The ground crumbles beneath my feet. With a great heave, it swallows my right boot. I pull my foot free and keep marching in deeper to find him. Waves of earth ripple toward me as his pulse surges through it. It’s a slow beat. He thinks he’s safe.
Mountains crack into shards that fall and disappear into the dusty haze on the horizon. The storm whips around me, slams against me, the dust blanketing my clothes and face. I cannot breathe here; my one remaining lung lies still in my chest. I cannot feel my own pulse over the force of his, though he is miles away.
When I sensed him in the future, I concentrated on the memory-yet-to-come, releasing my grip on the present, expecting to find him right in front of me. But he’d been hard to focus on. I found myself in front of an old farmhouse. I was about to leave when I realised I was standing in a vast puddle of thick, dark blood.
I knew it was him when I found his kneecaps lying on the ground nearby. He’d stolen two more hearts. The local village was flooded with liquefied bodies. There I found his muscles and veins and tendons, no longer needed to fill his skin, a piece of himself for every kill.
I struggled to imagine how many hearts he now had; surely more than enough to fill his entire body. Then I noticed it. The pulse moved silently through the ground, through my shoes, brushing the soles of my feet. I walked until the pulse got a little stronger. It was faint, but I was sure. The monster couldn’t hide.
The man’s breath jerked out of him in whimpers. He scrambled backward in the straw until he hit the splintery planks of the barn wall. What had mother done to him, to make him afraid of me? She placed her hands around my shoulders.
‘Eating this man is not really killing him. His heart will beat still, inside you. It will make you stronger,’ she murmured into my ear.
‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.
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‘Here.’ She turned me around and knelt so that her eyes met mine, placing my hands on her chest. Her pulse bumped my fingers up and down. ‘You can feel them, can’t you?’ she asked. ‘I have one lung, and one breast, but the cavities left behind are filled with hearts. They are my strength. You, and I, and others of our kind only need human organs to fill our skin for a short time. My first heart made me a woman, as yours will make you a man.’
I stepped toward the creature cowering on the floor. Something inside me shifted, and I could feel his heart beating. I could hear the blood flashing through it; taste the living tissue. I placed my hands on his head and opened my mouth, as wide as I could. My jaw closed over his skull, my skin and bones stretching around his form the way I once saw a snake swallowing a large egg. It hurt more than anything but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t …
When my lips finally closed over the tip of his shoe and I lay trembling on the dirty floor, skin stretched thin and transparent over the man crushed inside me. Only able to move my eyes, I looked up at Mother as she approached. She removed her opal necklace, slipped it over my head, and left me.
‘What is your name?’ I demanded, shaking the Heartstealer by the throat as she writhed beneath me. I sensed only three hearts in her, as if she too had been trying to resist the kills. But three was still too many. ‘What is your name?’ I repeated. She wore an opal necklace just like mine; I wondered if we shared the same blood. But if she were of my family, she would have been able to traverse her lifeline as I could, and she would have disappeared to a safer time by now.
‘I will not ask you again,’ I hissed.
‘Mara!’ she screamed. ‘My name is Mara.’
Snatching the knife from my belt, I stabbed each of her hearts and she fell limp. ‘My name is Joran,’ I said. ‘I will not have your hearts live within me, but I will remember your name.’
I was just about to move back to a place in my timeline to find shelter for the night when I sensed another heartbeat approaching. I waited until he emerged over the crest of a hill, breathing heavily. I figured he must have known the Heartstealer, since there were no other houses around. He looked from me to the woman lying dead outside the house. He seemed familiar. Perhaps I had met him before, or would meet him later. His eyes returned to me, and even from a distance I could see his rage. I prepared to fight. He closed his eyes and flickered out of existence.
‘What?’ I ran over to where he had been. I had finally met one of my family. Another Heartstealer with the ability to move at will through any place he would ever go in his lifetime. Hunting him would be a challenge.
I tried to moan, but I no longer had a voice. I wondered why Mother had left me alone as I crushed the man inside me into a syrup of blood and organs. I could still feel his heart beating, out of time with my own, pressing against the lower part of my ribcage. A sudden fire shot through me and I found my voice again, screaming in shock and pain. Gasping, I blinked back tears.
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The fire returned, coursing through my body to the tips of my fingers and toes. I watched as dark red dots appeared on my skin. The dots became small drops, emerging from every pore. They grew until my skin was coated with the blood. It poured from my body, burning its way out.
Yet pressure was also being released; my skin was contracting around my form. When my skin tightened neatly over my body again I thought it was over. I choked and gagged, and one of my lungs flopped wetly onto the floor. The heart had moved. It was where my lung had been, beating with my own. I was alive … and so much stronger. I never wanted to do that again.
Mother hummed as she combed my hair by the fire and I asked as innocently as I could: ‘How do you kill a Heartstealer?’
‘You eat or destroy all of their hearts,’ she replied simply.
I smiled.
With every pulse of my hearts, great shards of rock thrust up around me and move outward in waves. Every pulse is a terrible force through my body, as if it might tear me apart, but my skin is like steel. I am huge, bulging with what would be mistaken for muscles, but they are all hearts, beating so it seems there are snakes writhing beneath my skin. All I have left are my eyes, and I can barely move them with this pain. This power.
He moves quickly, dodging or enduring the stone that rushes toward him. I can make out his figure flickering through the dust. He has few hearts, but he is young. The Heartstealer who killed my Mara. He will be the last of my kills, and I will take his name with me.
Suddenly, he is upon me, leaping from the top of a stone before it’s carried away. He grasps at my neck and pulls himself in, wrapping his arms around my head and gripping my skull. Now I will kill him.
‘What is your name?’ My voice bellows out over the storm. I will keep his name in my mind among so many others.
He seems to lose grip for a moment.
My body is burning with every pulse. ‘What is your name?’ I repeat.
He is silent.
I open my mouth again, but finally he speaks.
‘Joran,’ he shouts. ‘My name is Joran.’
Miranda Richardson is a creative writing student who depicts physical representations of psychological conflicts through fantasy. She tries to fit as many different art forms into her schedule as possible; her most recent ventures involve learning to dance and drawing people from life. She also likes fried nectarines.
