By my calculations, it would take a year for the debris to clear from the skies. The world I grew up in was being irrevocably changed. My village was caught in the epicenter of the blast. The people would’ve perished instantly with no pain. It was a small blessing. They needed to die, but that didn’t mean they needed to suffer.

I cannot say the same for myself.

Oh, I had been well prepared, of course. After generations of eating raw meat and hoping for the best, I taught my people how to preserve their food. Even still, rationing the food proved difficult, as did the passage of time. Fortunately, isolation didn’t take much of a toll on my sanity. After all, I had been surrounded by animals who only looked and spoke like me. Loneliness has been my entire existence.

Finally, though, the time to venture outside. Malnourished and weak, it took far longer to remove the stone, even with the tools I had prepared. Two days passed, the lack of water fueling my desperate attempts, before I forced the door open and nearly choked on the smoke.

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The land around me had been laid to waste by the impact. My eyes widened along the horizon as I studied the thing that killed my world. Its head reached the burning sky, standing on two legs longer than the continent. The giant machine reared its spiraled fist back and slammed it to the top of a mountain. A sound like screaming children billowed as the machine went to work, shredding the top of the mountain in seconds. Looking around, I see that that many of the mountains, the homes of the false Shadow Gods, were flattened.

I quickly swallowed my wonder down. This wasn’t some god come to lay judgement. I knew that the Shadow Gods were nothing but a myth. But that machine…I didn't know what it was. But I knew it was a way to turn myth into reality.

Sadly, my horse had been converted into my rations to make it through the winter. Placing one foot in front of the other, I began my long walk toward the machine.