Edge Orrswell - A Recovery Log

Edge Orrswell - A Recovery Log

Edge Orrswell – Recovery Log

So, after what feels like forever, I’ve finally gotten started on a journal log. This is something I’ve started on my own; in the hopes that it would prevent me from sinking back into the rut I’ve once called a normal life. It took, obviously, years of convincing before I could be brought to see the light as it truly is. As a partial gluttonous vice, it only made sense that I would need to be revealed the path by another person under gluttony’s control. It still strikes me as odd that the oddest spice of the bunch would be perfect for the job, even though the best dishes have to do with the strangest dressings.

My life on Earth was mostly secluded from the rest of the world, something Krefja Horund and I share. I used to be a mountain man, surrounded by a vast forest which was teeming with life. Life for me to take, mostly. A person has to eat at some point or another, right? Father taught me how to kill an animal at an early age, but only how to kill them. Said that preparing them to eat was a task I would have to learn later on in my life. When I could be better trusted with kitchen knives and crude forks we’d use over and over without washing. But you could probably imagine the taste from previous meals would stay on those forks. Bit of leftover caribou on a fork didn’t taste bad with the next meal, even if it was something a bit different, like freshwater fish or some kind of flying creature. Red meat was always my absolute favorite; the taste of it was savory, and father could smoke, marinade, roast, or grill absolutely anything you gave him. The best stews were made from variations of red meat, fish, some vegetables, or even fruit, thrown together in a huge black pot over a hot fire. That’s real food for you. No nutritionist crud was thrown into the stews or the meals, and that’s what made us so much stronger than anyone else in the world. Real food, real lifestyle.

My homeland must have been in the States, but further up in the mountains. Perhaps Maine, though I can no longer recall. It has been much too long without being there, and much too long without my normal self. Living in Hell has taken too big of a toll on my body for it to matter.

When I was around eleven, I was finally taught how to skin and prepare animals to eat. The task at hand became easier as time went on; at first, I viewed it as being barbaric, but then again, what were we? Animals. Eating other animals who were lower on the food chain. The secluded school I attended had a few others like me, but not necessarily the same type of people, you understand. I was easily the most hard core mountaineer, could tell the time by the temperature in the wind. Could tell you what kinda game was out and about at what time of the day, depending on the season. You name it, I knew it about the mountains, and I arguably still know a thing or two about how to catch me something to eat.

High School wasn’t important to me. So I didn’t go. No need to worry about things like a higher education if you were just gonna go out and hunt. It was a good amount of money for catching things, even if you were just going to skin them and turn them in. Father was an expert at advertising prices to people who needed clean raw materials. Mother prepared the foods, and she could probably also hold her own at finding game.

Father always said that we were the predators of the world, human beings. We knew how we could catch food, and we had the instincts to succeed on our own, if we had to. I believed him. Father always mentioned reasons why we were what we were. We lived by the natural standard of life, he said. We hunt things lesser than what we are, eat, sell what we don’t need, and live a life of envy. He also said that the rest of the states were going about things the wrong way. Said they were all giving into this whole technology business, when we really just need to survive out here.

The foods you see in markets and fast-food joints today aren’t even food. They’re processed materials designed to be food-like, and nobody should kid their selves in that respect. One year, everybody’s hyped about increasing fiber. Then protein. Then trans fat. Then one day, someone goes ‘oh shit, trans fat is actually bad for ya,’ and takes it off the market after the damage is done. Fast food places freeze their meat patties and feed who knows what to their cattle to make them fatter.

Father always said, hey, if you want more food, go get it. He’d throw me a rifle and tell me to have at it, son. If you see something move, shoot it. You know how to shoot, he’d say, so just go on and shoot.

And I did know how to shoot a rifle. I knew how to shoot a rifle, how to work a scope, how to use a bow, how to trim with a knife, how to spear fish and how to scale mountains using the knife in my hands and the cleats on my feet. Never wise to go out there to scale mountains, but hey, if I was hungry, you knew I could get what I wanted. And at one point, I could prepare it how I wanted.

