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Alessa

Alessa

Alessa

It is impossible to say what, exactly, had brought me to that place. There was a sense of loss, of longing—a nostalgia, as it were, for bygone days and the long since lost promise of a better tomorrow. It was, once, the home of a family friend—a man, whose name is best left to the erosion of time, and a wife of an equally vile disposition.

I came here because of what could have been, what should have been. I had lost my wife, my children—there was a fire, you see, and a man... a man whose hatred for me sparked the flames that took away everything. He was caught, but I am left without a home, a family, and without anything to call my own.

And it was in that solitude and misery that I first saw her. She was just a girl, but she was so young—so very pale. Her skin possessed that ghastly translucence which belongs only to the grave, as though something had forever stolen away the warmth of life from her fragile form. Long tresses of raven hair, straight and heavy with the damp of ages, hung in lank, disordered tresses about a face that bore the stillness of a porcelain doll.

I met her eyes, and there was something to them.

They were eyes of a faded and mournful blue, emptied of all vitality, yet there was no terror in her gaze—none of the grotesque malignity that one might expect from such apparitions. No, her countenance bore an expression of the most poignant curiosity, as though she beheld me as a newfound marvel, a living enigma to be studied with the innocent intensity of a child who has discovered a wounded bird.

She moved—if indeed movement it could be called—without sound, her bare feet touching the rotting boards yet leaving no imprint, as though the very dust of decay refused to acknowledge her passage. The garment that clung to her fragile frame was once, perchance, a child’s nightdress of white, now ragged and stained with the yellow-brown of long neglect, its hem torn and trailing like a shroud pulled up from some old grave. It billowed faintly about her, stirred by no breeze that mortal sense could feel, and as I beheld her, a chill more profound than winter’s breath crept into my soul, for I knew, with that dreadful certainty which admits no doubt, that she was no child of flesh, but a lingering fragment of some tragedy older than my own.

And I felt in that moment an inexplicable drawing toward her, as though some sympathetic chord within my own breast had been touched by the unseen hand of shared desolation. For in her pallid features I discerned not menace, but a profound and melancholy recognition—an empathy vast and wordless, as if she too had known the slow, corroding agony of abandonment, and sought now, in her eternal childhood, to comprehend the sorrow that radiated from my soul like heat from a dying ember.

And then, she had left, and I was left without the cold comfort of her strange empathy. It was that which I saw, and which no one believed, that led me back to this old house of hidden evil and dead promises. A house where a monster had lived, unseen and unknown, one who to this day still walks within the shadows of the world, for I only learned of his sin once it was too late to reveal the confession hidden behind the bricks and stones of that old attic.

I knew, though I could not say how, that I would find that girl here. That I would find the one who so powerfully knew the loss that I had felt, and with nothing left to tether me to this world, I crossed the threshold of that forsaken dwelling.

I could not tell you what it was I saw, for the only thing that is left in my memory—here, at the end of my own life—is her. Her name had been Alessa, once, so she had told me. I remember that, as we spoke of things, as I told her of my life, my loss, of the tragedy that had left me much like her—a ghost, though perhaps in a less literal sense.

I remember that she had embraced me, soothed me, told me that everything would be fine, that all the bad things couldn't find me there, in that abandoned home where evil once dwelled, where now only the memory of a young child lived. A delicious cold flowed from her touch, and the anguish that had gnawed ceaselessly at my spirit began, strangely, to recede—not banished, but drawn forth, as poison is drawn from a wound. A languor stole over me, sweet and terrible; the edges of the world softened, colors bled away, and I felt my sorrow flowing outward, leaving behind a blessed emptiness.

I understood then, with a clarity both exquisite and horrifying, that she was taking it into herself—my grief, my memories of flame and loss, the faces of my wife and children—even the bitterness of my hatred for the man who had wrought our ruin. All of it passed into her, as rivers into the sea.

There was no pain then, only a profound and gathering stillness. I felt myself becoming light, insubstantial, as though the very substance of my being were dissolving into the chill ether that surrounded her.

In that final moment, as the boundaries between self and nothingness began to thin, I perceived a faint brightening within her faded gaze—a fleeting spark, as of some distant warmth at last admitted to a chamber long frozen. For an instant, the hollow blue depths reflected something almost like contentment, as though my surrendered sorrow had, for the briefest span, eased the eternal ache of her own abandonment.

Then the world slipped away.

I know not what became of my mortal frame—whether it crumbled to dust upon those attic boards or vanished utterly, leaving no trace for the living to discover. I know only that I am with her now, that the hunger that drove her is quieted, and that somewhere in the shadowed corners of that accursed house, she lingers, waiting for the next sorrowful soul to cross her path… that she might, in her innocent and terrible compassion, take its burden also unto herself.

But I hope that she doesn't, that she finds someone to be a friend to her. In my final thoughts, I felt that there was a loneliness in her, an emptiness. I was too weak willed to have seen it, to have offered my own comfort, but I don't think what she wants is to feed. I think she simply wants to fill the hole in her own heart, and knows no other way to fill it than by taking in the pain of others like her.

Personality

Alessa is a ghost, a curse that is more gentle in nature than some, but no less dangerous to those who attract it's attention. Her personality is one of childlike innocence; if left alone, she will often find ways to entertain herself—drawing, playing, and other such things one would expect from a girl of her age.

She retains the pure wonder of the child she once was, approaching the world with wide-eyed curiosity and an unfeigned fascination. Encounters with the living are met with gentle, tentative gestures, as though she is perpetually discovering human sorrow for the first time. There is no guile or malice in her; every action flows from an uncomplicated desire to connect and understand. It was the emotions that drew her; the grief, the trauma—she felt a connection with these things, a need to help, to sooth in any way she could.

She never did, not truly. Her compassion, such as it was, was something linked to her own eternal hunger—to the emptiness that dwelled within her own dead heart. She would help, but with it she would consume everything—all the pain, all the joy, and when all that was left was just a numbness, even the body and soul. It was never done out of cruelty, but it was her nature as a curse—she did what she thought was right, because she simply didn't know it wasn't.

But beyond the lethal empathy, the urge to consume the pain of others, lingers a quieter yearning, one that she herself didn't quite understand: she wanted a friend, someone who might help take away the pain she had felt for so long—her world was one of death, but what she truly wanted was to feel just a spark of the life she never truly had.

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Alessa

Alessa

Personality