Our council had always existed to protect the world, to offer a balance between the good and evil natures that were present in everything. We met every few months, observing the Earth in the time between, and discussed our concerns about the state the world was in. After many years, we decided that the works was too empty, and we decided to create the humans. These humans continued to progress and grow stronger, inventing many things and reigning as the supreme beings. But over time, some of our council began to regret our decision, myself included. These humans had grown traits that we had never implanted in them; their greed and anger were corrupting them. We had tried to warn them over the past few years, with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, diseases, and ultimately merging the fragments of our broken world into five small countries. But still, their nature never changed.

As a result of this, many of our members had begun to contemplate the end of the race we created. As our meetings began to become more frequent, these thoughts began to increase among us. In the end, we decided that we would take a week to make our final decisions and take a vote. That day marked the sixth day of that week. It was a Friday, so I was set to make my runs in Transitus city. My job is a simple one. I collect the bodies. It's a simple job, but also a very important one; I mean how would you like to walk around all day and see rotting bodies all around you? I used be able to do a lot more, but as our creation progressed, all of the council had to sacrifice some of our powers to give the world back what the humans were taking away from it.

Transitus city, despite its name, was much less of a city and more of the bare minimum of a living environment. The streets were just dirt roads were just plowed areas in the brown grass that filled the gray city walls. At the southern end of the city, the end which I had arrived at, there was a circular road with houses around it and a small marble fountain which was full of muddy water in the center of it. Branching out of this city was a long road that made its way through the city and all the way to the northern end of the city. This road was the main road of the city, the road scarred with the blood and sweat of the hard work of the villagers.

I walked along this main road and soon noticed that there was something different about the city today. It was as if the city was trembling in fear of the impending danger. I continued walking along the main road. checking the first few houses as I went along and following the few people that were outside around. After the first five, I hadn’t found anything, but the city was far bigger than five houses. I approached the door of the sixth house when I began to smell something burning. It was a faint scent, but it existed nonetheless. By the time I realized where it was coming from and what it was, it didn’t really matter anymore. The moment I had figured it out was the moment when the fuse on the bomb had just finished burning, and exploded.

The ground trembled from the force of the explosion, and the wall at the north end of the city, the end which I had entered from, began to crumble over. The gray bricks were vomited down onto the earth, scattering about before the area was filled with fire and smoke. People were running everywhere, screaming in fear and trying to get back into their homes and to the loved ones. As the smoke started to clear away, soldiers dressed in camouflage began to storm into the city. Each one of them was armed with a rifle or other firearm, and they were shooting civilians on sight. After a scream from what sounded like a commanding officer, the soldiers stopped firing and began to walk along the main road. I could see people desperately trying to keep their distance from the soldiers, but their fear kept them from running away. For me, humans were just like books. Each one of them had a different story, different emotions, different views of the world, but all of them were easy for me to read. My eyes jumped towards a woman in her late 20’s, and I could immediately tell what she was thinking. What would they do to me if I tried to run? Most of the others were thinking the same thing, but I on the other hand stayed completely calm and continued my job.

Upon walking into the sixth house, I only saw a girl sitting in the middle of a living room sitting in the middle of a red rug. She was a very young girl, probably only four or five years old, and probably far too young to have known about what was going on outside of her house. In her hand was a marionette, a ballerina in a tattered black dress. The girl commanded the puppet around the red rug, spinning it and making it leap with ease. Wherever her hands went, the puppet would follow. But it all stopped as her mother burst in through the front door of the house screaming and her father collapsed on the floor. The young girls hand stopped, leaving the puppet strangled in its strings and lying helplessly on the rug. The mother stumbled over to the rug, lying her husband's bleeding body next to the rug before she slightly lifted it off of the ground. Beneath it was a small hatch, which she led her daughter down. As soon as her daughter had finished climbing the ladder down to the bottom, she dropped down with her husband in her arms and let the hatch close up with the rug on top of it.

As the screams of their dying neighbors poured into their house and echoed throughout their secret cellar, the wife looked down at her unconscious husband. She knew that staying there and trying to hide was a giant risk, a gamble, a game of poker. Unfortunately, that is where fear is at its strongest. When fear plays poker it doesn't try to bluff and trick its way to victory. It simply stares you down until your confidence shatters, your emotions become corrupted, and you ultimately fold and obey it. Fear continues to play this way until all of your chips belong to it, and it has complete control. When a human plays against fear, they never win. But when I play against fear, I never lose. I don't have any confidence to be shattered, or any emotions to be corrupted. After slowly slipping out of my train of thought, I looked back at the wife's teary face, and despite only having slight emotions, I laughed. Behind her storm of tears, I could see her rainbow of happiness. She was overjoyed that it was her neighbors and her husband going through the pain, and not her.

