A land as dry as it is wet. A land as frigid as it is scorching. A land of strange legends and uneasy omens. And yet, a land populated by plentiful townsfolk. Situated at the foot of a great, spiked mountain that pierces into the clouds above, a mountain endlessly shaped with monolithic triangular protrusions and labyrinthian caveways, is the town of Kulku. Known only for the dangerous tales from their own Mount Kulku, and the distinct melody of their ritualistic anthem, the town remains quiet, and yet so full of life. In a place where folklore is shared by candlelight, no one thinks twice about the validity of such tales. It's all just a work of fiction, made up by creative minds long ago. But one of those minds saw something else. Something frightening. Something that felt real. A vision of great disturbance: a prophecy seemingly foretold by the universe itself. And so, in a state of deep confusion and disturbance, Airut got up from the desk he had dozed off on. Pens on the desk had knocked over and scattered on the ground, leaving behind tendrils of congealed ink inching across the floorboards, seemingly growing on its own as if it was alive and trying to go somewhere. He picked one up and immediately scribbled what he could remember down on the crooked page next to him. "FLIGHT OF THE SCAVENGER" Next to it, he sketched an image of a large raven-like creature with wide, withered wings and three glowing green eyes in a triangle formation on its head. The creature's form was very chaotic and eldritch in nature, with many strange thin tentacles jutting out of its back and wrapping around underneath to ultimately face forward. This dangerous and frightening being, The Scavenger, was set to be erected from the heart of Mount Kulku's centermost chamber, and break its way out of the stone prison by way of eroding the material around it. Once free, this beast would bring an end to every Kulkuan life and leave the town's structures in ruin. Of course, as soon as Airut came to his senses, he had the thought of telling the people around him. He warned everyone in his immediate family, but they all dismissed it as a strange and spooky story. He tried to call out to the people in neighboring homes, but they didn't even bat an eye to him. Eventually, after everybody had seemingly not even cared, Airut admitted defeat and assumed all it had been was a weird nightmare. A big unholy bird creature born from stone? Crumbling the rock around it by the gust of its wings alone? How foolish. Of course nothing like that could be real. It was all just a bad hallucination, no matter how real it felt to him. Airut just simply needed to forget this ever happened. And so forget he did. Four years pass by, long and uneventful. The town is still carrying on how it had before, surprising to no one. But the long forgotten visions of Armageddon had found their way back to the town in a new physical form. As the four years had passed, something stirred within Mount Kulku. Something that had gone completely unnoticed. Something just as the visions had told. The embryo of a raven once small had evolved into a larger mass. All that was missing was consciousness. All that was missing was the seed. The seed of grief brought forth by the machinations of Mother Nature. The seed in the form of a pebble, cut loose within the central chamber's ceiling and brought down upon the unconscious being. Of the creature's eyes, two were closed, but the third eye situated right center and above the other two had remained open but empty. A hole in the organism where the key must be inserted. And as the pebble tumbled down towards the mighty bird, slipping directly into the third eye, Kulku's fate was sealed in a dark bloody velvet. The pebble was absorbed by the eyelid, now closed shut. Inside, it crumbled down into tiny subatomic particles, rearranging itself supernaturally into materials previously unknown to man. As the eyelid opened back up slowly, the green light filled the dark chamber. And the wings slowly s p r e a d . The genesis of a destroyer. And the destruction of the current world. The mountain began to shake. Very minimally, completely unobservable to the naked eye at first. But then it grew. Over the course of several hours it grew. Within the chamber, the Scavenger was born. Its wings slowly moving in an oscillating motion, now growing faster and faster with each pulse. Wind gusts on the ground moving further and further with each swipe. Small rocks being pushed away, inch by inch until... t h e y c r u m b l e i n t o n o t h i n g And as the SCAVENGER took its FLIGHT, The current UNIVERSE would lose its SIGHT. The rocks previously situated on the ground below had vanished. Consumed by the Scavenger, they were eroded from reality and replaced with an empty vacuum of space. And as the matter disappeared bit by bit, the Scavenger grew that much more, until eventually, a pathway formed within the mountain. Continuing to grow ever longer as the creature scavenges for rock in front of it. l a l f a f o n n u n d o u d r g t e n r h r e g t r e h r e r until it breached the front of the mountain. The townsfolk finally took notice of the anomalous entity, but by this moment it was already too late for any of them to prepare. Airut had been quietly reading a book when his family had received the evacuation call. They quickly dropped everything and went outside. Up in the sky was the Scavenger, flying high above the mountain now crashing down upon the town. Airut looked up at the Scavenger completely stunned. He had forgotten entirely of his weird dream, but the creature seemed vaguely familiar to him. Had he seen it in an illustration? Perhaps a friend drew it? He knew he had seen this somewhere. somewhere. somewhere. The erosion of the rock and the very ground below him began to make running more and more difficult. With each passing step, a foot would easily get caught in a hole left behind. The townsfolk flocked in hundreds as the houses around them had begun collapsing. A smoke cloud had formed around the Scavenger, a smorgasbord of materials circling around it with the wind. It had singlehandedly formed its own tornado in a place where tornadoes had never formed before. The world around was eroding to nothing, the terrain growing more jagged, more beaten. Running out of breath, Airut dripped over a loose stone and faceplanted dead into the rough ground. His nose immediately started bleeding. His feet stuck in a deep gaping hole, ankles twisted. He tried to get up but it was useless. He tried to call for help but nobody came. He tried to cry but his tears were dried up in the wind. He tried to live but the Scavenger consumed any chance. While chunks of matter were disappearing all around him, he too was withering. His skin peeling off of his body. Chunks of muscle eroding into thin paste. The air around him turned into a thick red cloud. Painful shrieking slowly lulled into silence as Airut's very own brain had began to rip apart into dust. The town of Kulku once bustling with culture was reduced, e r o d e d i n t o e m p t y s p a c e . As the Scavenger took its bite out of the world... reality had faltered. The fabric of space ripped open by a creature... born of stone... born of nothingness... The universe... born of dust AND TO DUST THOU SHALT R E T U R N . -- E N D --