The Soul Eater

I.

Long after the surface of the earth became empty of souls, the nameless man still drifted in his endless roam.

His dark locks were grainy with the dust and dirt carried on the wind of the smooth plains of repeating nothingness. He was one with the scraping of grass blades across his feet and the occasional wide-berthed tree on the open savannah. He lived to drift without cause or reason. Each step was more insignificant than the one preceding it. Each passing decade was a hair closer to the certainty of failure.

Failure to find something different. Anything. Anyone. Something to bring an end to the sameness.

Here on this particular stretch of prairie, the grain stalks rose triumphantly, reaching heights that would have been impossible during the time of many. The man pinched them between his rough fingertips as he walked, sending more tufts in to the breeze.

His clothes were dark and faded with exposure to the elements in his aloof aimlessness. One stretch of overgrown road struck his senses no differently than any other, and no particular tree held any uniqueness as he stopped to lean against it.

Hundreds of years of solitude led this man with no name to find meaning in the observation of the earth with no living soul to alter it.

He roamed for six hundred years until he crossed paths with the Soul Eater.

II.

This stretch of stillness was no different than any other, save for the tree.

The locks of plain grass reached skyward in vain as the wind disrupted them and swayed them about with the rhythm of his step. It had been ten hours or ten minutes since he'd seen the broad base of a tree trunk intercepting his path of travel; with complete isolation and the solitary companion of the wind eroding his skin, length after length in the barrens of sameness, there was no concept of time any longer.

The change came as a small thing in a tree bearing no leaves or fruit. Nature had overgrown the grid and flourished, and yet finally, here was a dead tree among a billion living plants. This tree had been dead Before man. After man. It would remain after him, even, when a sweet end finally met his fates with an empty and perfectly peaceful void.

The presence of death woke up parts of him that had been dormant for centuries. This tree was very different in its rotting quietus, a far cry away from the day when every soul on earth had been eradicated in one ascending windfall of burning vengeance.

He'd asked himself why his flesh hadn't burned when others were disintegrating around him, their screams cut short by the instantaneous destruction that left them as nothing more than piles of ash.

Perhaps this tree would be the harbinger of more change. His mind raced in rhythm with the aimless strides of his step, and the most frequent thought in the millions of speculations that he entertained concerned Death himself. With the draught of new arrivals in the kingdom of oblivion, surely this nameless man's time would arrive when some sort of purpose was fulfilled.

He stopped a few paces short of it and admired the physical beauty of death, for he hadn't seen it in such a very long time. The gnarled and decaying flakes of wood were doomed by gravity and the persistence of the elements to bring them in to the sea of wind-waved grass stalks. The fractals of the branches gnarled upward without the instinctual glory of leaves or fruit, but decaying and dry rotted wood.

He decided to remain there when he felt the morning kiss of the sun's rays warming in to the nape of his neck. His back was to the east, and the miscalculation of assuming it was dusk suddenly amplified his feelings of fatigue. He was not a mortal man by measure of lifespan or soundness of mind, but he did sleep to avoid the most arid parts of the day. The wind was merciless when it carried the heat over the stalks.

He disconnected the clasp at the apex of his worn cloak, folding it at the base of the tree. Among the long walks, he'd spent hours obsessing over his acquisition of the odd range of clothes that draped about him. The folded drape served as a crude, crumpled pillow for his head. It wasn't until after he'd already reclined against the decayed trunk when he noticed that the tree wasn't rooted at all. The base bisected it in to a hollow pit, but the bottom of the trunk obstructed his view of what lay within the dirt burrow below.

He closed his eyes and shifted in to a dazed sleep under the rotting branches and the lazy heat. Exhaustion trumped the threat of the potential lair of something unpleasant below him. Surrendering his final moment of consciousness to the threshold of sleep, he found comfort not from physical rest, but in the prospect of an encounter with something besides trees and rocks and nothingness.

The dreams came when his body opened the cage for his mind and he succumbed to slumber. They were lucid and relentless images of sick men and women, staring at him in the final shock of their last breath. Others who realized he was the source, humans who had barely a day left, cursing him with vile-tongued promises of his destruction after their contagion took them.

He longed to be like the tree, out and gone, fulfilling their prophecies of an end to this.

To have fate prove them right after all.

III.

The first tug of consciousness came with the chill of an empty breeze that rustled the stalks and crossed his cheeks in a fleeting wisp. He opened his black eyes to the emerging pale creams of infant moonlight.

