In a land far, far away, further than the stars, a man wrapped in a black coat stood on top of a precipice, stock-still, unmoving. The sounds of the ocean raging against the rocks below, each slam louder and sharper than the rest, reached the man, but he didn’t care, like he didn’t care about the raindrops that drilled at him like bores, or the wind that slashed at him like knives. Here was a man exposed to the cruelest of elements, each carrying enough force to rip a house into millions of pieces and maybe more. But he didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t cry out in fear. It was as if all the rain, the wind, the waves were little inconsequential gnats that he could swat away at a moments notice. If anybody were stupid enough, or brave enough to be at the scene, they would have thought he was a statue, a commemoration to something greater by a religious zealot.

Then suddenly, the man moved, his ears perking up as if he was listening for something that seemed to be there, but wasn’t there, something that could have been a trick of the mind. But the man knew, the faint sound that he had heard, even with the howls of the gales, the roars of the waves and the pwishes of the rain, wasn’t something that he had made up because he wanted to hear it. His mind was too strong, too wise for that, and after all, he had heard it once before, eons and eons ago. It was a sound that he didn’t want to hear, but it grew louder and louder, until even he had to confirm it was real, no matter how much he wanted to believe it wasn’t. It was a beautiful melody, deep and rich, that seemed to strike at the heart, at the soul. Even if the man was deaf, he would have heard it, because it was just so eerily angelic, so devastatingly tugging. As time passed, the tune burgeoned forth into a full-bodied, sonorous fanfare that shook the heavens. But hidden within all the turbulence, a faint echo of the original melody remained, worming its way into the man’s mind, slipping through cracks he could not cover. The man slowly began to move, to dance to this fabulous orchestration of music. He was fully under its spell, and he didn’t even know it.

 Eventually, the music got so deafening the noise had enough power to turn brains to ground paste. The man could feel himself splitting at the seams, but he didn’t care. How could he? The melody was just too alluring. Then, with a rambunctious boom, the music reached its climax. It was a divine note, something that could not have been played by mortal instruments. The man felt like he could and would sacrifice the world just to hear this wondrous finale. The sky, previously as black as the void, lit up into a billion shades of blinding colours, most of which there were no words to name or describe. A streak of light, the embodiment, no, the essence of all those colors currently up on display like artifacts at a museum, raced down from the heavens, and struck the sea with a resounding bellow. The resulting shockwave pushed the water in its immediate radius in all directions at once, leaving a patch of ocean bed visible to the naked eye. And at the same time, the man, who was previously dancing in tow with the music, was hurled backwards hundreds of meters, landing awkwardly on a grassy knoll.

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  Then all was silent and peaceful. The ocean stopped raging. The rain stopped falling. The wind stopped howling. Nothing moved, all was still, as if time itself was frozen. As if everything was in awe of the display of power earlier. With a lifting of his arm, the man moved, and the magical moment was broken, like the shattering of glass. Time started flowing again; the ocean returned to hammering the rocks below, the rain fell and the wind blew.

 As the man stood up upon shaky feet, he convulsed, and blood started spurting out from every pore of his skin, forming rivers that bled into the surrounding grass. The land around him glowed with a spectral phosphorescence, and a voice, too beautiful and too majestic to be anything but a Gods, cried out in a booming fervor: “He has come! The Dark Sun! The Wings of Night! He has come!”

 Even after it had been spoken, the words reverberated in the air like an echo, causing little tremors in the earth and knocking the man off his feet again. The man clasped his ears desperately, hoping to block out the voice that threatened to turn his brain to mush, but it was to no avail. Like the song from before, the voice seemed to attack his very soul, and he could feel it slowly shattering and dissipating. But the force of the voice decreased slowly as time passed, and with a final lilting whisper, everything returned to silence. The man slowly unclasped his hands from his ears, and the blood that had drained into the ground came leaking back up, like buds growing shoots, burrowing into his body. All the gashes, scratches and lacerations… they mended themselves, new skin growing over broken skin in a matter of seconds, and before long, he was good as new.

 The man cracked his neck, astoundingly loud in the stillness, and opened his eyes. They were a deep veiny red, and reflected inside them like a mirror, was hope, desperation and fear. He had not felt those feelings in a long time. Millenia, no, eons! Looking upwards, to the inky blackness that was the night sky, he reached up with his hands, as if to scratch the darkness away like paint. His mouth moved, and an audible whisper permeated the air;

“And so it comes. The end of times. The start of the Exploration. I hope he survives. No, he must!”

 With a shake of his head, the man unfurled a pair of blood-red wings, and soared away into the endless night.