*"Death is but a door, and what lies beyond... is merely another beginning."*
— Ancient Solarian Proverb
---
The air tasted of copper and ash.
Lieutenant Deva Ram Dharma dragged himself across the rubble-strewn battlefield, each labored breath sending daggers through his punctured lung. Blood trailed behind him in a crimson wake, marking his desperate crawl toward... toward what? There was nowhere left to go.
Smoke billowed overhead, veiling the sun in a shroud of murky gray. The once verdant fields of the western front now resembled a shattered moonscape – craters pockmarking the earth, twisted metal carcasses of vehicles scattered like discarded toys of some callous giant.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
The rhythmic sound of falling debris punctuated the eerie silence. No birds. No insects. No screams of the wounded. Those had faded hours ago.
Deva coughed, speckling the ground before him with droplets of blood. His body was failing, but his mind remained sharp as the combat knife strapped to his thigh – the one memento from his father he'd carried through seventeen years of warfare.
"Poetic... isn't it?" he wheezed, addressing no one in particular, his crimson eyes scanning the wasteland. "That I, the Dark Reaper... should be the last one standing."
A bitter laugh escaped his lips, transforming quickly into a wracking cough.
His radio crackled with static. Deva paused his crawl, pressing the device to his ear with a trembling hand.
"Lieutenant Dharma," came the distorted voice of Command. "Status report."
Deva spat blood and keyed the transmitter. "No status to report, sir. Battalion is gone. I'm the only one left."
Silence stretched for three heartbeats.
"Understood, Lieutenant. Extraction is... no longer possible. Command has authorized Protocol Omega."
Deva's eyes widened, his breath catching in his ruined chest. Protocol Omega. The nuclear option. They were going to glass the entire sector.
"Copy that," he replied, voice steady despite everything. "How long?"
"Four minutes, Lieutenant. I'm... I'm sorry."
"Don't be," Deva said, rolling onto his back to face the smoke-choked sky. "We all die eventually. Some poetry in how we go is all anyone can ask for."
"It's been an honor, to fight along Dark Reaper."
"Likewise, Command. Dharma out."
The radio fell silent. Deva closed his eyes, his raven-black hair matted with blood and grime against the jagged ground. Four minutes. Two hundred and forty seconds. How should a man spend his final moments?
His mind wandered to his childhood in the mountain village, to his mother's gentle hands braiding his hair, to his father's stern lessons in swordsmanship. To his first kill at sixteen. To the faces of comrades long buried.
"Let me leave you with this, world," he whispered to the empty battlefield. "A soldier's farewell:
"*Blood-soaked earth cradles me,
As heaven's fire approaches.
I've danced with death ten thousand times,
Today, we complete our waltz.*"
A new sound cut through the silence – the distant roar of an aircraft. Deva didn't bother opening his eyes. He knew what it carried.
The light came first – brighter than a thousand suns, searing even through closed eyelids. Then heat – a wave so intense it vaporized the blood pooling beneath him before he could register pain. The shockwave followed, pulverizing bone and flesh into their constituent atoms.
In that final microsecond, as consciousness fragmented, Lieutenant Deva Ram Dharma, the Dark Reaper, murderer of thousands, met oblivion with a smile.
And then... nothing.
---
Nothing.
Darkness.
Silence.
Time ceased to exist in the void between worlds.
Then... something. A pulse. Faint. Distant. Growing stronger.
Awareness returned like scattered puzzle pieces slowly assembling. Not memory, not yet – just existence. Being. The knowledge that *I am*.
Warmth. Pressure. The sensation of being contained, enclosed in something both restrictive and protective.
*Crack.*
A fissure formed in the darkness. Light – blinding, painful – seeped through.
*CRACK.*
The enclosure shattered. Cold air rushed in, shocking newly formed lungs into their first desperate gasp.
Deep within the lowest level of an ancient dungeon, in the desiccated belly of a long-dead behemoth, something new entered the world. Something small and vulnerable yet carrying within it an essence older than its fresh form suggested.
Slick with amniotic fluid, a tiny black-furred creature tumbled from the remnants of its egg into a shallow puddle. Its body was perfectly spherical, no larger than a child's ball, covered in midnight fur that absorbed what little light penetrated this forsaken place.
For moments, it lay motionless, adjusting to existence outside its shell.
Then its eyes opened.
Two brilliant crimson orbs, glowing like embers in the gloom. Eyes that held an intelligence that didn't belong in such a primitive form. Eyes that remembered... something. Someone.
As those eyes opened fully for the first time, a tremor passed through the fabric of reality. Throughout the world of Astranksh, Urza – the fundamental energy of creation – fluctuated wildly.
In the immediate vicinity, the disturbance manifested visibly. The air around the small creature shimmered with translucent ribbons of color – azure, emerald, violet – dancing like auroras in miniature. The phosphorescent fungi brightened, then dimmed, then pulsed in erratic rhythm. Tiny motes of golden light materialized, orbiting the black furball before dissolving into nothingness.
The puddle beneath the creature rippled, its surface tension warping as if reality itself had become momentarily fluid. Small stones levitated briefly before clattering back to the ground. The very air seemed to hold its breath, then exhale with a sound like distant chimes.
In some far away land, scholars looked up from their tomes as crystal lamps flickered.
In the Palace of Light, Some Emperor paused mid-decree as the ground trembled beneath his golden throne.
Deep in meditation caves, elven mystics jolted from their trances, eyes wide with incomprehension.
And in the Nightmare Imperium, some Queen stirred in her centuries-long slumber, clawed fingers twitching upon obsidian armrests.
None could identify the source of the disturbance. None knew that a small creature with crimson eyes had just entered their world.
