Hanging in the balance

The quiet was peaceful.
 
There was no hunger here, no fears, and no troubles. It was soft and silky smooth as the deepest midnight. Some distant part of him knew he was dying – the life force that maintained his body in its strange half-stasis slowly withering away. He couldn’t feel his blood running away from him; after all, it only moved if he willed it to move. All the same, that last moment as the ghosts wail had buffeted him, he could feel himself losing all the same.
 
Please, please forgive me
But I won't be home again
Maybe someday you'll look up
And, barely conscious, you'll say to no one
Isn't something missing?
 
He could sense, more than see, that his soul hung in some sort of balance. One part of him called to the darkness and the other to the light. How fitting, he mused in the maddeningly long moments before death would take him. How fitting that even in death he should be torn between two extremes; in life, he was torn between love and his hunger, between the violence that he secretly enjoyed and the altruistic goal to protect people, and between the human parts of him and the monstrous half.
 
You won't cry for my absence, I know
You forgot me long ago
Am I that unimportant?
Am I so insignificant?
Isn't something missing?
Isn't someone missing me?
 
The quiet was peaceful and some part of him longed for it; he knew this was what was waiting for him at the end of the Fall. After all, it was why he had contemplated that fall for six months now; once he had found all the monsters and ended them, he would be the last one left.
 
Find the monsters. Kill the monsters.
 
And who was more monstrous than himself? He could feel the grasping pull of the dark trying to drag him down into the burning shadows. Secrets wrapped in secrets wrapped in casual violence – he deserved that darkness, after all – he had hurt Maelie by keeping his secrets and it was only a matter of time until he hurt the rest of them, those bright and shining souls that trusted him without ever knowing what he really was.
 
Even though I'm the sacrifice
You won't try for me, not now
Though I'd die to know you love me
I'm all alone
Isn't someone missing me?
 
“No.”
 
The word echoed in the resounding emptiness of the vast Nothing where his soul hung between two extremes.
 
“No,” he repeated into the void, looking not towards the darkness or the light, but back. He could feel the last vestiges of his essence fading away under the banshee’s wail. He could feel the warping essence that ravaged over his body, tearing away flesh and skin.
 
A single thought echoed in his mind like a churchbell – he’d promised.
 
He’d promised his mother, the mother he had never met, that he would find the thing which had attacked her, which had cursed him, and which had caused him to kill her in childbirth. That monster yet walked the world and he would be damned if he let himself die with his mission incomplete.
 
He'd promised those bright and shining souls that he would be there in the tomorrows-to-come. To hold them and protect them and walk the darker paths so they did not need to.
 
Please, please forgive me
But I won't be home again
I know what-
 
The quiet was peaceful. Living was difficult, painful, and filled with every challenge in creation.
 
That was just fine, some part of him mused. He was used to pain.
 
With an effort of will he turned away from that calm, quiet, peaceful silence and reached for the raucous world above….