The sound of another door busting open, the door to this house, made me realize how long I had stayed in this place. There were no bodies for me to collect here, yet at least. I climbed up the ladder and passed through the hatch, walked by the soldiers, and out of the door. I took no time trying to conceal myself from these pitiful beings. They can't see me, but they would never want to. A human's sight is blocked by their emotions, and I'm what every one of them fears. As I walked to the next house, I witnessed a man in his 30's being dragged out of his home by a group of five soldiers. I watched as they threw him onto the ground in the middle of the street and pushed a rifle to the side of his head.

"This is what is going to happen to every single one of you unless you give us what we want!" the soldier holding the rifle screamed out to the people around him. There was nothing like a public execution to excite the fear that lived in others. Gasps and screams filled the air as the bullet pierced his temple and his lifeless body fell to the ground. The streets were emptied as the soldiers resumed their business and the people that were watching ran away in fear. As soon as I was sure that there was no one else around, I knelt near his body and lowered my cloak over it. His body slowly shrank down and shriveled up as I drained what life was left in him away. After picking up the doll like figure that was left in its place, I continued on my path to the next house. Unfortunately, the soldiers decided to do the same thing.

As I approached the building, the three soldiers that were there kicked the wooden door down. They walked in slowly, carefully and checking every step that they made. I knew this family; I'd collected many of their bodies throughout time. They were the Garrison family, an aggressive and defensive family. I stood back, expecting the inevitable as the first soldier approached the stairwell. Before he could even speak, he was tackled by a man and woman both around 40 years old. They were Jack and Sasha Garrison. I'd always remember their names; they caused too many deaths to be forgotten.

The screams of the soldiers being massacred by two pocketknives was enough to draw the attention of the soldiers outside of the house, and the two parents knew exactly that. That was exactly what they needed. As the two of them ran to the front door, they looked back towards the steps. Their children knew exactly what they were supposed to do. The two of them, Molly and Josh, sprinted down the stairs and out of the back door of the house. They continued to run until they reached the wall surrounding the city, and proceeded to try and scale it. Both of them knew that they had to get out of the city if they ever wanted to avoid the soldiers, and wanted to keep their lives. I decided to leave my work behind and follow them; this would be far more interesting than my normal routine. Their stupidity, unneeded aggression, their fear over the smallest of things, it was so amusing to me. That was what I needed to see in order to make my decision for the council.

The two of them continued to run for about half an hour until they had become exhausted. However, they continued to walk until about 6:00 PM. This part of the world got darker much earlier, as soon as 4:30 PM, but got brighter at about 5:00 AM. They had gotten towards the end of the forest that surrounded the five countries, a forest which ended before a giant cliff on all sides. No one had ever ventured this far out of their city in years, out of fear of what creatures lived in them. The people of Transitus always stayed within their city. They were the weakest of the five countries, and it was inevitable that they would be invaded.

"Let's set up a camp here," Josh told his younger sister, fairly confident that the two of them gotten far away enough from the city. In preparation for their escape, the two of them had brought some blankets in order to set up a small place to sleep. Josh fell asleep quite easily, but Molly on the other hand could hardly close her eyes. The fear of being captured by the soldiers kept her adrenaline high, but her energy slowly drained away and she fell asleep, about three hours after her brother.

Molly had woken up fairly late, at about 7:00 AM. She rolled over, still half asleep, and looked over to where her brother was laying, but his blankets were empty. She didn't know about the twenty minutes that her brother had spent trying to wake her from her slumber, before he heard the enemy in the distance. He feared the soldiers as much as everyone else in the city, but his fear for his sister's life drove him to the enemy, and not away from it. Molly sat on her blankets, wondering where her brother could have gone. They both had brought pocketknives with them, so she thought that he might have been hunting. She stood up and walked around the area, trying to shake her drowsiness as well as look for her brother. Her drowsiness and thoughts of her brother instantly escaped her at the sound of a horses neigh in the distance. The population of horses had drastically decreased after we broke the world into five countries, and only people in power were able to obtain them. Molly could only associate this sound with danger; nobody in Transitus owned a horse.

Molly sprinted as fast as she could, using her pocketknife to cut away the vines that hung down from the tree branches. The hilly ground caused her to lose speed as she ran and constantly tripped her up. The sound of the horse's neighs and the sound of hooves slamming against the mossy dirt continued to get louder. Slowly, the trees began to disappear and the soft dirt turned into craggy rock. The sounds of danger continued to get louder and Molly began to speed up even more, to the point were she was running well beyond her limits. A crack in the rocky cliff face caught her ankle and snapped the bone in her leg as she fell over.

