Chapter 1: Awareness is fleeting

When I envisioned my end coming, I always thought it would happen with me surrounded by my loved ones in my old age. I always thought I would live a long loving life with a loving wife and some fantastic and intelligent children. I tried to live my life in a way that I enjoyed and tried to not be a scumbag. I was never worried about what would happen after death, but now… as I lay here bleeding out from a hole in my chest I have to wonder… will it be boring?

Some context would probably help in this situation, usually things like this begin with me introducing myself first and foremost before going into my life story but that story is about to end so I’ll just give you the basics so no one gets confused. I was born in the 20th century as a normal baby boy, no tragic backstories or epic destinies here. I had two loving parents who both had their own faults and virtues like any living being, I grew up a normal nerdy kid who later on became an older brother to my small sister. My life seemed to be going well, I had just turned twenty when everything went pear shaped.

My family decided to throw a party for me even though I've never felt comfortable at parties, I just went along with it just to make them happy. We were still setting everything up when my mother asked me to go buy some more condiments for the food. My birthday fell on a Wednesday so the department store should have been pretty much deserted. My sister decided to tag along when she heard I was going to the store. She knows I always buy her some candy while we're out together (I spoil her rotten sometimes). The outside of the store was just as empty as I expected, there were only five or so cars in the lot not including my own. The roads on the way to the store were almost as barren as the parking lot which was… disconcerting for some reason. I’m pretty sure there's a name for this, the wrong feeling surrounding desolate man made locations… I really didn’t have a good feeling about the place. My sister and I are only five years apart so I wasn’t afraid to leave her alone in the car, I told her to keep her phone handy just in case something happened. I remember her giving me such a weird look for being so paranoid but thankfully she listened to me anyway.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I entered the store, but of all the things that could have happened an armed robbery was the absolute worst. Stepping into the air conditioned store out of the warm sunny daylight didn’t make me sweat any less as two masked men swung their weapons around to point at me. One was holding a machete and was wearing a Frankenstein's monster mask, he’s currently the furthest away from me and was busy shoving food into a bag, my main issue was the much closer and clearly much jumpier gun wielding robber wearing a Michael Myers mask. How did I know he was jumpy you ask? Well let me tell you… he shot me in the chest then started shrieking in horror over what he just did. I'm pretty sure both robbers were subdued by some of the shoppers. I wasn’t sure… I was kind of preoccupied.

I don’t remember falling onto my back, I don’t remember feeling any pain, I don’t remember why I'm thinking in past tense either. I just felt… cold, a few shoppers were hovering over me trying to keep me alive. My shirt felt slimy and gross and it didn’t feel much better with two guys keeping pressure over my heart though I do appreciate the effort. Is this what it’s like to be in shock? Huh… they’re doing CPR on me now, it’s no use… I already felt my heart stop, oh! My sister is here now, I think she’s yelling something but I can’t hear anything she’s saying. I feel like I'm supposed to be sad about this but… I can’t really be bothered, why was I even at the store in the first place? I can’t really remember the reason why… Everything is kind of fuzzy. I’m pretty sure I'm supposed to avoid going into the light but the only lights I see are the ceiling lights. Now that I'm dying, I'm thinking about all the anime and movies series I'm never gonna see complete, that’s a pretty big regret. My attention was drawn from the lights to the strangers surrounding me, a bunch of dark shadows that were crowding around me. I… I'm so tired… I think it’ll be fine if I just… take a nap.

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I remember a conversation I had with a man who was in a coma for a few months, he was apparently conscious during it but couldn’t move, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome I think it’s called. He described it as sudden bursts of awareness and sounds around him that gradually got more frequent until he woke up. This description is what comes to mind when I first woke up and all I heard was the tell all sound of cars honking in traffic, Not many thoughts followed the sound at first other than a few confused ‘What?’ before my mind went blank again. The next time awareness came back I wasn’t in the same place as last time, I could hear the sound of metal clanging and shouts in the distance so… “A Factory…? '' and just like last time I drifted back into the dark.

