Heartworm

“I want Greg.”

“Who the fuck is Greg.”

“It’s the guy in the chapel. The one that I woke up in. We didn’t know his name, but that was the name Phern just… decided on."

“Oh shit! You mean the body that was there when we showed up?” Cecelia’s words caused a lump in my throat to form. Her wording, unknowingly, was causing me to get even more choked up. ‘The body’, she said. So neutral. So passive. But it wasn’t just a body when I met him. He was a priest who could have had a family waiting for him to return home. He was elderly, sure, but he still had years left in a life that I so callously ripped away from him.

“I killed him. All because I-I was hungry. I hate myself for doing it.” Cecelia had slowly wrapped a hand around my neck to pull me closer to her. Our foreheads gently pressed against one another as I began to cry. “But I hate myself even more for wanting to do it again. A person, a freshly killed person, was the sweetest taste that has ever graced my tongue. It was the most satisfying meal I’ve ever had, and whenever I get hungry I can’t help but think about it. You watched me emotionlessly as I feasted on him in that church. You didn’t know just how much I enjoyed my first meal. It was intoxicating, like the closest to divinity I could ever feel. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I get too desperate for another taste that I…”

‘So much shame threads through your soul. Shame that you need not feel for engaging in the hunger that you must sate like any other creature. You would not moralize the death of a caritune if it was slayed by a gourlash. What makes you moralize the death of a human?’

A human is more than prey. They are units of a family, collections of memories and reservoirs of emotions. There is so much more that drains from the face of a human as they die. I would never forget the agony that bled slowly into fear across Vyra’s face. I could see all of the fears of what had been, and what could be, all become meaningless in her eyes as she died. That was nothing like the soft whimpers of a caritune before I gently pressed a claw into its heart.

‘Perspective. A gross lack of perspective, Ester. The prey you snuff out will always feel fear, and it will always mourn the loss of unrealized life. The drug of life causes the fear of withdrawal from its influence. You only think it different when it is someone you care for, because you lack the perspective to see that it is all bias. I doubt you felt the same remorse for the guards that protected Markus. But when the victim is that sweet classmate of yours, a demon, in case you fail to remember, you hold on to the anguish of that loss of life for years.’

…and if it’s a sister? Do you hold onto that anguish for decades?

‘You lack inhibition.’

My mind was set ablaze, as if a bonfire was conjured in the center of my hippocampus to celebrate the infringement of Lilith’s boundaries. I could not wrap my mind around how she was able to cause such misery within the body we both shared. Though with the agonizing searing pain tearing through my brain, I would find it difficult to wrap my mind around anything at all.

“Ester!” I could hear Cecelia’s shriek rattle around in my mind amongst the blazing pain. I was so disconnected from sensation that I could barely tell she was holding me. I wasn’t even sure where I was, if I had fallen to the earth, or if I was still sitting upright on the stump.

‘I suggest you learn temperance, as well the aforementioned perspective. The longer you wrack your body with the shame of your nature, the longer you chain our potential to your fickle humanity.’

With the last of her words, the searing pain subsided. I was being cradled in Cecelia’s arms, my back resting unevenly across her legs. As my senses returned to me I noticed the moist trails of tears that covered my face, with the last of the tears having just dripped off of my chin and slipping uncomfortably down onto my chest. I felt Cecelia’s hand press gently against my chin to wipe away the remaining wetness. Her smile was warm and stood in stark contrast to the pulsing concern within her eyes. She was clearly struggling to reassure me even despite her discomfort in my admission. I was not the person that I used to be. She never even knew the old me, but she knew Xavier for a short time. She knew me before the ineluctable changes began to take hold. Cecelia was only privy to the physical changes, the leathery changes to my skin around my nose and palms, the emergence of tail, the odd peachfuzz that accompanied my ears growing enough to begin drooping. They were all signifiers that I was not who I once was. But Cecelia could not see the changes of my true nature, the fury that bubbled to the surface easier than it ever did before. The hunger that lurked in my stomach at all times, a hunger that writhed and thrummed when the time came for a meal. Cecelia could not see the bond that had begun to form between myself and the quincentennial Deathless that was altering the way I perceived the world. I could no longer differentiate if my changing perspectives were due to a conscious adjustment of thought, or the gradual changes that came with slowly becoming more of a Deathless with every day that passed. I saw the fear in Cecelia’s eyes as she went through similar considerations.

Did she recognize the being that she cradled in her arms?