Despite the pain and blood, she staggered back onto her feet and hobbled to the edge of the cliff. Nobody had ever been this far out of the countries; nobody knew how far the drop was. Unfortunately for her, the drop was 300 feet at the least, and into a sea of sharp rocks. Slowly, her broken leg gave out and she collapsed onto the ground. The neighs finally stopped as the general of the soldiers came into her view and hopped off of his horse. He was followed by several other men that arrived on foot. Fear began to seep into Molly, especially when she saw that one of the men was her brother.

“Just give up,” Josh said as he walked over to her. “This is a battle that we can’t win. We can just give him what he wants and we can live.” As soon as he put his arm on her to help her up, she pushed him back away. Fear had now completely taken over her, fear of what would happen to her life, fear of what would happen to her brother, and fear of what information the general wanted, even though it didn’t exist. The only thing that she didn’t fear was her next move. She slowly lifted her pocketknife up and her shaky arm jammed it into her chest. Her body stumbled backwards as she pried the knife out of her chest and dropped it on the ground, before falling off of the cliff. Josh screamed out as he ran over to the edge and watched as his sister’s body was torn apart by the rocks below. The general walked over to him and put a comforting arm on his shoulder, but he just pushed it back.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in a calm voice. “You have the information I need, you can just tell me and you and the rest of your city can live.” Josh looked down at the ground and picked up the knife which his sister used to kill herself and raised it up to the general.

“If you think I’m going to help you, you’re dead wrong!” Those were his last words before he charged at the general with the knife, and before the general shot him in the heart with a pistol. His body fell to the ground with a thud as the general turned around and jumped back onto his horse.

“Let’s move on,” he said in a disappointed tone. “We’ll get the information somewhere else.” As he rode away, his frown turned into a smile. He had killed two more; he was two people closer to a takeover. I walked over to him and lowered my tamarind cloak over his body. After draining his life, I picked up the figure in its place and walked back to Transitus. There was only one body here, there was nothing to salvage from Molly’s.

The main road of Transitus was now paved with blood and bones. Many bodies lay amongst the streets, but I never stopped. These human’s were incompetent, unintelligent, and above all they were obdurate. Their ways would never change whatever our council did; our efforts had always been and always would be futile. My work here was done, despite the amount of bodies I had left. I was done with this job, and I travelled back to the void, ending what I hoped would be the last day of this job.

