PLANET: Unknown
CLASS: Terrestrial
YEAR: Unknown
DIMENSION: 7
• •
There was nothing, and then there was less than nothing.
I floated in it. Or I was it. The distinction didn't seem to matter in whatever place this was — a darkness so complete that the word "darkness" insults it.
Darkness implies the absence of light. This was the absence of absence. A void before voids had names. Before anything had names. Before "before" was a concept that could exist.
I was asleep, or dead, or something between the two that no language has bothered to define because the people who experience it don't come back to describe it.
I was sleeping, and it was a perfect sleep. The kind of sleep where even dreams can't reach you —where consciousness dissolves so completely that there is no "you" left to be unconscious. Just warmth. Just stillness. Just the vast, unthinking peace of not existing.
But then the dreams came.
No images. No memories — I had none to recall. Sensations. A pressure in my chest, as if something enormous were compressing me back to normal. A taste that reminded me of starlight— that is, if starlight truly had a taste in the first place — intense, ancient, electric. The sensation of being supported by something so vast that my entire being was like a grain of sand in the palm of a hand the size of galaxies.
Feeling that, I tried to open my eyes, but I Failed.
The darkness pulled me back. Gentle, but absolute. Like a tide. Like a parent lowering a child back into bed. ("Not yet"), the darkness seemed to say, though it said nothing. Not yet.
I sank. Slept again. The warmth returned. The peace returned. And I forgot that I had tried to wake, because forgetting was easier than fighting, and whatever I was fighting for had no shape, no name, no reason to exist.
However, it seemed like even in death I couldn't be at peace, and then the dreams came again. Worse this time — or more. The pressure was a heartbeat now, slow, enormous, as if the void itself was breathing and I was inside its lungs. The taste of starlight burned. And then, through the darkness, I saw—
Light.
Not much — just a sliver. A crack in the nothing, thin as a thread, yet bright enough to burn in a place that had never known light. I stared at it with eyes I didn't remember owning, and it stared back — unblinking, patient, inevitable.
And for one second — one impossible, crystalline second — I was awake. And in that second, I saw something standing in the light. A shape. A silhouette. Enormous. Patient. It looked at me the way mountains look at rivers — not with urgency, but with the calm certainty of something that has existed since before time learned to count.
Then, It spoke — or I felt it speak. The words didn't travel through air; they traveled through me, vibrating in the marrow of bones I didn't know I had:
("Not yet. You will not die here.") It said.
However, my eyes closed again.
I fought. Tried to open them again, and Managed — barely. The light was still there. The shape was still there. Closer now, or perhaps it had always been this close and I was only now understanding the scale of it. Details flickered at the edge of perception: something like hands, something like eyes, something like a face that was every face, no face and the idea of a face all at once.
("You will not die here") it said again. The same words. The same tone. Absolute. As if death itself was an employee that had been given very specific instructions, and this shape was the one who had written them.
I tried to speak. To ask — ("what? Who are you? Where am I? Why?") But the questions formed and collapsed before they reached whatever was left of my mouth. I had no voice. No breath to carry one. Only the desperate, animal need to understand, which is, perhaps, the last instinct to die and the first to return.
My eyes closed again. Heavier this time. Now, the darkness wasn't pulling me down — it was building me again, and I could feel it. I Could feel something assembling itself inside me, piece by piece, atom by atom, the way a puzzle puts itself together in reverse. Something old was being poured into something new. However, the container wasn't ready, and the pouring didn't care.
I, then, opened my eyes a third time. The light was blinding now. The shape was gone—or had become the light itself. And the words came one final time, not from outside but from inside, from a place so deep within me that I couldn't tell if they were a voice or a memory or the fundamental vibration of my own existence:
("Wake up."), It said at last.
And then I was falling.
• •
I don't remember deciding to fall.
No, that's not entirely true. I remember pieces — the way you remember a dream three days after waking. Fragments that don't connect. A void where sky should be. Wind that tasted like burning metal. The sensation of my body not existing, then existing too much all at once, with every atom screaming into place like a choir that had forgotten the melody and was trying to find it again through volume alone.
