CRIMES OF BLOOD 3/7/08
Nourished by the residue of decay, the man, pushing his black cape's hood back, bent down low to feed off the body of the dying soldier. He drank the few remaining drops left in his victim's veins, and continued down along the bloody battlefield. His face was unfathomly pale, a face that had obviously hidden from the sunlight for years. His paper-thin face crinkled when his lips pursed to suck out the blood out of the brave fallen. The moon burned with an unnatural red hue, dark veins channeling their way on its surface. The man listened to the battlefield's whispers. Picking out the last prayers of the dying, he stole the weakened lives and gloried in the gore that attacked his vision. His dark eyes smoldered with their intense craving for gore. He reveled in the violence that had taken place. When he had had his fill of flesh and blood, he left the field and continued on in the night. Shadows haunted him, fear knocked at his withered heart's door, but still he continued on. Drawing his midnight cape around his body tighter, he quickened his pace. The shadows sped up with him. He began breaking into a run, running as if the demons of hell were pursuing him with the vilest of demonic weapons; and still the shadows pursued. He had now entered a secluded cemetery. He stopped running, his parchment lungs crinkling harshly under the stress of his labored breathing. He listened intensely through the cemetery trees, listening for the sounds of the haunted—and haunted—shadows. He gave out a strange sound, a suffocating and hollow sound. He stood statue still—a pathetic monument of desperation and fear. The sheer terror he was plagued by would have driven those weaker in spirit to complete and utter madness. His fear bloomed in his withered and desolate heart. He sensed a brutal murder in the air. A violent shock of maddening lightning evolved through the night's sky and highlighted the sharp silhouettes of the crooked and jagged tombstones. He fell deeper into the blackest throes of terror and anger. His mind was imprisoned in a cage of paranoia and inner warfare. His body became strangled by virgin fear. He fell heavily to his knees, clasping his hands as if in repentant prayer, his face uplifted to the harsh, black sky. Tears of blood streamed down his face, forging crimson channels on his withered skin. The violent winds whipped his skin, stabbing him with the most forcible of all kisses of death. The shadows flitted eerily in front of his eyes, caressing him with their inky blackness. The man began pounding his fists on the wet soil, crying out in agonizing guilt. His bloody tears rained down upon the unhallowed soil, nourishing the worms that fed off blaspheming decay. The shadows danced around the man, maddening him further. He screamed his fury, he cried his anguish, and still the shadows danced around the poor man. His mental memory strip inked his mind's eyes. His scars, never truly healed, bled out the tears of his crimes. Time reversed its stream and stabbed him with the deeds of the past. He screamed silently in raging agony, the shadows stalking closer ever so more. They kept moving in on the guilty man, enclosing him, swallowing him in their darkness. They engulfed him completely, encroaching harshly deep beyond the weak seams of his mind. They tore at his thoughts, ripping violently at the delicate shreds of his decrepit sanity. They demolished him, stealing the last dims lights of his life. They left him on the unhallowed soil, bleeding out the darkness of his wretched thoughts. He screamed out his tears and invoked upon the shadows for the prison of death, deeply craved for after the prison of immortal life. The shadows ignored him, refusing to pause in their mental torture. His guilt raged on, and the shadows pressed on. They never left him though, for the crimes of our blood are shadows.