Dry. Broken. Flat. The drop off at the horizon occurred at equal distance in every direction, the split and tortured hard clay and stone surface varied very little, ultimately, in height. In the perpetual night sky there were no stars. No sun. Three large fragments of a broken moon hung as a reflection, perhaps, of whatever had befallen this world.

If there was air, he did not need to breath it. Nor did he feel its pressure or the lack thereof. The silky, cool, almost liquid shadows which formed a ragged black cloak over what could only be called a body out of sheer generosity, the only sensation of touch. His hands were thin. Practically skeletal. The skin was stretched and looked so much like ancient paper laced with veining and the long mountain ranges of tendons and joints clear through the thin material. It also felt so very insubstantial. Clenching the far too long, too thin fingers into a fist, he felt barely anything. Pinching the cracked skin of a wrist between two jagged fingernails drew neither blood nor pain. Simply the mild sensation of a touch. Very mild.

He knelt to touch the broken surface only to find he could not kneel. Rather, he did not stand on legs. Did not seem to even have legs. He floated, the shadowy, ragged edges of the cloak covering whatever lay beneath. Something told him that he was not ready to see whatever it was which was covered. Still, he could lower himself as if he was bending over or crouching. He could touch the hard surface and feel it, to some extent. It was baked solid. Like a ceramic. Rough, raw, without glaze or the care of a craftsman.

Naturally since he floated, he should be able to fly. Perhaps he could have some sense of freedom and joy before he allowed his mind, emptied of whatever memories it may have once held beyond a few hazy flickers of… something… to break. To wallow in the despair that surely would come. Inevitable before the infinite loneliness of the wasteland before him. He seemed to be the only survivor. Rather, perhaps he was the only visitor. The broken moon looked far more lively if only for the great jaggedness of the forces which had rent it asunder and again, spewing countless smaller masses no doubt the size of cities or even small countries into or out of orbit of this planet. Perhaps they had resulted in the absolute destruction he now surveyed.

Yet he could not fly. Though he did not walk upon legs, he nonetheless was bound to the surface just the same. He could not even jump. There was a sort of gentle lowering and lifting within the range that one might consider the limits of lower limbs. The highest point felt all to much like standing on ephemeral ‘tippy-toes’. Exhaustion never came, though there was a sense of mental strain.

Hunger did come though. Not of a stomach. Though he dared not look beneath the cloak of liquid shadows, he knew in some place of instinctive truth that he required no form of material sustenance. Instead there was a pit of emptiness that was growing rapidly. Somewhere within his very soul, it seemed. What it sought to fill it he could only surmise. Human companionship, if such applied to whatever specter he now inhabited. Perhaps it was art, beauty. Maybe simply a distraction from his thoughts which sought and sought and sought and found no parse-able memories upon which to base any foundation of self.

No memories except for one, which felt so incredibly foreign, cold, and frankly, wrong, that his mind refused to admit it came across it over and over again. Yet it could not turn away just the same, just as a visitor to a library could hardly select any book other than the one single volume which sat upon the otherwise barren shelves. The librarian was even holding it out to him, ready to scan his library card. Insisting that it was already on hold for him specifically. The last copy. The only copy. Yet he continued to reject it for its wrongness, to inquire after some other option, any other option.

In this library, he knew he had authored a plethora of books. Of memories, volumes of them, most of a lifetime of them. The library was to contain those memories primarily, as well as the collected partial volumes which were borrowed from so many who had come before and allowed their knowledge, their experience, distilled however it may be for usage or amusement or any other impersonal function one may consume of the mind-works of those alive or dead, recently or long past. A quarter of a lifetime of education, borrowed from the minds of those smarter, their experiences and studies neatly organized and the copies remitted to his personal library over painstaking years of effort with curiosity, greed, necessity, and threat of failure the funds which paid for the licensing of these copies. Another half a lifetime of personal growth, research for career, life skills, and the endless cavalcade of interesting bits of information.

Yet the shelves remained bare. Perfect. Clean. In no failure of condition or construction. All but for the one detestable volume which screamed that it had never been registered properly within this library. Unlike the copies of the mind-works of others which were made and installed within these shelves through his own process, a process he no longer recalled for it too was a volume now missing, this was a copy directly from some other library of memories.

Simply put, he knew it was implanted there.

The hunger, the emptiness grew. He lacked an understanding of what it craved, so he journeyed. He glided across the broken ground. Any cracks too large to step across, had he the legs to step, he found impassable. A sort of mental barrier informed him that it was simply impossible. If he were shoved by someone, non-existent though it seemed to be on this entire world, he would fall. Become trapped. There was some rule to his existence and his locomotion which prevented him from crossing these spaces. Some were borderline too large. He could cross them if he got a ‘running start’ first, though his top speed was hardly a brisk jog and could be maintained constantly. He couldn’t reach top speed immediately. A short distance though was all that was required to do so. That made it all the more odd that there were these splits which blocked his passage except when he exercised that very short distance of acceleration, or approached already at speed.

