Human

Their ghastly whispers creep through the trees like roaches scurrying to the shadows. Dead leaves stir in the dying light as if moved by an invisible hand. The giant juniper trees whose leaves once looked like millions of tiny green fireworks exploding at once are little more than wooded grave markers of a town once teeming with life, grave markers for the decayed town, Hallebore.

Each of them march in reaper's cloaks through the forest's corpse; each crunch beneath their boots like the ticking of a clock counting down. Behind their silouettes rises the sleepy behemoth Macro City, its breath coiling into the sky in large white plumes. It groans and shrieks even in the dying light of the summer solstice.

And yet even her moans are contended with from the girl gagged, trussed, and blinded. She falls again and again over that which she cannot see, and is forced to her feet again.

“Daddy.” A tiny figure pulls on the cloak of her captor. “Do we have to tie Sister up?”

Nothing but the dying rattle of wind through leaves answers her.

“Daddy, Sister said she’d do it. Why is she tied up?”

The hostage falls to her knees again, crying like a mewling kitten. The hooded man holding her hoists her back up.

“Daddy?”

Ahead births a clearing from the snags. An ignoble stone circle stands at its epicenter with finger-width canals carved in an intricate spiderweb to the circle’s edge. It’s covered in dead grass, vines, roots, yet its presence exerts a pressure across the decay, a sound that can be felt but not heard.

One cloaked figure takes a stance at the edge of each canal, and from their cloaks pulls a black tar candle.

The girl is thrust like swine for slaughter upon the circle’s center. Her sister sits on the peripheral of the dark circle and begins to sob, her small hiccups echoing like beasts playing just outside sight.

Shadows extend longer and longer, their tails coiling and writhing through the clearing. And then, the final claws of sunlight vanish. Twilight descends like a stage curtain as shadows and sun blur into one glow. The girl’s captor pulls from his cloak a crooked black obsidian dagger. He lifts her by the hair and pauses only for one second. His eyes move to the dying sunlight.

One second passes, then two, then three. At the brightest glow of twilight, he slits her throat, her wrists, her ankles.

She utters little more than a whimper, trembles, and stills. Within the divoted bosom on the stone circle, she curls into a ball. Her blood fills the canals; it waters the parched summer ground. As her blood reaches the edge of the circle, they light the candles one by one, counterclockwise. They chant, they whisper. The wind steals their words as it tickles through the grasses. Each candle is lowered to the blood and ignited.

Black flames lick from the cheery yellow candlelight, and race to the center of the stone. In a plume that reaches its tendrilled hand to the sky, the fire rises.

“Everyone, back!” The man roars. “Keep your cloaks tight! Don’t let it see your flesh!”

A heartbeat passes, then another, then follows a third.

The fire tames itself to embers on the ground.

Standing in the center, feet stretched over the body, is a man with bronze skin and slitted pupils. He takes in the reaper-clad figures one by one. Then, he smiles.

*****

“If you’re going to take your own life, why not do something useful with your sacrifice?”

Leaning in the doorway of her small room was her father, a man ere of intimidating stature, now withered and scrawny. She looked between him and the blade in her hand, poised to slit her wrist. Through her tears, she lowered the blade and looked at him with deadened eyes.

Her father sighed and pushed his hair from his face. “Over a thousand years ago, this town called upon the aid of a demon when faced with annihilation. The writ was uncovered from the archives three days ago. It requires a blood sacrifice.”

She said nothing, merely stared at him.

The following day, May burst into her room. She was sobbing, and pulled on what little remaining heartstrings she had left. “Don’t die, Sister.” She grabbed her shirt and blew into it. “Please, don’t die.”

She patted May’s head. “You don’t need to worry about that. It doesn’t say I have to die, just that my blood must fill the cervices within the stone.”

Through tears, May looked up at her. “That’s a lot, Sister. You don’t have that much.”

“No, you don’t have that much. But I’m bigger than you, see? I have enough. I’ll survive.”

“Promise?”

Those eyes, so frightened and sorrowed, so full of trust.

One last lie, that’s all it would take to reassure her. “I’ll be fine, promise. And next summer, when the ground is healthy again and Macro City is destroyed, we’ll sit on the porch and eat strawberries until we puke.”

May’s smile cemented her decision.

Only three days until the solstice.

********

“Please!” A woman falls to her knees, her hands clasped in prayer. “Please, destroy that beast!” She points to where Macro City rumbles and trembles.

“Kill Macro City!”

“Destroy it!”

“Save Hallebore!”

The demon chuckles without sound. “Ah. You misunderstand.” It raises a bloody hand, and black fungus spreads from fingertip to wrist. A spike tears a hole through the ground and impales one of the only remaining citizens of Hallebore through the chest.

Screams fill the clearing. Above, the man claws at the spike and gasps for air. He releases a single scream that pitches above all other sounds.

“To be human is to fight.” The demon paces to the circle’s edge, where black flames still smolder and lick hungrily at the diseased earth. “You have to fight for your very existence in this world, and when there is nothing else to fight for, you fight each other.”

He trembles and shakes, pulling desperately at the spike; his blood rolls down like candlewax. But his trembles grow weaker and weaker.

“And when you can no longer fight…” It twists its hand and flicks it toward where he struggles in vain. The man stills and his eyes glaze over. “…you die.”

“Now, to do absolutely nothing, that’s the true nature of demons.” It takes one step from the stone to the dead world around it. “You cannot even fathom what it would be like to do absolutely nothing, not sleep, not eat, not think, not exist.”

Thunder pounds across the deadened earth in perfect rhythmic sync. A cloaked figure sprints for the forest behind the demon, away from its sight.

Without looking at them, it raises a hand. The fungus crawls and bubbles from its wrist to its elbow as another spike shoots from the ground and catches the man through his stomach. “You fight out of covetous greed, and you fight against that greedy urge.”

A scream fills the clearing. “Sister Evalie!”

Two women hold hands, one with a spike through her midriff that pushes her higher and higher. They hold hands until they can no longer. The sister rises high into the night sky; the cross she held falls from her limp fingers and clatters by the demon’s feet.

“You fight because ceasing to do so means your very existence is forfeit.” It smirks at the remaining citizens.

“Why?” A tiny voice asks.

All eyes turn to the sniffling little shape outside the circle’s radius.

“If being a demon means doing nothing, why are you killing people?” She screams and meets the demon’s reptilian eyes.

“May!”

“Because.” It purrs. “You forced me into existence. You have defied the embodiment of my purpose. So I will do the same to you.”

The fungus on its arm stretches to its shoulder and neck.

“May!” Her father screams.

He reaches her just in time for a spike to spear them both.

Dozens of wails fill the clearing; dark shapes fly across the ground and move to the protection of the diseased forest.

“And do you all know what the worst part of humans is?” It paces to the edge of the clearing. It raises both hands as black fungus sprouts from both fingertips to its face, to its cheeks, its eyes. “There’s far too many of them.”

Spikes pierce through the earth, silencing the wails within the wilting woods.

“F-, fine…” A weak voice whispers, not from the forest, but from behind.

The demon turns like an amused predator and spots, standing in the center of the stone circle, a girl.

She is bleeding profusely but tying her injuries with her own clothes; she pants and groans, clinging to life. “If that’s what it means to be human, let us show you how human we are.”