I Collect The Bodies
Our council had always existed to protect the world, to offer a balance between the good and evil natures that were present in everything. We lived in our void, a small haven lost within the fabrics of reality. This small group met every few months, observing the Earth in the time between and discussing our concerns about the state the world was in. After many years, we decided that the world was too empty, and we decided to create the humans. These humans continued to progress and grow stronger, inventing many things and reigning as the supreme beings. But over time, some of our council began to regret our decision, myself included. These humans had grown traits that we had never implanted in them; their greed and anger were corrupting them. We had tried to warn them over the past few years, with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, diseases, and ultimately merging the fragments of our broken world into five small countries. But still, their nature never changed.
As a result of this, many of our members had begun to contemplate the end of the race we created. As our meetings began to become more frequent, these thoughts began to increase among us. In the end, we decided that we would take a week to make our final decisions and take a vote. That day marked the sixth day of that week. It was a Friday, so I was set to make my runs in Transitus city. My job is a simple one. I collect the bodies. It's a simple job, but also a very important one; I mean how would you like to walk around all day and see rotting bodies all around you? I used be able to do a lot more, but as our creation progressed, all of the council had to sacrifice some of our powers to give the world back what the humans were taking away from it.
Transitus city, despite its name, was much less of a city and more of the bare minimum of a living environment. The streets were just dirt roads were just plowed areas in the brown grass that filled the gray city walls. At the southern end of the city, the end which I had arrived at, there was a circular road with houses around it and a small marble fountain which was full of muddy water in the center of it. Branching out of this city was a long road that made its way through the city and all the way to the northern end of the city. This road was the main road of the city, the road scarred with the blood and sweat of the hard work of the villagers.
I walked along this main road and soon noticed that there was something different about the city today. It was as if the city was trembling in fear of the impending danger. I continued walking along the main road, checking the first few houses as I went along and following the few people that were outside around. After the first five, I hadn’t found anything, but the city was far bigger than five houses. I approached the door of the sixth house when I began to smell something burning. It was a faint scent, but it existed nonetheless. By the time I realized where it was coming from and what it was, it didn’t really matter anymore. The moment I had figured it out was the moment when the fuse on the bomb had just finished burning, and exploded.
The ground trembled from the force of the fiery explosion, and the wall at the north end of the city, the end which I had entered from, began to crumble over. The gray bricks were vomited down onto the earth, scattering about before the area was filled with fire and smoke. People were running everywhere, screaming in fear and trying to get back into their homes and to the loved ones. As the smoke started to clear away, soldiers in camouflage began to charge into the city. Each one of them was armed with a rifle or other firearm, and they were shooting at anything moving on sight. After a scream from what sounded like a commanding officer, the soldiers stopped firing and began to walk along the main road. I could see people desperately trying to keep their distance from the soldiers, but their fear kept them from running away. For me, humans were just like books. Each one of them had a different story, different emotions, different views of the world, but all of them were easy for me to read. My eyes jumped towards a woman in her late 20’s, and I could immediately tell what she was thinking. What would they do to me if I tried to run? Most of the others were thinking the same thing, but I on the other hand stayed completely calm and continued my job.
Upon walking into the sixth house, I only saw a girl sitting in the middle of a living room sitting in the middle of a red rug. She was a very young girl, probably only four or five years old and probably far too young to have known about what was going on outside of her house. In her hand was a marionette, a ballerina in a tattered black dress. The girl commanded the puppet around the red rug, spinning it and making it leap with ease. Wherever her hands went, the puppet would follow. But it all stopped as her mother burst in through the front door of the house screaming and her father collapsed on the floor. The young girls hand stopped, leaving the puppet strangled in its strings and lying helplessly on the rug. The mother stumbled over to the rug, lying her husband's bleeding body next to the rug before she slightly lifted it off of the ground. Beneath it was a small hatch, which she led her daughter down. As soon as her daughter had finished climbing the ladder down to the bottom, she dropped down with her husband in her arms and let the hatch close up with the rug on top of it.
As the sounds of bullets and screams of their dying neighbors poured into their house and echoed throughout their secret cellar, the wife looked down at her unconscious husband. She knew that staying there and trying to hide was a giant risk, a gamble, a game of poker. Unfortunately, that is where fear is at its strongest. When fear plays poker it doesn't try to bluff and trick its way to victory. It simply stares you down until your confidence shatters, your emotions become corrupted, and you ultimately fold and obey it. Fear continues to play this way until all of your chips belong to it, and it has complete control. When a human plays against fear, they never win. But when I play against fear, I never lose. I don't have any confidence to be shattered, or any emotions to be corrupted. Fear was standing over her now, watching as she shook and her heart beat faster, her body tensed and almost folded over itself before she began to cry. Fear was the puppet master here; he was in complete control of this empty puppet. After slowly slipping out of my train of thought, I looked back at the wife's teary face, and despite only having slight emotions, I laughed. Behind her storm of tears, I could see her rainbow of happiness. She was overjoyed that it was her neighbors and her husband going through the pain, and not her.
The sound of another door busting open, the door to this house, made me realize how long I had stayed in this place. There were no bodies for me to collect here, yet at least. I climbed up the ladder and passed through the hatch, walked by the soldiers, and out of the door. I took no time trying to conceal myself from these pitiful beings. They can't see me, but they would never want to. A human’s sight is blocked by their emotions, and I'm what every one of them fears the most. As I walked to the next house, I witnessed a man in his 30's being dragged out of his home by a group of five soldiers. I watched as they threw him onto the ground in the middle of the street and pushed a rifle to the side of his head.
"This is what is going to happen to every single one of you unless you give us what we want!" the soldier holding the rifle screamed out to the people around him. There was nothing like a public execution to excite the fear that lived in others. Gasps and screams filled the air as the bullet pierced his temple and his lifeless body fell to the ground. The streets were emptied as the soldiers resumed their business and the people that were watching ran away in fear. As soon as I was sure that there was no one else around, I knelt near his body and lowered my cloak over it. His body slowly shrank down and shriveled up as I drained what life was left in him away. After picking up the doll like figure that was left in its place, I continued on my path to the next house. Unfortunately, the soldiers decided to do the same thing.