But one day I just plain-old got greedy and asked for a bit more food at the table. Father wanted it too, though, so he sent me out to go get more. He got to eat the rest of the food at the table, food that I caught for the meal. And I got pissed. I got up from the table and told him, to his face, that the food should be mine. I caught it. It was late, and there was no reason going outside at night. That’s when dad got right up from his chair and looked me in the eyes and said a good-old, simple, ‘tough.’ That was all I got from that man, after the catch I made on that nice piece of red meat. Pathetic of me, probably, but still being hungry and upset, I went back out into the cold darkness late at night to go catch something.

At night, the snow thickens, so I needed to work as fast as possible if I were to get back in time. But I couldn’t really move too fast out there; the wind picked up and my sight was blocked by snow thrown up into the air. I refused to stop heading out, and pretty soon I couldn’t see my home from where I was. Trapped, I fired plain rifle shots into the air, but I didn’t expect the sounds to get through expanses of trees and snow. Echoed off some of the mountain, but hey, big help that was.

I resolved to keep trying to find the food as best I could. I had some foolish idea that, when I found it, it would be warm and keep me alive. In the end, though, I was buried in the snow. I did not suffocate to death. I froze. It took forever to die that way, and it was painstaking.

Imagine lasting for two hours, lying down because you can’t really move and rest sounds good. But you can’t rest either, because your chapped lips need licking or they’ll break off. Breathing in freezes the back of your throat. Moving might snap something out of place, because it’s freezing. Agony in the fact that every second, the nerves in your body are either dying from the freeze or screaming in pain because the natural warmth is leaving your body. Every bit of your body is throbbing like the gavel on a judge’s desk, over and over and over again until you can’t hear anything and it becomes a solid line. The pain is constant at that point, and you enter a slight state of delirium before your mind finally stops going. The night’s sky is ominous clouds, white bits falling down from the sky all around. It looks absolutely beautiful, and I remember my last thoughts were sad.

I was dying. I was missing dozens of sights similar to the one I was looking at. I hadn’t lived long enough to meet a real woman, and I sure as hell hadn’t lived long enough to be a hunter in my own respect.

I hadn’t done enough, hadn’t gotten enough.

Because of those feelings, I guess, I was sent to Hell.

I still don’t believe that the place I’m in is the Christian-Catholic idea of Hell. This doesn’t feel like eternal suffering, to me; it feels more like the idea of purgatory.

I remember my first days here were spent trying to figure out where, exactly, I was. Everywhere I looked, things were reddish-gray, from the ground to the houses. And yes, there is housing here in Malevolence City, Hells. Much like any other city that I could remember on my few trips to the marketplace. Everywhere I looked, more people that looked as though someone had done them wrong, and I was one of them. I was just like they were; they must have all died to get there. The few who were well-off didn’t even look like us. They were these taller, human-like things with different shades of eyes, skin, and magical powers.

But what I noticed, above all else, was that things smelled so horribly. Everything was a horrific smell, and I just got incredibly angry for some reason. The only thing that smelled good was food, and not just any food, but meat. I still had a taste for meat, and it felt like it had been ages since I’d had any, even though it was probably only five minutes that passed. The hunger was boring into my stomach and my head, and pretty soon I was consumed by the feeling of hunger. I needed to get something to eat and I didn’t care what it was, so long as it tasted a little like meat. Enough like meat to pass for it.

Much to my surprise, in my person was the dagger I died with; along with a hook and the same clothes I had worn. I wore a hot fur coat, and in the sun, that fur coat was torture. Again, too hungry for it to matter. Boots, pants, all too hot to be wearing, but at the time not important. But there was no game around. No creatures. Just people. Dozens and dozens of people out there, and no law enforcement. What was the purpose of this? Did people get murdered every day out here?

Suddenly it all made perfect sense. This was Hell. The strong survived, the weak perished, and I was destined to be one of the strong. Consumed by that idea, and hunger, I wrapped myself into an alleyway corner and waited for the next unsuspecting victim to turn into it. The man was strong, but unaware that when he rounded the corner, he’d be slashed by the jagged hunting knife I was used to using. He went down faster than someone falling off a cliff. The spray of blood was invigorating, and the smell…oh, it was as though the atmosphere were cooking him for me. I dragged his body into the alleyway and began to slice off pieces of meat, as though savoring each piece, and indeed I was. Everything was tasty, even for what must have been human being. It rivaled deer and chicken, and the taste was even more savory than if I had added barbecue sauce.

