"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It was late in the evening, and the sun was getting ready to set over the horizon. The sun’s light had taken on a red hue, dyeing the world in the afterglow of a bright day and setting the stage for darkness to take over.
Even though the sun was calling it a day, the city’s inhabitants were not ready to call it quits. Vehicles still came and went across the road. Pedestrians still walked about, and some businesses even started opening for the night.
For all intents and purposes, the city wasn’t going to miss the sun’s absence. Like a hardworking elder brother too focused on his work, the city bid the sun farewell absentmindedly.
Alex was one of the people too focused on work to notice the sun setting. It was already after 7 pm, but he was still at his desk working.
He was in a high-rise skyscraper with glass for walls, so he could see the sun setting if he looked away from his work for a moment. Unfortunately, the view, much like the rest of his life, was wasted on him.
Around him, there was silence. In that silence, if he paid attention, he could hear people walking back and forth across the room or hear their fingers tapping away at their keyboards like his.
But the floor was generally silent, with no laughter or chatter between coworkers. It was as if an oppressive force had descended onto the room, stifling human interaction.
The dreadful silence made it even more terrifying when a loud, booming sound tore through the world.
"Boom!"
The sound was like a bomb exploding, but louder. It was so loud that it made the ground shake beneath his feet. The whole building was shaking as if an earthquake was ravaging the city.
Worse still, the sound didn’t seem to end and grew louder by the moment. This made the building vibrate even harder.
This time, he looked up from his work to see what was going on. No matter how engrossed he was in his work, this matter seemed to be bigger than his work, piquing his interest.
As he looked around for the source of the problem, he spotted it immediately. He couldn’t miss it because the sky lit up with a brilliant, golden glow.
The world had become brighter than ever before, so his attention snapped upward to the sky where he saw a large black sphere suddenly appear.
The sphere was the one producing the intense golden light. It was so large that it could be another sun. It was also close to the surface and was getting closer by the moment.
From what he could tell, something from space was entering the atmosphere. It looked like that because the black sphere looked like a meteor entering the atmosphere that he once saw online.
Whatever the black object was, it was clearly the source of the anomaly. And the closer it got to the surface, the louder the sound it produced and the more the skyscraper shook.
He didn’t know when he did, but he had stood up from his seat and was now looking at the sky with his mouth agape. Confusion and incomprehension were clearly written on his face as he watched.
’How did something that big manage to get close to us without any warning?’ he asked in disbelief.
He stood there stunned for a long time, just looking at the sky. When he finally came to, he looked around and saw people panicking.
His previously quiet and serene coworkers were calling others, checking online for information, or running home to safety. For some reason, he couldn’t see their faces.
Their faces were blurred and indistinct. He couldn’t tell what they looked like, but he knew that they were his coworkers.
He was wondering why he couldn’t see their faces when his boss came out of her office. This time, he could see her face clearly.
She was a beautiful woman with blond hair and an air of authority. She made sure to channel some of her authority as she shouted, "Silence!"
"Running around won’t fix anything. We need to form orderly lines for evacuation. We need to..."
At this point, he stopped listening to what she was saying. She was saying helpful things, but her voice only made him angrier.
Her voice grated on his mind, reminding him of unpleasant experiences. The more of her irritating voice he heard, the angrier he became.
For some reason, the world ending around him didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was the anger. There was also a little bit of hunger, but that was irrelevant.
Very soon, he got too angry to think. He couldn’t tolerate her anymore, so he marched over to her.
His steps were deliberate and heavy, not attempting to conceal his destination. His face looked menacing, too, so it was clear that he was up to no good.
His strange behavior attracted her attention, and she turned to him. She said something, but he didn’t hear her. All he could think about was his anger and how to release it. So he swung his fist and smashed it into her face.
His fist struck flesh, and she dropped like a sack of potatoes. She was down, but he didn’t stop there. He dropped onto her, straddling her chest, and smashed his fists into her face.
Again and again, he struck her face. With each hit, his anger about being overworked, underpaid, and sidelined for promotion time and time again found an outlet, relieving him of his hatred for her.
By the time his anger left him and he was feeling better, he had smashed her face to pieces. She was bloody, definitely unconscious, and probably dead.
His fists were bloody too, and he had broken many of his fingers, but he didn’t feel any pain. What he felt was pure, unadulterated joy. There was also some hunger.
Actually, the hunger was becoming too much to ignore. Without his anger to occupy the space in his chest, the hunger now had more room to grow and blossom.
The sight of so much blood didn’t help his hunger either. His stomach spasmed with hunger pangs as he looked at the blood. It was a strange situation that he had never experienced before.
Then a voice said in his mind, "Eat! Eat! Eat!"
He didn’t know where the voice came from, but he found the suggestion tempting. Since he was hungry, he decided to indulge himself.
He brought his face down to her bloody face and bit on it. Unlike what he expected, it didn’t taste that bad. In fact, it tasted rapturous.
A feeling of pure euphoria gushed through his body, making him feel incomparable pleasure. It was the best he had ever felt in his life. Even sex and orgasm couldn’t compare to this feeling, so he didn’t hesitate to take more bites out of her face.
Unfortunately, her face was mostly skin. What he could eat was too little. The bone of her skull was too hard for his teeth to deal with.
Of course, he could solve this problem by shifting to other parts of her body. Her chest, for instance, could offer a lot of meat. Soft meat his teeth would have no trouble biting through.
But he had a better idea. Instead of wasting time moving to another spot, he pushed his three-headed tongue out of his mouth. Then he struck her skull with his tongue.
The tongue pierced into her skull, crushing it. With her skull smashed open, he could now gain access to her soft, squishy brain.
