The Kissed
"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no...anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever... lost."
—Remus Lupin on the Dementor's Kiss (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)
They say that a dementor's kiss leaves behind an empty shell that is alive but not living. What they don't tell you is what happens next.
Most people don't care about the shell left behind. The empty face of a loved one horrifies them so they're more than happy to just forget this thing that is neither dead nor living. So they don't ask questions. Everyone assumes someone else will take care of it. So no one asks and no one tells and the world spins on content in its ignorance.
No one is told about the agonizing emptiness or the torturous need to fill that ragged, gaping hole inside where something vital was ripped away from one is told how without a soul those around you become a constant taunt, dancing about with the one thing you need. No one is told how that emptiness drives you. How your existence narrows until there is only the black hole inside you and the all consuming need to fill it.
No one is told how your magic fights instinctively to keep you and itself alive when everything else inside you is dead, blank nothingness. No one is told how in its desperation your magic reaches out to find what you need, or how when it finally finds someone nearby it latches on to them parasitically stealing the warmth that you lack.
No one knows the ecstasy of that first taste, or the despair when you realize it's not enough, it's a crumb to a starving man. Know one knows how from that point on you are reborn. How that ragged hole drives you to feed on the babbling humans around you in a futile, desperate attempt to be filled. Nothing else matters anymore. Even when your body begins to decay. Even when the sun and the light start to burn away you flesh. Even when your feet fail and break upon your endless journey you drag yourself along. You don't notice or care as your senses begin to fail, as your eyes rot away inside your skull till there's only empty sockets left behind. You are not slowed or stalled as withered and beaten skin tears and falls away leaving scabs and sores. There is only the driving Need. You don't care that you've become the boogeyman in the shadows; a thing of nightmares. The strange creatures with their tools and their noise become little more than cattle to you. There is only the NEED.
No one can tell you the sheer orgasmic high when you finally taste your first stolen soul. How after finally experiencing something that soothes that aching nothingness inside you however briefly, you at last understand the Need and what it is that you crave. Your only goal is to gorge yourself in a desperate need to feel full. There is only the Need. There has only ever been the Need. There will only ever be the need. Only the Need.
No one tells you because
no one knows, and
no one wants to.