(Day nine, with a piece from Nightwalkers, my monster story! This time focusing on Peter, the character I love to hate.)
~Sylv
100 Theme Challenge Mix-Up 2 Day Nine #100: Death Warnings: None
Death has always been a companion of mine. It began with my mother, as it does with many an unfortunate soul. I was a young lad...no more than, oh, five or six years? It all blurs together at this point. Father told me it was because God needed a new angel. It would be many years before I learned she died with a rotting fetus poisoning her innards.
It made me wish that lump of cells had been me. Though I never wished to be the cause of her death, nor did I wish to grow up without her.
We were poor, Father and I. Farmers that tilled soil for just enough to live. Father died not long after I became a man – exhaustion, I was sure. Certain that the farm was in capable hands, his withered form finally gave out, no longer having a reason to be bound to the mortal plane.
Humans are so disgustingly weak.
From there, I witnessed the occasional corpse. It wasn't uncommon in the time of my youth. Diseases blamed on demons, danger of daily life, and sometimes even monsters of legends.
But the first time I brought death upon another, it was not a human.
Weary from a day selling the last of my wheat, I was stumbling to my inn when I was caught by shaking fingers. Fingers that sought blood. Panicked and desperate, I bit my attacker just as he had bitten me. Tainted blood swept past my lips, and it was then my curse, and my blessing began. I became wild, feral, untamed – bodies fell to me like the wheat I had once felled with a rusted scythe. Death rode with me, eager to claim my kills. Only once my body was twisted by injury did it stop, and my new role began...though the death count still rises.
Many will tell you that my kind are the dead risen...but this is not true. We are masters of Death. He cannot touch us, so long as we continue our sin of feeding upon what once were our brothers and sisters – our kin. All that remains for us to fear are Hunters, sent by the fearful Church. Formidable opponents...but mortal.
I do not fear Death. Instead, we are old friends that meet occasionally for a fair wager. So far I have yet to lose.
But, I suppose...no one's luck lasts forever.