Witchbound Villain: Infinite Loop
278 – Ensoulment

Morgan Le Fay described her death and rebirth not as some divine transcendence or poetic transformation, but as something deeply unpleasant. Not painful in the way fire or blades are—but painful nonetheless. It was raw. Unfiltered. The kind of vulnerable that strips you down past dignity and dumps you there, conscious and watching.

“When do you think a soul enters a fetus?” she asked Burn casually, like one might ask the weather forecast.

“Hmm… 120 days after conception?” Burn muttered, clearly dredging from some half-remembered academic paper. “Didn’t Vision Mages from Saint Lucia Academy figure that out? Ensoulment kicks in around that time?”

“Yes,” Morgan nodded, far too serene for someone discussing soul mechanics. “Normal pregnancies stabilize around that point. The fetus begins to grow faster—about five to six inches long, a third of a pound, give or take. Major organs are formed, albeit not exactly ready for a dinner party.”

“Yeah, they start hearing things, kicking around… even the toenails show up by then…” Burn trailed off, already seeing the horrifying dot-to-dot she was about to draw.

And of course, she connected them. “That’s when I come back,” Morgan said.

Burn winced. “So, after you die… you just—what? Wake up in a womb?”

“Yes,” she smiled, entirely too gentle for someone admitting she respawns in uteruses.

“Fully sentient?” he asked again, praying for a “no.”

“Absolutely,” she confirmed, still smiling.

Burn made a face like he’d just licked a lemon dipped in existential horror. “So, just… waiting around for one of Elle’s descendants to have sex with someone fertile, and then—ta-da—you’re a fetus again?”

“Exactly. Elle had quite the bloodline, and lucky for me, they’re not exactly celibate. So usually, I don’t have to wait too long between lives.”

Burn gave a slow, defeated nod. “Right. So, you die—get your soul wrung out of your corpse like a wet rag—and then poof, fetal awareness.”

“Well,” Morgan added dryly, “there’s also the in-between part.”

Burn blinked. “There’s an in-between?”

“There’s always an in-between,” she sighed. “Not quite a void. More like… my soul gets scattered. Thin. Like mist caught in wind. I drift—across air, water, stone, sometimes space, just waiting to be called back.”

He said nothing. Just listened. Grim. Still.

Because of course, when your body’s in pain, your soul feels it. And when your soul is injured? The body reacts. Burn knew that truth intimately. Soulnaught Syndrome didn’t let him forget.

So now imagine: your body dies and you don’t leave it cleanly. You feel your flesh rot. You feel yourself dissolve. And then your essence floats around like sad stardust until some lucky Elle-based zygote is available.

And the kicker? She feels all of it.

“You remember your theory about Soulnaught Syndrome?” Morgan asked, already halfway into the autopsy of Burn’s trauma. “Now that we’ve more or less confirmed it—Merlin snatched the thing that binds your body and soul during your Ensoulment. Around 120 days in. That’s why you were born broken.”

“Yes,” Burn said. They still had no idea why Merlin did it—Lancelot blamed it on Merlin’s twisted spiritual enlightenment or whatever, but Morgan’s immortality seemed to offer a possible clue.

“Unlike me,” Morgan continued, “your soul couldn’t stay. But mine doesn’t get a choice. I’m stuck here, leashed to this realm like a… ghost with a paperwork addiction, haha. My connection to this world’s flesh is so deep, I don’t leave—I… recycle?”

Her body may rot, but her soul? It clings. To the wind. The dirt. The sea. To every atom that once said, “This is Morgan.”

“That thing you had to artificially stitch together by devouring merfolk and unicorn flesh to become you today…” Morgan tilted her head. “I had that built in. Naturally. No mythical buffet required.”

And thanks to that innate connection, she could draw from her soul infinitely—without snapping her body like a twig. Soul energy itself was infinite. The problem was always the poor, breakable flesh trying to contain it.

Which is what made Burn’s and her case so tragic. Most people’s soul-to-body link breaks upon death. His was never properly made. Hers, however, refused to sever.

“So when you said Merlin helped you ‘escape the cycle’—you meant…?”

“He taught me to be a real Vision Mage,” Morgan replied, like she was telling someone how to knit. “To channel Vision mana, keep my body from aging, and eventually build a body using only my soul.”

A functional immortal vessel. Crude, perhaps, but permanent.

The cost was that her Elysian traits vanished, and what remained… wasn’t built for glory. It was shaped by her soul—not biology, not talent. Not even taste.

