There are two fundamental things shared by all organisms on Vintreth: they age and they die. From the largest Niberious arching over the rooftops of Luden with its long, ribbon-like tentacles, to the smallest mimic tucked quietly on a bookshelf. They all age and they all die.

  He had no such luxury. He was the first, and if all went as it had been going, he would be the last as well.

  He remembered waking up, before those words had first been stated and before the concept of sleep was truly understood (if anyone could say it really has been). So empty, so incredibly empty it was to be the only one alive. That was the first feeling that struck him. He could not admire the beautiful sun sending heavenly rays of warmth through treetops, nor weep at the vast sea so striking and clear it led to millennia of poetry in its honor. He simply sat on the ground, tilted up his pale head, and asked if that was it.

  There can’t be words put to an emotion that has never before existed in anything but animals. He realized this rather quickly, in the process of inventing language. He spent many years trying to describe it, every night staring up at the sky and pleading for a concept that hadn’t been conceived.

  “I feel like you forgot to put something under my skin, Father. You have missed a piece I cannot function without.”

  “It’s akin to eating bad meat, but never-ending, Father. Something is weighing and churning in the pit of my stomach.”

  “They do not talk back, Father. The animals cannot express how I express.”

  And Creation understood. He had built children of deep shadow and gleaming steel for much the same reason, yet He had never considered something so… Alive, might undergo an experience so divine as loneliness. There were more then, he couldn’t remember who came first. The Sea of Heaven forming combinations of creatures so vile as to be beautiful. They grew to the size of trees and glowed like a million sunsets. He nurtured them deep below the surface, a microcosm of love so specific it became something more than the sum of its parts. The Nature of Heaven raising mushroom-capped warriors and giving them a strength so profound it required culling. Mind brought horned devils to the peaks of ice-capped mountains, Smile placed a folk with deep hunger in their veins, then from Light came a bright, zealous people.

  He did not feel the twinge of a fettered, bitter loneliness for a very, very long time. But there are two fundamental things shared by all organisms on Vintreth.

  He was sitting on a hill that would, in a few hundred years, be known as Widow’s Peak. An abrupt cliff sliced it through its middle, smooth grass transitioning to harsh stone in an instant. He had brought with him two items: a lotus flower inside a jar half filled with water that had been nearly impossible to get, and a stout glass of whisky. A pink lotus was the first gift he had ever received, from a little girl of Heaven’s Smile. The inkling of a culture starting to take root, represented in one miniscule gesture. The original was long dead, of course, as was the girl, but he kept that memory close to the chest for centuries. A simple, selfless gesture that taught him more about people than a hundred years could.

  The whisky was for courage. It could be said that he, the first man, was about the most cowardly creature on the planet. It was a novelty for other people to die of old age before other accidents or calamities got to them. Not him, he had survived several lifetimes skirting the edges of violence and hiding where no one would care to look. So long as nothing damaged him beyond repair, that big overarching killer would never get him.

  He did not age. He felt as if he did, on the inside. Like he matured and changed with everyone else. But he stared down the end of Widow’s Peak into the water below and saw straw blond hair down his back at the same length it always was, bright brown eyes under a tilted brow, trimmed beard and pinched lips. It made him nauseous, as it always did, to see himself. He figured it was funny how that worked; seeing something over and over for so long had caused him to develop an aversion to it. He somewhat enjoyed the feeling. It made him feel like a person, revulsion being such a human emotion. But there was one experience he had yet to feel despite all his travels, one last disconnect between him and everyone else. He was the first man, and he would make sure he was not the last.

  The whisky wasn’t particularly good, a lot of alcohol at that time was putting something in a barrel and seeing what happened. It burned his throat, making his eyes prick with wet tears as he thumped his chest with a closed fist and coughed. A blooming fire that roiled through him from tip to toe. It fuzzed the edges of fear a bit, smoothed over sharp terror into a more manageable dread. He didn’t think much in those last moments. He had assumed his whole life would lay out before him like some great unwinding scroll. Frankly, there was far too much of it to fit on the page. Too much information, too much time, an overload of noise so intense it became nothing at all. He had become nothing at all. He stood and threw his arms into a languid stretch. That was alright. He could handle nothing. It was the everything that worried him.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The jar of lotus was smooth and cool, like a fall morning, in his white-knuckled hands. His ears were buzzing with static. He knew that if he didn’t move now, he would never move at all. He held his breath as he stepped close to the rocky side of the cliffs. There was no reason in particular for the action. He was about to feel far worse than any water up the nose could manage. But when you’re about to fall into water, you hold your breath. It was just such a basic mantra from who-knows-where he felt he had to follow it.

