Drinking…blood. That was the first and most prominent visual I had to experience. Tackling cute, innocent women and then biting into their shoulders. Engaging in violence in such an animalistic way with honest men that they’re left with hundreds of bite marks. Crossing distances spanning miles in minutes… I passed by visuals of buildings falling, wooded parks burning, and bridges crumbling. Nothing stood in the way of the progression of these visuals. Military forces, barricades, even concrete walls knock over without needing any effort. Absolute destruction filled every second of this experience.

What am I even looking at? What is on my other side, causing a natural disaster in the making? The perspective, specifically what angle I’m witnessing from, jerks back and forth, honing into small details sometimes far in the distance. Each moment, I witness a new obstacle in this…thing’s waking chaos, and then each moment after, they’re obliterated. If that target is human, they tend to be eviscerated. If the target’s a machine, they normally get tossed sometimes hundreds of feet in the air. And if they’re stationary, they crumble like a thousand years of erosion hitting them in a moment. 

After seeing possibly a hundred bodies splat into pieces, I caught the first glimpse of whose carnage I was witnessing. They had these huge talons- well, actually they mostly looked like a human hand, but it was just so covered in blood that the actual talon-ey part blended in with the rest of their hand. I noticed it after it tore apart a metal guardrail and then, I guess, twirled it around or something insane. It felt like the only thing on my host’s mind was to unleash as much anger as physically possible. 

The monster I was viewing this scene from appeared to lose all control of himself. He was jittering, clawing into nowhere, seemingly slobbering and completely out of fine motor skills. Upon collapsing and hitting the ground, my vision quickly transitioned to black. 

For everything to hinge on a single perspective, to miss the mark of his destiny is kind of pathetic. He could have changed everything. Actualizing what he could do in the form of mass bloodshed, he had nearly unlimited potential. It was like looking at a skeleton key. I felt like I was viewing someone scrape expensive furnishings with that skeleton key. He could have unlocked the solution, the key to salvation.

I actually don’t know who my host is. 

If not to unlock the gate to bridge our differences, he could have at least attained an ideal unlike ever seen before. He could have climbed the heights of the world. Maybe he could have led the survivors through the forest, where no one else knew how. At the very least, he could have made meaningful relationships. He neither settled nor found a connection to satisfy the reason he even came to the City. So, he didn’t give himself any purpose.

I don’t even know what my host looks like.

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His peers settled for their preferences. They ate and felt merry. They held hands with others and found companionship. They built projects and marveled at what they had made. They gave him a chance to enjoy what they relished. None of it ever made sense to him. It bothered him. He knew their satisfaction was temporary. He knew what he built would be an agonizing struggle to pull from the worms in the earth. Ultimately, he didn’t fit in with what their goals were. His hands couldn’t make anything from the earth.

As my thoughts wrestled against my hosts’, or possibly some sort of narrator to my vision, what I witnessed began to speed up. Like, my host tore apart everything in front of him quicker: blood fell faster, dust kicked up into the air and settled sooner. Fleshy vines then wrapped around the periphery of my host’s vision. People began to tumble around my host, and they all looked asleep. As my host sprinted at the speed of a train, every fiber in his body then was ribboned into a million pieces. 

One figure stood stalwart, not even fully facing my host, and shredded him into spaghetti. She twirled her curly, shiny black hair for a moment. My perspective stopped in front of her, watching heaps of person-pulp settle in a circle around her. The city my host had been destroying disappeared from view. The only thing between her and I was my host’s disgusting flesh.

Why did I have to meet her?

I just don’t know what to do. There’s no way forward. Like, there’s literally nothing I can do that I would call one of my own actions, something I intentionally did myself. Any direction I go in sabotages me, and doesn’t even give a long-term benefit. There’s nothing I can do that would be called human, or good, or, I don’t know. 

If I can’t become more human, then I guess I must become something like a monster. There is no third option, and nothing neutral or even balanced. If I try to retain my humanity, everything I do results in a humiliating loss. It’s like being pulled downwards, where worms in the ground grip my skin and then drill holes into my pores just to melt together into my veins, pulling them out, twisting my arms, and unraveling my flesh like they’re unwrapping Christmas presents, slowly reeling me into the dirt and putrefying my blood into a viscous, dry, brown substance. I can’t just let that all happen to me. But what else can I do? Slash and swipe away those worms? Bash and punch the ground? Thrash in rage? Shake it all out and retaliate against my aggressors? I have to fight back. I need to draw blood. I should drink their blood. I need to neutralize all of them by drinking their blood. I want their blood.

I then began to weep bitterly. I cried hysterically with all of these horrible thoughts coming into my mind. And for obvious reasons- I’m a monster! I’m something terrible; I’ve become something that leeches purpose away from anything in my reach. Everything I do is vile. Everything I do betrays me. Despite my intentions devouring me from the inside, I'm calloused on the outside, my skin hardening like sun-bleached leather. 

My only thought back then was: “Maybe I could rewind my steps to find my goal again, recuperate the parts of me that were scattered across the world,” but the other shards rejected me! I could only think they were more than me as if I could only drag them into the earth and not be of some mutual comradery. I couldn’t justify myself. I paddled upward, what was left of my host and, I tugged at her ankles. I kept- He actually kept lunging to and up as the worms pulled-