"You cannot kill an idea, Avatar Korra."
They were once simple words he had spoken not long ago to the Avatar, yet now they were his life sentence, this being put mildly. He would have laughed, or even smiled if he had the ability to at the irony of the punishment for his sins. Staggering foward down the darkened hallway, he found himself lost in thought about how he had come to be in this current situation. Once upon a time, he was considered a boogeyman to bending children, a monster in the shadows.
Now he truly was one.
He couldn't remember much prior to his final moments with his brother, nor the long months afterwards. Just darkness and a haunting chill that still lingered to this day. Was this what he had to expect in the afterlife? An eternity of nothing? It frightened him in the beginning, nearly drove him mad with insanity, and yet as soon as he was coming to accept this, he was pulled away from it all. thrown back into the land of the living.
The experience had been one of the most painful and difficult procedures he had ever had to endure, and even then it was incomplete. Though injured both physically and emotionally, the Lieutenant fished his broken and bloodied mask out of the harbour, taking it back to his homeland in the Foggy Swamps to one he believed could bring Amon back. Why the man had felt the need to do something like that the bloodbender would never know, as the task itself took more out of the elder witchdoctor and his second in command than expected. A life for a life, apparently. So then he was left alone in the world, an abomination without a purpose. He tried to hide away from the world for a short time, waiting for the day he could rejoin his brother in their eternal darkened hell.
In time, he would come to discover that he had primal needs of survival, yet normal substanance proved to be of no nourishment. He grew enraged, mad with a new form of twisted insanity as he began to starve away with each passing day. It became such a burden to him that he dared to venture out of the seclusion of the deceased witchdoctor's home into the small tribal encampment nearby, intent on satisifying his hunger.
It was there he discovered he could feed off a person's chi through contact to the forehead with the aide of a young waterbending man. It wasn't enough to kill the man nor remove his bending, though it instilled a new sense of fear in the bending society. The new Boogeyman had come, and he was more frightening than before. Needless to say, word spread quickly to the Four Nations, most unbelieving of this story while others began to make preparations to defend themselves. It wasn't until a few months had passed and more victims popped up over the map waking in the night to find their bending weaker than before and a dried red splotch on their foreheads did more believe in The Boogeyman.
It wasn't just the chi he lived off of, but the fear as well. The scent of it was intoxicating to the bloodbender, fueling him to make more and more appearances, and where would he thrive off of it like a fat king more than the city he once held in his hands?
He was brought back to the present at the sound of soft snoring coming from the open door next to him. The man paused, his movements uncoordinated and stiff as he turned and walked inside silently, softly padding towards the large bed that held the four sleeping children. Oddly enough, he found that the younger the bender the more fear and untapped chi they possessed. Feeding from one small child was the near equivalent of three adults, and he had a feeling that with tonight's hunt he would be full for many nights to come.
Raising his gnarled hand awkwardly, he bent the blood from his body, crumpling to his knees to accommodate the amount of blood taken to feed from the four children at once. He watched through the hollowed eyes of his mask as the dark red fluid moved through the air like thin vines, positioning above each of their foreheads before finding their target. As soon as contact was made, he felt a course of energy unlike anything he had ever experienced shoot through him, eliciting a barely audible hiss from behind the bloodbender's broken mask. The children made faces in their sleep, their dreams of flying and clouds gradually becoming dark and twisted. Minutes had passed and Amon broke the connection, his blood singing with power. He stood, his movements not as noticeably jerky but smoother, more fluid than moments before.
He would have to pay a visit to the children soon again, he thought as he left the room as quietly as he had come in, the only proof of his being there were the small red splotches on pale skin, matching drops at their bedsides, and a message scrawled across their door.
You cannot kill an idea.