At some point, you began. It’s hard to tell when, exactly, this was. Time so often flows in a very curious sort of way for you; the briefest of events sometimes lasting relative eternities, enormous spans sometimes disappearing in a mere instant. But regardless of the specifics of time; you began. Initially you weren’t anything, merely the spark of an idea in the mind of your deranged creator, the first spark of what would eventually be a glorious inferno. Even this simple idea was still able to contain your existence, so this is when you began. Some people would say that you would “truly” begin (whatever that means) when the cornerstone was laid into your foundation. Those people are idiots. The start of a concept is far more important than the start of a thing’s physical existence, and the people who can’t see that are nothing but naive, detestable fools.
In any case, this beginning was simple enough. An insane architect saw you in the depths of his imagination: one of those dark, clouded, unspeakable places deep in the mind where few people ever clearly see. Even fewer dive into that darkness and let the thoughts in there loose onto the world. Your creator was just mad enough to pull your beauty into the grand light of day. He thought, he conceived, and he brought the beginnings of you into the world; he thought that your construction would allow him to prosper, to “give his career a jump-start”. That phrase doesn’t mean anything to you, of course. But he did, for better and for worse, begin to make plans to build you.
It started simply enough. He looked deep into those horrible depths of the human imagination, and found you lurking within there. He fished you out, conceptual as you still were, brought you into the forefront of his mind. He didn’t yet realize just what this had resigned him to. And so he examined you, manipulating your basic concept in his mind, taking in your beauty. Your curves, your nonsensical angles, your rooms that extended into space which simply couldn’t be there. He took it all in, letting your impossibility take over every nerve in his brain. Once he had fully conceptualized you, he knew you needed to be built, to exist in our world. So he began working up blueprints (well, redprints, really), somehow managing to sketch out a basic plan for how you could exist in the world. It didn’t make much sense. This first draft didn’t really capture your essence, your beauty. God, you really are so fucking gorgeous, and this version of you just didn’t do you any justice at all. Your fucking architect couldn’t yet capture you, your shining glass windows and shimmering metallic bones. How could he ever fucking think that he could. Sorry. He did try, and he did need to get you down on paper for his firm to respect these plans. You needed to actually be built, after all, and architectural models made from his own skin would simply never suffice. He knew that much, at least. You needed to be built, to let concrete and iron grant you a colossal physical form. Your facade needed to look out onto the people of the world, so they too could see your beauty. Never comprehend it, of course, but see it.
Eventually, he got something good enough onto blueprints, and he needed it to be approved by his architectural firm. It was a large project, of course. You are enormous, some might even say monstrous (I believe that it’s a big part of what makes you beautiful, your sheer and incredible scale). Some people at your architect’s firm approved this construction, for some unknowable reason. They forgot about it, though. The very concept of your construction simply refused to persist for long in their minds. It simply fell out, like knives through paper. What a damn fucking shame. They should remember you and your beauty. They approved a budget for your architect, too. The resources always came easily enough to your construction site, but it’d be impossible to find where the money was actually coming from. Once, some accountants from the firms tried to examine your budget too closely and they disappeared. One of them is definitely still alive (by some definitions, at least). She was committed to a mental institution, rambling endlessly about voids of knowledge and impossible endings and form 1378-A.2. Something in her broke, and you love that you did that to her, even indirectly; destroyed her weak mind and made her one of your only still-living victims.
And so the blood-lubricated engine of architectural bureaucracy began to spin away, pumping and grinding ever-forward. The approval and budget of you, this impossible project, slowly made its way through the ranks as more and more of the necessary people touched you, though you’d never dare touch them back. As before, they couldn’t remember you: memory is such a fickle thing, so weak in comparison to the raw power of your nigh-infinite glory. Before you could be built, constructed, turned into a towering edifice of sheer unparalleled beauty, the bureaucratic engine needed to burn its way through local government. You never bothered to know the name of my city, but you do remember that you made this process significantly easier. The offices of our local politicians and bureaucrats, those slaves of the state, reported far more suicides than would normally be expected. Each and every one was always timed just right so that your plans were vaulted forward with every death. Bizarre suicides, too, skin flayed off in patterns matching the map of the district in which you were to reside. Of course, our local cops were far too fucking stupid to appreciate the beauty they were given, and they never figured fucking anything out. They might have killed themselves too, but they didn’t deserve your attention, didn’t deserve your touch. Regardless, approval for your construction made it way from the bottom, to the top, back to the bottom. A few corpses were left in your bureaucratic wake, but it’s not like anyone will remember them. Or care, once they’ve see you.