  The first man didn’t gaze out into the vast nothing of the ocean; rather, he looked straight down. It was hard to judge the distance, all indistinguishable rock leading to a sharp bank. He knew goals; he knew how going from point A to point B was supposed to work. This was a plan, just like any other. He had a problem, and he was going to solve it. That was all. He skidded bare feet closer to the edge, almost testing how close he was willing to get. He wore only a black robe cinched at the waist. Not wanting to get any of his nice clothes dirty, he had folded them all neatly and placed them in the middle of the unnamed room of the unnamed tavern in the unnamed town he had been staying in most recently, alongside a note saying they were to be donated. The loose gravel underfoot shifted, and he realized he was at the end of his rope. Death was an odd thing-so undefined. But he knew where he wanted to end up. Wherever the people were.

  Pressing a gentle kiss to the lid of his jar, One let himself fall.

  In all his imaginings, he had only ever pictured the jarring stop at the end. Never the descent. Widow’s Peak was tall, much taller than he had thought. He had the time watch. To watch the watercolor melt of grey sky and pink clouds. The ocean was crystalline blue, foaming white at the edges. He saw the lighthouses, titans reigning over lapping water. Their blades reflected as they pressed beneath the surface. Slender hilts rose like beacons. Stained glass windows stand proudly along the pommel, stretching over the guard. They were beautiful. He was afraid, and they were beautiful.

  His brain felt like it was melting against the sides of his head, wind shooting across his body as his grip on the lotus loosened with the force of it. The world went a blurry black around the edges. He felt his stomach in his throat. Tears are ripping from dry eyes. The jar slid from frigid, sweat-soaked fingers. He stretched a hand out. Flexed frozen fingers towards the cool glass when-

  -The ground met him.

  Jagged rock shot through his chest, cracking his sternum in two near-perfect halves. His ribs shattered, spilling fragments across his lungs like stardust. Burst fractures cascaded down his spine. He realized distantly that the sensation from his legs all the way up to his neck had gone gummy and numb. Blood vessels popped. Something along his side ruptured. Fluid near his eye began leaking out of his ear.

  His thoughts turned to molasses. He knew he was supposed to be in pain (and something very bad was happening to his body), but there was a dreamlike quality to watching himself come apart. Splat. Black sunspots blotting his vision, making the searing shine of those marvelous light houses dim away to nothing. It was supposed to be quick; it was supposed to be painless. An instant alive, then dead between breaths. He couldn’t exhale; there was no breathing, no release. He held air in the loose spread of his stomach. Let it linger in the thick, collapsed roots of his lungs. Had it danced in his splayed brain matter. But never once did it slip from between his clenched lip.

  As his remaining unburst eye drifted closed, One thought of flowers and dancing and people. He had visions of soft fur, of kindness. There was no kindness in death, he realised. Wet droplets rolling down ruddy cheeks, no kindness at all.

  He felt so very silly for the notion.

  The tendrils of ice water sinking into his back began to warm, rising to enclose his chest and legs. Light filtered through his eyelid, something tickling his nose. The exposed pieces of his body: intestines, pieces of bone, the gel of his sclera, all washed away. Something soft rose in their place. His stomach sealed shut, one eye fluttering open as something bloomed from the other. Roses tied their vines within his gut, daffodils weaving the vertebrae of his spine back together. He lifted his head to find the broad top of a chrysanthemum holding him aloft, above the rough rock that had previously impaled him. A pink lotus lay innocuously upon his smooth, pale stomach. Below him, spools of blood stretched, keeping their shape. They weren’t supposed to do that, were they? Dandelion fluff snapped the synapses in the grey mush of his brain. No, it was supposed to dilute. His guts crawled up the stem of his petal seat, a great light rumbling from beneath the surface. Ten rays of light, one for each finger on either hand, cupped fragments of pink bone in their gentle palms. They rose, higher and higher, above the chrysanthemum, towering among the clouds. One felt his eye shrivel from his skull, the flower in his socket curling before both were renewed as if nothing had happened. Such radiant light.

  White shards rained from that spot just above the clouds, spiraling tighter and tighter as they hugged closer to the patient snake of intestines waiting to meet them on the flower. Some a deeper eggshell while others fell illogically pale.

  One pushed himself onto weak elbows. His throat felt dry with flaky blood and awe. Only a few feet away, guts and bone playfully danced into form. First, a curled gush of organs floated a few inches above the surface. One could be sure that only around half of those had leaked from him. Next, a rainbow of white bones lovingly cradled them.

  There was a moment of pause before the next, a stutter. The hands lowered themselves from their place in the sky and poked the half-formed body. That divine light rippled out, illuminating everything in the area from within for only a moment.

  Then, as if remembering itself, slabs of greyed skin rose out of the sea, painting themselves tightly over skull and knee. An eye, One’s own, splashed into a socket as the other unraveled into a deep purple lily. A single strand of blond hair shone against the rising sun, landing ceremoniously atop the figure’s head before sprouting into hundreds of thousands of inky black fibers.

  The thing that was not One blinked, and he blinked back.