Nulls woke inside a body that breathed, bled, died and would eventually rot and be eaten by the vermin of the world.

He remembers fire. A detonation that erased everything. Not just places and people. Concepts. Histories. The gods that had watched over him and the ones he had never known. All of it gone in a flash that had no color because color itself was consumed.

The detonation was his doing.

Something went wrong. Something always goes wrong when you try to cure a disease by killing the patient. The hunger that drove his people could not be cut out. It could only be destroyed along with everything else. So he destroyed everything else.

The screams of species that never existed anymore. The death cries of stars that had names in languages now forgotten. The silent agony of laws of physics unraveling. He heard them all. He remembers them all.

Something endured.

A library of forbidden knowledge survived the fire. Its pages scattered across the bones of what was, drifting through the void between realities, waiting in the dark for hands that could still read. Nulls did not build it to withstand the explosion. He built it because some knowledge deserves to outlast its creators, even if no one remains to understand it.

Those pages float now. Somewhere. Waiting.

He woke in this body. This fragile, bleeding, dying body. The air here smells of rot and growth and the constant churn of things consuming other things. The sun is a ball of fire that will eventually cool. The people here build cities and tell themselves stories about meaning.

Nulls feels echoes. The psychic scar tissue of the detonation infests the soil of this reality. Buried beneath the noise of this young world, something stirs. A seed. A potential. The same hunger that destroyed everything he knew, waiting to sprout again.

He will not cure it this time.

He will wander. From world to world, across realities he has never seen, through civilizations that have never heard his name. He will gather power. He will sharpen himself into a weapon. He will become the thing his people became, the monster he destroyed, so that no one else has to.

When a civilization reaches too high, he will be there. When their scientists crack the first laws that should remain uncracked, when their philosophers glimpse the hunger waiting in the void, when their children start to dream of consumption, he will descend.

He will hear every scream. Every cry. Every plea from mothers begging for their children, from fathers who cannot protect their families, from priests whose idols will die beside them. He will hear their prayers and he will kill their idols too. He will carry every sound, every face, every moment of agony. He will bear that weight so that no one else has to.

The screams will follow him across worlds. They will gnaw at him in the quiet moments between genocides. He will remember every single one.

There is no one else left to remember. There is no one else left to do what must be done.

The pages of his library drift through the dark. Waiting. One day, perhaps, someone will find them. One day, perhaps, they will understand what was lost and why.

But that day is not today.

Today, Nulls stands on the soil of a young world, in a body that can die, and begins to walk.

In the end, there will be no idols left to pray to.

Only Nulls.

And he stopped listening a long time ago.

Chapter 13 - Yama I