“It makes sense, y’know. That you’ve started to think of yourself as Deathless first, and human second. I know I was surprised to hear you say ‘my kind’, but I’m sure it's hard to feel human anymore with those… thoughts.” A gracious way of phrasing my urge to hunt and consume another human. “But you’re still my button nose Bandit. I saw how ashamed you were to eat Greg. You urged me to be afraid of you immediately afterwards. That is the Bandit I know. We can find a way to curtail these urges, I promise. When we first met, I kept saying ‘your kind’ because I was—well to be honest I was going off of a heaping of prejudice. When I noticed you didn’t exhibit any of the behaviors of Deathless that I had come to know, I started to think of you more as a human. I don’t want to say that was a mistake, however, because I think you still have plenty of that in you, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.”

“These changes have all happened so fast. I feel a lifetime removed from the person I was when we met. What happens a few months from now? Will I even resemble the Ester of today?”

“Do I resemble the Cecelia of yesterday?”

“Now who’s overintellectualizing…”

“I’m going somewhere with this. You can call it pretentious if you want, but I think it’s important.” Cecelia adjusted her legs underneath my back. It suddenly reminded me of my position and how uncomfortable the weight of my body might be after how long I’d been lying there. I slowly lifted myself back up to sit on my trusty stump once more.

“I think you’re pretty much the same Cecelia as yesterday, sure.”

“Pretty much, but not the same, right? Even in imperceptible ways, I’ve changed from the Cecelia of yesterday because I know more about you. But it doesn’t feel like I’ve changed. I think you will change in the coming months, Ester. As will I. I don’t even think either of us will notice at all until something big happens to give us the lucidity of hindsight. But that’s natural!”

My mouth contorted into a subtle smile. Cecelia was trying to comfort me with lofty concepts that she didn’t often indulge in. Perhaps she knew that it was something particularly effective for me. That was sweet.

“Memories are like photographs of our lives at one specific moment. In that one specific moment, we are a version of ourselves that we have never been before, and will never be again. But I think what makes up a person is amalgamation of every one of those photographs. The sum of all of your parts, y’know?”

Not the analogy I had expected Cecelia to be working towards, but one that I was pleasantly surprised by. It also wasn’t the only thing about her analogy that I was surprised by.

“Why photographs? That doesn’t feel like a very small town upbringing to me.”

“It wasn’t. Phern and I ran into a man that did them a few years ago in the north. We got a few photographs together for the novelty, but the experience really stuck with me for some reason.” Cecelia reminisced about the experience as she spoke. It was beautiful to witness her relive a happy memory like that.

“A person is a kineograph of all of their memories.” I mused.

“Good to know you can always out-pretentious me at a moment’s notice.” Cecelia gave a hearty laugh.

“A kineograph. You know like those little booklets you flip through? They made a lot of them for children in Varenthell. Seeing all the images blend together to make it look like they were just one smooth moving image.” It was fascinating how the rapid movement between the images could almost trick the brain into not even noticing the switch.

“Oh my Gods… that’s it!” I blurted out in my excitement. The epiphany hit me like a perfectly positioned shovel to the bridge of my nose.

“What the fuck are you freaking out about?” Cecelia was staring at me with a heaping dose of confusion and apprehension.

“The hunt! My senses!” I was having trouble accounting for all of my senses simultaneously, because I was spreading my attention too thin, and could only really focus on one thing at a time before switching focus to another. I was so concerned with focusing on one thing and then randomly moving my focus to another sense, losing all sorts of details in the haze. I needed to switch my focus rapidly, just like the kineograph, so that I could blend them together in my mind. It was just as Lilith explained with her orchestra, the ability to use everything together in a symphony. With a specific order in mind, and a repetition akin to skimming through a flipbook at the right speed, I could trick my mind into focusing on each of my senses simultaneously.

“I have a theory that I think can work, I just need to test it!” I frantically stood up from my stump to move towards the clearest section of dirt. I lowered myself to the ground, placing my hands onto the earth and readying myself to test my theory.

‘While horrendously ridiculous, I cannot complain as long as it lets you concentrate on your senses.’

With Lilith’s discouraging words as my encouragement, I imagined my five senses before me. Each a diorama of their importance, being placed into a cyclical booklet to be flipped through repetitively.

Sight

Sound

Scent

Touch

Taste

It was a regimented cycle. Beginning slowly, but steadily accelerating as I became comfortable with the rapid switching and the innate intuition of what sense came after the other. In the mental image of the kineograph the pictures were slowly blending together. They were choppy at first, flicking past in sloppy ways that made it clear it was not the correct speed. But soon enough, the pictures began to meld into a moving image indistinguishable from the stagnant tableaus that comprised its existence.