The creature – who had once been Lieutenant Deva Ram Dharma – struggled to its stubby limbs. Fragments of memory flashed through its primitive brain: blood, fire, pain, a poem spoken to an empty battlefield. But these were just fragments, disconnected shards with no context.
What remained was a drive. A need to survive.
The dungeon around it stretched in all directions – a labyrinth of crumbling stone passageways, ancient mechanisms, and lurking dangers. Bones of previous explorers and monsters littered the damp floor. Phosphorescent fungi clung to the walls, casting an eerie blue-green glow that barely pushed back the darkness.
A skittering sound echoed from a nearby passage. Something was coming.
Instinct took over. The small furball creature rolled awkwardly behind a fallen stone column, its red eyes peering cautiously from the shadows.
A massive centipede, easily twenty feet long with mandibles that could crush stone, slithered into view. Its segmented body glinted wetly in the fungal light as it paused, antennae waving in the stale air.
It sensed something new had entered its domain.
The New creature held perfectly still, not even daring to breathe. Its tiny heart pounded so rapidly it threatened to burst from its furry chest.
The centipede moved forward, mandibles clicking. Closer. Closer.
Then a distant rumble – the sound of stone grinding against stone – echoed from deeper in the dungeon. The centipede froze, then abruptly changed direction, disappearing down another passage toward the noise.
The small black creature waited until the skittering faded entirely before allowing itself to breathe again. Its first lesson in this new world: stay hidden, stay quiet, stay alive.
Hunger gnawed at its insides. It needed food, needed to grow stronger. With no weapons, no claws, no teeth to speak of, it would need to be clever.
Slowly, cautiously, the creature emerged from behind the column. Its body rolled more than walked, an awkward locomotion that would improve with practice. It paused at the puddle where it had first fallen, catching a glimpse of its reflection in the still water.
Red eyes stared back, familiar yet strange. This body – this was not right. This was not who he was.
But who was he?
A flash of memory: *"Lieutenant Dharma, status report."*
Dharma. Was that his name?
No. That belonged to someone else, someone gone. Someone who had died in fire and light.
The creature blinked at its reflection, then deliberately turned away. Whatever it had been before didn't matter now. What mattered was survival.
A small movement caught its attention – a beetle the size of its eye, scuttling across the stone floor. Food.
With surprising speed for its unwieldy form, the creature lunged, trapping the beetle beneath its body. The insect struggled, pincers snapping ineffectually against the soft fur.
Instinctively, the creature absorbed the beetle into its body, its fur parting to reveal a small mouth-like opening. The sensation of sustenance spreading through its form was immediate and gratifying.
One beetle wouldn't sustain it for long, but it was a start. Where there was one, there would be others.
As the creature continued its exploration, a faint chittering sound drew its attention. Around a corner, a nest of luminous spider-like creatures, each the size of a thumbnail, swarmed over the remains of a much larger insect. Their bodies glowed with an internal light, casting moving shadows across the stone floor.
The black furball hesitated. There were at least a dozen of them, and while each was small, together they might pose a threat. But hunger drove it forward.
The creature approached stealthily, staying close to the shadows. As it drew near, one of the glow-spiders detected its presence, rearing up on its hind legs and emitting a high-pitched sound.
The alarm was raised. The swarm turned as one, tiny glowing eyes fixed on the intruder.
The first spider lunged, surprisingly fast. The black creature rolled aside, but not quickly enough – pincer-like mandibles grazed its fur, drawing the first pain it had felt in this new existence.
The familiar sensation triggered something – a flash of battlefield memory. The whistle of incoming artillery. The impact. The pain.
*Roll. Counter. Strike.*
Without conscious thought, the creature flattened itself against the ground, then suddenly expanded upward, catching the attacking spider mid-leap and crushing it against the ceiling. The spider's glow flickered and died as it fell to the ground.
The other spiders attacked en masse, a wave of tiny glowing bodies. The black creature spun, using its round form to advantage, becoming a living ball that bowled through the swarm. Three more spiders were crushed in its path.
But the survivors swarmed onto its body, pincers seeking purchase in the thick fur. Pain lanced through the creature as mandibles penetrated its soft flesh.
Another memory flashed – a knife fight in close quarters. The feeling of steel slicing skin.
*They have numbers. You have mass. Use it.*
The creature slammed itself against the wall, crushing two more spiders. Then again, against the floor. Then a third time against a jagged stone outcropping.
The few remaining spiders retreated, scuttling back to the shadows. Victory.
Exhausted but triumphant, the black furball absorbed the fallen spiders one by one, each providing a small burst of energy. The pain from its wounds faded as its body rapidly healed.
Its first real battle in this new world. Its first victory.
A distant sound – a low, rhythmic booming – echoed through the dungeon. The sound tickled something in the creature's memory. Drums. War drums. The march to battle.
It paused, listening intently. Not drums, but something massive moving through the dungeon depths. Something to avoid, for now.
But the direction of the sound – it came from higher passages. Higher meant closer to the surface. Closer to light, to freedom.
The creature made a decision. It would follow the sound, carefully, staying hidden. It would learn the paths of this dungeon, grow stronger, find its way upward.
With newfound purpose, the small black furball with crimson eyes began rolling deliberately toward the distant booming. Each movement more confident than the last, each decision more certain.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – or in this case, a single roll forward into the unknown darkness.
Somewhere in the depths of its being, the spirit of the Dark Reaper stirred. This world had no idea what had just been born into its midst.
*Blood-soaked earth cradles me,
As heaven's fire approaches.
I've danced with death ten thousand times,
Today, we begin anew.*