Bleached

So I haven't posted anything on here before. I hope this is okay. :/ This is a Bleach fanfiction. I'm thinking about turning it into a book or a series or something. Let me know what you think about that!

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White bones lay scattered beneath the black sky, and the Hollow, monster of the night, breathed to the bottom of his lungs.

He remembered being human, vaguely. Or at least he remembered the scent of human, what blood and pain tasted like. He wanted that taste again.

All Hollows are born in the forest of endless sleep, as black ink from the sky falls down to spark life in the bleached white sand. But there was no way for him to know this. After all, he had only been born yesterday.

“Don’t go out there.” A voice behind him hissed. He turned and found himself face to face with the smooth skull of a snake.

“Why not?” he asked it.

“There are thingss out there, things much more powerful than you or I.”

As if on cue, a low haunting cry cut through the silence. It echoed in the still forest, and froze him in primal, uncontrollable fear.

“They will eat you.” The snake continued. “Tear the flesh from your living body so that you wither away.”

“I will eat them first.” He said. “Isn’t that the only rule of this world?”

The snake reared back and bared its fangs, spitting into his face. It struck without warning, but he had been expecting it. He moved faster. The snake’s head crashed into the sand and he grabbed the back of its neck. He sunk his teeth in to its throat. The snake’s body thrashed about wildly. Once, twice. Then it became still. He took his time in tearing off pieces of carapace, black blood oozed from his mouth as he ate. He could feel the snake’s power entering his own body, energy hitting his system like a drug. As for the snake, it lay still and looked up at him with bitter despair.

“Damn you.” It gurgled.

He licked the blood from his fingers and stared up at the gap in the canopy he had been gazing at before. He could feel a cold wind coming from up there, whistling through the hole in the center of his chest.

“Why do you want to go up there?” the snake rasped. “There is nothing but death on the outside. Here at least…” he coughed, spraying blood on the ground. “Here at least, you can feasst on the flesh of others.”

“There is light there.” He replied. And there was… a faint, pale, light from the sickly moon.

He left the snake to die on the floor of the forest and started to climb. Hand over hand, slowly making his way up to the top of the tree. This was the only way to escape his subterranean prison. And he was only halfway to the top. The tree stretched endlessly upwards, and it was hard to find his grip on its dead, hardened bark. He felt weak. Even though he had done nothing but kill for the past two days, he was still weak. But now he was tired of the slaughter. He wanted to be free.

And at last he was. He emerged into the clear, ever-night air. All about him stretched a vast desert. Devoid of sound or heat. Nothing but white sand. He began to walk away from the forest below, his naked form casting strange shadows on the ground in front of him. And he walked, and walked, and walked…

Years passed in that place. Years of a still hell. He lived alone. Hunted other Hollows. Lived in the crags and rocks that occasionally broke the openness. He had grown strong, but not strong enough. He knew he would never be strong enough. Strong enough to abandon his prison world and return to the world of the living. Return to drink real blood and eat real flesh, perhaps. Or maybe, after all these years of eternal midnight, all he wanted was to see the sun.

But one day, while absorbing the power from a Hollow’s corpse, he caught sight of a flash of red in the distance. They say curiosity kills the cat, but today he couldn’t leave the sparrow to lie. It was as though he had been favored by fate that day, for as he loped across the barren plain, he saw that it was an Arrancar. An Adjucha. No mere “Hollow” like himself. This one had gained enough strength to take on human form, and even a weapon. As twisted and strange as it looked now.

He approached it carefully, as it was not dead yet. It was almost dead, but not quite. One of its arms was dismembered, and its torso had been deeply slashed across in more than one place. What was this? Hollows bit and tore and ripped. He had never seen injuries like this before. He bent down and smelled the blood seeping from the wounds. Metal. He could smell a trace of metal. And something else, a power that was not a Hollow’s power. A power that terrified him, as faint as its scent was.

“What happened to you?” he asked the dying Hollow with his whisper of a voice. His voice had never been able to rise above a whisper… he couldn’t afford to waste his precious, stolen power. The Hollow’s lips started to move in reply, up and down. He barely caught what he was trying to say:

“Human… shinigami… Kurosaki…” came the heavy, labored words between breaths.

He couldn’t care less. He parted his lips, preparing to take the first bite, when the Adjucha suddenly caught his arm. He tried to wrest free, to escape, but was powerless in its grip. It glared at him, as if daring him to make a move. The Hollow pulled him down towards his face. His red eyes bored into him, and he watched as a trickle of blood slowly beaded over in the corner of its mouth.

“Eat me.” It choked. “Take… my power… my memory. Take revenge.” He tried to pull away, but the Hollow only dragged him closer. “Revenge. Surpass me… kill him.” He said, his voice growing strained and feverish. “Kill him!”

Terrified and unable to escape, he took the only course of action left to him.

He ripped out its throat with his teeth. The Hollow tried to scream one last time and then fell still. Dead. He immediately felt a surge of energy hit his body, pulse through his veins. Was it against some rule for a low level Hollow like himself to absorb the powers of an Arrancar? Would it kill him?

The pain started, burning fiery pain spreading from under his mask. He screamed soundlessly as the transformation took him. The worst of all were his memories. Pouring into his brain, drowning out all other thoughts. A flood of images. Centuries of bloodshed. Centuries more of human bloodshed.

He had tried so hard. Hunted so many. Why did this one human mock him at every turn? He had killed its mother, it had sliced open his shoulder. He had tried to kill it, it had sent him back, mortally injured.

Through all the haze he could see the image of a moon’s black fang, a Soul Reaper bathed in the blood of Hollows.

The Hollow collapsed to the ground, buried his head in his arms to escape the pain. But it hounded him. It would not let him go. And soon his body began to change. Morphing into some new creature.

Red fingers emerged, long and clawed. The red went halfway up his arm. His face was lined with strange, red patterns. Like tattoos. He looked completely human now. Human except for the tangle of razor wire that had come from the hole in his chest. How interesting. He stretched out his arms and looked up at the sky. Never before had he felt such power. Never before had he been so alive. He would surpass the Hollow who came before him? Hah! There would be nothing to compare him to. He would rise above all other Adjucha. He would rule the night, and the night would fear him. At long last.

And there, on that eternal night, the nameless Hollow whose only desire was to the see the sun, was lost forever. A new Hollow was formed. An Arrancar. Twice as strong as what had come before. He remembered the longing he had to see the sun, and the intense hatred he bore towards one particular Soul Reaper. But he could not remember anything else. It had all faded into a gray haze of the distant past.

“I am the King,” he proclaimed with that whisper of a voice. “The king of shadow and fear. I will seek out the one who wounded me, and I will catch my prey. “

“I am the king. King Fisher.”