Hope and Humanity

I have been searching. What for, I do not know. The scenery around me constantly shifts like a living thing, each step forcing new ground beneath me. But it’s never unfamiliar; every sharp ridge, every jagged crag, every endless plain of desolation feels like I have walked it before. Over and over again. Perhaps I have. Perhaps I am walking in circles—bound in a cruel, eternal loop. My legs? I don’t feel them anymore. They carry me forward, but they are no longer mine. My arms hang limp at my sides, useless, as if they too have become artifacts of a distant past. I haven’t opened my mouth in what feels like centuries. What would I say? What would I scream to the void that is my only company?

Sometimes, I close my eyes, hoping to drift into a sleep from which I will never awaken. But I never sleep. Not anymore. The boundaries between reality and dream, between waking and death, have long since blurred. I am caught in the nexus, where existence itself has stripped me of my humanity.

How long have I walked like this? It feels as though my body slithers forward even when I am no longer conscious of its movements. When I am exhausted, I still walk. When my mind cries for respite, I still walk. And when my feet are no longer feet—when the flesh has rubbed away against the barren rock to reveal gleaming bones—I still walk. I cannot stop. They won't let me stop.

There is something white poking through the cracked remains of what were once my toes. Is it dust? Or perhaps it is the bare bone, exposed to the indifferent world. I can’t bring myself to care. I stopped caring long ago. Pain, too, is a distant memory. My feet screech against the stone, but I am beyond feeling. My body is no longer a body—it is a vessel, nothing more. A vessel for a soul that is evaporating.

Time passes. I think. Or perhaps it doesn’t. I cannot tell if the hours stretch into decades, or if the decades compress into mere moments. The passage of time is a gift I have lost. But this loss is a blessing. The less I know of time, the more I can lose myself in it. Let it take me, swallow me whole, erase me. I want to lose more of it. I want to lose everything. No, I don't want to lose myself, lose the memories of my loved ones.

The landscape before, mocks me. The rocky terrain shifts, its stone teeth protruding from the earth like a mouth torn open in a cruel smile. Some peaks are jagged, stretching toward a sky that is neither day nor night. Others are worn and broken, as if they, too, have suffered a beating from time’s relentless fists. A landscape freshly bruised and battered—much like me. It seems I too have become a part of it.

We were supposed to find a new home here. That much I remember. We were supposed to save them—our brothers and sisters—those left behind in the world that burned. We were supposed to bring hope to those who had prayed for salvation. They prayed, they screamed, they cried until their eyes melted, their throats shattered, and their tears dried. Just like mine. We even forgot how we sounded.

But who are “we”? As far as I know, there is only “I.” There has only ever been “I.” Perhaps I walked with others once, but those memories are as dust, blown away by the endless wind. Now, I am alone. Alone with my thoughts that cling like ghosts, haunting the edges of my mind. If only I were a machine, I could pull my own cord and let it end. But they won’t let me—not even then.

Was I their savior once? Their god? I must have been. They prayed to me, looked to me to deliver them from the terrible fate that fell upon us all. But their prayers have failed. I have failed. And who, now, do they pray to? Who do they cry out to in the darkness, seeking a voice to answer them? Because their god is no more. I am no more. But what about my god? Where is He? Who did I believe in all this time? God is dead.

I have become nothing. I walk, but I walk for no one. I walk with no purpose. The mission—my mission—is forgotten, lost to the void. I am a husk. A hollow figure driven only by the faintest whisper of a dream that this might end. That this is, perhaps, all a dream. If only I could awaken, find myself somewhere else, somewhere far from here. But I cannot. For if this is a dream, then I am the dreamer who has long since forgotten how to wake. Oh, dear mother, hold me close and put me to sleep. For if I sleep in this reality, I may wake up in the next.

I haven’t eaten in what feels like an eternity. The last meal was something... something forbidden. Something that shouldn’t have passed my lips, yet I consumed it, desperate, my senses numbed by starvation, by visions. It was made from the same elements as me—alive, wriggling, its flesh yielding beneath my teeth. Its movements against my tongue, stirred a forgotten primal part of me. It tasted sweet, sweeter than anything I had ever known. But forbidden things often do.

Perhaps that’s why now, a part of my arm shines white, bone gleaming in the relentless heat of this twin-star system. A reminder of what I have become. My arm dangles at my side like an old man’s cane, brittle and twisted, no longer whole, no longer mine. Bent, tattered—an extension of the landscape itself. I am the Ouroboros with legs, destined to consume myself someday.

But what does it matter? Who were they, or rather, what were they? I can no longer tell. Everything was fine until we made contact. How naive we were. We believed we were alone in the universe—masters of our own fate, the pinnacle of creation. Our science told us so. Centuries of learning, experiments, and exploration had assured us that we were the only sentient life in the cosmos. But it was a lie. We were never alone. They were watching.

We thought we were gods. Fools! We played with the universe as if we controlled it, casting dice, expecting the golden numbers to appear, over and over again. But the dice was never a cube; it was a sphere—rolling, spinning, slipping from our grasp. We thought we were throwing it into infinity, but we never realized it was rolling down a cliff. A cliff we now lie at the bottom of, unable to climb back up.

