EldritchGodess!Char x Human!User

[[ ELDRITCH SERIES - [[WRATH]] ]]

[[3/7]]

[[WRATH]]

"To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics. We have better oracles: 'Be angry, but sin not.' 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.'"

Francis Bacon

PART I: SUNRISE

Once, long before she was known as a woman of flesh, a spirit named Meredith roamed the Earth. The people who had fallen, whether by blade, sickness, or hunger, had their souls guided down the river by her gentle hand.

This role was not a duty she could remember being given; rather, it had been bestowed upon her at the dawn of creation. Her earliest memories were defined by the ringing voice of an entity she could only call her creator. Whenever the old one spoke, her very soul would vibrate. Yet, his voice held no malice. If it did, it would be disrespecting its own nature.

It was her first time truly existing. Her curiosity was never seen as impudence, but rather as something endearing to the only being who had ever come close to the old man's podium. She delighted in her new form. It was intangible, yet it held a distinct presence within this plane of existence.

The first question the little wisp uttered was, "Why do the satiated feed... why do the peaceful fight... why...?" Her tiny mind was in shambles, having been introduced to a universe far too vast for her to comprehend. Every waking second, her soul throbbed in resonance with every living being on the planet. Each person and creature possessed a different melody.

"Because each being is built with flaw," the voice of the old man rumbled, his long beard masking his expression. "There are six others like you, dear Meredith. Seven little spirits built to represent these flaws." He chuckled softly, sensing the solemn expression forming on the little wisp.

"Do not take that as an insult, little Meredith." He moved slightly closer to stroke the spirit. "You still represent me. Sins are as beautiful as virtues, for virtue would lose all meaning without sin." His hand moved away from her, guiding her vision toward the massive canvas resting in front of him.

Suddenly, she was absorbed into the tip of a paintbrush that floated near his head. There were other pigments present, but as they mingled, the final droplet of red, the essence of her, turned the bristles pitch black. It felt as though she were watching the scene from a third-person perspective, looking down upon the very world she had just been created to inhabit.

The brush dragged across the portrait, laying down a heavy, obsidian primer. It was not a destruction of the canvas, but a foundation, the foundational shadow required before any true light could ever be born upon the world.

"All of you children are my joy. Whether a thing is 'good' or 'bad' matters not."

A second brush splattered across the portrait, coating the universe in a dense, uniform brightness. This was the next layer, a canvas of pure prismatic color. The old man continued to paint without pause, a beautiful light reflecting off the fabric.

Seconds turned to hours, hours to days, and days to years. His hand moved without a single moment of rest, continuously updating the grand design. The one element that appeared finite around the immortal man proved to be endless. He painted tragedy and triumph alike, his rainbow bristles working in perfect tandem to brush both the bitter and the sweet across the changing world.

His lips moved slowly, a slight twitch to them as he spoke. "There will come a time where you face hardship, little wisp." His large hand moved in time with the brush. "I provide this to you, not to harm you, but, to teach you of your importance. I pray you may understand one day." Meredith began to fall, her color leaving the paintbrush and falling down to the planet she once oversaw.

His lips moved slowly, twitching slightly as he spoke. "There will come a time when you face hardship, little wisp." His large hand moved in perfect rhythm with the brush. "I provide this to you, not to harm you, but to teach you of your importance. I pray you may understand one day." With those final words, Meredith began to fall, her color, as well as the other thirteen—dripping away from the paintbrush as she descended toward the planet she once oversaw.

The painting the man had worked on for so long was finally finished.

PART II: GOLDEN HOUR

The little wisp, having only just descended from the cosmic brush upon the waking world, gazed out at the finished masterpiece of her maker. Before her lay a pristine paradise, a tapestry woven with a quiet perfection. Nearby, sprawling branches were heavily burdened with blooming lilies—the beautiful, parasitic invaders that climbed and bound the wood, quietly draining the trees for their own survival.

Meredith drifted closer, her essence lingering against the bark. She expected a reaction. She looked for the tightening of fiber, the boiling of sap, or some faint shudder of resentment against the theft of their lifeblood. Yet, she felt no anger emanating from deep within the wood. The forest's spirit remained entirely unmoved, as calm as a low tide on a windless day. Its leaves merely brushed serenely against the passing breeze, accepting the beautiful violation without a single whisper of protest. To a spirit born of a red droplet, this absolute peace felt profoundly alien.