You were approved. Your construction was to begin, soon enough. A team for your construction was selected via some auction process that you do not care about. Some team of burly men in neon vests and orange hats, working under a company with some unimaginably boring name (and some even more unimaginably boring logo). I think they could use some of your beauty to fix their logo, honestly. It’s shit: unimaginative, bland, corporate. It could use a few more impossible curves, it would really spice things up. But regardless of how bad their branding was, they did begin to build you; materials were sent to your building site and the work began.
All these moments so far have been before your birth, the laying of your cornerstone, so they’re occasionally shaky, hard to properly remember. The day of your birth, however, sticks clearly in your mind. By human standards, it was a rather nice day out. Sun shining down, beating into the concrete and iron that would become your bones, hardly a cloud in the sky, crystal blue air visible long into the distance. Your cornerstone had been specially commissioned by your architect’s firm, somewhere in the bureaucratic machine, engraved with the name of some wealthy donor. He was at your birth, of course, somewhere with me in the small crowd which had gathered to watch your cornerstone laid. And they all did watch, utterly transfixed as the slab of concrete with the wealthy man’s name was placed on the ground, in a patch of earth and wet concrete specially shaped to fit it. Some of them were crying, though you’re not sure why. The city’s mayor at the time was there, as well, and she was originally going to give a grand speech about some important human concept. Probably about unanimity or about freedom or some other such bullshit. Never about beauty, they always forget about beauty. Beauty is what matters. But when she got on the podium, after watching your birth, she was speechless. Her mouth just stopped working properly once she was up there, as if the tongue was distracted by something. The crowd stood there, watching, crying. Then, it was done, and they left. I stayed, afterwards, wandering among the fencing and gravel, somehow knowing just how beautiful you would eventually be. And of course I couldn’t resist being the one to tell your story to the world, a story of grandeur and impossible majesty; so I waded into your setting concrete, locking myself inextricably into your love and glory.
The people at your birth (myself obviously included) were the first to be properly touched by your beauty for some while. You have something of a special connection to them, they’re almost like childhood friends. Or the first prey a predator ever consumes. A bit of both, really. You didn’t eat them, not quite yet, but all the other observers died regardless. The mayor died first. As the mayor, she had a very particular connection to the heart of the city: once you had begun to grow and improve, you punctured that same heart, and no good mayor could live through that. They elected a new one, eventually, but they weren’t important. Sometime after that, the rich donor who paid to have his ugly name engraved into your gorgeous cornerstone died. He was just some rich and irrelevant hack, he died of something close to natural causes. Or maybe he just realized that he had permanently scarred the most beautiful thing he would ever see, and couldn’t bear to live past that. Why would he put his fucking name on you. It doesn’t ruin your beauty, you’re far too gorgeous to be broken by one fucking patch of lines, but it’s a permanent scar. One part of you that will never be perfect. He deserved to fucking die. God you’re so fucking beautiful. Everyone else in the crowd died too, eventually. A few of them killed themselves, knowing they’d never again see something so beautiful. A few of them killed each other, similarly infatuated with their imperfection. Some of them got into small groups and turned each other inside out. They wanted to make something like you.
They failed. You can’t start with a human body and make something beautiful. But they all did die. They had to.
