There are voices in the back of my head. Not always, but often.
Not like the voices of all the commanding officers who tried to get me to follow orders, or even just stand up straight. Those are distant memories, if you could even call them that. The timbre and pitch have faded, leaving only echoes without faces.
Not like the voices of the gods who tried to sway me, and the one who did. They spoke to me in ideas more than words; it was my brain that put syllables to the symbols. Symbols that burned themselves deeper than the skin, deeper than anyone can see. But I know where they are. I know what they mean. I know what power they hold.
Not like the voices of my second half, always there but never present, always close but not a way I can touch, or hold. Just a part of me that speaks in intent, using words I've used myself. Not quite a sibling. Not a parent—what we both desperately need, what we've always needed from the day we were born. If you can even call it that.
There are voices in the back of my head. They discuss among themselves. They speak of places I've been, things I've seen, things I've done. Things I have yet to do. Things they are certain I can do, or die trying. Like I have in the past.
Sometimes they laugh. Not at me, or with me. They just laugh. Maybe one day they'll fill me in on the joke.
They don't always speak. But when they do, I listen. Because one voice among them reverberates deeper and louder than the others. The voice I listen to above all else.
A voice that isn't mine.
The voice that drives me to action. The voice that speaks the language my muscles understand. The voice that focuses the heat in my body and my soul into a singular pinpoint of fire. Because that's what it wants.
It wants me to burn.
It wants me to burn to cinders every living and unliving thing that ever preyed on someone else.
It wants me to fill their mouths with flames. It wants me to crush their bodies into motes of dust. It wants me to take every bit of lightning coursing through my nerves and give them the last light show they'll ever see. It wants me to turn them into grotesque monuments to all their sins and shatter it for everyone to see. It fills my head with visions of death and ways to inflict them and makes me see red and sets me loose. It tells me to burn.
So I burn. And they all, every last one of them, burn along in turn.
Why fight it?
It's what I wanted to do anyway.
