He who treads softly goes far.
"That's a lie."
A tall, lean man said, as bodies around him kept dropping to the ground like flies, and white threads extended from them and back into him.
"That which I give returns to me. My doing is the cause of your undoing."
He spoke, his black, somewhat curling hair flew in the air, it's immense length ensuring it reached his lower back, while a separate set of pale locks that covered half of his bangs remained draped over half of his face, and through them, like grapevines, sharp eyes peeked, joy painted on his long lashes.
His long, pale arm reached forth, sharp fingers pointing towards the last of the people before him that still lived.
"What purpose do you serve? Do you have a life full of potential, a life where you're meant to reach great heights, achieve your life long goals? Or were you born merely to serve as a stepping stone for a greater being?"
"The stepping stones beneath my feet will break under my strength."
He said, as with the flick of his fingers, his feet crushed the heads of men and women one by one as they were suddenly atop them.
"Your cruel, barbaric and thieving kind knows no ambition. Even your blood is barren and dry, it knows no substance, no thickness."
Indeed, though somewhat cynical, this perspective was only in action when he laid eyes on irredeemable beings. Again, white threads unravelled themselves from the corpses as they came to him. Leaving the bodies lighter, looking less structured, more emaciated.
The man wore nothing but rags, his feet and hands exposed as the rest was covered in torn fabrics and long robes, making him appear all the more wild, as though he picked these clothes off a corpse and knew not how to properly use these clothes.
This, was Silas Wulfgar. Who, not soon after an important revelation, understood that his fragmented mind was causing him all his issues. He unconsciously split his psyche into four separate versions of himself, and took a small part from each one, remaining forever incomplete.
He looked around, at the golden fields around him. Some lucious, yellow, simple fauna grew all across where his eyes could see. Silver clouds covered the skies, and simple rock roads served as your only hope in this immense place. Silas' hand reached into his mouth. The feeling of his scarred fingers rubbing against his teeth was quite unique, but not something he wasn't used to.
"No, I still have these sharp talons... I still find myself no less and no more hungry than a wolf. Pride of the Wulfgars."
Silas said, looking behind him, where a huge black forest took place. The trees were immense and dark, almost impossible to distinguish from eachother, other than when the golden glint of eyes shone between the spaces.
He looked closer, a whole pack's worth of wolven eyes glared at him. One feline pair of eyes.
"Such strange creatures."
Turning around, he expected to simply move onwards, but he felt a force clamp down around his ankle. He felt individual pieces of bone press into his flesh and bone. He didn't have to look down to know what this was.
Silas' own eyes narrowed and the wolf soon would feel many hands embrace it all at once, before violently digging into the wolf. As Silas dove into the tall, golden grass where the wolf was, the rest of the wolf pack watched as he emerged, clad in the crimson dress of blood.
Silas went for the rest.
Let the hunt begin.
The wolves began to run away from the beast before them, each going deeper into the dark forest. Wild pounding noises and the sound of something tearing into wood chased the wolves, as with every passing moment, one wolf would drop dead.
Silas relished in the hunt. As much as he could deny himself this part of himself in the past, now he understood just how much he enjoyed this. It was quite literally in his body. His spirit. His strength.
One by one, the entire pack was torn apart, and the last of them stood before him, guarding something, or rather, something huddling under a tree stump.
"Tender is the flesh."
He thought, as his fingers dug into the body of the wolf, and his other hand dug under the stump of the tree, determined to find the remaining beast. Silas hardly felt like himself, he felt like an actual animal. His clawed hand slashed at empty air as it tried grabbing onto the cub he thought that hid under the stump.
There it was.
With one violent motion, he tore it out of the ground, hitting it against the ground, and preparing to tear into it's warm, tender flesh. Excited for the intrusive feeling of warm, thick blood flooding his mouth, covering his tongue, greasing his sharp teeth. His heart raced, face barely breaking a sweat.
He expected his lips to meet against wool. Hide. Wolf's skin. But instead, it met with... Soft skin? It was elastic and stretchy. The shape of the bones beneath it didn't seem to match the bones of a wolf. He pulled back and focused his eyes.
It wasn't a wolf. It was a human. A woman with a complexion he could easily tie to ochre. An aroma of cedar. She was about a head shorter than him, he could tell, and her hair was even longer than her entire body. It was so thick and so huge. So brown. How could he not notice it while she hid under the tree stump?
Her eyes were wide and shaky, and as he was lost in thought, finally snapped out of his wild, beastly haze, the woman lunged at him, her nails digging into his flesh, teeth biting him as she tried to cause him some substantial damage. Silas fell back, completely shook by her will to live. Most humans would've died simply of fear alone. Silas fought back, but she pushed back with a great force, a force he didn't think could come from her far smaller frame.
After a wild scuffle on the ground, Silas managed to pry her off of him, and he immediately got up. After shuffling on the ground a bit, so did she. They stood close to eachother, eyes glued on eachother as they both wildly panted and wheezed.