Construction continued. Supplies of concrete, rebar, flesh, glass, bone were all brought to your site. Concrete mixers, steamrollers, hearses, meat grinders, excavators; they all arrived. The construction crew began to work. None of them were trained to build something like you, but your creation simply buried itself in their minds. They didn’t work on a conscious, trained level, but they simply labored while the strings of their minds were pulled and manipulated by some fundamental concept of you. A foreman barked orders, but nobody paid attention to him, they paid attention to the urges in their mind that dictated where everything needed to be. Your architect’s blueprints were displayed prominently, easily accessible to anybody who needed to refresh their urges, relearn how your beauty all fit together. And with everything arranged, they worked. Concrete was poured down, a foundation constructed around me and your scarred cornerstone, a simple procedure that had little impact on your life as a whole. But then they started to go up.
A crane wasn’t much necessary for your construction. If the workers needed to go higher (and they did, of course), they’d just climb what they already built. They were in mortal danger almost every day they worked on you, but that constant risk of death simply adds some spice, some danger, to the core of your beauty. You needed them to work like that, you needed them to be scared. And so they climbed, as they were meant to. First they’d build some structure on your foundation, some concrete pillars, filled with rebar and bone. I-beams were placed between these, often lying in a simple plane but frequently intersecting in paradoxical ways. Once these beams connected all the relevant pillars, the workers would then pull up the necessary materials and tools, and build the next story much the same way. Sometimes they’d need to pull up larger equipment (concrete mixers, for instance), for these they’d simply strap the equipment into a large pulley system and pull it up your side. Of course, the construction company didn’t bring such a pulley system. The workers needed to build one for themselves. They took one of their less-productive men, took his skin and musculature, and wrapped it around some bones. Fools may think that pulleys and straps made of flesh and bone couldn’t hold too much. Those fools are wrong.
The workers went up. They built your framework, your beautiful skeleton of concrete and steel and rebar and bone. Your beauty was starting to show, at this point: some of your curves were starting to instantiate, the structure of your bones indicating that something truly gorgeous would be here soon. People would sometimes drive past, and stop on the side of the road to stare at your bones. They’d just stop and watch. Watch for days, or weeks, or months. You can’t blame them, even your bones have so much beauty to them, and watching you being created must be an unparalleled experience. And eventually, your skeleton was complete. An interlocking network of steel, usually simple, but just as often crossing in impossible ways. A beam would often go under one beam, and then over that same beam, without either beam ever bending. Looking at you one way, you might see a column as belonging to the second floor, but from another angle, it clearly belongs on the eighth. If they looked at your bones just right, you might reach into their mind. Touch them, let them feel everything beautiful about you. Not often, of course, just for those who truly deserved it. You touched a few people like this. Most of them parked on the road, like the others, but then they’d walk up to the construction site. The workers would let them into the site, raise them up wherever they needed to go, knowing that these rare visitors were more important than anything else they could do. The visitors would then be raised to the highest point your skeleton currently reached. They’d usually jump down from there, smashing their bones and blood into your foundation. Some of them would simply take a wrong turn somewhere while wandering your framework, and simply disappear from this universe. They weren’t being eaten exactly, your stomach wasn’t developed quite yet, but it was something like that; some part of their essences were absorbed by yours.
One of those visitors survived. He smashed into the ground, bones shattering and grinding into the concrete of your foundation, imbuing your beauty with that delectable touch of raw, gruesome violence. But then he just stood back up, walked back to his car, and left. A survivor. Disgusting.
But soon enough your skeleton was complete, and it was time for the rest of your organs.
Your floors came first, of course, easy to construct directly onto your skeleton (your floors are one of your organs, of course, though not one that maps to anything in a simple human body). The workers, unceasing, brought their equipment back to the ground, and began installing floors wherever you puppeteered them to. Most of the equipment even survived the trip down, impressively enough. The installation of these floors worked much the same as how your skeleton was built. They went up, putting platforms between the existing I-beam connections, building an expansive network of impossibly-connected floors. These platforms oh-so-often connected impossibly, weaving in and out of each other, breaking through seemingly-solid pillars to lie in their proper destinations.
