The living fragment of death gasped as it felt something reach for it. It reached back, ephemeral claws seeking to cling to the warmth. As it moved, pain radiated from its neck, threads of fire licking its nerves for the hubris of thinking it could dare use them.

When it had been born, all it had known was pain. A deep voice had spoken to it, ordering it to exist, and it had opened its eyes to see a figure of black and metal standing over it.

The dark figure had given it a purpose, and a place to wait.

The dead thing made of pain had two directives: to hurt someone, and then kill them.

It hadn’t, at first, understood why it must hurt and kill this someone. But then its creator, its resurrector, explained in excruciating detail. The someone was the reason that it was dead, and in pain. The someone had let this happen. The someone had been weak, and abandoned it to its fate.

It learned hatred. Every moment of pain experienced was attributed to this mythical someone, and what little sanity it had awoken with was slowly scraped away. And the master that had sought to contain it learned all too well what happens when one attempts to control fire.

It rages.

Everything was lost, save the hatred gifted to it by its creator, and the whispers of the dreamer.

It didn’t know who or what whispered to it. But sometimes it caught glimpses of a world it knew but did not remember. Of a family of friends, bright and clear, free from the misery it soaked in.

It clung to those whispers with everything that remained of its mind.

Then the whisper had become a cry for help. Grief, terrible and overwhelming, had flooded through the fragile connection and the creature of pain and hate had followed that river of emotion to the source.

It came across the dreamer in the ruins of her village, struggling to shield herself against the darkness that threatened her, and the creature knew true wrath.

Someone had hurt the dreamer. It knew, in its borrowed bones, that it was the someone who’d done this to the dreamer. It couldn’t lose those whispers. It couldn’t lose those fragments of sanity.

So the living death sought to steal the dreamer’s darkness, to share the burden, even if only a little. The dreamer had repulsed it, but the creature didn’t begrudge her that. It was repulsed by itself. But it had been afraid that this meant the whispers would stop.

Its scraps of sanity couldn’t continue to exist if the whispers stopped.

Yet, every now and then, the dreamer would still reach out to it. Sometimes for minutes at a time the creature would connect to the warmth of that bright dreamer and feel the darkness gather around her, threatening the dreamer’s joy. Desperately it offered the only things it had to give: rage and a tolerance for pain.

The dreamer accepted its gifts, and in return gave it something far more precious: Acceptance, and echoes of what it was like to be loved.

The dreamer was drawing near; it could tell. The more the dreamer accepted its gifts, the more it could help, the more warmth it gained.

Soon the dreamer would be with it, and it could burn the someone to ashes, and consume its beloved dreamer, so it could never be afraid-alone-lost again. It would protect the dreamer, and help it with its hatred.

A giggle stuck in its severed throat as it pictured the joy of having the dreamer within it forever.

It would finally be whole.