The more pieces I ate, the more I came to realize that…I was enjoying eating human being. I took a look down at the surprised expression on the dead man’s face, lower and lower until I had seen what I had done to his arm, his stomach, his legs; things were stripped off, revealing muscle, tendons, and all sorts of innards that I had taken to eat. I had killed him and eaten him, as disgusting as it was. I realized how disgusting it was in that precise moment; I had torn apart a human being for food, in the spur of the moment. Can you believe the smell that had entered my nostrils after that realization? Things went from smelling great to smelling…dead. Blood seeped out from under him and I went into a panic.

I left the alleyway to find one of the houses and stay there. It didn’t matter which one. I found a house with what looked like a thin window, busted inside and hooked the first person I saw through the neck. A woman, she was, and she died close to instantly. I heard some movement upstairs, so I quickly climbed up and found the source: a man working on putting clothes on. He turned, saw me, and put his hands up, as though he weren’t looking to fight. Too bad. This was my home, now. Without second thought, survival kicked in and I tossed my dagger at him. The rotation, as I’d learned to perfect, got him clean in the throat. He went down in a spurt of blood, choking until his death. I tossed his body out the window after retrieving my knife. I had a home, thankfully. The only problem was...I was hungry again.

The woman I had killed downstairs would be fresh, and hey, I had to eat something or else I would die…again. So it would be the last one, I think I remember saying to myself. I would only kill one more for food, and that would be it. The next day, I’d have to go down to the shops to see what I could find. So, having rationalized it, I went downstairs and made use of a nearby fireplace to cook the flesh I’d remove from her body. No broths to marinade the meat, no spices to liven it up, no nothing. But it still tasted great.

Until I realized, once again, that I had killed a human being for food. Then I could eat no more, and became sick from the sight of her maimed body. I was partially full, but also very, very ill. Only a murderer would do such a thing to another person, and I had effectively done it…twice.

During that night, when I tried to sleep in the stranger’s bed, I realized I had become hungry once more. I woke up because of that feeling, and sure enough, I was in a state of craze. I needed to eat something, and the rest of that woman would be dead. I was no vulture; I had no stomach with which to churn out dead meat without getting sick. At least, I didn’t think so. I wasn’t ready to mess with my system in a way I wouldn’t enjoy. Priority number one became food, once again, and I took the time to get out of bed, put on my jacket, and go outside.

It was surprisingly cold outside, and it felt a little like home in that respect. Yes, I felt like I was at home, out looking for something to kill once again. I tread close to the alleys, dagger in hand, behind my thick fur jacket. The first person I saw was my target, and I didn’t feel at all sorry for him. He noticed the knife I pulled out and attempted to run, but good luck running from my throwing arm. He got about two seconds before I sent the knife flying; he took it in the back of the spine. He still wanted to run, but I rushed up behind him and practically floated through the air, hook in hand, and brought it through his head when I landed on his back. Anyone who was watching merely stared in horror. I needed to eat in that moment, so I began eating him. Anything. His back muscle, his side muscle, his neck, his face, I turned him around and got at his chest and his legs, more than I had ever eaten before. And I don’t appear to be that big a fellow; I’m actually fairly short in comparison to everyone else. I’m about five-two, but with the strength to climb mountains, and I felt like Hells did only one thing to my strength: improve it. Out here, I became a true demon, and soon my mind had rationalized it permanently. There was no reason to be afraid of eating human, and if I could gain a profit by doing what I liked, I would. First food, then commodity. Fresh meat for sale. Come one, come all.

My resolve wasn’t nearly as strong as I thought it would be, at first. In fact, the whole thing...was horrifying.

