The final living creature, a monster who has lived for over a thousand years since the end times now stood before a land of endless blue boulders, the sky above was dark blue-ish grey and it was, as he suspected, the reason for the gloomy colouring of the rocks before him. There was no opening, just rubble as far as the eye could see. Below the boulders was just boulders he had checked.

Up above a dead snake was curled around a half-eaten world, the snake itself was far larger than the planet it died eating and was actually connected visibly to this one he was on, this always confused him because the clouds were beyond the dead world in the sky. He wondered what they were since he knew what actually clouds were and how it didn’t make sense for them to be behind the broken planet. However he never cared enough to find out. 

He knew that the snake had stopped his planet's revolutions through space when it hooked itself onto its new home and that he had been suffocating to death for at least a hundred years now as he waited to die. It hurt. He believed that was how the snake died, somehow gravity seemed to die as did time at some point as things he picked up stopped falling back down to the ground, there was one exception to this himself. 

He remembered that he used to eat things and that when the food ran out most things stopped moving eventually turned to dust, he understood this as a strange concept called death that he used to be scared off and that one day he too would stop. 

He remembered everything or he would claim to but it all seemed so weird to him now and if pressed he would admit that he had forgotten why he believed he would die if he didn’t eat anything. His sanity was kept in check by one goal, not survival, in fact, his mission would see him “destroyed” physically but would ensure he was remembered. 

That was all he wanted now, was to let someone know how long he struggled for and that he was here. That when all things died, death never took him, and that eventually even the concept of death was dying itself with no life to support it. That he was the final one standing just as he said he would be, just as he should be. As he looked out over the horizon he knew all was right. 

He wanted someone to know he won or he felt it wouldn’t count if ‘he’ declared it himself so he decided to destroy himself. He would take his memories and send them back in time to a past life, a thousand years this creature had managed to survive through will alone but it would end by his own hand. His ‘will’ is still unbroken even in madness. 

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He would tell someone of the future, not so they could change it. No. He knew that most likely he if succeeded then he has done so already and been remembered by someone who died, like an eternal checklist of self congratulatory victories because if he could send a message to the past then he knew that one day a new version or maybe it would be himself exactly would be here once again to send the message again. 

This would become the future to someone else's present, then in time that present would catch up to this future only for the memories to return to the same present as before in an endless cycle of victory. This was the perfect world in the monster's mind. 

He was glad the future was set in stone.

The creation of this cycle has become the monster's purpose. He was motivated knowing that the cycle was probably already in motion. He doesn’t know how long he will go after this but ‘today’ is the day the message is sent. He doesn't expect to last after the message there would be no point to him if he did.

 “ Behold I won!” He wanted to scream one last time, but the world didn’t have any air to carry the sound. He dreamed sometimes of what noise was like, but that didn’t matter, only the purpose mattered. Turning around there it was, his final challenger. A tall black cube the size of an elephant. A library he believed created in the last moments of everything as a warning to those who would come next, it’s a shame that nothing else would be coming. 

The sum of magical knowledge and a collection of historical records. It would help himself more if his memories had context so he had memorised all of them. Every word, each individual one and even in the order they were written down, even the ones he didn’t understand so that if called upon he could etch them into the side of the dead world above easily.

He took out a single square piece of old paper and a small black inc box. He placed them down on a rock before him as he sat down, he would engrave one last ‘spell marking’ then cast the magic. Magic had gotten funny when the primordials died, the rules themselves had changed so now he was far more limitless then his past life would have been… or be. He spent a few years casually deciding on whether be or been was the better, more fitting word before he decided to continue as is, with the word be.

When he opened the inc box he went blind. He reminded himself that he wasn’t blind just that the inc was so dark that it devoured the light around him. Taking a single drop of inc on his finger he brought his finger over to the paper where the inc seemed to… hop onto the paper by its own will. 

Then by holding his hand over the ink, palm out towards it the inc started to crawl around the paper. Like a circuit board, it painted itself onto the paper. Then holding it up, he tore the paper in half… and then he ripped out his own heart using his life as fuel for the spell. 

The way he saw it, no matter the cost for the spell, the life of the one above all was definitely too worthy. And it was, and so… the story begins.