My first sensation in this world was a smell. The aftermath of an Armageddon.

The extent of the world was burnt wasteland. Certainly, beyond the horizon was likely a more peaceful scenery, but that possibility did not immediately register for me. Clouds of ash and fumes concealed what lay ahead.

My bare feet stood upon the cracked stonework of a grandiose plaza, some hundreds of feet raised above the distant scorched ground. It appeared to be an upper level of an enormous castle complex; behind me limped a crumbling cathedral that grazed the bottom of thick brown clouds that seethed overhead.

“Sycophant…”

An inhuman voice gurgled that word. The scenery around me, which I had been lazily admiring as one would an enrapturing painting, suddenly became visceral. I coughed burning air from my lungs, and pointed my attention at my feet.

There was the upper half of the proprietor of this castle metropolis. The Goddess of the Forgotten. The blood that pooled around her was already congealing, turning black. The woman may have been synonymous with domination itself, yet she would die, apparently, as any human would.

Her hand, flawlessly pale, reached out for me. It wasn’t blood loss that gave her skin this fantastical quality, but her race.

“Demon-kin” I muttered. The word forced itself into my vocabulary, but I immediately forgot how strange that is.

Her youthful face, which likely obscured her true age, was scrunched up in pain.

I was compelled to take her hand…

The hand of my Mistress was warm… It was hot. Fiery. As though great power might rampage from it at any moment.

The sky at that moment, as well as the stones, and the air, were hauntingly frigid. The only warmth dwelled in the hand I held.

Somebody once said this: Suppose that all questions of science are answered. That is, all possible questions. Still then, the problem of life remains. The question of why sits untangled.

Then, there is no question. This is the nature of the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. For there cannot be a question where nothing can be said.

A new type of reality filled my mind. It was the future I would attain. No matter the hardships, no matter how many I killed, or however many times I died…

I wondered this as the Goddess died and her command invaded the deepest recesses of my swirling mind. I wondered how I had ever lived without meaning.

I forgot to wonder what it meant to have had lived before now. What may have been a former life faded from my memories.