The Dwindling End is here.
I cannot stop the feeders, but I will save as many as I can, one soul at a time until the last light falls.
Humans are violent, desperate creatures. I know well their hatred, their mistrust, and their fear. My purpose in...
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In my time on this Earth, I've come to learn the difference between the silence that follows the Feeders and the silence before their arrival. Beyond the measure of a mass grave against a held breath. The former is a familiar sight, especially in the first days, when the living still outnumbered the dead.
Now, those who remain don't bother with any sort of graves for the fallen. The bodies are left where they drop, to be reclaimed by the Earth. Because when the Feeders blaze through, there is no one left to bury the dead. No one left to remember the graves. Not even the carrion eaters remain.
Before, the Feeders, even death created noise. The low droning buzz of flies, the clicking of feeding beetles, the call and caw of vultures and crows, each sound a building crescendo— the song of death as a continuation of the cycle. Not this time. The Feeders are a disruption of the natural, a brutal and final note to bring the curtain down.
And I can tell by the absolute silence, they've been through this town.
There are fewer bodies than I expected. Or perhaps, humanity is finally running out of pockets to hide, these backwater towns the final frontier of a once sprawling race. The first one I find lays in the middle of the street. A young woman, her clouded eyes wide open and jaw slack after the tension of rigor mortis. There is nothing left of her past her navel. Once, the sight of naked bone and viscera would cause my gorge to rise, but I've grown numb to such gore.
My joints creak as I kneel beside her, smoothing the pad of my thumb over the waxen flesh of her forehead. She is long past the point of my aid, her vessel emptied by the Feeders, but her memories remain. Their ghosts still linger in the gray matter of her skull, her death still fresh enough to cling to those final remnants.
The contact is cold and unpleasant yet the grisly sight of her body fades into a mass of blurred shapes. A rush of sharp focus and I see her in living colors, clear blue eyes and brilliant smile. Her smile is for the man holding her in his arms, rocking them slowly to a quiet melody. There is love and devotion on his face for her. The scene shifts, the world filled with splashes of crimson red, the song discordant with screams. The man is in her arms, lying on the ground, blank eyes staring up at her face. A loss that mutes her world into tones of gray. I expect anger, rage against the dying of her light, but there is a calm, cold acceptance on her face when she kisses his forehead. The remainder of her memories are flashes of violence, fleeing the Feeders, bearing witness to the fall of humanity, and watching humans tear into one another in their desperation to survive. The young woman is no exception.
Blood stains her hands, smeared on her face, where she slit a man's throat for the cans of food in his pack. For the dozen people she left locked in a church cellar with the first Feeder who found them. The sins of her survival sank into her soul, bloated and swollen with the putrid stench of it, until the Feeders finally tracked her here.
She didn't run when she saw them coming this time, caught in the memory of a near forgotten smile and a soft song. The acceptance of her death didn't make it gentle. The Feeders do not know mercy. Removing my hand from her forehead, I shake my head, the movement making my feathers ruffle. I wonder if her world remained one of devoted looks and dancing, would she have fallen to violence. A question I have asked myself far too often the longer my task drags on.