How long he wandered, he was not sure. The gnawing emptiness grew and grew though he lacked any means to fill it that he could discover. He did have a sort of face and mouth, though he was unable to exert any physical force upon even the occasional loose piece of broken ground to attempt to even taste or swallow it. He was also unable to bring his face fully down to the surface.

He had no tongue to even lick it and taste it directly, had he been able to lower himself. He could not breath even with effort and he smelled nothing. If he even had a nose. His hands would not quite reach his face. A deep uneasiness rather than any physical barrier halted any attempt to touch it. Some part of him was afraid of what it would find, perhaps.

The cloak covered his head, though at the same time the cowl did not prevent him from turning and looking at anything. The range of motion came without any sense of stretch, though he could not turn his head any further than seemed correct for a human. That was the one thing he did get from the broken, incomplete, suggestions of the glimmer of a hope of the idea of memories that slipped through his mental grasps. He’d been human. What a human was, he wasn’t entirely certain. Legs. Arms. Head. Limited range of motion. Sight forward, just as he had now. Beyond that, nothing. At least, nothing for now.

No sun or stars ever revealed themselves. There was no light, though he could see in a sort of universal grayscale. Given the raw amount of things he inspected and tried, ignoring time spent internally trying to remember or thinking on his situation, it had been at least a day or two before they came.

They, though to call them by any pronoun ascribed an undeserved suggestion of existence beyond just raw energy, stood out with such contrast on the endless, broken expanse that it was almost painful to look at. Was painful to look at. Still, there were two things he knew, spoken to him by that implanted volume, that one book in his library. Two things which struck deep within him.

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The first was that they would consume him, if they touched him. The second was that he was hungry and they, rather the Them, were what he hungered for.

His mind screamed both joy and terror as he glided towards the first of Them. The first had started as a chaotic kaleidoscope of colors which could not exist, loosely bound by whisps of shadow much like his cloak, writhing and pulsing in a perpetual lack of form from the cracked earth. It was only one, and small. Small enough he could have held it in one bony hand.

HE HUNGERED.

Pain. Incredible pain. The tearing of some intrinsic material of his very existence threw such agony through his mind that it was truly a wonder that it did not simply break beneath the strain. In his hand, he grasped the ball of Shadow and Chaos and in turn, the small first of Them pulled on the Shadow of his cloak, swallowing torn fragments rapidly into itself. Without the need to reach out and bite or tear. Without the need to rend or wound. Simply by contacting his withered hand-flesh did it begin to consume the Shadow. The Shadow was not merely ethereal clothing, he now and surely realized, it was rather the very fabric of his existence.

With a soundless scream, he tried to crush the first of Them, and, finding physical force completely ineffective, threw it away a pitifully short distance. Choosing, instead, to flee. Flee he did. For minutes or hours, terror the only thought in his mind, memory of the agonizing consumption of his Shadow driving him to create distance. The first of Them was slow and though, while he was also not particularly fast, he could outpace his pursuer easily.

Only the hunger grew, this time two-fold. Inside of him, somewhere, that still emptying place begged and salivated for the Chaos, the impossibly, infinitely hued and writhing energies held by the bits of Shadow. His own cloak now, his Shadow, felt as if a critical piece was missing. It now called for him to consume the fragments of its own self which barely held together the Chaos. Shadow containing Chaos, that was Them. After having stolen some of his, the Shadow was a little stronger, a little more structured, and thus the Chaos was also more formed. The first of Them was probably more powerful as a result.

If he could not hurt it physically though, how was he to take from it the very same things it sought to take from him?

The volume spoke to him again. Though he sought to ignore it. Though he rejected its foreign nature and the disturbing, violent feelings it gave off, it spoke to him of the power to defeat his opponent. The power to grow from their loss. The power to survive against those who wished him destroyed. Steeling his resolve, he turned to towards the distant but approaching thing. The first of Them continued slowly, inevitably, tirelessly even as he himself was tireless, in its relentless hunt. His gnarled hand lifted, pointed roughly towards the approaching thing. In his mind, he opened the volume and let the knowledge fully sink in. A way to move his energy. Inside of him, the Chaos was purified, attuned, made Mana. The Mana could be controlled with his will, his soul, made manifest in Shadow. Chaos given structure and purpose became power. The first of Them entered well into his range before he felt fully satisfied he could form the patterns and move the Mana the way it needed to be moved. He only had enough for a few tries before he was truly empty.

