The journey across this dark sea was long and tiring.

At first, he explored his new body, marveling at all the intricate systems that when bound together made up the whole of him. He counted his scales, measured the lengths of his claws, sent his perception winding through the pathways sunk beneath his flesh, the veins and nerves and arteries. He forced his heart to stop beating, then made it resume when he realized he preferred the feeling of flowing blood. He flapped his ungainly wings to see if this might increase his speed (it did not). He practiced creating noises like he had heard the Old Ones make in their sleep.

When he knew everything that could be known about his physical form he turned inwards, ruminating on what he was and the nature of this realm he was now traversing. Had he existed before his birth? Sometimes he felt like he had, that there was a great store of memories and knowledge sequestered deep within his mind . . . but in other moments he believed that these glimpses of other places – and those strange pangs of nostalgia – had seeped into his consciousness from the dreamers in the first darkness, those slumbering Old Ones.

He certainly knew some things that he had no right to know. When the first glimmering points of light emerged from the black he realized he had been expecting their appearance.

Stars.

The remains of a fire that had blazed long ago, a failed attempt to push back the endless void. Embers slowly fading in the dark, around which huddled . . . what? Something. Something important, even for his kind.

How did he know this?

What was he?

***

It began as a faint ache, barely noticeable, but since there was little else to do, Zogrusz brought his full focus to bear in an effort to understand this new feeling. There was an emptiness inside him, he realized, and it seemed far too large for the actual dimensions of his flesh-formed body. It was from this gaping hollow that pain was radiating. You hunger murmured the ancient memories that he suspected were not his own. You must eat.

Eat what?

The blackness he traveled through lapped against his scales, but when he opened his mouth and let his tongue slip out from between his fangs he tasted nothing.

Not the void. He would get no sustenance there.

His gaze returned to the stars that had quickly proliferated and now filled the black in every direction. One seemed larger and brighter than its brethren, and this he decided to make his destination.

***

The sun awed him. It hung huge and bloated and red, far larger even than the sleeping Old Ones he had left far behind in the void. Despite its size, Zogrusz could sense the star was sick, dying, the ember in its core on the verge of guttering out. It had spilled forth from its shell long ago and swallowed whatever else had once existed in this place, save for a small dark speck that hovered just outside its ravenous boundaries. Zogrusz surged towards this anomaly, his curiosity rising.

A world, the voice inside him whispered.

His feet settled on the empty surface, raising a cloud of gray dust. He bent and scooped up a handful of this regolith, watching as it sifted through his claws and slowly drifted down again. The swollen star encompassed nearly everything above him, its sullen red veined by black fissures. He felt warmth for the first time, heating his scales and making the tips of his mouth-tendrils tingle.

He preferred the cold.

Dead. This place was dead; there was nothing for him here. The hollowness inside him twisted.

His hunger was getting worse.