This is the beginning of a very strange and unusual sort of modern AU. Part supernatural tale, part fairy tale, it ponders on the topics of self-forgiveness, personal sacrifice and redemption.

It won't be as long as my other long stories, but it will be a multi-chapter.

All feedback and comments welcome! I'm a bit nervous about this one and could use any encouragement.


The sour, acrid scent of death and decay curled about the interior of the filth-covered room. The antique concrete floor of the decrepit basement was covered in a thick coat of grime and gore, layered from years of murders occurring in this gloom-ridden place. He knew the bodies were tucked away unceremoniously under floorboards and within wall spaces in the upper floors above. In the corner, tucked away in the shadows was a woman's nude body, suspended by rough rope and twine like a butchered marionette. Her body spoke of unspeakable horrors, days of agonizing torture. Thankfully, her suffering was over now, having passed from this plane of existence to the next. She was only one of dozens before her, the body toll had reached thirty-two.

He wondered what had taken so long for him to be summoned to this place, surely the perpetrator of such carnage had reached beyond the point of redeemability long ago.

"Why must so much evil occur before we intervene?" He had once asked, in the very beginning of his immortal sentence.

His predecessor had looked at him blankly, but with an undercurrent of pity and replied, "It is not our place to question the innerworkings of the system, only that we must act when called."

"And what if I do not act?" He stubbornly replied.

His predecessor, a fine-looking man with auburn hair and severe green eyes had merely quirked his brow. "You know why."

During his lifetime he had thought himself immune to the horrors of man. Afterall, he himself had committed his fair share of atrocities. How many times had he delighted in the moans and wailings of his own victims? How many nights had he stayed up devising ingenious and increasingly more painful methods of torture? His skeletal hands had so much blood stained upon them, his soul blackened with the cold murders he himself had committed. The hatred he carried for mankind had rested heavy upon his shoulders like a comforting cloak. He used that anger to justify his callousness towards others, to become separate from the rest of mankind.

It wasn't as if he did not have his reasons for ostracizing himself from the species and retaining so much vitriol towards it. From birth he had carried the burden of difference. It manifested itself upon his face in the form of a death's mask. He only need look in the mirror to see just how inhuman he looked. Or, perhaps, not inhuman, for he certainly resembled a man, but a man long death and mummified.

Imagine his mother's surprise, a woman who carried a cryptic pregnancy to term, having no knowledge of having been with child, to sudden enter the agony of labor and expel something as ghastly as himself into the world. It was no wonder she was convinced he had been the spawn of the Devil himself. His skin was so translucent the skull could be seen beneath and a cavernous hole served for his nose. The midwife had not even cut the cord, leaving the scissors on the bed and quickly fleeing the ungodly bedroom. Moments later his father had quickly rushed in, took one staggering look at his monstrosity of a son and decided in that moment to abandon his poor wife, packing a bag of his belongings and vacating the home before the cord had even been cut, before they even knew if he drew breath or not.

His mother wanted to throw him into the fire and end her own life with the very scissors that sat on her bedspread, but something inward prevented her to act. Was it fear of Satan's wrath or mercy? He would never know, for he was not permitted to have such knowledge. Instead, she cut the cord with a quivering hand, swaddled him in bloodied sheets and set to work creating the only thing that would bring her sanity during the next coming years…a simple cloth mask for an infant.

That was a lifetime ago now, nearly two centuries had passed since then. His poor unhappy mother was merely a part of a separate life, but the memory still burned bright within his blighted heart. She was long gone and this was his world now, his fate, and it currently brought him to this basement of human slaughter.

His memories were being crowded and infiltrated with the scenes of what had happened in the rooms of this house, every scream, every sharp crack of bone, every tear of a knife through flesh or crushing thwack of a hammer, each terrible sexual offense. The pleas of women and children cluttered his consciousness. This was his curse now.

"There is something redeemable in you, Erik." His predecessor, Lucius, had said upon the eve of his death, "You have been called to taste the wickedness of men until you find that which can be saved within you."

"I have already tasted enough!" He had spat at the unwelcome specter that had entered his chamber, leering at him with handsome features as Erik lay dying in the coffin he utilized for a bed.

"Not wickedness of this sort," Lucius replied, a compassionate frown upon his face. "I pray you do not take as long as I had to find your redemption, a couple millennia at this post is far too long."

And with that, Erik had died, his throat emitting a terrible death rattle as his body exhaled for the last time. It should have brought him peace, instead he was promptly resurrected, his body different yet very much the same.

All he had ever longed for was death, yet it had been denied to him.

"You could not even do me the dignity of correcting my face?" Erik had fumed as he clutched his head in his hands, his body racked with sobs as he dealt with the awful understanding of what had just occurred.

Lucius had just given a sad laugh as he opened the panels of his shirt to reveal a sickly jagged scar running from pubic to sternum, a scar that Erik would later learn was from the moment Lucius was disemboweled during battle. "We keep the bodies we were born into; it is a part of our penance."

Even now, he was not certain how anyone could find redemption doing the tasks he was assigned. It seemed more along the lines of punishment than reformation, but Lucius had instilled some kernel of hope within him…If he found redemption, what lay on the other side? Could he, perhaps, be transformed into someone new, a sort of reincarnation? He knew it was not sweet oblivion, a realm where no memories or consciousness dwell, that was the fate of irredeemable souls. Endlessly, he contemplated where Lucius had gone, once he had finished mentoring him on the execution of his sentence and vanished into the ether like a brilliant amber wisp of smoke. His ancient teacher had the most serene expression on his face as he fizzled away, as if he had finally found the resolution to a lifelong pursuit of an existential question.

"Do not take so long, Erik." Were his last, parting words.