As I approached the building, the three soldiers that were there kicked the wooden door down. They walked in slowly, carefully and checking every step that they made. I knew this family; I'd collected many of their bodies throughout time. They were the Garrison family, an aggressive and defensive family. I stood back, expecting the inevitable as the first soldier approached the stairwell. Before he could even speak, he was tackled by a man and woman both around 40 years old. They were Jack and Sasha Garrison. I'd always remember their names; they caused too many deaths to be forgotten.
The screams of the soldiers being massacred by two pocketknives was enough to draw the attention of the soldiers outside of the house, and the two parents knew exactly that. That was exactly what they needed. As the two of them ran to the front door, they looked back towards the steps. Their children knew exactly what they were supposed to do. The two of them, Molly and Josh, sprinted down the stairs and out of the back door of the house.
Molly was unusually small for her age, only 4’9” at 16 years old, but this size only helped with her running speed. Her brother on the other hand was 6’ 2” and 17, and very muscular. He was always quick to fight, and his muscles helped him out with that. The two of them continued to run until they reached the wall surrounding the city, and proceeded to try and scale it. Both of them knew that they had to get out of the city if they ever wanted to avoid the soldiers, and wanted to keep their lives. I decided to leave my work behind and follow them; this would be far more interesting than my normal routine. Their stupidity, unneeded aggression, their fear over the smallest of things, it was so amusing to me. That was what I needed to see in order to make my decision for the council.
The two of them continued to run for about half an hour until they had become exhausted. However, they continued to walk until about 6:00 PM. This part of the world got darker much earlier, as soon as 4:30 PM, but got brighter at about 5:00 AM. They had gotten towards the end of the forest that surrounded the five countries, a forest which ended before a giant cliff on all sides. No one had ever ventured this far out of their city in years, out of fear of what creatures lived in them. The people of Transitus always stayed within their city. They were the weakest of the five countries, and it was inevitable that they would be invaded.
"Let's set up a camp here," Josh told his younger sister, fairly confident that the two of them gotten far away enough from the city. In preparation for their escape, the two of them had brought some blankets in order to set up a small place to sleep. Josh fell asleep quite easily, but Molly on the other hand could hardly close her eyes. The fear of being captured by the soldiers kept her adrenaline high, but her energy slowly drained away and she fell asleep, about three hours after her brother.
Molly had woken up fairly late, at about 8:00AM. She rolled over, still half asleep, and pushed her golden hair out of her pale face to look over to where her brother was laying, but his blankets were empty. She didn't know about the twenty minutes that her brother had spent trying to wake her from her slumber, before he heard the enemy in the distance. He feared the soldiers as much as everyone else in the city, but his fear for his sister's life drove him to the enemy, and not away from it. Molly sat on her blankets, wondering where her brother could have gone. They both had brought pocketknives with them, so she thought that he might have been hunting. She stood up and walked around the area, trying to shake her drowsiness as well as look for her brother. Her drowsiness and thoughts of her brother instantly escaped her at the sound of a horses neigh in the distance. The population of horses had drastically decreased after we broke the world into five countries, and only people in power were able to obtain them. Molly could only associate this sound with danger; nobody in Transitus owned a horse.
Molly sprinted as fast as she could, using her pocketknife to cut away the vines that hung down from the tree branches. The hilly ground caused her to lose speed as she ran and constantly tripped her up. The sound of the horse's neighs and the sound of hooves slamming against the mossy dirt continued to get louder. Slowly, the trees began to disappear and the soft dirt turned into craggy rock. The sounds of danger continued to get louder and Molly began to speed up even more, to the point were she was running well beyond her limits. A crack in the rocky cliff face caught her ankle and snapped the bone in her leg as she fell over.
Despite the pain and blood, she staggered back onto her feet and hobbled to the edge of the cliff. Nobody had ever been this far out of the countries; nobody knew how far the drop was. She slowly leaned over the edge and her nostrils were filled with the putrid smell of fish and salty water. The drop was about 120 feet, and into the rocky sea below. Slowly, her broken leg gave out and she collapsed onto the ground. The neighs finally stopped as the general of the soldiers came into her view and hopped off of his horse.
This man was what humans would call intimidating. He was very muscular for a 50 year old; you could clearly see their tone through his thick uniform. As he stepped closer, he was followed by several other men that arrived on foot. He licked his lips as he walked forwards, his body savoring the bitter, salty taste of blood, the blood of an enemy about to be killed. Fear began to seep into Molly, especially when she saw the unmistakable curly black hair of her brother.
“Just give up,” Josh said as he walked over to her. “This is a battle that we can’t win. We can just give him what he wants and we can live.” As soon as he put his arm on her to help her up, she pushed him back away. Fear had now completely taken over her, fear of what would happen to her life, fear of what would happen to her brother, and fear of what information the general wanted, even though it didn’t exist. The only thing that she didn’t fear was her next move. She slowly lifted her pocketknife up and her shaky arm jammed it into her chest. Her body rapidly staggered backwards and the tension in her muscles vanished as she pried the knife out of her chest and dropped it on the ground, just before she plummeted off of the cliff. Josh screamed out as he ran over to the edge and watched as his sister’s body was torn apart by the rocks below. The general walked over to him and put a comforting arm on his shoulder, but he just pushed it back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in a calm voice. “You have the information I need, you can just tell me and you and the rest of your city can live.” Josh looked down at the ground and picked up the knife which his sister used to kill herself and raised it up to the general.
“If you think I’m going to help you, you’re dead wrong!” Those were his last words before he charged at the general with the knife, and before the general shot him in the heart with a pistol. His body fell to the ground with a thud as the general turned around and jumped back onto his horse.
“Let’s move on,” he said in a disappointed tone. “We’ll get the information somewhere else.” As he rode away, his frown slowly modulated into a smile. He had killed two more; he was two people closer to a takeover. I walked over to him and lowered my tamarind cloak over his body. My hands moved over his warm and wet body; my fingers danced over his jagged bones before pushing against his chest, stopping the flowing blood, and draining the rest of his life. There was only one body to be collected here; Molly’s would lie forever lost beneath the water.
The main road of Transitus was now paved with blood and bones. Many bodies lay amongst the streets, but I never stopped. These humans were incompetent, unintelligent, and above all they were obdurate. Their ways would never change whatever our council did; our efforts had always been and always would be futile. Besides, Fear now held too high a place in our council; eliminating his greatest source of power would only serve our council. Things needed to be set straight again, the world needed to feel the strength of my true power. My work here was done, despite the early time and the amount of bodies I had left behind. The humans could deal with some rotting flesh for only a day. I was done with this job, and I travelled back to the void, ending what I hoped would be the last day of this job.

