Miscellaneous

Gashadokuro

Plot: This was a challenge I set for myself to write 1000 words about something. I only finished half of it before I gave up, but this is about a Japanese mythical creature known as a gashadokuro. Hope this makes sense.

—

What lurks in the dark of night,
Is a being of bones evoking fright,

It is large with a stature of 15 men, towering over everything that dares to stand in its path. With eyes burning with the bitterness of a thousand centuries, it is hungry for revenge. It is starved of human flesh, the blood of the living, the breath of the lungs. It is malevolent and broken, moving with a tremble that radiates fury, calling for violence. Its gaunt being rattles, shaking the brittle bones that gingerly hold it together. It is fragile but powerful. It is deranged.

With a tongue that laps at a victim's crimson fluids, it is dangerously cannibalistic. It desires sustenance eternally, never satisfied. However, it's a victim of starvation and inhumane crimes. It knows the pain of loss, grief, and sorrow. It knows it all too well.

It has lived a hundred lives in a hundred bodies, suffering at the hands of the selfish. It has died a hundred times, sinking into the abyss of the afterlife like it was meant to reside there forever. It has no soul, only hatred. The only sense of love it has is reserved for savage murder. Its bloodlust is potent, and unstoppable.

It possesses supernatural power, able to become invisible at will. Almost invincible, it's more devastatingly superior than the mortal beings it once was. It is a phantom; a ghost formed by inorganic means. It will stalk you. It will swallow you whole.

When it looms, it is silent. The stillness to its presence instills doom for its victims, unaware and unprotected. It attacks swiftly, consuming its prey with a signature grinding of the teeth, eating its sought out meal. Its appetite is endless, constantly hungry for the next unfortunate human who gets in its way. It has no mercy. While seeking justice, it will break you, roaming like a malicious tornado waiting to cause absolute chaos.

But there's something so hauntingly beautiful about it. Maybe it's its decaying body with such jarring movements and emotions, demanding to be feared. Maybe it's its gloomy aura, as black as night but as inescapable as day. It is cold, but its wish is as warm as the blood it seeks to drain from all. It has a mission; a pledge of retribution. Its campaign of death has no end.

As a skeleton made up of the starved, it wanders. It is a reaper, as grim as the myths foretell, too good for hell. It is doomed sempiternally, ruined in its quest for annihilation. But who could feel sympathy for such a wretched and evil creature?

The gashadokuro has no desires of the flesh, but it has longing within its bones. It aches for satisfaction, but will it ever find contentment? Will the gashadokuro ever crumble away, disintegrating under the weight of its miserable existence? Does its life have no resolution? 

Perhaps there's a cure for such forceful aspiration to maim others, but the gashadokuro is irredeemable.