I had that two-story room. The bottom floor was the display room, where everything looked like regular meat. Steak, cuts of red meat, fresh blood. I could keep my own clothes relatively clean, being as experienced as I was in the art of the kill and clean. Besides, the victims of my attacks would have fresh clothes on their backs, and some of it would soon be mine. So now I had their things, their weapons, their tools, their money. And anyone who walked in to buy meat imagined it to be other types of meat. Satisfactory, fresh cut, incredibly tender, perhaps, but not human. They wanted to believe the meat they ate was something else, and it became whatever else they wanted, depending on how they cooked it. Oh yes, it wasn’t human to them, because they didn’t know it was human.

But I knew.

I caught people on a regular basis and could create tons of meat from each waking cadaver. I gave into gluttony fully, reaped the physical benefits for doing that, but sacrificed who I was.

In the first few days, where I was still aware of who I was, I walked up to the second floor and surveyed what was the kill room. Bodies hanging upside down, as other types of meat would. Some skulls carved into, for brain, and others not. Some in the later stages of meat production, their kidneys taken out and being prepared to be pulled. The kidneys were larger than I had anticipated, and if you could imagine for a second the pale color of skin, combined with a multitude of veins, blood, and random solid pieces of organ inside such large mass, the smell would overwhelm any other individual. Imagine, then, going through with eating such a mass, or even sorting through it for things which could be eaten.

The masses could have been toxic. They were a pale orange color with a thin film around, to signify them as entire pieces. Yet, unlike most other organs, the kidneys had the consistency of mucus. They could roll off desks like liquid, splash on the floor like water, spread like slime. Except it was that disgusting, ugly vomit color. I had lost myself so much that even those became food. I ate those.

I separated eyes from the bodies, but left them hanging in the second floor. To mask the scent from those on the lower floors, I began to close up the second floor and only accept commissions from the outside. People would stop by and pick up the meat they ordered ahead of time, pay on the spot, and leave. Only I would be the one to check on the bodies in the second floor, and when I would, I would try to keep myself from staring at such victims. I almost felt as though they could stare at me: eyeless bodies with the teeth still in their mouths, some twisted in pain. Some had single eyes, unfinished work. Others had both eyes, and I had to avert my gaze away from them, guilty as I ever felt, for killing. I wanted to avoid the room, altogether, but this was a task that began to envelop me. This was my access to fresh meat, whenever I wanted it, however I wanted it.

The kill floor was something I could never reveal to customers, unless I intended to kill them. Merely opening the bottom floor door eventually brought in a wave of fresh decay. Disposing of the bodies I didn’t need wasn’t a problem. The bodies accumulated until someone caught news of my wrong-doing, and a man by the name of Tim Cre thought I was someone prime for action in the Silver Union. Finally in a group of bonafide anti-organization, I considered myself a true demon of Hells. Nobody would oppose or question my authority. I had not only become gluttonous for food, but also gluttonous for power, for the sake of having power. After becoming part and parcel of the Silver Union, I learned of a necromancer named Harold Alle, who had the means of disposing of bodies. He’d walk in and out of the kill floor as though it were no problem, as if he had seen it all and done it all.

Harold had once walked into the kill floor and whistled at the work, leaned over to a dead body which hung upside-down and shoved his hands inside his jacket pockets.

He took a moment, blinked, stared for a second or two.

And smiled at it.

He said nothing. He just smiled at the skull that stared back at him, the eyes still present in the red flesh and skull.

I remember my personal reaction to that simple gesture. Unlike me, Harold was cruel. I don’t believe he means wrong, but I do believe, even now, that Harold is a cruel spirit. In Greek mythology, one of the gods of the dead was Hades. Harold reminded me of Hades in that he associated with the dead. Controlled them, commanded them, created the dead.

He was used to the sight. He paced around the room and took looks at the other dead bodies. I remember another one of his visits to the kill floor, he asked if he could carve a body on his own. Naturally, I told him he could, and he took one of his own knives to the nearest body. He took a sliver off the torso, a good area for meat, and threw it in his mouth to chew. He nodded his head once or twice, enjoying the rare meat, before he turned and asked to buy some from me. Harold Alle knew what it was, but unlike most others, it didn’t bother him.

