The Tree

The Meeting

When humans look at each other what do they see? I ponder this as I sit staring at a group of jittery caffeine induced college students at a coffee shop. Do they know that some of the people they encounter aren't human? I knew the answer was no, they simply live life because that's what normal people do. How can I be so sure? Because I have traveled this Earth for centuries and no one ever questioned my humanity but they should. What am I? I am a person's worst nightmare. I am the one who collects souls, who takes ill mannered children, who hears your secrets and tells the world. I am a slaugh, secret, quiet, living amongst them despite the fact that I'm not alive. I try to blend in, I try to make myself look and act like the humans, but deep down the battle of being a slaugh never dissipates. Hospitals, parks, school yards, daycares I can't go near these places. The moment I see a dying person, someone who should be punished for a crime but hasn't or a child who is not behaving, I can't control the impulse to give into my nature, the spirit form that steals souls. .

I try to focus on day to day life, but it's hard to pretend when in order to survive you must do the very thing you can't stand...taking the life of a human. You hear their last thoughts, their unfulfilled dreams, their wants and desires. Their whimper, the last breath they will ever take...and you took it from them. I am death. I am evil. I desire not to be...but I must partake to live. I justify my needs by taking only the lives of those who need to be punished, that's why I work at a prison and moved to America, where the prisons are overcrowded. No one realizes when one low life criminal is dead or gone and better yet no one cares. I can easily cover it up by antagonizing the inmates against each other for I love gossip, and we all know not all gossip has to be true. To frame them is easy and the government simply looks at it as saving money. I've become a pro at deceiving the humans that I so long to be.

My human form is deceiving, it changes as the desires of a society changes. If a society values women who are skinny, blonde haired and blue eyed that is what I become, if they desire a woman who is voluminous, brown haired and brown eyed that is what I become. I am what people desire the irony between the living and the dead, what you want may just kill you. What most people don't realize is the closer you are to what you want and not just what you need the closer you lay to death.

In the past I had a friend named Soren, he was famous for his ideals concerning death, of which I helped him to develop, a gift I was overjoyed to pass to him, most modern people know him as Kierkegaard. He and I would discuss death on any given day and into the wee hours of the night, for me it was freeing for him enlightening. He was someone who was willing to listen to the darkest secrets of my very existence and was not afraid. He always said I was a dark being but he never knew what he was saying was the truth he meant I was somewhat deranged but I knew he was just seeing me for what I really was. I treasured his friendship, in a way I loved him deeper than my own clan, he was the only one who understood me. His life was short and I was the one who collected his soul something I wept over for a few decades. I knew I shouldn't have gone to his house that afternoon, I knew he was going to pass, I felt it with each day we spent together like the pulling of days off a calendar, but I had to see him one last time. When I saw the west window open to his room I flew in and loomed above him with the darkness so dark that you couldn't see through. I hovered above his body hissing the noise of death. He trembled and breathed heavily while gasping for help. I dove deep inside as he screamed and cringed in pain and retrieved his soul, devouring it. For Soren there was no heaven just hell, I stole his soul from him and replaced it with an eternity of meaninglessness and torment. It was the most unfulfilling life I had ever consumed and my heart ached. It was this event that turned me into what I am today. I killed my best friend, I took what I didn't want to take from him, his life. I am evil. I decided I wasn't going to kill anyone who didn't deserve to die. Not taking life wasn't an option, a slaugh must devour souls to continue to live but I refused to take the innocence of mankind any longer. My clan was disgusted with my behavior, and declared me a degenerate. I didn't care and left to America where no one would judge me. I didn't know that, our enemy, the Tiyanaks would reside in America having had to flee the Philippians. I wasn't prepared for the battles that would lay before me considering how weak the lack of innocent souls makes me but I would soon find out.