Lucius himself did not know what existed after this. They only knew there was no heaven, no hell. All the things Erik had been taught by the pitying priest who came to visit him twice a week as a child, none of it was real. All his mother's superstitions and fears of her child were entirely moot…that seemed to make it all worse. If he really were the Devil's spawn, it would certainly have justified his childhood, would have given him some sort of excuse for the manner he lived as an adult, but he wasn't the child of Satan. He was merely a clumsy mistake made by nature, a warped piece from a potter's wheel who should have been discarded.

He did know one thing for certain, the existence of the soul.

Which is what brought him here, waiting in the flickering incandescent light of this basement while his current prey came stomping down the worn stairs, black trash bags and duct tape in hand, materials to wrap a body within.

Erik could taste him already and it made his stomach churn. He lamented what was to come, could feel the sick coming upon his quaking belly already.

The man was middle-aged, white, heavy around the mid-section and sporting a reddened face from years attached to the bottle. His dusty colored hair was unkempt and thinning, he had it swept to the side in an attempt to cover the balding patch on top. The faded blue flannel he wore was covered in blood splatter and the tears of the dead young woman hanging in the corner. Erik did not need to see this scene to know what had happened. From the moment he was summoned he could read this man's soul. Every despicable and nauseating act this man had committed became Erik's memory and tormented his very being.

He had been an abhorrent being in life, but nothing compared to the souls he was quested to claim.

The man halted at the bottom of the stairs upon seeing the dark, unmasked guest in his basement of terrors. Erik knew what he looked like to this man; death incarnate, mythological.

Erik had no patience for any preamble or pretense. Raising his outstretched hand, he physically yanked the man's essence from his body. The empty shell of his carcass dropped to the floor, scattering the bags and tape from his suddenly limp fingers, leaving the faint, glowing imprint of the man's soul behind. The jerk of the wrist was similar to the very same motion he would employ when dishing out death in his other life, when he used his most beloved of weapons, the Punjab Lasso.

This was the only death he served now, the sort which had been preordained by some higher entity.

"I suppose this must come as quite a surprise," Erik said, his voice sounded slightly disused. He rarely spoke these days, save for moments such as this when he was summoned. He could sense the man's wild panic as he tried in vain to fight against Erik's hold on his spirit. "I'm afraid there is no point in struggling, it will do you no good. You see, I'm a reaper and not an ordinary reaper…no, their jobs are far more luxurious than mine. They get all the good and decent souls to ferry off to God knows where, it sounds like far more glamorous work, don't you think?" He shook his death's head in morbid humor. "No, I have the distinguished title of Soul-Eater." He quirked his eyebrow up. "Sounds, terrifying no? Well, I assure you, it's certainly not pleasant for either of us. Your soul has been weighed and judged by whatever powers that be and here I am to collect it. Many must wait for death first, but in cases such as your own, I am called to remove you permanently from existence. I understand the process is to be unspeakably agonizing for you." He sighed, weary from his absurd speech to this unworthy creature. "Now, let us not extend this much longer, I wish to leave this hellscape you have created."

Opening his awful maw, his thin, white lips retracting from his teeth, the lifeforce of the man began to funnel towards him and down his thin throat. The process was took less than a minute, but it felt like an eternity as the foul, putrid taste of evil coated his tongue and burned his belly. Every inch of Erik was pulsating with the dark, wickedness infecting this man's spirit until, at last, the soul was consumed, and the man's existence was no more. Erik could feel how excruciating it was for the man's soul, incomprehensible to any mortal, as the man was forced to experience every sin as though they had been inflicted upon his own person instead of the long list of women and children rotting away in the walls of floors of this house.

Erik gasped and fell to his knees, clutching at his abdomen as his mind rapid-fired the memories of the man's life like a gruesome slideshow of iniquity. This part was always the worst as he was forced to relive a stranger's life, to feel all the terrible things he, and his victims, had felt. It was the sickest form of empathy God could have surely devised.

And then, like every time, when the memories faded away and deposited themselves neatly into the vault of his mind, he retched. The bony protrusions of his shoulders curled forward as he vomited. A thick, tar-like substance pooled from his raw throat and onto the dirty, blood-soaked concrete floor. This was all that was left of the man who once was, the digested, concentrated remains of an irredeemable soul. Crime scene investigators may later swab the foul substance, run it through every test science had at its disposal, only to find themselves utterly baffled by its origin.

In a way, he envied the man for his newfound nonexistence. Was this truly justice for the man's foul deeds? It begged the question; what lay on the other side that oblivion would be considered punishment? Why must Erik now carry the memories of this man in his cursed skull? How had Lucius endured a millennium of such labor?

When Lucius had left him alone to venture into this strange new world unaccompanied, the ancient reaper had left Erik with every memory from his own long sentence. It was the way of things, each successive Soul Eater obtained the memories of the former Eaters spanning back from the beginning of time, although those memories were nearly impossible to access at will but would often come in the form of nightmares. There were some benefits, however. With that burden of knowledge came languages, even those long dead, and the images and sounds of forgotten art and music. Erik would sit with a violin in hand and spin melodies and musical tales from the sights and sounds of a long-gone memory not his own.

Raising from the ground, his pant legs slightly soiled from his own sick, he groaned and rubbed his face. Glancing at the cold female body hanging in the corner, he felt the fierce desire to cover her naked form. She did not deserve to be found in such a degrading state, but it was not his place to intervene, and the evidence of this man's deeds would eventually be known.

Lifting his hand, he invoked the small portal, a window through space, on the other side lay the quiet abandoned apartment he now temporarily called home, its humble furnishings far more inviting than this cold basement full of despair.

He stepped through and sighed.

Perhaps it there would be another long span of time before he was summoned again.