Post by Nai-ru on Jan 8, 2008 20:15:00 GMT -5
The Soulless. Everyone's worst nightmare, the tale told to young children to keep them vigilant, to remind them that their power comes from danger. Because who wants to become that?
Hated, feared, put up on a pedestal of horror, the Soulless are fully expected to be selfish, cruel beasts. Children imagine them as being twenty feet tall, horribly hairy, with spiky horns and long, terrifying toenails.
The truth is much more frightening, because the Soulless are us.
Born out of the continuing fear, the Soulless have no bodies of their own. New ones are constantly created, because all it takes to keep them coming is a single thought of them, a single nighttime prayer for them to stay away from my child who is about to turn ten... And there they are.
A new Soulless is nothing more than a sigh on the wind, a chill down your back, the cold hands you are sure are reaching out for you but are not there when you turn around. They search for a soul in question, one who is too afraid to turn out the light but, in some corner of their heart, longs for the darkness because it will bring the fear's end... Once they find this one, they merge with its essence, and take its body as its own.
After the initial hold is achieved, the battle begins. The Soulless, born anew, will begin stalking those it could not touch before it had a body. It goes first for those who were closest to the one whose body it now possesses, family or friends. Someone who will come close enough for the snatch that will end everything. Every time a Soulless makes a conquest, it eats the soul, merging with it, desperately searching for something to stop the hurt of being without a purpose. It inhabits the freshly vacated body of its most recent victim- after all, a body without a soul will rot, and no one will allow a rotting corpse to approach.
It is difficult to tell the difference between a human and a body animated by one of the Soulless at a first glance. The first clue is a change in movement- a new, inexperienced Soulless moves jerkily in its skin, like a puppet with the strings caught, tangled, and severed. An older Soulless, one with practice, moves with seductive predatory stealth.
Bodies inhabited by a Soulless are incapable of speech- they are utterly silent. A voice that once told a soul's tales could never be used by something without a soul. The eyes of a Soulless change too, for are the eyes not the windows to the soul? The previous inhabitant's natural eye color darkens, near to black, to make the disappearance of the pupil less noticeable. They tend to cast their eyes downward to avoid detection. Somehow, the Soulless can see through the eyes without the pupil, and their other senses are heightened.
The body of a Soulless is superhuman- difficult to destroy, super-strong, unnaturally fast. Elder Soulless develop particular skills, grotesque mirror images of the ability of a human, employed only for use in the hunt. The older a Soulless, the more powerful, the more dangerous, and the more unpredictable.
There is a famous saying, "Keep to the straight, and wonders await; fall from the path, face ice's wrath. Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed; fear empty nothing more than Hell's will." It tells of the terrible fate of those who are taken by the Soulless:
Nothing.
Hated, feared, put up on a pedestal of horror, the Soulless are fully expected to be selfish, cruel beasts. Children imagine them as being twenty feet tall, horribly hairy, with spiky horns and long, terrifying toenails.
The truth is much more frightening, because the Soulless are us.
Born out of the continuing fear, the Soulless have no bodies of their own. New ones are constantly created, because all it takes to keep them coming is a single thought of them, a single nighttime prayer for them to stay away from my child who is about to turn ten... And there they are.
A new Soulless is nothing more than a sigh on the wind, a chill down your back, the cold hands you are sure are reaching out for you but are not there when you turn around. They search for a soul in question, one who is too afraid to turn out the light but, in some corner of their heart, longs for the darkness because it will bring the fear's end... Once they find this one, they merge with its essence, and take its body as its own.
After the initial hold is achieved, the battle begins. The Soulless, born anew, will begin stalking those it could not touch before it had a body. It goes first for those who were closest to the one whose body it now possesses, family or friends. Someone who will come close enough for the snatch that will end everything. Every time a Soulless makes a conquest, it eats the soul, merging with it, desperately searching for something to stop the hurt of being without a purpose. It inhabits the freshly vacated body of its most recent victim- after all, a body without a soul will rot, and no one will allow a rotting corpse to approach.
It is difficult to tell the difference between a human and a body animated by one of the Soulless at a first glance. The first clue is a change in movement- a new, inexperienced Soulless moves jerkily in its skin, like a puppet with the strings caught, tangled, and severed. An older Soulless, one with practice, moves with seductive predatory stealth.
Bodies inhabited by a Soulless are incapable of speech- they are utterly silent. A voice that once told a soul's tales could never be used by something without a soul. The eyes of a Soulless change too, for are the eyes not the windows to the soul? The previous inhabitant's natural eye color darkens, near to black, to make the disappearance of the pupil less noticeable. They tend to cast their eyes downward to avoid detection. Somehow, the Soulless can see through the eyes without the pupil, and their other senses are heightened.
The body of a Soulless is superhuman- difficult to destroy, super-strong, unnaturally fast. Elder Soulless develop particular skills, grotesque mirror images of the ability of a human, employed only for use in the hunt. The older a Soulless, the more powerful, the more dangerous, and the more unpredictable.
There is a famous saying, "Keep to the straight, and wonders await; fall from the path, face ice's wrath. Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed; fear empty nothing more than Hell's will." It tells of the terrible fate of those who are taken by the Soulless:
Nothing.