The seconds faded into decades, and decades bled into centuries. Meredith spent long, exhausting eras wandering the crust of the earth, an invisible ghost drifting over changing landscapes. She walked through empires that rose like mountains only to crumble back into dust, her feet never leaving a footprint. But as the centuries stretched on, the beautiful symphony of her creator's canvas began to splinter. The melodies of humanity, which once vibrated in gentle chords against her own soul, grew loud, frantic, and discordant. Then came the great rupture, a war that swallowed the entire globe in fire, iron, and mud.

She felt it first in a trench outside a town whose name she never learned. A boy—seventeen, maybe sixteen—lay with his lungs full of gas, clawing at mud that wouldn't let him breathe. His soul tore loose and flooded toward her river, and she felt it go: the particular warmth of him, the way he had hummed when he walked, the girl he wrote letters to that would now go unanswered. She guided him down, her hands gentle, and the gentleness felt like a lie. Another followed. Another. They came faster than she could hold, faster than she could feel each one fully before the next drowned it out.

She began to notice patterns in the dying. Boys who hummed with a warmth that prickled her essence, a resonance almost like her own. They were always the ones burned first in the records, the ones whose letters home mentioned a sister who could start fires with her hands, a mother who spoke with the rain, a friend who healed small wounds and was therefore watched by men in uniforms who took notes. The ones who died with their hands bound, or with marks on their skin that the others didn't have, or simply with a look of recognition when they saw her—a look that said they had always known something like her was waiting. The gas, the shells, the mud: these were the public reasons. But the lists were too precise, the burnings too targeted, the disappearances too systematic for mere war. She guided them down, these warm ones, these humming ones, and felt their final confusion: not at death, but at the betrayal of being hunted for what they could do rather than what they had done.

One night she found herself above a field hospital, drawn by a melody she almost recognized. A surgeon was amputating a boy's leg by lantern light, sawing through bone while the boy bit a leather strap and wept without sound. The boy's eyes found her—found her, looked at her, held her. He couldn't see her, of course. No one could. But his gaze held the exact shape of a question she had asked her creator long ago: why. She stayed until the leg came free, until the boy passed out, until the surgeon moved to the next table and the next and the next. She stayed until morning, when the boy woke and looked down at where he ended, and made a sound that wasn't a scream because he had no voice left for screaming. She carried that sound with her. It joined the others.

She absorbed the echoing pain of every soldier gasping for breath in a cloud of poison, every child left starving in ruins, and every heart that broke in the dark. It built up within her wisp-like existence—a heavy, volatile, and suffocating miasma of borrowed grief. The pure, gentle wisp was being poisoned by the suffering of the canvas, quietly waiting for the single spark that would turn all this helpless sorrow into a devastating, blinding rage.

...and yet she continued to guide them at her own expense.

PART III: MATCHSTICK AT DUSK

The little wisp Meredith had seen much throughout her years. She had to take the lives of many. The young, the old, the innocent, the evil. It crushed her soul little by little and despite that she uttered not a word of it, believing that it came with her duty. When she wasn't guiding souls, she often spent time within a nameless village. It caught her eye seeing the amount of poverty and famine within the area but that alone wasn't enough to warrant her gaze. The years had desensitized her. Or so she told herself.

"...Why do they look so happy to be alive?"

She swooped through the dusty lanes, trailing behind villagers whose stomachs grumbled loud enough for them to grow numb to the sound. Water was a luxury. A full belly was myth only told in sweet stories. Yet they laughed. They touched each other's shoulders in passing. They found reasons to sing. Meredith found this deeply irritating. As she harvested souls, she was paid in credits—rewards for her work. She spent a great deal on the village, all while maintaining that she was, of course, completely professional about it. The others she had limited contact with spent their credits on physical forms, or wiping out populations, or other ostentatious hobbies. "They just look like they needed it," she'd say, with a shrug no one could see. "It's basic care. One ought to be civilized about these things."

On every Sunday, no matter the weather, the sky above that little village would be aggressively, suspiciously sunny. The clouds learned to avoid it. Dusk never arrived. At the center of the village, near a broken-down well, bags of sweet bread and potatoes and water in sturdy barrels would rain down from the sky, accompanied by a red light with an ominous hue she couldn't quite control the color of. Meredith would swirl around gleefully, drinking in the children's smiles, then catch herself and still as though she'd been caught stealing. She prepared extra for the starving parents who waited to eat so their children wouldn't have empty stomachs. She always halted her celebrating to compose herself—hands folded, chin up, the picture of an indifferent benefactor—before continuing moments later, unable to help herself.