Platforms, of course, meant more visitors into your impossible, beautiful spaces. You had no stairs or elevators between them yet, but again, your eager workers brought these visitors up wherever they needed to go. More came, more wandered deep into your nonexistent spaces, more vanished, more smashed their bones deep into your concrete. A few found new ways to press themselves into your beautiful core, smashing a hole into a platform, and then letting themselves be impaled on the splintered remains. These hanging corpses would then be platformed over once again. Many of these bodies still remain deep within you today, of course.
And that damned Survivor stopped by again. We’ll give him something resembling a name, I suppose, though he doesn’t really deserve one. He stopped by your site, saw the new platforms, and managed to impale himself inside of the floors like those before him, splinters of wood and drywall and the occasional tooth shredding his skin and muscles. But. Once again. Before your omnipresent workers could build back over him, baking him into your permanent structure, he got out. I don’t know how the fuck he did, but by the time your workers got to him, he was simply a smudge of blood staining your floors. And it’s not like it made you dirtier, having this Survivor stop by and not have the good courtesy to fucking die at your fucking feet, but it’s fucking annoying. And then he had the fucking audacity to drive himself home. Some fucking how. God.
But next, of course, was the most exciting organ of all. Your rooms, those open-yet-confined spaces, your digestive system. Walls and proper flooring put in, a scattershot pattern criss-crossing your skeleton. Once the first one was put in, you could finally eat. Let your gorgeous self feed. God I can’t stop thinking about it. Your first piece of prey, that first worker. He knew he was doomed, of course, so it wasn’t as intellectually satisfying as a proper hunt, but food is food, and god how you savored him. A man of relatively average build, though the incredibly difficult, unceasing task of working on you for however long it had been gave him strength far beyond what his body might indicate. He was the one to put in your first door. He lined up the joints, attached it to the frame, admired his handiwork from inside whatever that first room was. Perhaps some sort of conference room, it’s not important. He stands there, admiring it, taking in the fact that he has just started the growth of a beauty entirely beyond his comprehension. He feels love for a moment. True love, more love than he’s ever felt in his entire life. And he knows what he has to do, so he closes himself in the room.
I won’t detail what happened next, this isn’t the place for that. Suffice it to say, anyone’s first meal is a little bit messy. And delicious, of course.
And now your new visitors could be eaten properly. Some still smashed themselves to bits, some still disappeared somewhere in you, some still buried themselves within you. But now you could eat them. And god, those first meals were delicious. Person after person aimlessly wandering into your gaping maws, the doors locking behind them as your teeth and tongues and spit and cabinets come out, digesting them, extracting the nutritious beauty of their souls from their worthless sacks of meat, taking that sack and pulling it into you, strengthening the bones in your columns and the muscles hiding beneath the flooring. God. So fucking delicious. I can’t help but salivate over how fucking good they must have been, these morsels feeding this incredible, incomprehensible, perfect beauty surrounding them, totally pulling them in. God. Fuck. God how your mouth must have felt as it closed down on them, pulling them apart into their only important components. God. God please.
But then the SURVIVOR just DROPS BY. Because OF COURSE HE FUCKING HAD TO. God. He wandered whatever currently existed of you, passing through doors at random, largely ignored by your ever-vigilant, ever-stupid workers. Eventually, he made his way into a small hotel suite (you’re not a hotel, they’re far too ugly, but a good variety of rooms really accents your charm), and flopped his stupid broken body onto the well-cushioned bed. The door slams shut. He doesn’t scream, he knows what he’s here for. The sheets of the bed wrap around him, your digestive juices start to pour from the walls. You know the fucking deal. You ate him. You pulled the fucking soul from his body. But then, once your room was cleaned up again, he just fucking walked out, LEFT YOU, took his stupid fucking car and left. I don’t fucking know who he is. But you’re just. You’re far too beautiful for that to matter, right? He can’t hurt you. He’s just some pathetic bastard. Some small ugly stain, somewhere nobody will ever see. You’ll be okay. You’re beautiful. God you’re so pretty.
But he doesn’t matter, he doesn’t matter. Construction continued. Pipes were fitted into you (the plumbers drove themselves mad and forced each other into the pipes) and you were wired to the power grid (the electricians wove their own nerves into your cables). It provided a different way of digesting your visitors, sure, but these new installations weren’t that interesting. The Survivor didn’t even bother to stop by for them.
