“And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”

– Revelation 9:6

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It beats. A tattoo. A pulse…

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I sweep through the void, ever watchful, ever cautious.

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Across darkness, tangles and tunnels, I drift monotonously, nullifying all in my path.

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I scour and feast in toto. I crawl, like an arachnid marching to war, ready to find disaster around every turning.

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The pulse is joined by growing waves…

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I can hear them. Their wretched whirling and warbling tones. The echoes of the unliving. The restless dead. Their forces grow and amass.

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I swerve past a corner till I see it gleaming to me – the prize. It is within reach. We meet.

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… Retribution.

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I am renewed. I am a dance of light and shadow, a chiaroscurotic reaper. I skate toward my foes. The hunter has become the hunted. I am become death. I feed on their torment. Tastes of ashes and salt.

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The phantasm remains before me, formless. Yet through the void its eyes stare back at me with idiot malice. It falls away.

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Their hunt will resume later. Our joining is staved off by the narrowest of moments.

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Time makes a mockery of all who enter these lands eventually. Either the march of the living dead or raw entropy itself will see me dissolved. My rapacious consumption will falter and my avatar will be reborn again, embodied by another.

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In the end, nothing but a vain quantity escapes the darkness and the dead.

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