Prologue

Demise crawled through the forest of dead trees, where traces of its master took it. Signs of a fight were evident, but the body was gone. Demise raised itself into a sitting position and looked for anything to indicate where its master was, and then wailed at the moon when it found none. Where had the body gone? Demise needed its master.

A change in the wind brought forth another scent for Demise to sense. As nothing but a lump of black threads strung together around a weakly beating heart, Demise's senses were not sharp or refined, but it knew that something special lay before it. Crawling forth with arms made of threads, dragging its body forward, Demise made way for the Nara forest in the distance.

None disturbed it, as it crawled. Crossing the dead tree forest took over a full day at its slow pace, but Demise had been crawling for a very long time, and would continue until that one single heart stopped beating. Such was its role.

Upon reaching the forest a deer approached. Its thoughtful eyes curiously wandered over Demise's shape, but before it had the chance of flee, Demise let its black threads ensnare it. The deer tried to get away frantically, but Demise was at a safe distance from it, as it pierced the deer's flesh with its threads. When it let go the deer fell dead to the ground, and so the other creatures of the forest learnt to stay away.

Another day passed, and then a second, of Demise's lonesome journey. Dawn, day, twilight, night, nothing made a difference to it. It had no will of its own, just an instinct, an innate knowledge of what it was supposed to do. And now, that instinct made it search the forest. Traces of its master were vague, but traces of something else grew steadily closer.

Then came a sound. Someone, a human, was growling from the earth beneath. And somehow, Demise knew that this was it. Just a short distance from it was a hole in the ground, filled up with rock, and yet Demise sensed a presence beneath it all. An echo of a man.

The presence was related to its master, Demise understood. And so it crawled towards the hole, and when it was there, it started to clear it. Rock by rock, it reached down its threads to remove. It dug for hours and hours, until it saw what it had sensed. A male human, an associate of its master, someone who would help in the finding of the body. And he was broken.

The human head Demise had found was withered and weak, with his eyes closed. Bruised and dirty from the dust, he did not stir, as Demise picked him up. He groaned when Demise placed him up on the ground, but said nothing.

With the head found, Demise started to look for the rest. Everything was in pieces, but that could be fixed. Demise pulled up a leg, then a second, and pieces of a torso. When it found the still beating heart in the broken ribcage it made pause, before stroking the organ with its thread. The head groaned again, and so Demise let go, and simply brought the part to the surface.

The process had started at sunrise, and finished at sunset. All of the pieces had been collected, and when they had, the eyes on the head opened.

Demise could not read the emotion flickering across the head's face. It was not capable of such things, just as it was not capable of understanding the words coming from the head's mouth. Instead, it simply started to repair the human, piece by piece.

The head was the last thing Demise strung together. And then the human was whole again, with black stitches across every limb of his body. The laugh, Demise could understand.

Now they would find its master.