During one meeting in the Silver Union, I felt threatened by Alle’s influence over the others, even Tim, when I was supposed to be Tim’s right hand man. I challenged him. I wanted him to present evidence to support how he was, in any way, more threatening than I. Tim would let me have this challenge.

Not one to back down, Harold stood up from the table, slowly, took off his jacket, and took in a deep breath. He was a bony figure of a man, suddenly, anorexic. As though he did not eat. A skeleton. He pointed a finger to me, stared, and became serious. For once in a long while, Harold Alle was being serious.

“You think the fact that you can kill people makes you any more threatening than I am, Edge Orrswell? Do you honestly think, for a moment, that being able to give people rest from this Hell of a world makes you any more sinister, dangerous, vengeful, or intimidating than me?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, no, Edge. Inside you is someone who is insecure about what he does. Someone who can’t deal with what he’s done, but can’t stop. You’re addicted to killing. You think it’s wrong, but you do it anyway. Because you can’t stop; it’s your food you kill for, and it’s working so well in your favor that you’ve rationalized murder as the perfect job.”

He pat his own chest, as feeble as it was.

“What makes me more threatening? I make living here a worse hell than Hell, itself. I make each passing day feel less like a second chance at life and more like a chance for otherworldly forces to punish you.” He shook his finger at me, once. “I don’t kill people on purpose. I kill them on accident. They breathe a little too hard and they die. They walk a little too close to the piping and they drop dead in a fit of seizures. They take a shot at my chest and begin to hallucinate and vomit uncontrollably. Edge, you may be a killer, but you know nothing of torture.”

In his eyes, I was the child. I was the kid throwing tantrums. I was the killer, and he was the assassin, and I was too naive to understand it all worked. I was hungry, but Harold had no vested interest in what he did. He just did them, like a madman. Harold was, and is, cruel. He is naturally mean-spirited. Perhaps not for the worst reasons, because Harold could always bail us out of trouble, but he is spiritually evil.

Nothing to retaliate with, I only spat and clenched my hands at him. As if disciplining a child, he pointed at my chair.

“Now sit down.”

Over the years, I grew accustomed to eating human and selling it for money. It took me a lot of time to get used to the bodies like Harold had. I learned much about people, but still needed to keep my murders in check. I could take food from elsewhere, I learned, instead of always killing for it. My comrade Jackie the Blade would sometimes provide what I required. Jack and I became very good allies in that he could supply the best in weapons and I could do a good job of selling them out. We became a great duo in selling.

We enjoyed that prosperity before the Apocalypse Units began to appear on the scene. They were revived by Her Highness, the Queen Mercosso. She taught the Pride Unit, Travis Vertex, the Red Letter, how to locate and mold the other Apocalypse Units. He took this as his own task and created versatile military units. But he did more than that. He created individuals who needed to overcome their vices to lead normal lives. They were twisted people, so twisted that their existence begged them to be normal once more. They had these powers which, odd as it sounds, eventually led them back to needing to overcome one or more vices. And though they could have blamed Travis for granting them these powers, they all seemed to refuse, as though he were some kind of savior. Indeed, plenty of people in Malevolence City viewed Travis Vertex as some kind of god. The Red Letter of Hells was a high rank in the military, due to Her Highness, and he was a tool of justice, even at royal parties.

The Red Letter became such a prominent class that business slightly declined in the need for our goods. It so happened that this ‘Vertex’ of Central Hells could more than mold flesh. He was a powerhouse who sought to restore old fights to the Pit; hand to hand combat to see who was the best of the best in speed and agility. Demand for bladed weapons went down after he appeared, but more than the lack of demand was the Union’s fury that such a simple demon could be promoted so easily to the high rank in the military, for having done nothing except being taught to bind other beings. In the eyes of Tim Cre, if you wanted to teach someone a lesson, teach it; do not turn peoples’ lives into large metaphors and insult them for the rest of their lives. The soul seed, we did not understand, played both the role of passively teaching the Units the lessons they needed to learn, and also gave them the military strength necessary to defend Malevolence City, Hells. Back then, we saw Travis Vertex as nothing but an enemy to the common man; a traitor who gained high rank for nothing.