She wasn’t a Force Master. She wasn’t born with the right tools. Her reconstructed body was more like a placeholder. A stand-in. A mannequin animated by sheer metaphysical will.

A soul does what it can with what it has. And Morgan’s did its best.

But the end result? A vessel not built to live—just to last.

“So, we understand how it works now, right?” Morgan said slowly, like a teacher wrapping up a particularly disturbing anatomy lesson.

Burn looked down, eyes heavy with guilt. “I’m sorry for asking.”

She exhaled sharply with a sharp, theatrical “—ha…” and then, as if summoned by cosmic irony, immediately frowned and groaned like a tragic opera heroine. “Owwwwww…”

One hand flew to her abdomen. Her complexion dropped to the shade of death-by-cramps.

Burn, clearly alarmed, reached over and began rubbing her lower back. His hand, broad and steady, traced slow circles with enough pressure to maybe not help, but at least feel like it was trying.

“Suddenly menstruating is… hngg…” she winced through the hormonal maelstrom now tearing through her body like a riot. “Forget it. I need to stretch before I implode from this scratching, stabbing hell—”

“Let’s get you some comfort food,” Burn offered. “Rich, fatty soup. Blood-heavy dishes. Roasted marrow?”

He said it like it was romantic.

She grinned through her misery. “Will you carry me?”

“I will,” he said without missing a beat. “But first, stretch like you promised. I’ll assist.”

The elves had congratulated her for finally being able to menstruate—because, apparently, in some circles, that was cause for celebration. Although it came with the sensation of being slowly gutted by a celestial sewing needle. Delightful.

Still, Morgan was ecstatic. Because this meant something.

It meant last month, she had ovulated. The sperm hadn’t caught yet—much to her body’s disappointment—but the point stood.

After a lifetime in a limp, infertile shell, and centuries reconstructed into a passable but barely-human immortal body, her biology was finally… doing something right. For the first time, she could—maybe, eventually—carry a child.

That was thrilling.

She was, perhaps, becoming a real human being. Slowly. Gradually. Painfully. But surely.

“Right… we have to buy pads.”

“Noted,” Burn replied, the image of supportiveness.

“And… someone needs to fix the cabin.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“I should enchant the mountain…”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ll enchant every individual brick later.”

Burn burst out laughing. “Fine, Miss Momo.”

In the middle of all this domestic chaos and reproductive triumph, the two of them somehow forgot that the mythical world around them was actively falling apart.

But hey—priorities.

They stepped out of the cabin—or rather, he stepped, while she played the damsel in distress in his arms. Her head rested on his shoulder, her face tucked neatly into the crook of his neck like she’d found the one place in the universe that made sense.

Then he leapt into the sky, because walking was apparently too pedestrian, and landed gracefully near the city that glittered down the hilly mountainside like a scattered pile of jewels.

Morgan broke the silence with a hypothetical laced in dry irony. “What would’ve happened if you hadn’t mistaken my period for a pregnancy?”

“I might not have told you anything at all, and…”

“Oh? You’d just leave me? No explanation?”

“...”

“Or marry me, conveniently forgetting to mention we’re ‘siblings’?”

“Yes.”

Well, at least he was honest about the potential trainwrecks he was ready to commit to. Either way, if he hadn’t thought she was pregnant, this conversation—and perhaps their entire fragile peace—would not be happening.

Morgan smiled as they touched down.

“So this nonexistent baby saved us and the world from nuclear misunderstanding, huh?” she said, dry as dust.

Burn didn’t reply, but he was visibly red—blushing from the tips of his ears to the base of his neck like a man caught fantasizing mid-sermon.

“What will you name him?” she asked, softly this time, eyes brimming with something tender and terrifying—love, longing, maybe a bit of maternal delusion.

“Him? Why would I want a brat?” Burn deadpanned, immediately retreating into his fortress of sulky denial.

“Pfft—just name him already!” Morgan laughed and launched a full-on assault of kisses, pecks landing on his face like affectionate machine-gun fire.

He endured the onslaught, braved himself with the stoicism of a man walking through flames and narrowed his eyes through the bombardment.

“Mor…” he muttered.

Her eyes widened. “After my name?!”

“Mordred,” he declared, as if that solved everything and was somehow the most logical choice in the world.

Morgan was suddenly at a loss for words.

Honestly, she should’ve expected that.