Pulse Ledger

Dark Memoirs - Index

Many are the paths the destitute and desperate can follow to reach me. Some whisper my name like a prayer; others barely dare acknowledge I exist. In ancient texts, you may find my name murmured beside Anubis and Hermes, though I was never simply a guide. Their devotion to peace is unbecoming. My interests are entirely self-serving, a hunger dressed in the robes of ritual. I eat the insincere, the spineless who parade their postulation before neighbours, playing priest to their own hollow lives. I drink the essence of a life the way men drink wine — blood drawn warm, direct from source.

Phillip Matthews was a short kid, a bit tubby for his age — always the last picked for teams. You know the kind. If the others were drafting his obituary in the schoolyard, they’d cast him on a show called My 600lb Deathbed Life without blinking. He carried the standard emotional excess of fifteen without distinction. Kids added itching powder to his clothes while he dragged himself around the track, whining about an itching world, until one day he stopped. The gossip said his father left; others said his mother broke down instead. Schoolyard scripture, recited by insensitive little pricks.

I know the truth. Plot twist — or did you see that coming? Legacy. Heritage. Life. Death. The burden of fifteen. All of it snapped the moment his synapses finally surrendered to shadow. Two lunges were enough to crush his bravado, then his pulse, then the small spirit beneath. His mother watched; his father fell on steel.

It was Phillip who unknowingly baptised my vocation. He sought refuge from a life of guilt and suffering, heavy by default, never by distinction. He wondered if it would hurt. I didn’t have the heart to dress the truth in mercy — that I would maximise his suffering until the last glimmer of light in his eyes dulled to black.

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Author's Notes: Still enjoying developing this into whatever it may turn into. I already know where it's going, and I'm excited.