But I don't remember a choice. I don't remember what came before it. I don't remember my name, or that I had one, or that names were things that existed. The shape in the light... Had there been a shape? Had there been light? Already the memory was dissolving, the way water dissolves in water, leaving no trace except a faint sense of something that I couldn't name and wouldn't be able to name for a very long time.
What I remember is hunger.
Not the polite kind. Not the kind that makes your stomach growl and sends you wandering to the kitchen. This was the hunger of something that had been emptied completely — soul, memory, purpose — and refilled with nothing but need. Every cell in my body was a mouth. Every thought, if you could call them thoughts, was a single word repeated in a language I didn't recognize as my own:
Consume.
• •
I materialized at forty thousand feet.
Later — much later — when language came back to me in full, and I could hold ideas like altitude and terminal velocity without them slipping away, and even entertain the thought that perhaps I should've aimed for the ocean, I would be able to appreciate the absurdity of it.
A mass of dark matter condensing into flesh midair, spinning end over end through cloud and wind like a drunk hurled from a tavern window — except the tavern was the fabric of reality itself, and the window was a dimensional rift that shouldn't exist.
I didn't fall gracefully. There was no streaking comet, no trail of divine fire cutting the atmosphere. I fell the way a stone falls. The way meat falls. Because that's what I was: meat that didn't know it had once been something more.
The impact created a crater three kilometers wide.
Trees within a ten-kilometer radius flattened outward like grass bowing before a storm. The shockwave crossed rivers, shattered windows in villages that wouldn't understand what had happened for days. Birds dropped from the sky, not dead — stunned, as if the world itself had flinched.
At the bottom of that crater, I lay in silence. No thoughts. No pain. Just the slow, animal awareness of a body that existed and didn't know why.
The hunger pulsed.
I opened my eyes — all of them — and the world was wrong. Too bright. Too loud. Too much. With colors I couldn't name, and sounds that felt like pressure against my skull. The air itself tasted alive, and every molecule of it was something I wanted to devour.
I didn't know what I looked like. Didn't know I was enormous. Didn't know that the dark substance coating my limbs was the Primordial Void given physical form, or that the smoke rising from my body wasn't smoke at all but spacetime unraveling at the edges of me, unable to decide if I was real.
However, I knew one thing. I was hungry.
And somewhere — two hundred kilometers to the southeast — something was bleeding.
• •
The world I had fallen into was at war.
I didn't know that. I didn't know what war was, or what a world was, or that the bleeding I smelled was not one wound but thousands — an entire coastline steeped in death. What I would learn later, much later, when words returned and people were willing to speak to me without trembling, was this:
For nine months, something had been rising from the deep ocean. A thing older than the kingdoms it was breaking — older, perhaps, than the continent itself. It had climbed out of the Blacktide Trench like a nightmare hauling itself awake, and it had been feeding ever since. Cities drowned. Fleets disappeared. The shoreline was no longer a line but a bruise — reshaped by the sheer bulk of it dragging across the earth.
Seven kingdoms — nations that had spent centuries killing each other over borders, scripture, and the color of their flags — had sworn the largest alliance in living memory. They gathered everything they could name as power and pointed it at the Ashen Coast, where the creature had hauled itself onto land to digest.
They called it the Devourerof Seas.
The war had been going for eleven days, and they were losing.
I, on the other hand, was walking toward it, drawn by the smell of blood like it was a compass.
Commander Aldric Voss stood on the broken crown of Fort Hallen's southern wall and watched the end of the world take its time.
The Devourer lay half-beached along the Ashen Coast, a mountain of wet flesh and plated ruin, with the sea around it churning as if it were still trying to swallow what it couldn't fit in its throat. Scholars argued over what it was — as if a name could shrink it.
A creature so vast that the first reports described it as an island. Then as a continent. Then people stopped describing it and started running.
Voss understood why. You couldn't fight something like this. Not with steel. Not with fire. Not with prayers.
Eleven days of volleys and spells. Eleven days of machines grinding themselves into splinters against its hide. Twenty-two thousand bodies burned, drowned, crushed — turned into numbers because it was the only way to keep commanding.
And still the Devourer hadn't reacted.
Not rage. Not pain.
Not even attention.
It only kept defending itself when needed.
