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Writer's pictureS.L. McKinley

Salvation/Damnation


***A quick short nothingness. I am currently writing an actual short story called The Sin Eater. This has nothing to do with it but instead of actually writing chapter 6 like I should be doing, I decided to fuck around and write this. Again, nothing to do with the short story except the words "The Sin Eater" haha.

Enjoy.


In this forgotten town, where time seemed to unravel and the past clung like ivy to the crumbling facades, there existed a man known only as the Sin Eater. Forgotten was his true name, lost to the shadows that consumed the town and its whispered secrets. He was no mythical creature spun from the looms of fancy; he was flesh, yet cloaked in an aura of desolation, a solitary soul burdened with a gift as much a curse.


The Sin Eater teetered on the edge of existence, in a decrepit house that mirrored the decay festering within him. To the untrained eye, he might appear composed, his demeanor a quiet pond undisturbed by the wind. But his eyes betrayed the turmoil lurking beneath, the depth of a stormy sea threatening to engulf him. His movements were calculated, each step measured, each word a whispered echo of the chaos trapped inside. Under the cloak of twilight, they came; souls tormented by guilt, their lives shadowed by actions they could no longer shoulder alone. To these tortured spirits, the Sin Eater was a vessel of absolution, a dark angel of sorts to whom they could confess their sins, seeking respite from their internal infernos.


The ritual was a slow dance with despair. In the stifling quiet of his shadow-drenched home, the Sin Eater invited the haunted to unburden themselves across from him, in a space that felt suspended between worlds. Here, they spilled their darkest secrets, their voices a scheech of pain and plea. The Sin Eater absorbed their confessions, each word a weight that he bore with a grim acceptance, but with each sin he took in, the sludge of his own wickedness stirred, a relentless torment gnawing at his essence. His ability to bear their sins was born not of empathy but of a pact with his own demons. He did not merely carry their sins; he fed them to the ravenous beast within, hoping to satiate its hunger with their lesser of evils. Yet, this beast was born from his own grievous sin, a betrayal so profound that it had cursed him to this eternal penance, binding him to a life of consuming the sins of others to temper the poison of his own.


As he accepted the sins of others, his own remained, a malignant growth festering in his soul’s crevices. The sins of others were temporary burdens, their darkness transient within him. They came as shadows and left as echoes. But his sin was a constant reality, a relentless shade that colored every corner of his existence with despair.


This was his existence: a cycle of absorption and decay, a continuous intake of the vilest human deeds, all in a futile attempt to dilute his own lasting stain. The more he took in, the more the boundary between his sin and those of others blurred, until he was less a man and more a nexus of anguish and redemption.


Each confession he heard was a temporary balm, a fleeting moment where he could believe in the possibility of his own salvation, a misguided hope quickly dashed by the resurgence of his inner darkness. Once relieved of their burdens, shunned him, fearing the sorrow that clung to him like a shroud. They whispered of the man who devoured sins, who conversed with shadows, whose very presence was a reminder of the death that awaited all. In his solitary existence, the Sin Eater found no joy, no respite, only the relentless progression of his own decay. A step closer to deaths door that would one day swing open and he would take her hand. He lived in a limbo of his own making, a purgatory bound by the very sins he sought to erase. Each new sin he consumed was a pyrrhic victory against his own damnation, a fleeting reprieve as he sunk deeper into the abyss of his own creation.


Thus, the Sin Eater remained, a figure sketched in the dim light of a dying day, forever waiting in his house of whispers, where the walls absorbed the screams of the damned, and where he, the most damned of all, awaited an absolution that would never come. His was not a tale of redemption, but a chronicle of enduring torment, an inescapable prison of one's own sins.


There is no saving a man who is damned



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