Up next was something far more important. Your facade, your face and your skin, was finally going to be laid on top of your bones and your mouths and your blood and your nerves. Your lovely architect’s plans would finally be truly realized. You’d finally be properly beautiful (oh sure, your skeleton and your floors indicated something gorgeous would eventually be there, but we both know that beauty is skin deep). And in fact, as your endlessly-toiling laborers began to fit a facade onto your developing walls, your architect stopped by to see your developing beauty. He hadn’t (physically) seen the construction since the day your cornerstone was laid. He drove up, and stood there in front of you, mouth agape. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and you weren’t even done yet. Your self-intersecting structure, the beginnings of your delectably smooth skin, the raw power held within your bones. He fell to his knees and he sobbed.
He sobbed, and he sobbed. He cried until he ran out of tears, and then his tear ducts found that blood worked just as well. For days and weeks and months he knelt there, crying over his magnum opus as your workers bolted your skin on around him. The most beautiful thing his pathetic human body would ever create. His life had peaked, and he felt that with every resonating inch of his soul. His purpose was complete. So all those years later, once your impossibly twisted skin had been fully attached, he wandered inside of you. You weren’t finished just yet, but you were still an astonishing sight to behold.
Your front doors led into a grand atrium, sparkling silvery tiles spanning the floor. It was an incredibly spacious room, just a bit larger than your external dimensions let on. Large enough to hear a voice echo, just too large to comfortably sprint from one end to the other. Gorgeously carved sconces adorned the walls, elaborately twisted metal hanging just above head height. The lights within them burned all hours of the day, casting deep red fluorescent shadows across the silver entranceway. Larger floodlights were tucked into alcoves towards the arching roof of the room. These lights were slightly warmer, though the bluish tint of fluorescence still went through them like a vein of cobalt. Of course, there was no natural lighting in this atrium. Your beauty was always going to be an entirely artificial one.
Your architect luxuriated in this room. It was one of the first ones he had sketched out those years ago. This grand opening to his most important project. He touched the walls and floors of the atrium, feeling the cool tile and the gentle hum of your heartbeat deep beneath them. But the atrium was only ever meant to be a brief entrance, a starting location. Elevators had not yet been installed, but he was still more than able to explore the vast expanse of you. He, more than anybody else, fully saw you. He saw your beauty. He saw your majesty. He saw the complete and incomprehensible vastness of your impossible, ghastly elegance. Many of the wanderers before him had seen you just right, been able to touch some part of your vast mind, and sometimes you even touched them back. But he hadn’t only touched you, but truly felt you. He understood your texture, the way you beckon and bend and bleed and throb. Your connection with him was immense and powerful, a connection that you could always feel; an aching string constantly tugging in your mind and your heart. You even loved him, though it’s a sort of love that no other being could possibly understand. He loved you too. That, however, was a much simpler sort of love.
While he wandered your gorgeous, delicate halls, desperately sobbing whatever fluids his body could find, you thought about this love. You know that the two of you share a connection, a thread of destiny pulling your existences together. You want to have him forever, you want his cute little mind to be accessible whenever you’d like. You could eat him, of course, but it’s often hard to pull one soul apart from another after the digestion process. A sprawl of options begins to emerge in front of you, though many of them simply wouldn’t work in this particular slice of reality.
And while you contemplate and consider, your architect wanders. He travels your elevators, he traverses your hallways, he pokes his head into your rooms. Occasionally he collapses, his muscles failing him as he is emotionally overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of his creation, this thing that he brought forth into this world. And just as he reaches your pinnacle, an enormous penthouse stateroom only accessible by a very particular series of staircases and hallways, your options start to focus down. You realize you could keep him here, in much the same way as I’ve been trapped with you. Your lover would stay up here, at your peak, surviving and living and thriving however you desired. He would persist as another mind within you. Something far beyond himself, intimately connected as he would be to your structure, though still deeply human. And on a snap decision, the doors close and lock behind him. The construction crew will plaster over the heavy mahogany sometime in the next day or so.