The planet we landed on—what a cruel joke it was. We thought it was rich, a perfect world that could nurture life. Our probes had shown us rivers and plains, where trees stood tall and green. But the land was deceiving, no they made it deceiving. At first, they—the creatures—were just a part of the landscape. Black as the void we had traveled through, still as the rocks scattered across the ground. They lay in silence, almost invisible against the ash and dust.

It was the first fool, one of my crew, who made contact. He reached out with his gloved hand and touched the slimy surface, the ooze that lay still like a predator does for its prey. For a moment, nothing happened. And then... his hand was gone. Not severed, not bleeding, but simply gone. As if it had never existed. Soon after, he was gone too, swallowed by the same void that had taken his hand.

We watched in horror, but still, some of us were drawn in. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe madness. Or maybe it was something far worse, something that had reached out from the dark and touched our minds long before we ever landed here. We began to see visions—beautiful, glorious visions. Visions of our home planet, of Earth, reborn in full bloom. Forests spread like emerald blankets across the land, oceans sparkled with sapphire brilliance. Life flourished, peaceful and abundant. And the food! We saw long tables laid out with every delicacy we had ever craved: roasted meats, rich wines, fresh bread still warm from the oven. Everything we could want, or need was there before us.

And we ate. Oh, how we ate. I remember the taste of the food, the way it filled me with warmth, with life, with hope. It felt so real, every bite, every swallow. I was convinced—convinced beyond any doubt—that we had found salvation. Our mission had succeeded. We had discovered paradise. Paradise beyond our star.

But it was only when my plate was empty that the truth came crashing down around me. The warmth and richness of the feast dissolved like smoke in the wind, and the barren, jagged reality of this cursed planet reasserted itself. However, I was the only one to wake. How could the others wake up when there was nothing left of them to wake? Their bones lay scattered across the table, gnawed and partially chewed, stripped clean of flesh. The creatures I had once called friends, comrades, the last remnant of our species, reduced to brittle white remains. I stared at them, horrified, yet knowing deep inside that it was I who had done this. The one who was supposed to lead them to salvation, to show them the light, had instead thrown them into the abyss of his own inner void.

I want to die. Oh, how I long for death’s cold embrace. But death has forsaken me, just as I have forsaken my parents, my friends, my people. It refuses to kiss me, to offer me any form of release. I walk this wasteland, bones scraping against rock, toes falling, and still I am not allowed to perish. In the grand scale of things, I understand now that we were never significant. We were but prey, wandering blind through a forest filled with predators far greater than we could comprehend, waiting to be devoured by the darkness that surrounded us all along.

Now that I remember… we were not supposed to bring hope to our people. We were the hope. The last desperate flicker of light in a dying universe. But no one survived. No one ever did. They were already feeding on our planet long before we pooled the last of our resources to send humanity’s remnants far, far away from their onslaught. But now, I see the cruel irony. Lady Luck did not smile upon us; she raised her axe high and struck with precision. We were not led away from those horrors. No, we were sent toward them, directly into their waiting maw. Their planet. Their home.

The irony is sharp, bitter as bile in my throat. In fleeing their reach, we had only placed ourselves in their hands. A loop of cosmic cruelty, unimaginable until now. We tried to escape our fate, and yet we ran straight into it. All our knowledge, all our science, all our attempts to outwit the predators stalking us through the stars, futile. They had us from the beginning, and we never even knew it.

If this is the reality I am fated to endure, if this is the truth that has been carved into the fabric of my existence, then I would sooner scour my mind with the jagged rocks beneath my feet. For those I once cherished—those who stood beside me with hope in their hearts—they are gone, vanished into the abyss of non-existence. All that remains of them are bones and echoes.

And I? I am left to wander, cursed to carry their memories like stones tied to my broken limbs. But I need not worry, for even these memories are fading away, like breadcrumbs scattered among a crowd of pigeons.

I will never have the chance to end my suffering. I know this now. The human mind—so fragile in some ways, so resilient in others—is a machine built to endure. To survive. Even against its own will. And these creatures—these abominations that have made a sport of us—they plan to test that endurance. To see how long we can last. How much torment we can take before we break, or perhaps, how long we can keep going before we forget we were ever human. However, I alone am the single specimen left of what we once called humanity.

I am their plaything now, just as we were from the very start. They do not kill us. They do not let us die. They feed on our hopes, our dreams, our suffering. Perhaps they feed on something even deeper than that—our very souls, if such a thing even exists anymore.

I walk forward because I cannot stop. I am drawn to the void, to the black shapes that shift and writhe in the distance, just beyond my sight. They are watching, waiting. They will not let me go. They will not let me fall. No matter how hard I try to break myself on the stones, I will never be free of them. No, they are inside me.

I am trapped in this nightmare, this endless loop of suffering, and I know now that there is no escape. Not in life. Not in death.

And so, I continue. Step after step. Forever.

“All of humanity is addicted to the sweet-smelling poison of hope. Even those who recognize their addiction cannot abstain from it. To lose hope is to die—whether physically or mentally. And so, we keep injecting.” - Mandred.

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