Theme: Fear has the power to control a person’s thoughts and actions in very negative ways.

I Collect The Bodies
Our council had always existed to protect the world, to offer a balance between the good and evil natures that were present in everything. We lived in our void, a small haven lost within the fabrics of reality. This small group met every few months, observing the Earth in the time between and discussing our concerns about the state the world was in. After many years, we decided that the world was too empty, and we decided to create the humans. These humans continued to progress and grow stronger, inventing many things and reigning as the supreme beings. But over time, some of our council began to regret our decision, myself included. These humans had grown traits that we had never implanted in them; their greed and anger were corrupting them. We had tried to warn them over the past few years, with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, diseases, and ultimately merging the fragments of our broken world into five small countries. But still, their nature never changed.
As a result of this, many of our members had begun to contemplate the end of the race we created. As our meetings began to become more frequent, these thoughts began to increase among us. In the end, we decided that we would take a week to make our final decisions and take a vote. That day marked the sixth day of that week. It was a Friday, so I was set to make my runs in Transitus city. My job is a simple one. I collect the bodies. It's a simple job, but also a very important one; I mean how would you like to walk around all day and see rotting bodies all around you? I used be able to do a lot more, but as our creation progressed, all of the council had to sacrifice some of our powers to give the world back what the humans were taking away from it.
Transitus city, despite its name, was much less of a city and more of the bare minimum of a living environment. The streets were just dirt roads were just plowed areas in the brown grass that filled the gray city walls. At the southern end of the city, the end which I had arrived at, there was a circular road with houses around it and a small marble fountain which was full of muddy water in the center of it. Branching out of this city was a long road that made its way through the city and all the way to the northern end of the city. This road was the main road of the city, the road scarred with the blood and sweat of the hard work of the villagers.
I walked along this main road and soon noticed that there was something different about the city today. It was as if the city was trembling in fear of the impending danger. I continued walking along the main road, checking the first few houses as I went along and following the few people that were outside around. After the first five, I hadn’t found anything, but the city was far bigger than five houses. I approached the door of the sixth house when I began to smell something burning. It was a faint scent, but it existed nonetheless. By the time I realized where it was coming from and what it was, it didn’t really matter anymore. The moment I had figured it out was the moment when the fuse on the bomb had just finished burning, and exploded.
The ground trembled from the force of the fiery explosion, and the wall at the north end of the city, the end which I had entered from, began to crumble over. The gray bricks were vomited down onto the earth, scattering about before the area was filled with fire and smoke. People were running everywhere, screaming in fear and trying to get back into their homes and to the loved ones. As the smoke started to clear away, soldiers in camouflage began to charge into the city. Each one of them was armed with a rifle or other firearm, and they were shooting at anything moving on sight. After a scream from what sounded like a commanding officer, the soldiers stopped firing and began to walk along the main road. I could see people desperately trying to keep their distance from the soldiers, but their fear kept them from running away. For me, humans were just like books. Each one of them had a different story, different emotions, different views of the world, but all of them were easy for me to read. My eyes jumped towards a woman in her late 20’s, and I could immediately tell what she was thinking. What would they do to me if I tried to run? Most of the others were thinking the same thing, but I on the other hand stayed completely calm and continued my job.
Upon walking into the sixth house, I only saw a girl sitting in the middle of a living room sitting in the middle of a red rug. She was a very young girl, probably only four or five years old and probably far too young to have known about what was going on outside of her house. In her hand was a marionette, a ballerina in a tattered black dress. The girl commanded the puppet around the red rug, spinning it and making it leap with ease. Wherever her hands went, the puppet would follow. But it all stopped as her mother burst in through the front door of the house screaming and her father collapsed on the floor. The young girls hand stopped, leaving the puppet strangled in its strings and lying helplessly on the rug. The mother stumbled over to the rug, lying her husband's bleeding body next to the rug before she slightly lifted it off of the ground. Beneath it was a small hatch, which she led her daughter down. As soon as her daughter had finished climbing the ladder down to the bottom, she dropped down with her husband in her arms and let the hatch close up with the rug on top of it.