Angered, the Silver Union ordered hits on Vertex, but to no avail. No melee attacks could pierce his skin made of blades and no magic could overcome his blood made of some kind of elixir. His very being was resistant to magic, and his body could easily become resistant to melee damage. We would try constantly, yes, but only until he created more prominent Apocalypse Units, like Archie, Karasu, Marcus, Torren, Krefja, and Kristy. They were units with less defensive measures, but some with equally difficult vices to get rid of.

As soon as he had created these new units, did we finally see it fit to move the hit order off of Travis Vertex and onto these new units. Exactly why we saw it fit to switch targets, I’m still not personally sure.

I was entering a stage in my gluttony where I began to lose parts of myself. Instead of thinking as the ‘real’ Edge Orrswell would, I thought as the vice of gluttony. I spoke, ate, moved, and thought as a being whose only concern was the attaining of more to eat, more to spend, and more to kill, overall. I was bound by the idea that more of anything was good, and that if I obtained things of slight value, it increased the want for more, more, more. As odd as that sounds, it is the plain truth – the Edge Orrswell that people came across was nothing more than a mimic of my true nature and more so a being fixated on gain; blind with rage.

As such, I was willing to go along with any hit order placed on anybody, whether the hit order came from a prominent Silver Union member like Tim Cre or a lesser member like Michael Oldman; the difference didn’t matter. I still wanted to hunt the same as always; the mimic, and for more gain; the glutton. I had but one person I did not want to hunt, and that person was Archie Castor. The Apocalypse Units of Sloth. Most would probably ask why, of all my choices, the one I choose not to attack is the unit of lazy. The fact is this: Apocalypse Units can apparently choose to never reflect their vices. They can hate their vice and they can fight against it to the bitter end, but I think that these vices are so difficult to beat down that they get shown in different ways.

For Castor Hughes, I saw a young man with great physical power at his disposal. I viewed him as the Greek creature, the Argos, the Guardian of Io, the thousand-eyed all-seeing monster. Hughes had a limited omniscience over Malevolence City, Hells; he has a bit of a shared conscience with the insects he so controls. As a result, my actions could not be obvious to the world, or even noticeable to the world. Even without needing to move or take action, Hughes could know where I was and what I was doing. But that is exactly the Sloth portion in his being: the sheer knowledge that he made known his omniscience prevents many from taking actions in public; things the military might not enable. He doesn’t need to do anything, because he’s made sure all malicious acts have been reduced by a margin. Anything more he must do is lessened by default. I’ve also noticed his lack of cleanliness. Not that there was much to be done about cleanliness in Malevolence, but most of these sons and daughters of Travis feel free to use his cleaning facilities, or else ask him for their own. Archie didn’t seem concerned with cleanliness; as though it didn’t make a difference. I suppose one could argue that it doesn’t, and didn’t, matter. It just seems that, for someone so high in mental stature, he didn’t bother with it.

Archie Hughes had so much power, I didn’t want to go after him. He had so much control that many others would call it foolery to go after him. Instead, I decided to go after someone I thought was weaker, when she was really just strong in a different way: Krefja Usaltr Horund, the unit of Gluttony.

She was a target willing to take a beating, but probably at too high a price. Krefja Horund was a military unit who had the power to regenerate her body, in exchange for consuming blood. I’m sure that if I had been fairly ‘sober’ I could have noticed she, too, was the Unit of Gluttony, but I didn’t bother at the time. I was clouded by my own sin, and so saw her as just a threat. Someone to eliminate and impress Tim Cre. We would make our lives so much easier, he would argue, if we could just get rid of those Apocalypse Units who guard the throne.

So I did what I could to get rid of Krefja, but her body was meant for crushing. I took knives to her wings, hatchets to her chest, torso, legs, even a nine-iron to her arms at one point or another. But at the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter. She would always regenerate and live on, able to escape at my own expense. I would usually go home with some kind of debilitating injury; something that didn’t hurt too much, but would make sure I couldn’t chase her or fight her any further. I was someone who couldn’t be convinced to not fight, and she knew, so she did her best to stop me from inflicting harm. One day, however, I took an honest throwing hatchet to her head, and she went down. Unconscious.

