Lathea, my homeworld, was attacked by something called The Void… at least that's what we called It. It came from rifts, rents in the steely fabric of our reality that gave birth to horror after horror of monster and ruin. I was just a child when it started, the Great Corruption, but I remember it vividly. My people fought The Void. We were strong and resisted its corrupting effects, but we could only fight an endless enemy for so long before falling from fighting to surviving. Our technology was useful at first to dispatch the chitinous masses that flooded from the gashes in reality, but as time went on things got worse. Larger horrors, more powerful monsters stepped and slithered out onto Lathea and we couldn't hold out… not without the World Soul. Gaia, Mother Nature, Earth Mother, whatever name attributed to the soul of our world, she fought back too. We had always treated our world right, balanced our own corruption of her with healing and care, and she fought for us. She began summoning ruins and caves across the world which burst forth with monsters. The monsters left us alone at first, they tore into the ranks of Void horrors with claws, crushed with tentacles and tails, breathed fire and lightning. The monsters were powerful and for a while we could attempt to find a way to fix the apocalypse occuring. Even Lathea herself fighting wasn't enough in the end though. The greatest monster, Horigand, was born in response to a particular horror of the Void… The Shade of Annihilation. The Shade stepped out from the largest tear yet and the whole world felt its presence. Basically a titanic maw covered in tentacles, it tore the world apart. It dug deep with numerous twisting tendrils, each covered in spikes and blades. The Shade Immediately started for the World Soul in the core of Lathea. It aimed to consume the world core and kill our world, ending the war against the Void. Horigand was everything Lathea had left, a great beast of smooth scales, draconic and mountainous, horn wreathed in lightning and shooting blasts of energy. The two titans battled for weeks, the whole world felt the destruction as Horigand lifted The Shade out of Lathea's flesh and began tearing into it. The Shade won…

  On the day I died I had seen a child running outside my safe zone. I yelled out to them, trying to get the child to come to safety with me, but they ran off into the forest. I knew they could be some kind of illusion or mirage, the Void had made them before, but this one seemed different, more real. I had always been good at seeing through the Void's illusions. The Void didn't understand people, it made horrors and was good at it, but it couldn’t replicate people very well. The best it could do was the Sapio Voidus, the top of the Voids food chain, and even they were freakish horrors. No, I needed to go find the child and save them, I was at my limit and couldn't stand that thought of being alone anymore. I grabbed my spear and pack on my way out of the protection circle. I was chasing the child's trail, still fresh and easy to follow. Frantic steps through the dead dirt, short strides, small, bare feet. I went far from my safe haven and knew it was foolish, I knew the child would already be gone when I found them, an insect likely, if they were even real. I had to keep going, hope was something I had lost and I needed it again to keep going. I came into a clearing and stopped. The clearing had a large stump on the top of a small hill, twisted bushes with branches angling in patterns reminiscent of horrific faces littered the hill. The child's path lead to the stump, and I moved towards it. Moving past the bushes, the faces seemed to track me and grow sorrowful the closer I came to the stump. I eventually reached it and looked down into a hollow, and against one side of the inner stump cowered a baby. No larger than a toddler, but no… they had the features of an older child, no less than ten cycles. All I could think was they must have been a runt of some kind, small for their age, but I also noticed the child had strange clothes. A bright blue shirt and dark orange pants with many pockets on them, and no shoes.

  “Young one, don't fear, I'm here to help.” I tried to speak calmly, soothingly, but I hadn't spoken to another person since I couldn’t remember how long.

  My voice came out slightly hoarse and the child jumped in fear and whimpered within the hollow stump, seemingly trying to disappear. I heard the child muttering something under their breath and leaned closer to hear.

