Empath

I’d never seen so many bodies. Just strewn about, like trash. Heaps of meaningless forms covered in a shroud of blackness, as far as I could see. I stood above, looking down at them. Mangled. Lifeless. In a pit of forgotten life. Each one had a life. Just like me. They had friends, family, hopes, dreams, angst, pain, struggles. I felt my feet moving along the ground beneath me. I walked among them, the dead. I felt the emptiness, the lack of souls, of energy. It felt so uncanny. It was impossible to accept that each face was just a shell. I felt nothing in this place. Their souls had long since left, and I was alone, among the thousands, the piles, the heaps of flesh.

I grew up learning to feel and breathe the energy from every creature I met. I’m not telepathic; I guess I’m what you would call an empath. I can feel your emotion, the full depth of it. I can feel if you’re trying to hide something, and depending on the level of strength of that barrier, I can even feel beyond your fear. Oh yeah, and I can’t turn it off. Everyone everywhere gives off some kind of energy. Whether it’s the full blast of how truly excited and powerful they feel, or just the bits of happiness seeping through their wall of fear. I feel it all. And I wish I could explain in a way you’ll understand, but no one gets it anymore.

So maybe you can understand why walking through a field of faces and feeling nothing but myself, allowed me to be reflective. Due to the mass-grave nature of the area, it was pretty deserted by the living. It was the only place I could go where I wasn’t feeling people, where humans weren’t trying to steal my energy.  They could learn to channel it themselves if they tried.  I closed my eyes and breathed in the dank stench of rotting decay, which can be pleasant if you get used to it. I breathed out. Then in again. Then stopped. I felt something. This place was dead. There shouldn’t have been anything. I opened my eyes and realized why.

I’d walked this place a hundred times, and typically I walked with my eyes closed, because I didn’t need them. I could sense the hills of flesh around me. Everything gives off some kind energy; but when it’s dead it gives off negative energy, pulling in your own, if you let it. Another reason why no one else comes here: it drains them. Most dead things lose the ability to leach energy within days, sometimes weeks of their death. My kind was not so easily deterred.

We are resilient race. Stronger than humans in mind, body, spirit, you name it. We understand emotions, because we feel them as well, but minimally. Where we lack in emotion, we have reason, and connection. And thus we also have the strength not to be ruled by our emotion. We have no need for power. Fear. Anger. It is our choice to feel emotion, if we wish.

What had I felt? Positive energy, here? No human would dare set foot in this place. No creature would approach due to the nature of the specie that was piled here.

There. At my feet. There was a necklace. A beautiful, silver chain with a circular pendant. A rune at the center, and two raven heads engraved at the top and bottom. The chain was worn at the sides from where it had rested on his neck. He’d been my friend. We were connected, as they say. And I’d been hoping that maybe he’d survived. That maybe he was out there, somewhere, and not among, them. The bodies of my ‘people’.

These were my ‘people’ if you could call them that. We are nothing like people. We didn’t kill. We didn’t have a need for control. We didn’t walk with the purpose of getting from here to there. Our walking was reserved for a specific, circular energy cycle, one I’d been performing at the mass grave for years.  Instead of walking we lifted ourselves with the energy we’d built up throughout the day. Humans said we ‘floated’ which was far from the truth. They didn’t understand how we could ride the waves, how we could see the effects of that energy around us and ‘walk’ through the air. Air-walkers they called us, as if it was unusual. Anyone could have learned it if they took the time to open their bodies, their minds and feel the waves rising and falling, circling and flowing all around them. Humans were too clouded and grounded with emotion.

I looked at the necklace again. It was still emulating energy, after all this time. Was he calling me; was his soul at unrest? I picked up the pendant and chain and held it in my hand, watching the sun gleam on the metal. Was there a chance he was still alive, flowing and riding the waves of the world, as we had once done?

Humans talk about love, but I don’t understand how they can really be in love without flying through life, without swimming through another one’s energy. How do you love without melding your waves with another, without feeling what they feel inside and out, and spending hours losing track of whose thoughts are whose, and letting yourselves intertwine until who is who doesn’t matter anymore, because you truly are one.
I looked down at the pendant in my hand, and closed it. This meant something. The energy was so faint that I couldn’t find the emotion behind it, but I felt you. And I knew you better than anyone else in the world. Of anyone to find this, you chose me, and I will find out what it means. What you are trying to tell me. I will find you.