I was like this for who knows how long, eventually I began to remember every other awakening. There were times where I would wake and hear the sounds of nature around me but get a soft visual imprint of somewhere else like a construction site, like my eyes and ears are in different places at the same time. This all changed when I came back into awareness and heard the familiar sound of cars and city life except… it was all muffled. Like I was in a building or alley that was muffling the sound, it was pretty dark too so I couldn’t see much other than some dull moving colors. My thoughts were way more scrambled than usual, I tried to focus on the two blobs but I kept getting distrac- hey I think it’s night, I can see the stars kind of. My scatter brain was brought back into focus by possibly the worst thing to hear in an alleyway, a gunshot.

One of the two blobs falls away as red takes over their previously gray countenance, while the sudden death was sad and pretty terrifying. I was focused on something else. Remember how in movies when something important comes into the foreground, the rest of the background falls out of focus and goes fuzzy. This was happening to the glowing red mass that was rising out of the dead body, I was attracted to this glow like a moth to a flame. What happened next could only be described as… a feast. Whenever I look back on this moment I always ask myself… How did I live like that for so long?

It was like a deep fog was finally removed from my mind as awareness flooded back into my system. My sudden clarity was quickly cut short by the mind and personality of the mugger burning its way through my system, trying to overflow my mind with a lifetime of experiences and teachings. The metaphysical pain I was feeling gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘I have no mouth, yet I must scream’. Flashes of memories not my own, first birthday, first day of school, first fight, For a moment I was able to wrench back control and forcefully burn away my-(His!, his memories- Not Mine! Burn-Leave!) Moments of his first time trying some kinda weird magic (Magic?) drug, going into debt with his dealers, his first murde- BURN IT ALL!!!

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Every bit of information, every memory, every experience that made up this man’s soul was burned away until nothing but energy was left. Energy that quickly flooded into my system bringing further clarity, now that my mind was almost completely returned I could feel a dark cloying hunger deep inside me. It was screaming that I was still incomplete and that it would continue to eat at me until I satisfied it. I unfeelingly gazed down at the now panicking man as they frantically checked his attempted assassin for a pulse, my vision twisted as my view quickly drew closer to the man’s frantic visage.

“-orry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m-” The disheveled man’s words were quickly being drowned out by something else. I could feel the suited man’s emotions, no not his emotions… something deeper. I felt the feelings that he himself was unaware of, I felt his fear, his panic, and most surprisingly… his relief. I felt how good he felt doing something that was considered wrong by society, something violent. The excitement this one act injected into his once monotonous life was like finally breathing fresh air after years of suffocating.

I felt my hunger rear its dark head once again and I felt its guiding hand push me, I reached out to the man’s dark intent and whispered to them. My whispered words added fuel to dying embers, lighting a fire that was doomed to die on its own. The change was immediate, before the man was in near hysterics and was fumbling with his phone trying to call the police then the change happened. The phone quickly dropped from his hands as his now bloodshot eyes slid from the ground, over to the quickly cooling corpse then over to the still smoking revolver. I could almost feel my hunger scream with delight as a large twisted smile grew on the man’s face.

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It took almost twenty minutes for the police to arrive at the alleyway, two officers exited their vehicle with all haste. In the dark of the night I could only tell that the two officers were male and female, the male officer quickly approached the alleyway and quickly spotted the unhinged man. From above the officer’s words sounded concerned as he slowly approached the man. I felt no joy as the bloodied man raised the revolver and pulled the trigger but my hunger screamed in glee as the soul of the officer floated up to me.

The feeding wasn’t as painful and overriding this time, now that I had a bit more experience with the feeling I could keep my sanity while the memories of the officer passed me by. I only let the information I could use stay in my mind as a sort of packet of info and left the rest to become more energy for me, the whole time I felt sick to my non-existent stomach but the hunger was satiated… for now. I ignored the fire fight that was starting below me and started to parse through my new information… or atleast I was until something extremely unexpected happened.