When he got to his feet and reached downward for his cloak, something rough like a leathery surface collided with his nose and lips. He cried out in surprise and before he realized the source of the attack. A severed human head with hollow eye sockets and an open, gaping mouth frozen in the horror of its own twisted fate lay there in the dirt. He was sure that the laughing sound was his own head playing tricks on him. He wiped a veneer of filth and blood from his face, and briefly considered the enemy in his mind. He couldn't discount hallucinations or insanity in his eternal loneliness. In six hundred years, his mind had created worse things that weren't there before.

He took in a deep breath and braced himself against the tree for balance, and something in the air tasted different in his nose and mouth. His head began to swim. He smelled the delicate sweetness of sandalwood and found himself pushing the new discovery of the cadaver head to the recesses of his mind.

"Ah. You're awake."

The voice excited him with a terrible fear and euphoria at the same time. His ears told him that it came from above, and as he looked upward and saw the eclipsed outline of a human figure, he was absolutely certain of his insanity.

He would have expected the tree to grow a mouth and speak to him before he thought he would encounter another person. The figure darted and crawled down the gnarled branches with a feline grace that couldn't be human. Before he could react, it had darted behind him, sweeping up the severed head in the process.

He could feel breathing on his neck, but he dared no sudden movements. The voice had sounded human. Impossible. As he felt his heart begin to thud against his chest, thin but strong fingers clenched in to his left shoulder. The other hand dropped a skull, stripped of hair and flesh, nothing but pearly smooth bone. It was laying at his feet, and he now realized that his shoulder was bleeding.

They were not fingers, but talons.

He'd lost the sound of his own voice for such a long time that he struggled to bring it back. It was a scratchy shade of what it once was, weak and atrophied, but it finally came.

"Wh...who are you? Where did you get a human head?" He asked shakily.

"They were doomed, but they will never be completely gone."

He was certain now that the voice was female, but with a sweet hiss that rolled between syllables and consonants, as if the tone of her voice said more than the actual words formed by it.

"It was fresh. Bloody skin. Recently grown hair. It's impossible." He said.

"How ironic that my eternal resting place would be within the tree of life, neutralizing its legacy of creation with my appetite. This is my home, and beneath this tree, a new human is brought in to the world every day." The voice flowed from behind, and she released the pressure on his shoulder.

When she circled around to cradle the skull within her fingertips, she hoisted herself up in to the lower boughs of the tree, wrapping her bare legs around an inclining branch.

She was humanoid in a dozen ways, and exotically beautiful in a thousand others. She had the perfectly toned muscle lines and natural build of a perfect huntress, and he now saw that the sandalwood scent came from her brilliant scarlet locks as she waved her hair about. Her skin was ghostly pale with the slightest flavor of cream, and her entire body was interlaced with jagged symbols and markings that all flowed in to one another. He couldn't discern whether the marks were part of her skin, or applied over the top of her flesh with dye or some other unknown method.

She was clothed in almost nothing except for an extremely long strand of billowing purple silk, wrapped and gathered about her torso in hips many times over, strategically concealing the parts of her that any man's eyes would eventually fixate upon.

He was not a man. He was an infinitely enduring vessel of nothingness, and yet he felt a cinder of something that he had forgotten about, standing below this magnificent creature in her niche of sweet and deathly pleasures.

Her eyes held no irises or pupils. Instead, they were billowing orbs of gleaming colors, constantly shifting about within their sockets, sometimes coalescing in to cohesive pinpoints as her gaze moved up and down his frame, and sometimes swirling in such chaotic patterns that he had no way of discerning what she was focusing on.

He felt as if he was being assessed, but fear had evolved in to a twisted form of hope that she would bring him the same fate as the anonymous headless victim whose ivory cranium she now ran sharp talons across, grinding deep rivets in to the bone of the skull.

"Humans are created here, by this tree? What are you?" He asked, befuddled.

"You have a purpose, just as I do. You were the Bringer. The initiator. Created from the earth to reclaim it from a species that was undeserving." She said.

"Everywhere I walked, they perished. I thought myself doomed and judged to live forever. Roaming alone for eternity." He said.

"If that were true, then fate would have met you with an end when there were none of them left. You were created to bring them their last breath, and I was created to consume the souls of all the fallen. My appetite has been sated for as long as you've walked alone, but we are both still here. I have consumed the soul of one new human being beneath this tree every day for centuries. Ever since you wiped out the last of them." She said.

"So the earth creates souls for you. To keep you alive, until I could arrive here." He said.

"Precisely."