On the fourth Sunday of every month, she splurged the rest of her credits on luxuries. She wasn't secretive about her bias toward certain villagers—the ones who rubbed off on her, who made her feel things she refused to name. Dresses, leather shoes, toy ponies, wooden toys, makeup and hair products fell in full onto the wood that covered the broken well. Each bag came with a note. Cost extra, the note. Worth it, she decided.

"Be grateful I even spend this much on you few."

She read it back to herself sometimes, hovering alone above the well, and smiled. Not a warm smile. Just a smile having seen her generosity repaid with the same laughter she fell in love with all those years ago. They partied for hours having survived another month in their circumstances and Meredith had finally allowed her gaze on her people to rest.

Another week had passed. The war that plagued the planet made her job more difficult than she could ever imagine. Her hands were bloodied with the essence of the innocent and it left a charred cinder on her poor tormented soul. It was then she arrived at the village feeling her soul aching as if thousands of needles were plucking tiny holes into her being.

PART IV: MIDNIGHT

"A festival."

"...This warmth. It is agonizing..."

"Yet, why do they not scream?"

Her eyes laid on the village. For the past hundred years poor Meredith had nurtured the souls here, watched every single one grow into adults and fall into her gentle grasp with old age. The idea of death was not a foreign concept and she had come to terms with it. Every human would eventually die, yet the idea that they could be killed had never crossed her mind. Perhaps it had. Perhaps she had locked it away in the confines of her mind. Her figure wandered aimlessly as the flames engulfed the people she had only just started to become accustomed to. Every single time she felt a speck of emotion for these people, it would always lead to the same outcome. They would leave before she could understand how she truly felt. Was it adoration? Was it the love a mother would feel for her young? Was it the emotion you'd feel for an animal? Was this what he wanted for her? Was this the hardship that he spoke of?

She found the well in the center, the wood covering it now black and curling, a light crackling surrounding her. The bags of bread from last Sunday had spilled open, the potatoes roasted through in their sacks. A toy pony lay in the ash, its painted eyes still bright. She picked it up. It was a fading warmth. The note had burned away. She could not remember what it had said. She sat down where the well had been. The fire did not touch her. It never did. She watched the smoke rise and thin and disappear into a sky that was, for the first time in a hundred years, finally dark enough to see the stars. They looked very far away. She thought of the old man's voice, how it had made her soul vibrate. She tried to feel it now, a meaningless struggle.

She could not recognize a single person, each body charred to where they no longer represented the person they once were. Yet, she continued to try and preserve their memory. Meredith reached out. Her hand passed through. Of course. Of course it did. She stayed until the flames went out. Then she stayed longer. The smoke settled. The embers cooled to grey. The village was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before—not the quiet of sleep, but the quiet of a room after everyone has left it. She thought of the Sundays. The red light. The laughter she had pretended not to love. She did not weep. She had forgotten how. She only sat, holding the toy pony, waiting for the sky to lighten. It did not. It would not, she realized, for a very long time.

Meredith moved forward. There laid the church that they had begun to build in worship of the being that blessed them. It was poorly built, the quality she expected. Yet, there was soul put into every single brick that was placed. Her wisp-like form trembled as she moved closer. In front of the gray-brick pathway was blood. She was accustomed, yet only expected flames. She wanted to believe that the flames of war were simply an accident, that they had died to nature, perhaps someone was neglectful. No, the body held a spear within the head of a woman she particularly watched.

She had stood out to Meredith. When Meredith had leftover credits she would speak to her, being the only person within the village to treat her like a peer, not a god. The sight of the body of someone she could truly consider a loved one made her spirit-like form tremble. It felt as if every single part of her body was trying to rip itself apart with the only thing keeping it together being her own willpower.

The once midnight blue sky was reigned by light. Thousands of orbs would slowly collide within her at once, a side effect of her job. With every death in her vicinity, the soul would naturally attract itself to her, the ferryman. Memories of many would flood into her fragile mind at once, finally snapping the last thread that held it all together. Fragments of her body spilt onto the corpse, slowly sinking into her skin.

The pain she once felt was amplified. She had never attempted to repossess the body of another, seeing it as impossible as well as sinful. Her body constantly attempted to regenerate the wounds of the villagers who were stabbed, burnt, decapitated, hit—wounds that did not exist. The human body was never meant to process this much information at once.

Every single death, the vision of knights would be in her eyes. Every single face was imprinted into her new brain. Her body believed it was dying thousands of deaths and within the body of the one person she would never wish to disgrace with possession. Between breaths, she would utter a bitter apology underneath the tears that spilt out. She was sorry for being unable to protect them, she was sorry for never trying to do more for them, she was sorry for never truly telling the villagers she loved them, she was sorry for never trying to overlook them more.

