Survival: Prologue

She has found something new, on what should have been the morning of her death. What shall she do with it?

Survival: Reaper's Birth
Prologue

Thoughts are strange when you begin to run out of life, literally. Bright, beautiful, bloody. Alliteration.

Sunrise filtering through a ruby stain on glass, a hand print. A morbid image...

Whose blood? Hers.

She had been grasping at the window like a character from.... She blinked with thoughtless contemplation, unable to recall the genre and entertainment medium she was supposed to identify with.

An attempt to speak is eaten by more hot redness as it spills over the edge of her mouth.

Another attempt, then. This one, stranger, even by the standards of the dying. She feels, on the edge of consciousness (fading with it, too) entities. They were a new feeling. She feels them, invisibly, drinking her life, spilling it all over the floor as if her body was a three-year-old's sippy cup with a loose lid.

They obviously enjoyed it.

She could feel their strength.

The feeling of them was fading because of her weakness, yet from the idle swirl of thoughts in her head she had dragged a single point with difficultly, that she could only still feel them because their strength was increasing.

They didn't merely take... No, take was not a word that applied to them at all. They didn't merely receive. They could give, but something normally held them away from a life they could use, a barrier, if you will, and they were forced to feed on scraps. In fact, it was a feast of scraps, because they could have everything at once, but it lacked fullness. Only experiences had that, and people were usually through with experiences when the had reached the point she was at.

She wanted to experience more. She didn't mind feeding them.

So, the next attempt. She called them. The barrier blocking them was a piece of herself, somehow, so getting rid of it was a small matter. That small trinket that you've had for a while, but suddenly find unnecessary. Even sentimental value is no longer there. The entities slid into her eagerly, assuming a physical form inside her veins, replacing her blood, serving as the energy they supped on.

And maybe something more.

She rose from where she had lain, and left the room with a note of confidence in her stride.