The Beast (Experimental Artsy-Horror-Short Story)

The Beast

Fitting Songs:

SH3 – Never Forgive Me, Never Forget Me

SH – Tears of...

How cold the day is, that you chose for this trip,

how deep the evening runs, the setting sun above your head.

You cannot remember why you chose to walk through the forest this evening,

you only know that you must.

You do not know this path, you only know that you must walk it.

Like a strange attraction, a feeling in your head,

Like a brick beneath your chest, as if your spine could not bear to turn the other way.

A flicker in your heart, a pain like a needle at mere thought of standing still.

As you walk this path, you can feel the coarse stony ground tremble beneath your feet,

spawning cracking sounds as if you walked on bones.

Every step, you can hear them – crumbling, breaking, pushing against your feet as you step on them, a strange sensation like a lust engulfing you.

You know why you’re here.

You remember now.

They told you not to look.

To stay away.

Fiction - Empathist's Downfall

Disclaimers:

1) This is an Archived post, it was originally written and published in 2013

2) This is a side story for my fictional universe for which no comprehensive unifying work exists. But it may be interesting anyway.

Klick. The broadcast ended, leaving several dozens of people baffled. The tallest man in their ranks flapped to the ground. Karen slowly turned her head, looking at the man sitting on the ground, hanging his head. “Mastakov, who was that woman?” she mumbled. Slowly the tall man looked up “That, was Pan Laifgaim. And he was a colleague of mine. No! A friend. Once, a long time ago.” tears started to run down his face “Thousands of years ago, he was there with me when we split the world, and made new rules for it.” Karen was baffled. This was the first time she had seen that man cry. The very man that appointed so many people as new wardens to watch the world in his stead, the very man that had let them run into their misery, question themselves and allowed them to hurt others. Seeing that man just sit there, with tears on his face was not only new, it was also unreal, like something not meant to be that way. “That Karen, was a Temporal Herald.” said Senzaro, a young man of about Karen's size. He walked up to Karen and laid his hand on her shoulder “And don't worry about the pronouns, remember, we're not a bigendered culture, and as we are practically genderless, so is that man, if you want to call him that. He describes the empathist's downfall, he is what happens when Timewardens move away from their path of empathy. When they have to fill the hole in their hearts with something else.” quickly Karen turned around, facing the man “What is it about this empathy thing anyway?” she turned around to face the rest of the group of people in the room. Another young man with scruffy dark brown hair, a much smaller white haired boy in the corner of the room, silently watching the scene, and a woman with orange hair, about a head smaller than Karen. Her girlfriend Mina. “Cydric” she looked at the boy in the corner “you told me this culture is about empathy and love, how can people like that man exist? That sadist talked about killing my people, and trampling over their corpses without so much as a whimper.”