Editing The Tragedy of Thing-tan (section)

== End 1 ==

The Paladin finally catches up to me twenty years after our last encounter. He finds me because I let him find me. Ever since I devoured my cousin, I had gotten better at being my victims. I would choose carefully, devouring a new life once every few years, eating the biomass, but not the souls, of criminals to sustain myself in the interim. I always chose those I felt could teach me something. I would live their lives for as long as I could before something went wrong. Once, I spent so much time as one person – a maiden of a minor noble house named Alina – that I almost forgot who I truly was. I had almost convinced myself that this time I could be her for good. That this time nothing would go wrong.

Something always, always went wrong.

Alina’s house is a crumbling, deserted wreck. The farmlands around it have been vacated. The locals believe them to be cursed now. They burned the entire village nearly to the ground, salted the earth, and left the shell of the manor to rot. I’m waiting in my – Alina’s – bedchamber when the Paladin quietly enters. I’m holding a tattered portrait of Alina – of me – and of her new husband. A bright-eyed squire of a minor noble house. A young man whose honor was eclipsed only by his tenderness. A man who dreamed of being a Paladin not unlike the man who has been my shadow for the past two decades. A man whom Alina had loved, and who I in turn loved after I became her. 

“He wanted a child,” I say, half to the portrait and half to the Paladin. “I could do everything else I needed to do: I could make myself seem to age. I could feed so infrequently that nobody even noticed when I went on my ‘sojourns’. I could even keep all of the others…all of those countless voices screaming in my head…happy enough to not interfere.”

“But you couldn’t create life,” The Paladin says, almost tenderly.

“No,” I say. “I can do anything else with life. I can shape it. I can devour it. I can preserve it forever. But I can’t create it.”

“He had the means to have barrenness cured,” The Paladin says.

“And when those spells failed, the means to test why,” I say. I feel like I want to cry, but my eyes don’t produce tears unless I tell them to. “The means to find out what was really going on.”

“He confronted you,” The Paladin says. I begin to understand what is going on now. This is my confession. Despite all that we’ve been through, he knows me well enough to see that my faith is real. That I need absolution in the eyes of Pelor.

“He said I stole her from him. That I stole the life that he and his wife could have had. The child they would have given birth to,” I’m whimpering now. I want him – I want them, the people inside of me, to understand. “I wanted to make him understand. I wanted to show him that I didn’t steal anything. That I was…that I AM Alina. And Danika. And Annabelle. And…and…and all of them.” 

“You devoured him,” The Paladin says.

“I had never done that before,” I say. “I had never consumed someone who knew one of my…my victims. I had never experienced the pain of losing a loved one to me firsthand. Or the horror of realizing that the woman you loved isn’t…isn’t really her. Not until I consumed him.”

“You’ve been starving yourself,” he says.

“I can’t do it anymore,” I whisper. “I love your kind. I love all of you so, so much. I can’t put anybody else through that kind of pain. It’s killing me.” I look at him. His eyes are sad. His hair has turned gray and he is so much smaller than the towering giant I was once afraid of. I could snap his brittle, old bones into pieces with a flick of my wrist, but I don’t want to. I only want one thing from him now.

“Am I a monster?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “A monster wouldn’t have saved my life twenty years ago. A monster wouldn’t have fought that dragon, or closed that demonic portal, or destroyed those slavers. You’ve paid for each of your sins in full. No, you’re no monster. You’re just…”

“Lonely,” I say. “I’m so lonely.”

His sword makes barely a whisper as it leaves the sheathe. “You don’t need to be lonely anymore, my lady,” he says. “Are you ready?”
I nod and bow my head. I recite Pelor’s prayer of absolution and, inside of me, I feel a thousand voices join in. I close my eyes and see them all looking back at me. My victims. My family.

Soon we’ll all be at peace. Soon we won’t need to run anymore.

I just wanted to be good.