As the sounds of bullets and screams of their dying neighbors poured into their house and echoed throughout their secret cellar, the wife looked down at her unconscious husband. She knew that staying there and trying to hide was a giant risk, a gamble, a game of poker. Unfortunately, that is where fear is at its strongest. When fear plays poker it doesn't try to bluff and trick its way to victory. It simply stares you down until your confidence shatters, your emotions become corrupted, and you ultimately fold and obey it. Fear continues to play this way until all of your chips belong to it, and it has complete control. When a human plays against fear, they never win. But when I play against fear, I never lose. I don't have any confidence to be shattered, or any emotions to be corrupted. Fear was standing over her now, watching as she shook and her heart beat faster, her body tensed and almost folded over itself before she began to cry. Fear was the puppet master here; he was in complete control of this empty puppet. After slowly slipping out of my train of thought, I looked back at the wife's teary face, and despite only having slight emotions, I laughed. Behind her storm of tears, I could see her rainbow of happiness. She was overjoyed that it was her neighbors and her husband going through the pain, and not her.
The sound of another door busting open, the door to this house, made me realize how long I had stayed in this place. There were no bodies for me to collect here, yet at least. I climbed up the ladder and passed through the hatch, walked by the soldiers, and out of the door. I took no time trying to conceal myself from these pitiful beings. They can't see me, but they would never want to. A human’s sight is blocked by their emotions, and I'm what every one of them fears the most. As I walked to the next house, I witnessed a man in his 30's being dragged out of his home by a group of five soldiers. I watched as they threw him onto the ground in the middle of the street and pushed a rifle to the side of his head.
"This is what is going to happen to every single one of you unless you give us what we want!" the soldier holding the rifle screamed out to the people around him. There was nothing like a public execution to excite the fear that lived in others. Gasps and screams filled the air as the bullet pierced his temple and his lifeless body fell to the ground. The streets were emptied as the soldiers resumed their business and the people that were watching ran away in fear. As soon as I was sure that there was no one else around, I knelt near his body and lowered my cloak over it. His body slowly shrank down and shriveled up as I drained what life was left in him away. After picking up the doll like figure that was left in its place, I continued on my path to the next house. Unfortunately, the soldiers decided to do the same thing.
As I approached the building, the three soldiers that were there kicked the wooden door down. They walked in slowly, carefully and checking every step that they made. I knew this family; I'd collected many of their bodies throughout time. They were the Garrison family, an aggressive and defensive family. I stood back, expecting the inevitable as the first soldier approached the stairwell. Before he could even speak, he was tackled by a man and woman both around 40 years old. They were Jack and Sasha Garrison. I'd always remember their names; they caused too many deaths to be forgotten.
The screams of the soldiers being massacred by two pocketknives was enough to draw the attention of the soldiers outside of the house, and the two parents knew exactly that. That was exactly what they needed. As the two of them ran to the front door, they looked back towards the steps. Their children knew exactly what they were supposed to do. The two of them, Molly and Josh, sprinted down the stairs and out of the back door of the house.
Molly was unusually small for her age, only 4’9” at 16 years old, but this size only helped with her running speed. Her brother on the other hand was 6’ 2” and 17, and very muscular. He was always quick to fight, and his muscles helped him out with that. The two of them continued to run until they reached the wall surrounding the city, and proceeded to try and scale it. Both of them knew that they had to get out of the city if they ever wanted to avoid the soldiers, and wanted to keep their lives. I decided to leave my work behind and follow them; this would be far more interesting than my normal routine. Their stupidity, unneeded aggression, their fear over the smallest of things, it was so amusing to me. That was what I needed to see in order to make my decision for the council.
The two of them continued to run for about half an hour until they had become exhausted. However, they continued to walk until about 6:00 PM. This part of the world got darker much earlier, as soon as 4:30 PM, but got brighter at about 5:00 AM. They had gotten towards the end of the forest that surrounded the five countries, a forest which ended before a giant cliff on all sides. No one had ever ventured this far out of their city in years, out of fear of what creatures lived in them. The people of Transitus always stayed within their city. They were the weakest of the five countries, and it was inevitable that they would be invaded.
"Let's set up a camp here," Josh told his younger sister, fairly confident that the two of them gotten far away enough from the city. In preparation for their escape, the two of them had brought some blankets in order to set up a small place to sleep. Josh fell asleep quite easily, but Molly on the other hand could hardly close her eyes. The fear of being captured by the soldiers kept her adrenaline high, but her energy slowly drained away and she fell asleep, about three hours after her brother.