I don’t know why I didn’t. Well, I know, personally, why I didn’t, but I can’t fathom why the Gluttony part of me didn’t just kill her off. I guess my body rationalized her as being downed, and I gave up on trying to finish her.

Harold tells me that she woke up with a kind of mental problem; amnesia. She couldn’t remember anything. She couldn’t remember me, him, Travis Vertex; only that she had some long-term memories from awhile back. Things that can’t be erased, he said. Her personality had reverted back to what it had been when she barely began being an Apocalypse Unit. She couldn’t even remember some greenback kid she got involved with. Important one, from what I had heard.

Yeah, I remember his name, now. She got involved with some William White greenback, skin-saver. Nobody wanted to touch her, Krefja, because they may have initiated a response from the bodyguard, the albino. I remember not caring, because what would it matter to me if some insane ghost-freak came out of nowhere to attack me? I would retaliate and show him what-for. But all the same, she couldn’t remember him, and apparently it freaked him the hell out. Slowly, she got her memory back, but I didn’t continue any attacks after that. Archie began to get involved, and that was a boy I didn’t want to pull any stops on. He had a way with torture and a way with frightening people. Those types of things, nobody wants to get caught up in. Once or twice, I tried against Krefja again, but I got no results out of it.

Only weeks before the Second Light/Fire War, Krefja and I met outside an area. I had been searching for someone…I can’t remember, even now, exactly what I was searching for. But she pulled some kind of magic over me. She got me to relax, the Gluttony side of me to relax. She has the power to create these kinds of auras, you see; maybe they work better on clean slates, or the willing, and this side of me was willing to accept it. I had been Gluttony for a painful amount of time, and it felt as though that side of me had been wiped out. I had become Edge Orrswell, again, and that is who I am. Someone who was once a survival expert, a hunter; someone who didn’t need to eat constantly to survive, or take in painfully good aromas to stay infatuated with the thrill of the hunt. I could think for myself, again, unclouded. Of course, food is still a priority so certain things do not get in the way of my judgment. But all was well…until all were also jailed by Leonardo during the start of the war.

During those days, I struggled to remain myself in the cells. I rationalized the eating of prison mates as a way to remain Edge Orrswell. I convinced myself that such an act was disgusting, but served a purpose: to remain alive.

With the kind of power most of us Silver Union had, Leonardo usually found ways to release us in exchange for a string of services to the crown. He released Dice Iceburg, the former 37 bar owner, in exchange for the use of his mafia and establishments. He agreed. Leonardo released Harold Alle, in exchange for the support of his so-called invincible army. Harold agreed as well, and played the part to the end. He released me in exchange for a string of assassination operations, which I accepted until I was released, then I escaped. At least, long enough to get much more food and feign assassination until Leonardo got wise and jailed me once more. He and his master guard, Darius Reaper, did their best to starve me as much as possible. But it was no use. I had eaten more food than was necessary and somehow found the biological way to adapt and store food in the body. Obviously I put down any food I could possibly get my hands on, and they found it hard to put any other prisoners in the cell with me. So they put Jackie the Blade inside with me. What they didn’t know was that Jackie had apparently been saving his rations for a better day. He was willing to share some of it with me.

Before long, there was a huge prison break, courtesy of that boy, William White and the rest of those Apocalypse Units.

Life is good as it could ever be, right now, in the midst of the third war. But I’m safe. A lot of us previously feuding gang members now work together. We’ve become friends, now that we’ve seen what all fighting gets us. We’re sick of it. We’ve been in too much pain, for too long, and we no longer need to battle for each others’ territory. Finally, we’re free. I’m free. And I’ll never return to be Gluttony. I have the Apocs, and especially Krefja, to thank for my current self. Repaying the debt is my next step. Should my help be necessary, I would return to cut up some fresh meat.

I may not be Gluttony, any longer, but I don’t mind saying the taste of flesh isn’t all that bad. All I need is an excuse before I try it again.

- Edge Orrswell, the Butcher

PS. Should anyone read this and need perfectly cut, fresh meat, just give me a call. I’m sure someone will know where to find me.