"Commander!" Lieutenant Maren scrambled up the rubble, her armor cracked down the center and dried blood painting one side of her face into a mask. "The eastern flank is gone. Captain Dreher is dead. Whatever's left is falling back to the ridge."
Voss didn't turn. His eyes were fixed on the Devourer. It had seven limbs — or tentacles, or something that defied the geometry of limbs. Each one was thick enough to dam a river. Its body pulsed with bioluminescence, a sick greenish-white that reminded him of the light deep-sea fishermen sometimes saw before their boats were pulled under.
"How many?" he asked.
"How many what, sir?"
"How many are left on the eastern flank?"
Maren was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that answered the question.
"Fewer than a hundred," she said. "Maybe sixty."
Eleven days ago, that flank had been four thousand strong.
Voss closed his eyes. He was fifty-three years old. He had fought in the Border Wars, the Siege of Kelmara, and the Ashwood Rebellion. He had buried two wives, three sons, and more soldiers than he could count. He had never once considered surrender. However, for the first time in his life, he was considering doing it.
"Sir." Maren's voice dropped. "What do we do?"
Voss opened his mouth. What else was there to say but retreat — a word that sent ice through his ribs, a word he hated, a word he had sworn he would never need. Yet if he didn't speak it now, he knew — with the bleak certainty of a man watching a tide rise — that this might be the last order he ever gave.
So he drew breath to say it.
And the sky cracked.
It was not thunder. Not lightning. The sky itself made a sound like bone breaking, and every person on that battlefield — forty thousand minus twenty-two thousand minus however many had died in the last hour — looked up.
"What the hell was that?" someone said behind them.
Then came the impact.
Two hundred kilometers was far enough that the shockwave reached them only as a faint tremor underfoot, easy to mistake for fatigue.
But they saw it.
A column of dust and shattered earth rose in the northwest like a second sun being born in reverse— dark, hungry, climbing higher than any storm had a right to climb. It kept rising, blotting out the horizon, and the light around it didn't behave like light should.
It wasn't shadow.
It was absence.
As if that pillar wasn't made of debris at all, but of a place where brightness had been undone —where the world had forgotten how to shine.
The battlefield went silent. Even the Devourer paused, its massive body shifting, seven limbs drawing inward like a spider sensing a vibration on its web.
"Commander… what is that?" Maren whispered.
Voss said nothing, because he had no answer, and because, for the first time in fifty-three years of living, something had crawled into his chest that was colder than fear.
The Devourer screamed.
He'd never heard it scream before. In eleven days of battle, the creature had made sounds —groans, grinding noises, the wet slap of its limbs on stone. But never a scream. This was a sound that killed. Literally. Three soldiers closest to the waterline dropped, blood pouring from their ears. Others stumbled, vomiting, clawing at their helmets.
Maren grabbed Voss's arm. "It's scared," she whispered. "That thing is scared."
Voss looked at the column of darkness on the horizon. Looked at the Devourer, which had survived eleven days of everything humanity could throw at it without flinching.
"So am I," he said.
• •
I didn't choose to go there.
Choice implies thought. Thought implies a mind capable of weighing options, calculating risk, imagining consequences. I had none of these. I had a body that moved toward the scent of blood the way water moves downhill — without decision, without resistance, with the absolute certainty of physics.
Two hundred kilometers in… I don't know how long. Minutes? Seconds? The world blurred. Trees became streaks. Mountains became bumps in the terrain I crossed without registering. My body moved at a speed that my fragmented mind couldn't process, and the hunger screamed the whole way, louder with every kilometer, because whatever was bleeding on that coast was enormous, and enormous meant full, and full meant the hunger might stop, even if just for a moment.
The battlefield opened up before me like a wound.
I didn't see the armies. Didn't register the fortifications, the siege engines, the war banners, the thousands of small warm bodies arranged in patterns that might have meant something to a mind that understood "formation" and "strategy." I saw shapes. Heat. Movement. However, none of it mattered, because in the water, half-submerged, glowing with that sick bioluminescence, was the largest concentration of energy I could sense there at that exact time.
The Devourer of Seas.
