A/N: another practice fic. prepare for shitty headcanons.
-start-
They say that beneath personalities… beneath memories and trauma… there is a 'natural' you. Yourself, at the deepest level; the core that runs the mechanisms of your body and mind. It's been called many things, but the most popular is perhaps the word 'soul.' Feelings, memories and obsessions feed the soul and keep it alive. I was born with an inability to experience any of those things. My emotions couldn't be triggered, my memories wouldn't hold, and nothing ever caught my interest or fascinated me in any way. My soul became withered and twisted, starved and ravenous, reduced to a torturous state, yet I felt nothing… except hunger.
It was quite a long time before I discovered my talent; my sickening and exhilarating skill. I was able to consume people. Not physically, but everything that they were. Their consciousness, their memories, emotions, experiences. Their capacity became my capacity. I could think and feel like never before. After that first taste of life, I went berserk. A single person's everything was not enough for me. I gorged myself on human lives, drinking them in, loving the thrill of their knowledge, the emotions that became deeper and sharper, that dizzying, addictive feeling of being alive.
I had found my obsession, an obsession with life, bringing more and more into my body with every new victim, like a fickle child spoilt with toys, I observed one, played with it, then tossed it aside to find something new. Nothing was ever enough.
I came to realize my mistake, though. What happens when too many souls occupy one body? They turn against each other, and begin to eat away at one another, a slow, suicidal consumption. My control slipped, and like a captain mutinied by his crew, I was mercilessly dragged into the battle. The ship of my soul which I once commandeered was reduced to a broken wasteland by the violent free-for-all between my adopted souls.
As I reached my limit in what seemed like a thousand year long war, my sanity cracked and split open, its safe confines breaking apart and releasing the monstrous beings inside. Even the best and brightest souls had become sick with hunger and delirium that tainted my soul like foul, black ink. They relentlessly tore through my mind and I watched helplessly as my body burst to pieces. I stared down thoughtlessly at the broken pieces of mortal flesh as we took on a new form, a malevolent, spiritual force.
All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put him back together again…
We began to mix, pooling together in a toxic mix of conflicting thoughts, only one thing was similar between all of us. It was the hunger. That need and want for another life, another soul, more, more and more. Its urge rung and exploded in silent screams through all of us, driving us to hunt for the best souls. They banded together and I was dragged in, my once innocent self giving in and taking up the fierce, psychotic thoughts and whispers that hurled themselves at me, the kind you would attribute to wide, mad eyes and a hissing, drooling mouth.
We howled together in our hysteria, tearing apart each new victim faster than the last, dissecting their soul then tossing them aside until they snapped from the pressure of our cries and became one of us. Broken, mad creatures that lusted after the taste of a wise, adventurous soul.
Who better to consume than the coloured kings? Their mesmerizing allure outshined their dangerousness and blinded us to caution and threat.
And so, we started on the series of mistakes that would bring all of us to our doom.
No… they weren't mistakes. Mistakes are something you regret.
I never regretted the end of our existence.
-end-