High on teen spirit: Saviour

In that moment, the silence was the most deafening. More than the unrelenting rain, more than the sharp tongue of the wind. Calling her name, he stood, dread filling him as slowly as thick liquor filling his glass. He had never felt my scissors cut a cord of his before. He fell to his knees, his tears going unnoticed, reunited with their long lost brothers on the ground. I felt his urge for me to cut his cord too and to let him drop into hopelessness but I knew this would change him. He picked up his broken glasses, and his broken heart, reluctantly turning away from the collapsed building under which his daughter’s corpse lay. One day, he would neglect to thank me in his acceptance speech for the mayor.

The sun blinded me, as the scent of fresh bread and stale sweat overwhelmed me. I walked up to the attic where an unfinished story lay in front of the old man, as he held his chest in pain. He should have looked for the warning on that first cigarette pack, not the price. He screamed out in pain and my conscience made me hold his hand, helping him to the other side. As his last breath left him, a young lady ran up the stairs in shock. She went forward, urging him, begging him to wake up. I pushed his unfinished manuscript off the table. Unable to see me in the safety of my invisibility, she crouched down, picked it up, and ran down to tell the baker of his father’s death. She would never mention my name in the foreword of her next bestseller.

I shifted once more, the beautiful stars filling me with wonder. A perfect night, perpetuated by gunfire and defined by blood. She walked through, She knew her longbow could never match their guns, but she soldiered on, unfazed by threat I posed to her. As she fell to her knees at being shot in the foot, she let loose an arrow before the killing blow was dealt. The rookie who had done the deed was static, staring at the arrow embedded in his foot.

That was all it took to turn him. Those who understood me always called me a good writer but today I was particularly proud of the irony I had injected in the dark bloodstream of another like me, War. The rookie would never think of me, as his many freedom speeches would stop the war a decade from now. In all their eyes, I am still Death, the ‘Destroyer of Worlds’.