The trance. The one described by Lilith and Cecelia. It was beginning to make sense to me on an instinctual level, like I had known this feeling my whole life despite only experiencing it before when I was in fight or flight. It was hard to dispel the immediate feeling of panic that crept in due to association. I had only ever felt this elevated state when I thought I was about to die. Given that I had died in a number of those instances, it was unnerving to be in this state while no danger was present. I was hyper-aware of everything in my vicinity, to an almost painful degree. I could smell the stain of the wind with the scent of everything it had blown past recently still lingering within it. I could hear the throbbing pulses of life that rattled through the living creatures around me. I was particularly interested in Cecelia, hearing the distant pumps of her heart pushing blood throughout her body. The overstimulation that I had mentioned to Cecelia earlier was stronger than ever, but I could tell within my trance that my tolerance for the amount of stimulation I could take was more, but not enough for me to last much longer. I felt entirely overwhelmed by the scope of the world around me. In such a small section of the Circadin forest there was an overwhelming abundance of nature that was normally so unremarkable. Not that it wasn’t beautiful before, but more so that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the scale and the details of what lay around me. These plants, the wandering animals, and the softness of the soil were all here before, but they were mundane to me until now.

‘I’ve waited painfully for this moment of reprieve. For the serenity of the trance.’

Is this how you see the world?

‘In nearly every moment of my centuries of life. The time spent within the body of a Deathless unaware of the trance has been suffocating. As if cotton was plugging my nose, mouth, and ears, with a layer of oil slicked across my eyes to blur the world.’

“So…? Did it work?” Cecelia’s words were clear as a bell, a soothing sweetness that could nestle in my ears like never before. The scent of campfire that I had savored and followed while tracking her was stronger than ever.

“Oh Gods, Cecelia. This is—I never realized just how liberating this could be! It feels like I’m hearing colors and tasting sounds! I think-” My words faltered shortly after the trance itself faltered. It was disorienting enough to break my string of consciousness, as my senses seemed to ‘flicker’ between clarity and muted sensations.

“It sure is. But it also seems like it’s a little too much for you right now. I take it from your scrunched up face it’s starting to fall apart?” Despite Cecelia’s words indicating disappointment, her face told an entirely different story. She approached me to softly take my hands in her own. She had the proudest smile plastered across her face.

“Maybe a little…” I couldn’t help but smile with her. “I think I had it down for a while there, but when I started talking I lost focus. I guess it’s still too much of a conscious action right now.”

“That’s okay though! If you found a way to make it work consciously, you just need to practice enough that it becomes natural! That way you can slip into it whenever you need to.”

‘That is not enough. Not for you, little morsel. You need to hone yourself until the trance is your entire state of being. It must become as natural as the breath that flows in and out of your body each second. It must become as frequent as each blink.’

Lilith, I’ve only just learned how to independently slip into this trance! You need to chill out and set some reasonable expectations.

‘These are reasonable expectations. You have no luxury of time. The Empire is an inevitability that nips at your heels at every chance they get. If you do not dedicate yourself to mastery you will likely not survive your next encounter with them.’

“I need more than practice, Cecelia. I need this to become entirely subconscious as soon as possible.” I didn’t particularly like how obedient I was to Lilith’s advice, but I couldn’t shrug off the feeling that she was entirely correct in her evaluation.

‘Of course I am correct. Your willingness to heed my words is refreshing, little morsel. I assure you that I am acting in the best interest of our health.’

“You just started, though. That was the very first time you ever used your kidney-o-graph method. This takes time, Bandit! It took me 9 years to master under Ffenton’s tutelage. Even for Deathless, who come to this naturally, they develop it throughout their childhood! You’d be packing years worth of training into months or weeks to try to have this become second nature. I wanted to teach you the basics so that you could use it here and there, like for hunting.”

“But there is so much potential there! Even in that small burst, I felt it for the first time outside of danger. I felt authentic, like I could actually be at peace with the part of me that I fear!” There was a mixture of emotions that swirled together across Cecelia’s face as I spoke. She let her hands softly slip away from my own. Why did she look nervous? “I need to master this if I want to keep you safe. If I want to keep all of the bandits safe. You’ve told me before that I’ve done inexplicable things for a Deathless of my experience. Who’s to say I can’t manage this as well?”

Cecelia’s face seemed to soften slightly when I pivoted towards protecting the bandits. It felt weird to have to change tactics to avoid concerning Cecelia, but my intentions of protecting my friends was just as truthful as the feeling of inner peace I had tried to explain.

“I can’t let Urden happen again. If I had been more attentive, if I had this trance, I would’ve been able to stop it all from happening. I need this, Cecelia.” I was only distantly aware of how frighteningly desperate I seemed. “I can’t let something like that happen ever again.”

It took a few seconds for Cecelia to decide how to react to my words. When she finally moved, it was to pull me into a tight embrace. Her voice was comforting as she spoke, but there was an almost imperceptible waver accompanying her words.

“Then we’ll have you flicking through senses like pictures on a page before you know it.”