Mortified, a woman stands. Staggered in a state of confusion, and disbelief. There is an overwhelming and disconcerting feeling of something unknown, of something terrifying.
Of being a corpse.
Her eyes stare blankly ahead, at the figure in front of her.
Memories that were locked out rushing in on her like an angry storm of her past, of everything that had happened, everything that had happened in a different world. In another life. But now her past memories, her past life, a different world and a different her. That's what she wanted to believe, that none of this had happened to her.
But, her body is that of a monster. And she was never going to get away from the truth, from the reality, of the past, her past, the life of her past. She could never escape.
Too much had happened in the past twenty minutes, or so it seemed for her, that was a lie of her memories as the maw and hole that was above, had long closed itself and swallowed everything in an instant.
The body she now stood next to, she had once loved. She had loved him.
She wanted to scream and cry, and to cry some more. The man who once held her heart, and the only one she'd ever truly loved. Now gone, and no more than a dark mass of rot and flesh and bones, with an oddly shaped skull.
In his wake, however, he was cursed with a fate far worse than his death, he was now a black mass of rot, a mass of rotten and twisted flesh, and a mass of rotten and twisted bone and sinews, a mass that is now the only thing that was left of his once living form.
The physical body woke up as Alice embraced it—Once limp, now alive and breathing. But the soul of the body that now stood up had never been there. And neither had the consciousness. They were not there and had been gone long ago, they had long ago departed the physical form.
"Who... who is this...?" She asked herself, as if the soulless and empty body was a foreigner, an unknown, and she had no idea what to say to them.
"Alice...? Alice...!" The voice called out, and the body, the body, the empty body that once belonged to Vetro, it did so as well, calling for her, "Alice, I... I..." Zaig■ spoke, through his vessel's voice. His soulless body and his empty and dead mind had been taken and used by the anomaly, the anomaly of a soul-eating monster. "Alice..." He repeated her name.
"G...Guillerme...? Is that... is that you?" She asked, her hands shaking as they held on to the blackened corpse, a dead and rotting body, with a black mass in place of a face. The body, the black mass of flesh, and a skull with no eye sockets.
Though it was not. "Alice. I... I know I am... a terrible and despicable being. I did not have the strength and courage to be a hero... I am a weak, weak man." His body stood up and he was looking at Alice, his empty eye sockets, his empty face, it was all so forlorn, "But, please... do not think ill of me... I intend to make it up to you... I..." He placed a hand over his right eye socket, as if in pain. "...I... I... I... I..."
"Zabulus. Shut up." Alice's voice had gone cold and was as if she was addressing someone who she had never loved.
"Alice! Listen to me! I... I am sorry. Truly, truly sorry! Please... just listen to me." He pleaded and his tone was desperate and his body seemed as if it was about to break into pieces. He looked pathetic and he was pitiful. He was just an anomaly in a dead man's body, and nothing more. "I am sorry, Alice... I am sorry, and... I am truly, truly, truly sorry, and I mean it."
"Is sorry all you have to say to me?! What about all that time I spent loving, and all that time we spent together, was that not worth anything?! You're sorry, you say?! Sorry?!" She yelled at him in anger.
He couldn't reply to her, he couldn't.
"Even so, you weren't the one that I loved. I don't care to hear any apologies from a dead man, a man whose heart was already dead and cold before he ever met me."
Her words stung, but she couldn't help it. It was a feeling of hatred, of betrayal.
"If I have to see your fucking face ever again... if you ever come near me, or even try to speak to me..." Her eyes were burning with hatred, and the blackened corpse of Zabulus could only look back at her in a dead stare. "I will eat your fucking face."
It was the same face, but it was the face of an entirely different person, someone whom she hated and would never forgive. Someone she'd never trust or have faith in ever again. Someone she wouldn't allow to even look at her, ever again.
The anomaly in the black mass of a corpse stood still and stared at her in disbelief, but it wasn't the same person she once loved. And never again could that be said. "I understand..." He said, surprisingly, in a calm and collected voice, though the corpse's face was full of sorrow and it was filled with pain and regret, "I understand." He repeated once more, his empty eye sockets, and the blackened skin that was left, began to break down, as if the blackened flesh and the blackened skull were nothing but dust, nothing but a mass of rotten, decayed and blackened flesh that was being torn apart. "I understand." As if his body, his vessel, was being eaten alive by something that could be seen in its entirety from within. "I am not going to apologize any longer, Alice, and you have every reason to not want me near you." He stood there in silence for a moment. "You're free now... you are not my prisoner. I will change myself from here on, for I am not fit for such an emotion as love and trust. And I shall never ask for forgiveness."
"I hope you die. Die, and go straight to hell. You deserve worse than death, you deserve to rot and decay forever... What the fuck was I to you?" She cried out in anguish as the anomaly that had been speaking to her had no longer any control over its vessel. It was as if the body was already dead.
"You... You were..." It spoke in a monotone voice, with an odd sense of emptiness, of something that was not of a human, "A victim, and a child of a dead universe." The nonsense spoken, bespeak the anomaly's insanity. The corpse had no soul or consciousness.
And Alice was left with a corpse of a monster.
