Amor Fati Book 1: Aya & Xiyang Qi

Chapter 1: The Beginning

                                                              Prologue

                                                             January 1, 1201, A.D

The creature began to wake, stretching its mass to feel its environment. It was starving and needed to devour all born into existence.  Opening its eyes, the creature noticed it was at a water's edge, and a vast forest was to the north. The Dark was tired and hoped it would be the last time it would have to endure the pain. 

Traveling across dimensions, space-time, or parallel worlds hurt it. It should have been satisfied with its existence but wanted more. The Dark always found a rich feeding ground full of life and light until now. 

The world it left behind had no light or energy. It had consumed everything. Nothing ever survived its invasion. This world had wildlife but was void of human life. It would need to pass to a new world quickly.

It wandered with urgency, waiting until a new door emerged and pulled it through. After six months of wandering, it felt something. The Dark knew that feeling, a force pulling, pushing its body into itself, and the pain. 

The closer it went to the center vortex, the more it felt like it was being ripped apart. The mass withered in agony as it pushed its way to the portal to a new world. All creatures in the world it was leaving were terrified by its scream and hid, trembling and hoping the danger would pass. If someone watched the dark come through a door, it would be like seeing it ooze its way into the landscape.

When it woke, The Dark was on a mountaintop with snow swirling around it. In contrast, the white snow revealed how black this creature was and how it moved. Its body was still withering, seared with pain.

 The Dark knew it would need a food source quickly; it had never been without food this long. In despair from the pain, it began its search, heading into the trees and down the snowy mountain. The Dark touched the tree, and it withered and rotted. 

While it wasn't enough food to satisfy its voracious hunger, it would help. Nothing living could survive its path. It was learned long ago that humans did not live on tops of mountains in extreme temperatures. As its mass moved down the slope, it hoped to find a village of humans it could feed on soon.

As the dark moved, it remembered that it needed to find one host. One human who lived, one it could keep forever but had yet to discover. For now, he would inhabit a body until its light was extinguished and move to another. 

The Dark consumed light, and no matter how hard it tried, it could not sustain itself in a body with any trace of light, even once he had destroyed all the light from them. It had tried to eat less and inhabit less of the host, but nothing worked.

It needed to find a host who was all dark, no light. He hoped this world would possess such a human. It was growing weary trying to find a human who could have a symbiotic relationship with it. It knew that someday it might find such a human, and that day would be glorious. 

It was not very patient and wondered if it would still have its all-consuming hunger for light once it found a host. Right now, the source of that light is humans, and that was its food, and it needed to eat. In this world, it might find the people who fled from the previous world.

The humans that made it so angry that it began destroying the humans faster than it had planned. A well-populated planet can take a hundred years to consume. Because of its anger, it finished the last world in fifty years. 

Could it be that one of the humans that fled was his host? Why would its host run if they were to complement each other? The Dark wanted to find this group of humans even more. It will find them. It will find its host or kill all the worlds in the universe.