We aren't meant to live forever… it corrupts even the best of us.
-Inscriptions found in the depths of the Maw.
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"Shhrr…. Shhrr… Shhrr…"
As Elias sawed through the neck of a man he had known for six years, he had to stop his mind from wandering, because he desired to make the butchery as clean as possible.
It was the greatest respect he could have for the dead after they had satisfied his… appetites.
The man under his knife, Josef, had been a friend and mentor for the majority of his life, and this man would never have believed that he would be dying in the hands of one of the boys he had helped to raise.
During the moments when Elias had been struggling to fit in, Josef had been kinder to him than most, and his children, while he could not call them friends, were still pleasant acquaintances.
He had learned many things from this man about life and considered him a good father and husband when compared to others he had seen.
For a man of his status, Josef was faithful to his wife and never cheated on her. Elias's investigation had been thorough, and six years was a long time to know someone.
'I mean, the man never fails to express his love to his wife every chance he has. To an almost sickening degree, as if he is desperate for some sort of attention or was making up for
Something.'
However, from the moment Elias laid his eyes on Josef, accepted his teachings, and was brought into his home, Elias knew that one day he would be killing this man.
He had a nose for these things.
To cut through his neck effectively, Elias had placed the head of his prey between two clamps to prevent it from shaking erratically while he used his serrated blade to saw through the neck, and he had been at this process for thirty minutes.
It was not as if Elias was weak, or he was cutting off the head of the man with a tofu knife. What was happening here was a direct manifestation of the power of this man, whom he had just killed.
In life and now in death, Josef had been powerful, and in many ways, Elias was still a mortal, and nobody would believe that Josef would fall by the hands of a mortal.
The eyes of Josef, filled with fear and despair, caught the glow from the dozens of candles that Elias had surrounded this room with.
He would have preferred using an Ember Orb for light; he could afford the smallest of those, but even that could leave traces. Elias needed his kill to be clean; it was a condition that could not be negotiated.
As he worked, Elias remembered a time when he still wondered why his prey never died with their eyes closed, and at first, he had spent many long moments staring into those crystalline orbs as the sparks of life faded away and then he decided that he could never get an answer, he was not a poetic fool that read meaning in the dancing of leaves or the shape of a woman's face, he only saw reality for what it was, grim and brutal.
He did not try to close his prey's eyes; he had discovered that it was far too problematic. And now, he almost saw it as poetic justice that their eyes remained open, because those worthy of being called his prey all deserved to be under his knife.
It did not matter what others might say about his hunts; for the matters of his prey, he was the judge, jury, and executioner, all rolled into one.
Elias did not feel much guilt for his actions. At first, he did, but the previous acts of all his prey that led them to him slowly crushed the last spark of guilt in his heart, and as all of his recent killings had been Siphons, and could no longer be seen as mortals, he was compelled to kill them.
To live, Elias needed to kill his fellow men.
This was for his survival, and he would have to admit, he had come to enjoy the hunt, all for one simple reason. He was good at it.
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Killing for him was easy; he would even say it was thrilling, and it was the only thing that gave him relief after he had endured the growing ache of the monster inside his head banging at the gates of his mind, tearing at the fraying threads binding his sanity,
"KILL!!! KILL!!!"
No, he was not mad. At first, he thought he was, but so much evidence came to light over the years that someone or something was inside his head, compelling him to kill, could no longer be denied.
Elias called this voice "The Passenger."
It was a simple name for something that defied mortal comprehension, but Elias considered himself to be a simple man.
Elias lived with a growing headache that painted everything he did with a shade of red, he needed to kill, satisfying the monster inside his head brought a release that he was sure was greater than any form of sex or drugs, not that he had ever tried any of those activities, but he was sure that abstinence from both did not leave you bleeding out your eyes, nose and ears and have your flesh slowly decaying.
If he refused to kill, this painful deterioration was going to be his fate.
Elias could not refuse the call of the Passenger as much as a baby could refuse the nipple from a mother's breast.
He had tried to fight it, of course, but it left him slowly transforming into a screaming invalid, wrecked by pain and madness, bound inside a decaying body.
Elias's greatest fear was that even if his body completely wasted away, his soul would not perish and would have to endure the mad cries of the Passenger for all eternity, with no way to end his torment.
So, he really needed to be killing… as much as possible.
The longest he had ever gone without killing was eight months, and Elias became a shambling corpse; the smell from his decaying body was so putrefying that he was almost thrown outside the walls of the city, and his survival had been a miracle.
Shaking his head and mentally pushing away those distracting thoughts from a time that he never wanted to revisit, he basked in the pleasure of the kill, feeling the tiny spots of dullness in his bones that signified the beginning of his decay slowly fade away as orgasmic bliss that would last for hours filled his body, but as with all things in life, the good part never lasted for long, and for every success, a great deal of work was needed to maintain it.