This body was dead. And to whomever was the next, she did not care.
The blackened, empty corpse of an anomaly and a soul-eater was dead, but that was never going to be the end of him. It was never so simple. It never could have been.
He had been an anomaly that should have been destroyed. If one truly loves the other, they will not let them live the life of an anomaly and a broken monster.
She was not willing to let that thing, that anomaly, that being that was so cruel that it foregoes all logic to gain its own desires. Its own, twisted love.
"Come here," she ordered the dead body, who could only comply. It was an empty vessel, not of the soul, but of something.
'Hungry.'
A soulless corpse as a meal, how disdaining, and utterly tasteless.
But she had no qualm in this decision.
The corpse moved on its own, as if in compliance to the words of a girl, her words.
As her arms came back and a familiar, yet odd, sensation hit the palms of her hands, she had regained some part of her sanity, a piece of herself, that was her. A girl in a blue and white dress and with long blonde hair that looked like a waterfall of gold. That's who she was in the end.
The soul eater's vessel, a black, soulless, empty, and rotten vessel, that was of a dead person's, a dead person's, dead flesh and decay.
The vessel walked towards Alice.
Slowly, slowly... the vessel was approaching, like it had a hunger for its flesh and rot to consume.
She could smell his rotten, rotten flesh and rot from the vessel. His rotten flesh was rotting away. Rot, rot, rot, rot. His flesh was rotting. Rot. The flesh of the body that had once belonged to another was rotting and falling away.
The rot, the rotten smell of the decay, and decay of a dead body.
It was all getting to her head, perhaps because the smell was so hypnotic and so enticing. She was going insane from this.
"Go slower. Slow down your pace, and stop, and stand there. Stop moving." She ordered and it obeyed. It was as if the corpse, the dead body was an automaton and she the master, like a puppet or an unthinking doll.
The corpse stood motionless and stared at her, its empty gaze was empty and void of a consciousness and life, just a vessel.
"Come on..." Alice said to the corpse with a smile on her face. "Surely, you didn't truly die, and are simply pretending to be dead in front of me... You've been alive all along... Right?"
She walked towards him and grabbed his hand and raised it up in front of his face. "You see? This hand, this will be the hand that ends my suffering, my sorrow, my heart ache. I just wanted to make this all a little less painful, just a little, just a tad bit better. And you can do this... for me." But the corpse did not respond as it's mouth was agape with his empty eye sockets looking down. His hand dropped to his sides. She sighed with disappointment in her face. "...I should've known you are a liar, an empty and hollow one." The corpse remained silent as she took hold of the corpse and pushed him forward with his head in between the palms of her hand, it was as if it was an object or an inanimate being that didn't need her permission. He stood there, as she brought his face close and closer to hers.
"Thank you for the meal." She spoke and kissed him on the head, "I'll have a nice dinner with you." As if she were thanking a god who she was to eat.
She had her lips open as if about to take a bite of the dead man, and the lips came forward as her tongue extended, and it licked the lips of the corpse. She had her tongue in the corpse's mouth as if sucking at something. It was like she was kissing a dead body. And she continued the kiss that had started in a seemingly innocent manner.
She embraced him, the corpse, and the kiss continued.
The corpse's mouth began to fill with the girl's spit that slowly flowed down his throat and out the bottom.
As if it was her last resort to have this corpse, to devour the corpse and make the vessel hers to have.
Slowly, the kiss of this dead corpse had become more intense, as if they had become lovers. She embraced the corpse even harder than before and as her hands went around its waist the kiss deepened, it was as if they both wanted to swallow each other's tongues. Or it was on her who wanted to swallow him.
Drip...Drip...Drip...
Blood dripped from where their interlocked tongues connected and flowed to their feet. The corpse's body and hers became more soaked in red blood, the more their embrace tightened.
Its tongue found its way inside her stomach, the tongue burning as her stomach acids dissolved it. The dead flesh of the anomaly was being devoured and eaten, inside her.
She took the dead body in and the tongue was gone and his lips were gone, the lips that once were the anomaly, were gone.
Then the teeth, as she bit down as hard as she possibly could and it came out of his mouth in pieces that she chew to swallow. The bone fragments and teeth, his, her teeth too and hers were crunching, crunch, and crunch. Blood flowed down their bodies in rivers that had come to cover the checkered floor beneath them and stained it all red. Her saliva dripped and dripped and dripped down as the taste of blood and flesh mixed and combined.
She embraced the body tighter and tighter, as she thought of the man she loved, this body once belonging to him, now hollow and empty.
Her embrace was so tight that the bodies very skin began to come away, like wet tissue, and the muscle underneath was revealed as well as the fat underneath it all and she continued the hug as all that remained was a pile of wet muscle and flesh.
An innocent, deadly kiss turned into an act of cannibalism.
Then her tongue found its way down the corpse and her teeth began to bite and chew the flesh that was on the body, the body that had once been a person.
And that is when her embrace stopped as she could no longer hug the body that she had just eaten, it wasn't there.
The body was no longer there as her stomach, and her intestines filled themselves and expanded to hold the meal she ate.
For once in forever, she felt satiated.