While he was gorging on her flesh, the entire office was now irredeemably beyond the point of saving. Everyone was beyond panicking. They were running around like headless chickens and screaming at the top of their lungs.
Of course, he wasn’t paying attention to the noise. Meanwhile, outside the skyscraper, the world was still ending.
The black sphere in the sky was now brighter and bigger than the sun, growing brighter the closer it got to Earth. It looked like the black sun would smash into Earth, but even before it made contact, the whole world began to crack.
The continental plate beneath his feet fractured and fell apart. Then gravity reversed.
The breaking landmass left the pull of the Earth and rose into the sky, specifically into the black sphere. As they approached the sphere, the landmasses seemed to shrink and become specks compared to the black sun.
Everything on Earth rose and fell into the black sphere. Alex was on one of those landmasses. His tongue was buried in her brain, sucking it into his mouth like he was drinking juice from a cup through a straw.
At the moment, he was having the best time of his life. The taste of flesh on his tongue was so good that he didn’t think anything could be better than this moment.
He was so engrossed in his engorgement that he didn’t notice that he had grown one more pair of eyes beneath his normal ones. Just as he finished eating her brain, the pull from the black sun became too much for his body to withstand.
His body began to fragment like glass. Then his flesh shattered, and the shattered pieces unraveled into smaller pieces that fell into the black sun.
"Noooooo!" he screamed in pain.
For a moment that was also an eternity, he experienced the greatest pain in his life. Even before his body unraveled, his mind had cracked and shattered. It was pain without comparison that made him wish he were dead.
As he shouted, the world faded around him, revealing that he was in a small, dark room on a straw bed. The bed was so thin that he could feel his buttocks pressing against the hard floor.
The pressure from the floor seemed to pull him back to reality. But it was the tongue quivering in his mouth that brought him to his senses. In a flash, he remembered what had happened yesterday and where he was.
"Right," he said in realization. "That was a dream."
He remembered that he had died on that fateful day. A black sun had come to Earth, and everyone he knew died.
He hadn’t punched his boss, though. He never once confronted her for the slights and injustice. His fighting her in the dream was just a mutation in what truly happened that day. But Earth did cease to exist that day.
The black sun eating Earth had really happened. Only he had somehow survived. At least, that is as far as he knew.
He couldn’t be sure whether anyone survived in other parts of the Obsidian Maw. But he doubted anyone could have survived something like that.
As for him, his body was rebuilt in the Obsidian Maw, and he became a Drone. From there, he worked in mines until he met Tessa and became an abomination.
"Pain! Pain! So much Pain!" said a voice in his mind.
The worm was quivering in both his mouth and in his mind. It seemed to be suffering some pain. It shrieked and whimpered over and over again, making it seem pitiful.
But he felt no pity for it. Instead, he snorted and said, "That’s what you get for intruding on my dreams."
He wasn’t surprised that the worm was experiencing catatonia because something similar had happened to him when he came alive within the Obsidian Maw.
In fact, the trauma was worse because he had directly experienced his body being torn apart. It wasn’t an indirect blowback from experiencing the watered-down version from his memories.
If not for the Life Forge having made him immune to his mind shattering from pain, he would have been too debilitated by the trauma to continue living.
But the Life Forge only made it impossible for his mind to shatter from experiencing too much pain because that was what had killed him. The Life Forge didn’t stop him from feeling pain, and it didn’t stop him from remembering that traumatic experience.
For a long time, he was not happy with that immunity because it meant that he would be aware throughout the next event that would kill him. This was one of the reasons why he didn’t dare to court death even though he had the Life Forge.
The second reason he didn’t risk death was that he wasn’t sure that the Life Forge would work a second time. The third reason was that he wasn’t sure that death would be enough to destroy his mind and stop him from feeling pain.
’If not for that immunity, I would have tried to kill myself a long time ago,’ he thought, chuckling to mask the pain.
He survived Earth being eaten, but that experience has stuck with him ever since. It is like they say, you can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm from the boy.
Every day, he woke up to that nightmare. It was a constant in his life, torturing him every day.
Then he had to go to the mines to excavate coal and other ores to make a living. It was a poor living, too, and it reminded him of the kind of life he’d lived before he died.
He felt that he lived a miserable life only to die, come back to life, and resume his miserable life. So he wanted to kill himself and end it all.
Unfortunately, he was scared of the pain of death and wasn’t sure that death would end it all. He didn’t want his mind stuck in a dead body feeling pain for all of eternity, so he continued to live.
’So far, it would seem my persistence was worth it. Something finally came that made me willing to risk death. And even though the death was bad, it wasn’t as bad as I feared.’
’At least, the gluttony worm killed me quickly and didn’t make me suffer. That’s a silver lining if you ask me,’ he thought, chuckling again.
Unfortunately, it was difficult to concentrate on his thoughts when there was a whimpering baby in his mind. Having two trains of thought in his mind, one of which he couldn’t control, was distracting, to say the least.
This made him snort and say, "Come on. Don’t be a baby. It was only a dream."
"No more!" the worm cried out in protest.
"Buck up, kiddo. We’re in this together now. You will enjoy this every day, so you better prepare yourself," he said with a teasing smile.
"Mercy! Mercy!" it pleaded with a shriek of pain. "End it!"
The sight of the whimpering baby made him curl his lips and say, "This might not be bad after all. At least, it is fun to see someone else suffer."
"Please. Too much. No more," the worm continued to plead.
He wanted to ignore its irritating pleas, so he shook his head to block out its thoughts. It didn’t work, so he let his mind sink into the Life Forge.