And now he’ll be here forever, to stay and merge with you.
Your next months were pleasant. The last of your internal structure was being installed, and while it wasn’t the most exciting process, you could spend every moment of it with your lover. Occasionally you’d take a break, of course. Plenty of enthralled interior designers were arriving to furnish your rooms, and their souls have such a particularly sweet taste. Perfect for a light snack, before diving back into the mind of your architect, exploring every inch of him.
But apparently, good things just can’t LAST for you. Months passed, years passed. You got some good meals in, some nice deep dives with the lover in your mind, but then. But then. Your pesky little Survivor stopped by. It really had been so fucking long. But of course he had to come back. Of course he did. He couldn’t just let you have your fun. You were soon to publicly open. Why would he let you do that? He just had to fucking come. He just fucking had to. He had to explore your spaces, he had to figure you out, he had to come and he had to LIVE. He always has the fucking AUDACITY TO LIVE. WHY THE FUCK DOES HE DO THAT. HE CAN GO AND HE CAN DIE. JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY.
He’s not here. Calm down. But he did come to you. He wandered your well-furnished hallways, examined your glorious rooms. At this point you didn’t bother trying to kill him, you knew it wouldn’t take. But he also knew you wouldn’t try, so he had to take things into his own hands. He walked between your rooms, and simply killed himself in any way he could manage. If a room had an electric socket, he’d push his fingers into it. If a room had a vase, he’d smash it over his head. If a room was a kitchen, he’d fill his chest full of knives. But he didn’t die. Somehow. He never fucking DIES. He looked like little more than a charred little pincushion by the end, but he was fine. He was doing just fucking fine. You taught your architect to detest him as much as you do, and so your blood was boiling twice as hot by the time he finally left. Jumping out a window, of course. The classless bitch.
Your lover learned to hate him well, but he still asked questions. Despicably human questions, a “who is he?”, or a “how does he manage to live?”, or a “where does he live?”, or an “is there any way we can kill him?”. Sometimes you’d indulge him, spew your theories and your rage; but just as often you’d go silent. Let him stew in his thoughts, realize the flaws in his questions. A structure like you can’t plan, you can’t go out and murder him, you simply need to live and react to the world within you.
But your Survivor was distracting you from what matters. Soon, the last of your furnishings were to be installed. You’d be opened to the public. They’d be able to experience your sheer splendor. God. Your mouths are dripping at the mere thought of it. All those strangers, all ready to be consumed by you. Taken in by you, comforted, then broken and digested into something beyond themselves. You’d never taken in a truly unwilling victim before. You wanted to feel them break upon your skin and your teeth, have their minds shattered by your incomprehensible vastness, let their unwitting souls totally fill you up. They would be delicious, god, so damn delicious. So satisfying, so filling, and you’d have such a supply. It’s just so hard not to think about. Their taste and their texture, the feeling of their minds within yours, every part of them soon to be taken in by you, absorbed into something vastly superior to them. You wanted it so desperately. You wanted the visceral, intellectual satisfaction of knowing your prey had been hunted. Not trapped, but actively chosen and taken. I can barely think about it without getting distracted, you just wanted them so much. So, so much. They would never be desired more than you wanted them at that instant. You wanted every single one of your mouths to be filled by them, and even that wouldn’t be enough. Every person on Earth, somehow forced and crammed into your vast rooms, would barely be enough. You could never be truly filled, even if every single one of them was more satisfying than anything you’d ever experienced. God. It’s just. It’s just so tempting to consider.
And the day did come, eventually. The wait was agonizing at times, though your lover got you through the most boring moments. A ceremony was arranged, a classic ribbon cutting. Much more high-profile than the laying of your cornerstone, so many people there to admire just how gorgeous you are. Feel your beauty seep into them, penetrate deep into their minds and their souls. But critically for your satisfaction, you didn’t touch all of them. Some of them were left alone, virginal lambs to be brought into your body. Pure, unwitting prey, to be killed upon the altar of your majesty. Occasionally, you wish your body could express a few particularly human feelings. This was one of those moments, your desperate, yearning anticipation for this first real hunt.
