Wherein the trade of life for death is established and new beginnings cause new endings. Our story begins here.
I remember my beginnings like it was just yesterday, that great re-birth that I now thank for my existence.
Something scuttled across my eyelid.
Such an incredible sensation! Hundreds of tiny impacts, each clearly defined as a tiny pad and surrounding chitinous hairs, on my eyelid. A clear and vivid twin path of tingling and vibrant life scurrying across my cold yet somehow sensitive skin.
A pause, then a hurried, rushing acceleration, each tiny foot driving into the flesh of my face as the unknown and unknowing insect descended the marble planes of my face before taking shelter in the hollowed confines of my mouth. Sweeping antennae softly agitating the nerves of my tongue and the roof of mouth. The gums itching with slow adhesion as they clung like lampreys to my teeth. The nerves echoing, hollow, in the core of those teeth, faintly vibrating with the harmony of tiny feet brushing gently together as the insect quivered and fidgeted at the top of my throat.
My eye rolled within its orbit, an indescribably fluid cacophony of conflicting and complementary nerve impulses, so sweet, so pure and gelid that my senses rang like a bell through my body in response. Such a feeling only experienced at the peak of a first orgasm. Sensual and sexual in awesome power, I quivered to feel it. A second shudder shook my body as the nerves raced each other to transmit the unknowable ecstasy of movement to my swooning brain, my neural pathways afire with the intensity of these titanic stimuli. The insect gathered itself within my mouth, fearing for its safety it prepared to launch itself from the suddenly churning and unsafe haven it had chosen.
I gently closed my teeth.
I could see light flooding my being, a subtle luminance suffusing my being, alight with the electrical impulses of nervous response and muscle activity. I could feel the insect frantic within my mouth, fluttering, jumping and panicked as it realised the freedom from which it was barred. Antennae probed between my gently interlocked teeth, searching in vain for an escape. Firm cushions beneath my spine, as I lay prone, supine, arms crossed on my chest, the crumbling petals of a rose wilting onto skin as the tremors in my hands shook them loose. I could feel the gentle weight of my hair, draped back from my forehead and pooling in the darkness around my ears. I shuffled my fingers, the nails scratching softly against the bare skin of my chest. THAT sensation driving me to an almost verbal exclamation of shock at its crystal sharpness. My eyes opened and I saw. I saw the flat boards before my face, and with a slowly awakening consciousness I sensed the environment in which I was encased.
The trapped insect, I know not what it was, leapt forward, forcing one then two legs between my teeth. In a ruminant motion, my tongue rolled the insect backwards and my mouth opened until my teeth found purchase on the fragile things body. A soft crunch as I chewed the creature, it's vital fluids spilling in a bitter fountain into my mouth, lubricating my tongue and teeth in a pantheon of tastes and scents.
I felt something leave the insect's corpse. Something ... vital.
Like a breath of wind fills the sails of a travelling ship, like a mother's kiss breathes life into the waiting soul of an infant, so the death of this small insect breathed a motivating force into me. A vibrancy hereto unfelt thrummed in my core, a quickening occurred and I fully woke, woke into my new existence.
The boards of the coffin, fresh and firm, did nothing to prevent my egress, and the yards of earth above proved permeable to my will. With splinters about my ears and rich loam falling from my body, I finally climbed forth, until I stood on my grave. The freshly minted headstone observed me in offended silence as I stood there beneath the shrouding clouds. I crushed it into powder as the first drops of new-minted rain fell onto my un-dead skin. Such a feeling filled me as must be felt by Angels in the presence of their Diving Lord, every inch of skin suffused by the warmth and love of the Divine Countenance as it spoke to them. So, the rain spoke to me, sluicing the sticky loam of my gravesite from my body, baring my skin and my soul to the night air. I fell then, and knew no more.
How long I lay there, I know not; the cascading sensations pouring through my being, overwhelming my fevered brain, short of memory and lost, unknowing and fitfully learning to control these rampant ecstasies of existence. I know that it was not long; another motivating force had dawned in me. Hunger. I now consider this my birth, as traumatic and shocking to my resurrected mind as the first must have been, so many years before. As I was thrust forth from my mother's fleshy womb, so I had ejected myself from my second womb of earth, water and death. Like a newborn babe, the impressions of my birth flooded my mind, suffusing my being with their intensity, only this time I was conscious, and the experience left me weak and shaking in both body and soul. Just like at my first birth, all this exertion made me hungry.
The hunger awoke in me a dire lust, a vengeful and rage-ridden thirst that drove me forth from my place of birthing. Leaving the crushed tombstone and the tormented gravesite behind, I loped into the night, limbs eerily graceful in remembered movement and hurried motion.
They never knew what hit them. That couple I so rudely interrupted, her skirts raised to her waist in a velvet and lace crush of passion, his jeans thrust down while he thrust himself forward onto her. Their cries called to me through the night. Her cries changed from pleasure to those of fear as I emerged from between the mausolea of the late-night cemetery and she spied me on my bold and fearless approach. He knew nothing, until I grasped him from behind and bent his head back before plunging my face against his throat; driving my teeth through his skin and ripping him open in one swift movement. He climaxed at once, his body, in one final defiance, spurting forth his seed that it might perpetuate his genetic line before surrendering itself to death and my embrace.
I finished him in seconds, too hungry to perform the act with any grace. She tried to scream as I reached for her, but in her shock she had swallowed her tongue, her throat seizing tight about that fleshy lump as I devoured her boyfriend. With her it took longer. As the seed of her lover slid from between her thighs I lovingly caressed her purpling face. One hand held her head high while the other stroked her body, feeling the delicious heat of her life surging through her veins, driven by the urgent pattering of her heart as she gasped in my grasp. My fingers stroked her soft skin, my nails causing gentle rents to form in their passing, the blood gently rolling forth in a miniature carmine fall before the lust overtook me again. Deprived of the sensibilities to appreciate her beauty in terror, I drove my bloody mouth against her skin and bit.
Her life's blood gushed forth into my mouth, the taste at once salty and spicy, and so vivid, so vivid I nearly swooned. He had given me no such pleasure, too hungry I to appreciate the life-giving joy of the supping. She, however... I retained enough self-control to take her slowly, and savoured every drop. He heart spasmed in her breast as I, the twisted beast, encompassed her in my passionate embrace, until at last, she ceased to struggle, and ceased to live. I left her there, and him, mute testament to the suddenness of their demise. Silent proclamations of my existence, and the existence of my kind, I left them there, and cursed myself for a careless fool in the nights that followed.
Alone but sated, for the moment, I returned to the night, and crept, like the bloated tick that I was, to a nearby mausoleum. Wrenching the door open with my fading strength I dumped the body from the sarcophagus inside onto the mundane earth. Sealing the door behind me with stone torn from the floor, I lay myself down, as if dead, in my stony bed, and slept.
Never has my kind dwelled happily in the light of recognition. Many are those who would see us destroyed, my kind and I, for no greater personal crime than our existence. Is it the sin of the shark to devour the seal? Is it a transgression of natural order that the leopard devour the gazelle? No! I say, no! And yet, hidden my kind must remain forever, if we hope to endure. Un-natural I am told my nature is, and yet, in the words of only a true sinner, it never felt so right to be so wrong!