human society had been. She was sanctioned by God himself and thus, by definition, anything she did was the 'right thing to do'. When she glutted her new body on the human's vast stores of food and wine, the acolytes had simply regarded it as a newly christened religious feast. When she slept through the morning vespers, it must surely be a holy day of rest.

Lytar was her favorite word. She loved the way it sounded when her acolytes moaned it in bed.

But words could cut both ways, and the Abbot had many dangerous ones, such as, "What happened to that soul gem I sent you to destroy, Lytar?" Or "What was Celeste doing in your bedchambers last night?". Or "There's an awful lot of pregnant nuns around here these days."

Most chillingly was when the old man would furrow his brow. "You've changed, boy..."

He was even spreading his dangerous words in letters to his superiors. He had to go.

She located a fitting vessel, a member of her own kind scavenging for scraps among the middens. While the rest of the congregation prayed at evening compline, she trapped the Abbot in his quarters.

"What is the meaning of this, boy?!" he bellowed as she pinned his old, frail body down, and placed the soulstone before his horrified eyes. The stone began to draw out his soul, and he clamped his mouth shut around the start of a scream, mumbling helplessly as the golden soul-glow began to pour up from his throat.

She rested a knee on his back, forcing the air from his lungs and his soul from his mouth in a gasp. The tiny glowing ball plunged into the fractured gemstone and out the other side, implanting itself in the kobold's body. The ex-priest screamed shrilly, raising a clawed hand in a futile attempt to smite her with holy fire.

"I don't think your god can hear you all the way down there," she sniggered, grabbing his entire torso within her fist and tossing him on the desk. "Now, you're going to tell me all about those letters you've been sending. Who were they to and when are they arriving?"