I didn't know its name, and didn't care. What I knew — what every starving cell in my body knew —was that it was full of the thing I needed. Energy. Life force. Matter to consume. It radiated power the way a bonfire radiates heat, and I was so cold, so impossibly empty, that the pull was gravitational.
I walked onto the battlefield, and the world went quiet.
• •
"Contact! Unidentified contact from the northwest!"
The shout came from a scout on the ridge, and Commander Voss raised his spyglass with hands that had stopped shaking an hour ago because the body eventually runs out of fear and switches to something flatter — a dull acceptance that whatever happens next will be worse than anything before it.
He looked through the lens. Adjusted. Adjusted again.
Lowered the spyglass.
"Commander?" Maren asked.
He handed her the spyglass without a word.
Maren looked. And then said a word that, under any other circumstances, would have earned her a reprimand for language in front of the rank and file.
"Is that…" she started.
"I don't know what that is," Voss said. His voice was steady, impressively steady, he thought, for a man watching a nightmare cross the floodplain.
It was enormous. Not as large as the Devourer — nothing was — but large in the way that made the human mind reject what it was seeing. Dark. Not dark like night. Dark like the space between stars, where light hasn't reached and never will. It moved on four legs, and smoke — or not smoke— trailed from its body. Where it stepped, the ground didn't burn, crack, or freeze. It simply vanished. Grass, soil, rock: gone. Erased. As if the earth itself was being unwritten.
"All units, hold position!" Voss shouted. "Nobody engage! Nobody move! Hold your ground and do not—"
"Sir, it's walking toward the Devourer!"
Maren raised the spyglass again. "He's right. It's not coming toward us. It's—God above, it's walking straight at the Devourer."
"Maybe it's on our side?" someone said. The desperate optimism of the doomed.
Voss watched the dark shape cross the floodplain in strides that covered fifty meters each, leaving a trail of nothingness behind it.
"That thing," he said quietly, "is not on anyone's side."
• •
The Devourer attacked first.
Territorial. Afraid. Or simply doing what any animal does when something enters its feeding ground. One of its seven limbs arced through the air, terrifyingly fast for something so massive, and slammed into me with a force that would have flattened a mountain.
I felt it. Not pain — I didn't understand pain yet. But impact. My body was thrown sideways, crashing through what remained of a stone fortress, through the earth beneath it, through layers of rock and clay and buried rivers. I came to a stop somewhere deep, surrounded by darkness, and for a moment — a fraction of a second — the hunger quieted.
Then it roared back, and I climbed out of the hole like something being born.
What happened next was not a fight. Fights have structure. Strategy and counter-strategy. This was two forces of nature colliding without rules, without thought, without any of the elegant violence that songs are made of.
The Devourer struck again. I didn't dodge — didn't know how. But my body reacted. The darkness that lived in my cells reached out and pulled. A chunk of the creature's limb simply ceased to exist. Not severed. Not destroyed. Erased. The matter unraveled at a molecular level, consumed by something inside me that converted it directly into sustenance.
The Devourer screamed again. The sound shattered stones.
I screamed back.
It was the first sound I'd made since falling, and it wasn't a roar or a war cry. It was the sound of hunger given voice — raw, desperate, primal. The kind of sound that makes every living thing within earshot reconsider the concept of food chains and where they fall on them.
The creature attacked with all seven limbs. I took every hit. My body broke and reformed. Bones that didn't know they were bones shattered and re-knit in seconds. The darkness consumed each point of contact, eating the limbs even as they struck me. The creature kept attacking because it was too large and too furious to realize it was being devoured.
Hours.
It lasted hours.
I know this because the sun moved. I didn't know what a sun was — just a bright thing that hurt to look at — but it was there when the fight started, and it was gone when the fight ended, and somewhere in between, the screams of the Devourer had changed from fury to something that sounded, against all reason, like pleading.
• •
Nobody spoke for a long time.
What was left of the Allied Army stood on the ridgeline and watched two abominations tear each other apart against the backdrop of a dying sunset. Soldiers who had spent eleven days fighting for their lives were now spectators. Some sat down. Some prayed. A few just left — turned around, walked away, and were never seen again. Nobody tried to stop them.
Maren stood beside Voss and counted the hours by the position of the stars.
"Four," she said softly. "Four hours."