She definitely did a number on him, he could feel hollow holes in his skin where her teeth sunk into him, blood trickling down slowly and decadently. He put his fingers through the stream of blood that went down on his torso, only to notice it flowed awfully smoothly and almost like it was going to a destination.
He looked at the girl, then at his wounds, realizing he lost his robes, then back at the girl. Her nails were suddenly blackened and far sharper. Her skin overall seemed a little darker, something was off. Something about her face told him she had absolutely zero blood relation to any animal at all, meaning she was likely abandoned here as a child.
Looking at her changes again, he could feel something different about her. It was as though his own energy and sheer meshugaas he usually emitted was slightly coming from her. Was this her ability?
The fact she had his blood smeared all over her, however, meant she was at a disatvantage.
"I don't know if you can understand what comes out of my mouth... But let me show you how a true sorcerer does.. no, let me show you how I do THAUMATURGY."
Silas raised his hands, the blackened blood on the girl's skin shifting and glowing red as Silas manipulated it. He would force his blood to grow and sprout into new life.
Inside of her.
Right as Silas was about cause the finishing move, he lost control over his blood on the girl's body. That was impossible. Before he could blink, the girl dashed at him and struck him a multitude of times, her enhanced body easily tearing and and damaging Silas' body. Her claws were black and tainted with Silas' abilities, his powers to manipulate biology. It easily tore into him.
Silas' body healed all of its wounds easily as he was sent reeling back. He supposed he had no choice, so he chose the simple way out. Multiple beings and creatures appeared from Silas' body, and wrapped themselves around the body of the girl, restraining her before biting into her flesh, locking those parts of her body into place permanently.
This girl was unlike anything he had ever seen before. She had easily enhanced herself using his blood, not only that, but she subsumed his blood. It was as good as hers, if he wanted to manipulate it now, he'd have to touch her without getting his body torn to shreds.
The girl struggled and groaned against the impossible to break hollow figures that held her in place.
"These are souls of those I've condemned in my very own Sheol. Souls of creatures who I deem wretched. I force them into eternal damnation under my rule, I use their souls as tools for sorcery. Such as this. But in that process, I lose said souls..."
Silas paused, realizing she probably didn't understand him anyways. It was time to conclude this fight, anyways. He put two bloodied fingers on her forehead, preparing to just mutate her brain into a mass of bugs or maybe some plant. But then he stopped to think.
Did she really deserve death? She was merely following the rules bestowed upon her by her family, her wolfpack. Not too different from him. Quite literally just like him, actually. How his family forced him into nonstop combat and violence with no cause. Senseless violence.
Right then and there, she managed to somehow redirect his tainted magic that she subsumed into her locked parts, destroying the souls that kept her restrained, the skeletal shapes breaking apart.
Her proficiency was far too advanced for this. Silas dove, preparing to strike her with a kick to her cranium, but she struck back, sending him falling to the ground.
Was he actually going to die to some feral child with an absurdly powerful sorcery?
He refused.
He got back up right as she dove at him, and placed his hand against a tree. The tree mutated into a weird creature. He used spiritual energy as a replacement for flesh and such, and out of the tree emerged a sea of arms that crashed down on the feral girl that had already grabbed Silas' foot with her sharp claws. Silas just made his body cast his foot off by mutating it to oblivion. He'd regrow it anyways.
Now he could easily... Yeah, no, that was too much for the feral thing. His senses extended to the pile of arms emerging from the tree, and they felt that the girl was out. Completely. The arms devolved into bottom feeding bugs, and they all returned to Silas. Returning to spiritual energy.
He knelt before the knocked out girl. She lacked the ability to speak a human language, that was for sure. She seemed to have a very animalistic character. He wondered how that would translate if she was given the ability to speak an existing language. What part of the brain was responsible for that again? Didn't matter, Silas just placed his hand on her head, and started to slightly advance and enhance her brain a bit. He could feel she was actually slightly behind on most common advancements in the human brain, so he was killing many birds with one stone.
He gave her the knowledge required to speak. He gave her everything he knew she'd need to be better than she was now, and even then, she'd basically just be a normal human being. She was just that absurdly strong and genius.
Now, the question that remained was simple— how does he avoid her just killing him? He just killed her entire family. Why wouldn't she just kill him?
He laid down next to her body, and looked up at the sky. It was night all of a sudden. They must've fought for a long while. The stars shone brightly. And prettily. It was enamoring. He heard the feral girl's quiet breathing as she slept and actually snored.
He scolded himself internally for not controlling himself.
But in his defense, all of his mental aspects were suddenly enhanced and fused into one, absurdly large singular entity. The complete Silas. No fragmented selves, no forgotten memories, nothing his body had to hide from him... Yeah, that was for the better.
It definitely was.
He was sure of it.