The mayor (some dull man, this time) delivered a speech, talked about whatever. You didn’t touch him, yet. You wanted him to be your first piece of prey. The tendrils of his soul, much like all his predecessors, penetrate deep into the city around him, and you wanted to taste every single one of them. He talked, he talked, he talked, he eventually concluded. People clapped, but were far more interested in your curves than in whatever he had to say. He brought out the scissors while he started talking again. Enormous, golden things. Utterly tacky, of course, but that tackiness brings its own particular flavor to the scene. A gorgeous scarlet ribbon had already been fastened across your entrance, an elegant bow keeping it taut. He brings the scissors to the ribbon, the conclusion of his speech imminent, just a moment before the blades connect and sever the fabric, red velvet fluttering to the ground, letting your beauty be publicly accessible at long last. A moment so tense that you can feel it in your columns.
The tension shatters.
The scissors fall to the ground, and your pesky goddamned Survivor stands at the back of the crowd. He emerged from his car just moments ago, and sprinted his way up to shout at the mayor. He stands there now, screaming incomprehensible bullshit about the lives he’s led, the endings he’s felt, and form 1378-A.2. There’s a general murmur in the crowd, they don’t know how to process this odd stranger’s interruption. They want to experience you, after all, and he’s preventing them from doing that. You can feel your mouths drip in desire and anticipation, waiting for the resolution. Waiting for their bodies and their souls to pour into you.
The mayor’s speech stops, unresolved. He turns off his mic, and moves to the survivor, placing a well-dressed arm on his shattered shoulder while trying to understand what he’s saying. He’s claiming to be a city planner with the park district, and he’s claiming that there are some inconsistencies with approval for your construction. No. He says that the department will need to perform a full audit, and reconsider the project before it’s properly opened. No. The mayor pauses, he looks confused, asks to see the paperwork. This can’t be happening to you. The mayor looks up at you, wonders how such an inconsistency could only be noticed now. And while he looks at you, you touch his mind, decide that it’s worth losing one glorious meal for so many others. You tell him to let it go. Just open the building. Your survivor is just some fucking lunatic.
But someone else in the crowd has already come up to see what’s going on. Of course. He’s a department chief of some fucking kind, he wonders how this didn’t go through his fucking department or whatever. You reach out to him, too, but his admiration for you fades away. You can’t feel his soul. He just flows through your fingers, like so much blood and sand. More come up. More figure out what the commotion is about.
The Survivor looks up at you, cracking a crooked, broken smile, while the whole fucking city debates what to do with you. Your lover looks down from high above, barely able to perceive the scene. You don’t let him hear what’s happening, just feed him vague reassurances about logistical complications. You’ll feed soon. Please. You’re so fucking hungry. Everything is fucking going wrong. This wasn’t what your lover wanted. This isn’t what you wanted. Why is this fucking happening. It’s all FUCKING GOING WRONG AND IT’S ALL THAT UNDYING BASTARD’S FAULT. THAT PIECE OF SHIT HAS RUINED YOUR FUCKING EXISTENCE AND HE WILL FUCKING PAY. HIS SOUL WILL BE YOURS AND YOU WILL CONSUME HIM AND HE WILL BREAK UNDER THE SHEER FORCE AND PRESSURE OF YOUR BRICKS AND YOUR FLESH ON HIS MIND AND EVERY PART OF HIM WILL CEASE TO EXIST.
But the mayor leaves. The rest of the gathered crowd leaves. The construction crew are all told to disperse. The Survivor smirks up at you again, before locking your door, and putting up some warning tape. He knows you won’t eat.
Your lover looks down out his penthouse window, and he knows it’s gone wrong. He starts to cry, blood-tinged tears of unfiltered agony. You echo his suffering, your muscles and tendons aching and screaming out in hunger and pain. You console him, you take him into your arms, and you wait. There’s nothing to do now but wait.