After the male officer was… killed, the other female officer had dived behind their squad car and had tried to return fire but was squarely pinned down by the monster of my own creation after he had taken the fallen officer’s firearm. The madman’s laughter was the only sound that rose over the ringing gunfire. What I was expecting to happen next was the police officer radioing for backup while trying to stave off death via acute lead poisoning. What actually happened couldn’t have been further from my expectations, a man who I assumed to be a random civilian from down the street sprinted to the pinned down officer dodging bullets all the while and proceeded to rip the car door off the vehicle and throw it like a frisbee at the madman sending him crashing to the ground.

That definitely knocked me out of whatever gray emotionless zone I was currently in and dropped me straight into a hodgepodge of different emotions. I first felt amazed at the frankly superhero-esque move this random man had just accomplished, then I felt extreme regret for instigating this tragedy, all of my regret was blindsided by my sudden soul crushing panic at the fact that I HAD JUST DIED! My previous modicum of control quickly slipped from my ephemeral grasp as I swan dived into a crippling existential crisis, My focus on the physical world quickly disappeared as my attention retreated inward as I spiraled deeper and deeper into my panic and sadness. I thought about my family, my sister who I had told to stay in the car while her big… something went and died in a supermarket in the middle of being robbed. I felt myself spiral a bit faster as I realized I couldn’t recall anything personal about myself. I could remember the color of the robbers eyes as he shot me but I couldn’t remember my own gender, the face of my own sister was slowly fading from my memory.

Was this my punishment… then what for? What could I have done in my life to warrant being reduced to a floating shell of my former self, frigid sadness quickly turned into boiling anger as I raged to whatever higher being would listen. If I have to let go of everything I ever knew and love from before then fine! But I will not be some eternally starving spirit whose only reason for existing is to sow discord and death. In a way similar to how I extracted the memories out of other souls I reached deep into my own soul and grabbed ahold of myself, the very core of my being. My dreams, my aspirations, my personality, everything that made me me and held it together. Already there were parts of my own soul that had been consumed by the deep and infinite hunger but that was all it was gonna get, I felt the hunger shriek and rage against me as I started cutting it out of my being. It was a slow process purging the acidic influence from my soul, the hunger began to realize what I was doing and that it couldn’t stop me so it resorted to its next plan… temptation.

The hunger promised me powers unlike I had ever seen, it offered life returned to me, it offered me riches, immortality unending. It tried to tempt me with knowledge lost to time, true stories darker than the deepest abyss. Words of magic and power over the greatest of beasts, those that could be considered gods to lesser creatures would fall under my thrall as long as I fed the hunger. The promises of power fell on deaf ears as I continued to peel the taint from my core, the hunger quickly caught on to my unwillingness to stop when I had purged it’s influence from over 80% of my soul.

I could feel the exact moment when desperation overtook the being I have now named Gluttony, it could feel the finality of my actions and tried to claw and reach for anything in its reach in hopes of staving off its inevitable death. Gluttony clawed and fed upon whatever bit of my soul that was still within reach, I felt my first few years of preschool fade from my memory. My first few friends were reduced to just shadows in my subconscious, my first girlfriend was rendered a stranger as all the emotional connection I had with her was consumed by Gluttony. I didn’t let the loss dissuade me from my goal and with a metaphysical twist I ripped the last vestiges of Gluttony from my soul, leaving me just as empty as I was when I first awoke. Gluttony having taken all the energy we accrued leaving me near empty again. To stop myself from just dissolving on the spot I had to burn the packet of memories from the deceased officer as fuel leaving me stable enough to watch the abyssal cloud of hunger now hostless quickly begin to wither and burn away. I felt like I deserved to feel a bit smug about removing a poisonous influence from my unlife, I gladly let myself drift back into unconsciousness and flow away on the wind away from the smoky corpse of Gluttony.