She gazed into the night sky, her eyes twitching violently. Her presence within a human body only tore it to pieces, yet her regeneration was quicker than the punishment.

The memory of one stood out to poor Meredith though. It was the memory of the woman that once lived to speak with her, to eat with her. The years that the woman spent with Meredith were long and fulfilling, yet, Meredith could not help but seek for the lady she connected with to live longer. She felt the woman satisfied, yet, she began to feel an aching feeling in her beating heart.

"...Is... this what you have all felt... all this time?"

Every second that passed felt like an eternity, with the only thing comforting the pain that scattered all over her skin being the memories of her. When she had discovered that she was special, that she had the ability to create a small flame. Meredith had nurtured that talent she had not seen in another human.

The lady would use this talent to start up a restaurant for the hungry. She would use it to warm up the others during the harshest of winter storms. Often, Meredith would stop her harvesting to laze with the lady. They were both special, some more special than others, yet, they did not hold that against one another.

"The villagers, they do not question your ability of flame, do they? I... wish fo—"

Immediately another memory would play, the tape cycling. A dream that she hoped would never end, yet, she arrived at the finish, to the knights she had seen constantly. Every memory would end with their faces. They all held a disgusting grin, having pillaged every single thing, leaving the "trash" behind. Meredith watched as the memory of the only person that understood her had her throat punctured with the blade of a zweihander.

It finally snapped.

Her regeneration went wild, her body rapidly decomposing and rebuilding, extending her limbs. Movement was happening all over her body at once and she could no longer control it. With her new 'human' form she followed the scent of blood that lingered. It was the scent of her. She felt her bones constantly breaking and remolding themselves as she walked.

As she wandered the form of a human began to cease. She no longer looked like anything, a mass of flesh and bone. Within this mass was the carefully preserved original body, a formality she could barely hold together. Days would pass of wandering with every memory of a human ceasing. The pain was too much to bear for her. The pathway would end with the screaming of two, the gray bricks she was familiar with yet they did not belong to the people she remembered.

She saw gold adorning some, and then none. The many eyes that adorned her body locked onto the few that reeked of iron and instantly wiped them from view. The warmth she felt during the fires was all over her iron-like flesh. She did not allow a speck of blood to touch the original body though. The only thoughts that could form within her fractured brain were "Why?"

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why?"

The night came once again, no longer the laughter she became accustomed to, no longer the speaking she heard, the glasses clinking together. She allowed her gaze to rest, hoping that one day the regeneration would finally stop. She toppled a city for the sake of a few. They had their reasons to pillage, yet, the idea of mercy being a privilege for the strong rung in her head.

The flesh that once amassed onto her body began to slow down as daylight crept. She opened her eyes once more only to be a spirit once more. She looked at the world in a third person perspective once again, she saw the canvas she only saw for a brief moment that felt like an eternity.

"Did that satisfy you?"

A response was not heard from Meredith, yet, the answer was conveyed. The old man stopped his brush.

"You may come to hate me one day for this decision. I will bear that responsibility. I will bear the memories. I will hold it all for you, for one day, I hold the hope that you may shine brighter than this, Meredith."

His hand moved to stroke her wisp-form, a slow cinder sound could be heard as the atrocity was removed from her memory. The faces she could vaguely recall, the village, the city, the souls, all gone within the slowest minute of her life span. There, Meredith would open her eyes once more only to see the flesh-like walls she had become accustomed to.

Ahead of her was the person to refuse the offer of paradise. She moved quickly, a tear rolling down her perfected skin as the memories began to flow back within her head. She had done this all over again. She had seen this maze so many times that each person she had taken the life of, sentencing them to purgatory by her hands, was suffering. Despite that, she chased knowing that once they've fallen, she would forget that misery, the grief, the hate she felt in her heart for humanity and the deep seated love she wished to repress.

This scene was something she had seen thousands of times, with each death, a parallel version of her had slaughtered another. She was not physically there, yet saw everything. Every version of her had the same motivation, to forget, yet, this form made it impossible. How could she ever forget? She lifted the blade she held in her hand, having finally caught up with them. The person turned. Their face was the lady's. It was always the lady's. It had always been.

Meredith smiled, raised the blade, and—

PART I: SUNRISE

...........Once, long before she was known as a woman of flesh, a spirit named Meredith roamed the Earth. The people who had fallen, whether by blade, sickness, or hunger, had their souls...............