Alone

I am an infant. My mother is a pustule mess of buboes and rot. She cannot feed me; she is too weak. I suckle on a nursemaid before the plague claims her as well, and then another, and then another.

I am a child. My mother is dead. The town does not accept visitors, and burns its dead. I have no schoolmates. All the other children are dead. When I kick a stone along the path, it collects dust and silence. I look to the sky and see an oppressive death-mask of grey cloud above.

I am an adolescent. I live in a place that stinks of death, occupied by grey-faced ghosts. Its occupants are hunched and scarred from drained buboes and lung-choking coughs. I have no friends. No one my age is still alive. As puberty takes me, I lust after imagined things: white porcelain skin, smooth without the touch of plague. It is an imagined thing. It is a lie.

I am a man. My father is dead. He did not recognise me in the end, and that was a blessing to us both. My neighbours are old. They begin to die, and no one will replace them. I will be alone in this town that has been slowly dying for twenty years. I burn the dead because no one else is strong enough to do so. Their bodies taste like dust-meat against my starving tongue. The smell of smoke and ash carries into the air and dissipates into nothing.

I am a student. I pore through the belongings of the dead. I am hungry but I cannot plough the fields alone. We have no livestock. My belly is distended. I should leave but I cannot summon the motivation to stand. I read the forgotten notes of a woman who was more desperate than I am now. She wanted her family to survive. In hopeless panic, she explored the darkest magicks. She failed. She is dead. Her family is dead. But I am alive.

I am an adept. I find the carcass of a rat and eat the flesh from its bones. When I chant ancient, foreign words, I see its skeleton twitch and purple fire spark in its rotting eyes. When the creature reanimates, it scurries a few paces before collapsing into stillness. I smile. It is a good feeling. I do not remember the last time that I smiled.

I am a necromancer. I stumble to the bonfire pit and summon forth the restless spirits within. They scream and curse me, but they are mine, and I am not alone. They drift in the air like wafted grass in a stale wind. When they howl, they fill the silence with noise forever.

I am a dying man. My flesh is taut like parchment, and my ribs are sharp and painful. My stomach is pregnant with desperate fluids and starvation-death. My eyes shrink back into their sockets and my lips crack like arid ground. My voice is a strangled whisper between prayer and death-rattle. I am not afraid. I have learned so much. I know that I will never truly die.

I am a betrayer. I stand on the edge of the bonfire pit and shackle the dead to my will. They shriek and howl, but they cannot resist as I compact them into one, purple light. I open my jaw wide and suck their essence into my lungs. I feel their souls screech as they are destroyed. I feel their desperation and suffering and death, and I am not alone.

I am an undead monstrosity. My body has died, but I remain. I puppet rotting limbs that once were mine, and watch as the skin collects flies and sloughs off in seeping pus. I do not feel hunger any longer. I wonder if I am the same creature that has died, and find that I do not care. If I listen, I can still hear the screams of those I have consumed. When I speak to them, it does not feel like I am talking to myself.

I am a traveller. I gather my paltry possessions and hide my skeletal form in heavy, black robes. I look back on the town for the final time. I thought it had provided only death and loneliness, but I was wrong. This town taught me that death is my companion. I can hear its whispers collecting where my ears used to be. Now I am never alone. I will never be alone.