Molly had woken up fairly late, at about 8:00AM. She rolled over, still half asleep, and pushed her golden hair out of her pale face to look over to where her brother was laying, but his blankets were empty. She didn't know about the twenty minutes that her brother had spent trying to wake her from her slumber, before he heard the enemy in the distance. He feared the soldiers as much as everyone else in the city, but his fear for his sister's life drove him to the enemy, and not away from it. Molly sat on her blankets, wondering where her brother could have gone. They both had brought pocketknives with them, so she thought that he might have been hunting. She stood up and walked around the area, trying to shake her drowsiness as well as look for her brother. Her drowsiness and thoughts of her brother instantly escaped her at the sound of a horses neigh in the distance. The population of horses had drastically decreased after we broke the world into five countries, and only people in power were able to obtain them. Molly could only associate this sound with danger; nobody in Transitus owned a horse.
Molly sprinted as fast as she could, using her pocketknife to cut away the vines that hung down from the tree branches. The hilly ground caused her to lose speed as she ran and constantly tripped her up. The sound of the horse's neighs and the sound of hooves slamming against the mossy dirt continued to get louder. Slowly, the trees began to disappear and the soft dirt turned into craggy rock. The sounds of danger continued to get louder and Molly began to speed up even more, to the point were she was running well beyond her limits. A crack in the rocky cliff face caught her ankle and snapped the bone in her leg as she fell over.
Despite the pain and blood, she staggered back onto her feet and hobbled to the edge of the cliff. Nobody had ever been this far out of the countries; nobody knew how far the drop was. She slowly leaned over the edge and her nostrils were filled with the putrid smell of fish and salty water. The drop was about 120 feet, and into the rocky sea below. Slowly, her broken leg gave out and she collapsed onto the ground. The neighs finally stopped as the general of the soldiers came into her view and hopped off of his horse.
This man was what humans would call intimidating. He was very muscular for a 50 year old; you could clearly see their tone through his thick uniform. As he stepped closer, he was followed by several other men that arrived on foot. He licked his lips as he walked forwards, his body savoring the bitter, salty taste of blood, the blood of an enemy about to be killed. Fear began to seep into Molly, especially when she saw the unmistakable curly black hair of her brother.
“Just give up,” Josh said as he walked over to her. “This is a battle that we can’t win. We can just give him what he wants and we can live.” As soon as he put his arm on her to help her up, she pushed him back away. Fear had now completely taken over her, fear of what would happen to her life, fear of what would happen to her brother, and fear of what information the general wanted, even though it didn’t exist. The only thing that she didn’t fear was her next move. She slowly lifted her pocketknife up and her shaky arm jammed it into her chest. Her body rapidly staggered backwards and the tension in her muscles vanished as she pried the knife out of her chest and dropped it on the ground, just before she plummeted off of the cliff. Josh screamed out as he ran over to the edge and watched as his sister’s body was torn apart by the rocks below. The general walked over to him and put a comforting arm on his shoulder, but he just pushed it back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in a calm voice. “You have the information I need, you can just tell me and you and the rest of your city can live.” Josh looked down at the ground and picked up the knife which his sister used to kill herself and raised it up to the general.
“If you think I’m going to help you, you’re dead wrong!” Those were his last words before he charged at the general with the knife, and before the general shot him in the heart with a pistol. His body fell to the ground with a thud as the general turned around and jumped back onto his horse.
“Let’s move on,” he said in a disappointed tone. “We’ll get the information somewhere else.” As he rode away, his frown slowly modulated into a smile. He had killed two more; he was two people closer to a takeover. I walked over to him and lowered my tamarind cloak over his body. My hands moved over his warm and wet body; my fingers danced over his jagged bones before pushing against his chest, stopping the flowing blood, and draining the rest of his life. There was only one body to be collected here; Molly’s would lie forever lost beneath the water.
The main road of Transitus was now paved with blood and bones. Many bodies lay amongst the streets, but I never stopped. These humans were incompetent, unintelligent, and above all they were obdurate. Their ways would never change whatever our council did; our efforts had always been and always would be futile. Besides, Fear now held too high a place in our council; eliminating his greatest source of power would only serve our council. Things needed to be set straight again, the world needed to feel the strength of my true power. My work here was done, despite the early time and the amount of bodies I had left behind. The humans could deal with some rotting flesh for only a day. I was done with this job, and I travelled back to the void, ending what I hoped would be the last day of this job.

Theme: Fear has the power to control a person’s thoughts and actions in very negative ways.