"Suffering opened my soul the way a meat cleaver severs gristle and bone."

─ Wendy Farley

≻───── ⋆PROLOGUE⋆ ─────≺

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐎𝐃 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒𝐍'𝐓 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏, 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐊 𝐈𝐓 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒.

It pools and it seeps and it'll get everywhere, no matter how much you try to clean. It congeals, after a while, like jelly. The clotting does that, it gets thick and it makes a stream to a drip to nothing.

My blood likes to run. It pours out of me like a gushing geyser, it flows and it does ebb to the constant flood. I lose it faster than I lose myself. But not everyone bleeds like me, not the dead. Their blood sometimes is red, when they come back early, before the begin to rot. It's crimson and it's ruby, like a fresh apple it's so ripe and clean.

Then the decay begins and it doesn't take long for it to go rotten and rancid, for it to turn brown or even a molding green. There are a few with black blood, thick and smelling like something past its due date. Something that had been left out in the heat.

Their blood is different. It might seep and it might get everywhere, but it doesn't run like mine. It doesn't move freely, it's full of restraints and evil and something ungodly. Something impure. Something tainted.

Unclean.

We aren't safe anymore, not from the things that move on stumbling legs and see with blind eyes. They rose up from some unknown beginning, as if the gods got tired of us and our bullshit and wanted to reign a little hell. As if we needed to be put back in our place, we needed to be taught a lesson.

Well, I got it. I got the message. I got the memo. I got the fucking idea.

We promise to do better but do we ever stay true? We kill, we enslave, and we hunt like animals, like the wild beasts we all know we are. We have the same instincts they do, the same urge to kill and to fight and to take what we want. We have evil uncoiling inside of us and it didn't matter if we were loving husbands or forgiving wives. The dead rose and we turned into something else, we turned into something just as vicious in order to survive.

I'm not saying this to make up for the things I've done, I'm not trying to make excuses but this world does something to you. It changes you and molds you just like the hands of angry fathers. We turn into the beasts we run from, we mirror our instincts and actions as if to make up for what the gods and this cruel world has done to them as they've done to us.

What I did and what I'm going to do, it's not pretty and it's sure as hell isn't okay. But in this world, the rules change. Everything changes when blood is drawn and the monsters come alive.

It's not my fault.

You'd all do the same.

The dead might be monsters but so are we.

AUTHOR'S NOTE━━yall better get ready for this crazy lil journey eeeeeee i cant wait i cant wait!!!!!!! hope you guys are enjoying it so far :) ily ily ily if you've made it this far!!!!