Anonymous Reflection

Avrik the Bleeder

I was surrounded an expanse with little color. There was no visible sky, and the landscape was nothing but rubble scattered from what appeared to have once been civilization. The horizon was tinted with red and the scarlet light was falling on the fragments of a dark recent past, casting ominous shadows across the ground.

“This was my home,” he began in a voice of his which I did not recognize. It was a voice of sorrow and regret, and although his dramatic image still terrified me, I still felt pity for him as he told me of his past.

“I lived here, with my kind, in peace. I lived, like many of us did, a simple life. I grew up in a society not completely different than yours, although in a universe which was altogether separate.

“The end of this world around us was marked far from here, where the lights you fear were born of sickness. A virus, not constrained to the mere physical symptoms of those in this world, but one which affected us into the depths of our minds, spread quickly and as a harbinger of our demise. But the end of my world was marked here. This is where the only people I had ever known were crushed and scattered into the winds of chaos.”

The scene changed and there were bleeders running amok through the streets between crumbling stone buildings which had just been dust. Some were crazed with the horrible white light in their eyes, lashing out at anything and everything. Some were slumped on the corners and in the alleys, their faces buried in their hands, as if to hide the light. Some were lying unresponsive in the streets, contorted and limp with shadow black flowing from their eyes. None could be seen staying close to another, except for one who was kneeling beside one of the limp bodies.

Avrik pointed to the one kneeling and the one who lay dead, saying, “That was me, and that was the man who had been trying to explain what had afflicted us. It was something more than just an epidemic. Nobody knew where it came from, and nobody would ever live long enough to find out.

“Those who were brave died first. He was brave; he knew what it was and how it worked. But I was afraid. I was always afraid, and that is why I lived. Fear was what stopped the light in our eyes from destroying us. Fear of the unknown, and of death: it drove us into anarchy.”

The buildings became dust again, drifting away with the rest of the environment until the air cleared. There was a gaping hole in the rocky ground and from it came a color which I could not name. It glowed softly around the edges and did not bring fear to me. Bleeders were gathered around it, and one fell in, evaporating and disappearing.

“We had known of your world, not in detail, but by passage through these, which some believed were the source of the disease. These had been a part of our culture for centuries and had been approached only by the mystic outcasts of our society. Once the terror struck us, some would madly cast themselves through the portal, desperately seeking relief from the fear that was keeping them alive.

“I, too, left our dying world, with nothing left to live for. But the world we found on the other side was not expected. Most were lost in the passage between worlds, but some such as me fell into any object which would contain us,” he paused for a moment as the white lights seemed to randomly appear in my world and flow into metals and animals and electronic devices, and also into people from contact with affected objects.

“This dimension has transformed us into a form which conformed to the physics of this world, forcing us into an energy state, which was found to decay and kill us unless it was in a mind, which leaves a great empty space for memory. It was in memory that we could survive, and it was with your fear that we could relieve ourselves. We discovered how to interact with your mind and feed.”

We were in a dark bedroom, where a young man of about my age was tossing and turning in his bed. He was crying, but more so with anger than fear or sadness.

“I was one of them, for a long time. I fed in the mind of young Dale Morgan. All I wanted was to pity myself and rid myself of my own fear. But Dale was not normal in the sense that he didn’t know what to do. He forced himself to sleep at night and in his dreams where I haunted him, he fought me as much as he could, and he became stronger.

“I never thought to let up; I was blind. I had no appreciation for his resistance until he stopped fearing me. I had plagued him so many times that he became less and less responsive to my visits. I slowly began to die without his fear, and became weak living on my own fear. I started to see what I had become: a pitiful and selfish thing.

“I felt convicted and guilty, and I was ashamed of what I had become. I had changed him in a way which practically ruined the ambitious future he had before I came. I had made him bitter and angry at something he could not fight very well, and it pushed other people away from him. Eventually, my guilt surpassed my will to live, and I resolved to give him the satisfaction of ending me.

“He very nearly killed me in that dream, where I confronted him in the form I take in your mind. He took me by the neck and attempted to strangle me, which could not physically happen in a mind, but in its representation of one person killing another, he was closing to getting rid of me. But he was confused because I did not resist, and he loosened and demanded I tell him who I was.

“I’ve told him more than I’ve told you, since I did, after all, live in his mind for a long time. It was after he recognized the fears in a student at his college that he realized there were more. And it was after that student committed suicide a few months later that he realized my knowledge and his mobility in this world seemed almost destiny in the eradication of my people, who have become too dangerous to save.”

We were back in the café, and his eyes were still glowing. Every single person around us was staring at him. They, being me in one way or another, were as terrified as I was. But I was terrified and intrigued at the same time, which was a little confusing.

“And my eyes, they are empty because I have learned to control my fear. I have had to be afraid or feed on your fear in its moments to stay alive, but when you woke the other night after my intervention I extended my time by slowly killing that one and feeding on his fear as he died.”

He paused for a moment, allowing me to digest the information as his eyes faded back to their empty state. I sat down, completely stunned. I had just experienced a very overwhelming ordeal. He had gone from stranger to bleeder to Avrik, and now he was Avrik the Bleeder: the troubled creature destined to kill what remained of his fallen people.