"I know."
"The Devourer is getting smaller."
"I know."
"The dark one isn't."
Voss said nothing.
An old sergeant named Polk, who had been fighting since he was fifteen and had a voice like gravel in a tin cup, shuffled up beside them and squinted at the carnage below.
"That thing eating the Devourer," he said. "What is it?"
"Unknown," Voss said.
"Is it winning?"
"Looks like it."
Polk nodded slowly. Spat to the side. "And what happens when it finishes eating that one and gets hungry again?"
The question fell into the silence like a stone into a well.
Maren looked at Voss. Voss looked at the battlefield. Two hundred meters below, the dark creature was tearing pieces off the Devourer with a violence that had stopped being terrifying two hours ago and had become something else — hypnotic. Mechanical. The violence of consumption, not combat.
"We should be very far away before that happens," Voss said.
"How far?" Maren asked.
"I don't think there's a 'far enough,'" Polk said. And then, with the resigned pragmatism of a man who has survived everything: "But let's try anyway."
• •
When it was over, I stood in silence.
The Devourer of Seas was gone. There was no corpse. Every molecule was consumed. Where it had been, there was only wet sand and the confused sea, rushing in to fill a space it didn't understand was suddenly empty.
I was covered in it. The remnants. Biological matter that my body hadn't finished processing — slick, warm, coating my limbs and my face and places I didn't know I had. The hunger had dimmed, but not disappeared. Dimmed from a scream to a whisper. A temporary reprieve.
I became aware of things. Small things. The way the air tasted different now — salt, copper, and something that burned. The distant sound of voices. Small sounds. Tiny patterns of noise that repeated in ways that felt intentional. I turned my head toward them and saw, on the ridge, shapes. Thousands of shapes. Small. Warm. Arranged in clusters. Watching me.
Something in my chest stirred.
Not hunger. Something else. Something I didn't have a name for and wouldn't have one for a very long time. A feeling like being watched by something familiar, through a window I couldn't find.
One of the shapes moved. Took a step forward. Then stopped. Took a step back.
I stared at them.
They stared at me.
The moment stretched. Somewhere in the broken landscape, water dripped. The sea whispered against the shore. The wind carried the smell of blood, salt, and something that might have been fear — and yes, fear has a smell. Everything has a smell when you're more animal than person.
I tried to think. Tried to form a thought more complex than eat, move, or where. And for a moment— just a moment — something flickered. Not a memory. A ghost of a memory. The faintest echo of a sensation I'd felt before I fell, before the darkness, before the hunger swallowed everything:
A shape in the light. A voice that said, "You will not die here."
Had that been real?
The flicker died. The hunger surged back, filling the space where the thought had been, and I forgot that I'd remembered anything at all. The shapes on the ridge were small and not worth eating —even the hunger knew that — and the forest to the west was dark, quiet, and something in me craved silence the way the rest of me craved food.
So I turned away and moved. Fast. Faster than something my size should have been able to move. The trees closed around me, and I was gone.
Behind me, eighteen thousand surviving soldiers watched the darkness swallow me whole.
They would build a monument on that coast. I know this because I saw it years later — a black stone obelisk with no inscription, because no one could agree on what to write. Some wanted Here, a God Fell. Others wanted Here, the Devourer Died. However, the compromise was silence. A blank stone that said nothing and meant everything.
I think I prefer it that way.
Silence was, for a very long time, the only language I understood.
But something had spoken to me in the dark. Something I couldn't remember, couldn't name, couldn't find.
And somewhere, in a place so deep inside me that even the hunger couldn't reach it, a single ember burned. Small. Patient. Waiting.
I didn't know what it was.
I wouldn't know for two thousand years.
Author Message:
Hi everyone! I hope you're doing well.
This marks the beginning of the second part of the novel. Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading and supporting the novel up to this point. I truly appreciate it, and I hope you'll keep coming along for what's next.
You may have noticed the writing style shifted from the last chapter to this new one. That was a deliberate change, as I've been working to improve the quality and make the reading experience even better for you. I hope you enjoy this new format. And if you preferred the previous style, don't worry — I can adjust the novel and bring it closer to that again.
Well, that's all for now. See you in the next chapter!