The bolt of energy, pulled from that emptiness within him and deepening his hunger, guided by the implanted memories, burst from his outstretched hand. The bolt struck that first of Them, scattering the gathered not-form of Chaos and Shadows. The first of Them burst, the Shadows joining his cloak, but the Chaos slipping underneath and into his flesh. It filled his emptiness a dozen times more than the bolt had taken. It wasn’t enough to fill the hunger which had built up while he’d wandered, but it was better.

Hours later, perhaps another day, the second of Them rose once more from the cracks. Within another hour, the third of Them.

Within a week, they were arriving in twos and threes every minute. Sometimes one was a little larger. Sometimes they tangled together and seemed to start to combine. Never did he wait. They all reached for him. If they got too close, they pulled at his Shadow and he felt the most incredible sense of dread and threat and agony. The amount of Shadow he obtained from each was microscopic. The momentary touch by one of Them had taken a hundred to replenish the loss. Disbursing and consuming the thief had not returned any more Shadow than any of them had provided, despite the theft.

When they came a dozen a minute, he was firing off the bolts and skimming along the ground as fast as he could, lining up long rows of them, letting them entangle and allowing his bolt to destroy several at a time. He could summon a bolt within seconds and his aim was preternatural and yet they sometimes dodged. Sometimes their inconsistent form shifted, and a bolt missed by a fingernail. If they grew entangled enough to form into a larger one, those often took more strikes than the pre-joined individuals would have taken, the greater amount of Shadow seeming to deflect his spell. Even worse the Shadow which deflected the spell was consumed, lost, unable to be claimed by his cloak after the Them was finally destroyed.

Life became a constant struggle, a constant running and shooting of magical bolts of energy. A constant feasting of tiny morsels. His cloak grew slowly, painfully slowly more solid. His skin and hands never looked healthier, though he felt stronger. The emptiness approached a feeling of fullness.

Abruptly, he was full. He could consume no more. The ones he blasted swirled and seeped back into the cracks even while more continued to rise and flow into whatever not-shape they would take. He was frustrated. Without even hunger to drive him, was he doomed to face ever increasingly fast rising hordes of chaos and Shadow until they overwhelmed him? Was his death inevitable? Whatever that meant as he was surely not alive in the biological sense.

That was when he truly thought, the first thoughts since awakening on this wasted planet in this dead universe without even a single star, nor a single hill, or mountain, or valley, or outcropping of bone or rock or boulder or anything beyond a broken moon in the sky. That was when he formed some basic sense of self that required no volumes on the shelves. He rose from merely existing to now being.

I… WILL… LIVE!

That thought. That sense of self. Of determination. Not the reaction but the choice to live, to survive, crushed at the full place within him. It was unable to withstand the unstoppable gravity of identity, however weak, however minimal, infinitesimal and yet infinite. The energy within him was compressed into a point so small it was as if it occupied absolutely no volume. The hunger returned, greater than ever.

So did though he find three new volumes presented to his underworked librarian. Only one would be provided to the library. To add itself to the shelf next to the one, lone volume. A small, thin, incomplete work was taking shape from his own writing desk, but this was a fully bound, published mind-work. Complete and with a definite finiteness which was both satisfying and terrifying at once. Each of the three hummed with power.

The first, an improved version of his Mana Bolt. Complimentary. The ability to fire shots faster and with greater density, causing increased damage and penetrating through Shadow more effectively.

The second smelled of ozone, despite his having smelled literally nothing since awakening. The sense of arcane lighting, thin, short lived, uncontrolled, yet deadly and able to arc through several of Them at once flitted through his thoughts before it was gone. The secret to its use required he accept this particular volume and reject the other two.

He moved on to consider the third. An energization of Shadow. Fusing Mana and Shadow to prevent his Shadow from being consumed so easily. It would not make him invulnerable, for Mana would supplant Shadow if he were attacked and recharging the protection would take time after it was used. Still, it would allow him to survive the ones which snuck up upon him, forming behind him while he glided, distracted by an incoming group or having missed a target.

Any of them would allow him to survive for longer. To fill his once again empty center. To grow fat upon the energies of his would be hunters and to once again grow and be offered another choice, another improvement or new magic. To grow. To survive on and grow more to survive more and grow more and so on and so forth. All three spoke promises of an eventual end, not death. First he must survive and consume and grow.

No. First, he must make a choice. The world was currently held in suspension, but not for long. Already the sense of time’s flow was pressing against whatever dam was halting its unstoppable inevitability. Time would move again soon and if he made no choice, then he would forfeit it and face the increasing flood without being any stronger.

It was time to choose.