  “Just a dream… just a dream… wake up, wake up! It's just another nightmare… it's not real…”

  I felt sorrow for the child, such a small thing surviving for so long out here in this horrible world. They must have used their small size to hide in crevices and compact places to make it so long. I heard the crack of a stick behind me and turned to see one of the insectoid Void beasts, abominations. I looked back to the child in the stump and was surprised to see they were no longer there. There was no way the child could have escaped the stump without my notice, so I assumed it must have in fact been an illusion. I let out a sigh, realizing the Void had finally gotten me with an illusion so real and perfect I couldn’t tell the difference. I turned to run, my safe haven was my only chance now—but I knew I had traveled too far from it to matter. I ran past the thick, gnarled trees of my home world. The forests were beautiful once, before they became twisted by The Void. Once beautiful, purple leaves and vibrant rainbow flowerings now bare branches, reaching and tangling survivors of this corrupted world. I passed the tree with the ‘X’ on it, marking I was almost to my safe haven—I wasn't going to make it. When I was halfway between the ‘X’ and my safety I heard them, my pursuers quickly gaining on me. An insect the size of a horse rushed out from the trees. Its carapace was beyond dark, seeming to drink in the light around it, a shifting silhouette against the rest of the world. Nine long, thin legs ending in claws that moved with the quick grace of an insect left no marks on the ground below as it moved. It had no visible eyes, just pits on its head of darker shadow. I was fast as a child, and over time I had only gotten faster. I could run down a full speed antler beast, and I was strong enough to bring it down barehanded. But that was in my prime, before I became a gaunt shadow of myself, when the world still had antler beasts. I was not faster than the void skitterer nor stronger, but I had a weapon. The spear I wielded was made from adamant and the horn of the greatest monster of Lathea, Horigand. The shaft of the spear was forged from adamant, the most durable material we had ever found. I knew little of Adamant besides that it was an alloy of some kind. The head of the spear was the horn, wreathed in lightning. I turned around, sliding to a stop, and brought my spear up and pointed it at the insect, aiming for its head. I planted my feet and stood my ground, prepared for the impact, and then took it. The insect slammed into me and my spear, but I stood firm and a flash of yellow lightning surrounded me. The void creature split in half to either side of me and I quickly turned and kept running. I was almost there as I heard more chittering from behind, so close, but I wasn't fast enough. The insects fell upon me as I turned to face them. I slew them, two and then three, but there were more close by. I turned to run again, but it was too late, I felt it. My gaze slowly rose up, past the leafless canopy above me. A Conqueror was in front of me, towering above the trees, its many hooked limbs hanging low, almost to the ground. Its aura of horror and madness struck me in waves, but I was used to the feeling. As the chittering grew louder behind me the Conqueror lifted its overly bifurcated limbs, ready to impale me, and I knew it was over. The Conquerors were the midsized frontline of the Void, they killed entire groups of people at once with their hundreds of blades and endless stamina, single handedly annihilating unprotected towns and cities. I had survived for so long, yet this was going to be my end, all because I tried to help someone.

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  “FUCK YOU!” I screamed my rage to the monsters, the things that had destroyed my world, people and future. The beings that made my life nothing but survival day after day, not even living. I had lost hope a long time ago, yet I kept fighting every day. The limbs of the Conqueror lashed at me, flashing from several directions at once as they extended like spiked rubber hoses. The insectoid skitterers jumped at me from behind, but I chose to strike down the tendrils. One came from my left, I dodged and cut the hooked blade off its meaty appendage. An insect bit down on my right leg and tore at it as it ran by me, its huge mouth taking a chunk of me with it. More tendrils came from above and below, I struck out at them with my spear taking two more of their blades off, and dodged one losing my pack in the process. The last tendril impaled my right arm, yanking my spear from my hand. Four more hooked blades slashed down and pierced into me, lifting me off the ground. The pain was intolerable to the point I could barely stay conscious. I bled from bite wounds all over my body, and the blades impaling me lifted me higher and higher until I was lifted beyond the tops of the trees. I coughed up blood as I tried to scream more expletives at the monster, but my lungs had collapsed from one of the blades. I reached out, weakly gripping one of the blades in an attempt to pull it out, but I couldn’t fight gravity much and only managed to lift myself slightly before losing strength completely and dropping even deeper onto the blade. My mind swirled, blackness edging into my vision as some kind of purple flash of energy shot out at the Conqueror. The beam was light purple with darker strands of purple lightning arcing across its surface like the flares of a star. The upper half of the Conqueror was burned away, nothing left but the smoking stump of its lower torso and long legs. I felt the air drifting past my face as I fell, the ground coming closer and closer until in an instant the horrible world around me was no more. That would normally be the end of a person, the Void taking another victim to their grave, but it was not my end. My death that day was the beginning of my next life, in a new world, a living world full of the hope I had been seeking.