And Seri flew until he could fly no more. And Seri ran until he could run no more. And Seri walked until he could walk no more. And Seri crawled until he could crawl no more. And when there was no movement left in him, he rolled onto his back and laid still.
His eyes gazed upwards and he saw the stars. He saw them not as tiny dots but as great balls of fire. Masses of heat and pressure so vast that no one could walk around one. He saw where hey sagged and fell, where spots patterned their surfaces. He saw the light growing and spreading, vanishing and changing. He saw the heart of the universe and felt nothing.
Seri saw the stars not as they were, but as they had been, as they would be. He saw not a snapshot of the universe but a snapshot of every way that the universe would ever be. He saw the trails stars left as they carved over the sky, as they exploded and reincarnated, as cosmic dust merged and danced and fell away. He saw the millions of places he had been, the footsteps left in an uncaring cosmos. He saw all the places he had yet to walk. He saw the vastness of the world, and the insignificance of his role in it. He saw the measure of infinity. He held it up against himself and found himself wanting, for the weight of uncountable aeons was too much for any mind to bear. The knowledge that he would bear it someday was maddening.
The size of the world was unknowable to all but him. He carried a curse none would ever understand. His movements shattered continents. His feet straddled mountains. His breaths broke hurricanes. He slipped from form to form as easily as he liked. He had mastered death itself. His very motions drew across time and space, leaving patterns and wakes that could be studied but never understood. He had come so far. He had so very far to go.
He was so very tired.
He shut his eyes. The sunlight shone on him anyway. It was bright and it was warm and it felt good.
And the planet spun its merry dance, the sun hiding once again. Seri made no movement. He felt the cold for the smallest moment before the warmth returned. He felt his bones relax slightly. The sun rose. The sun set. The sun rose. The sun set. The sun rose. The sun set. He had lived thousands of times longer than this sun had burned. He would live for thousands of times more. The sun didn't mind. It knew Seri was far brighter than it would ever be and yet it shared its light regardless.
Eventually, the animals found him. Seri made no move, gave no sound, as they ripped the flesh from his bones. First came the wolves, tearing him limb from limb. They chewed and chewed, leaving naught but scraps and bloody carnage. Seri thought about moving. He thought about how with just a thought he could vaporize these aggressors. Instead, for the first time in many years, he thought about pain. He had not felt pain for longer than he could remember and he was curious. It took only that stray thought for his carefully manufactured self control to crack and the pain to come rushing in. If his mouth was still intact, he would've screamed then.
He thought about the way the pain infused him. He thought about the overwhelming totality of it. He thought about how he'd once been just a boy, how avoiding pain had been his driving motivation. He wondered what he was now without it. He spent so long thinking about these things that the wolves had long moved on before he finished.
After the wolves came the scavengers, the racoons and the rats and the hungry things that dwelled in the night. They picked over whatever was left of his body, extracting whatever value they could. They gnawed and chewed and shoved each other to get at the prime pieces. And from the scattered remains of his body, Seri considered hunger. He had no need for food. His sustenance was that of light, of air, of wisdom. His quest for knowledge was eternal and in it, his body had become a rock. He was impermeable to all things physical, to all requirements of life. But surely, to live was to eat? To breath? To feel? He tried to take a shuddering breath, but he had lungs no longer. Instead, he let the air stir upon his bones. That was almost as good, he supposed.
And finally came the maggots. The bugs crawled through what was left and chewed it up and spat it back out again. In this way, Seri passed from flesh into dirt. The stars stared down at him imperiously. They now gazed upon him as he once gazed upon them. Seri made no movement. He made no sound. He felt his body liquify and drain, stirred into the soil. And the roots broke him down further, drinking him dry as the grass grew to cover where once he lay. And the clouds bloomed and the rain fell and the grass grew and the animals ate him again and again and again. Seri let it happen. He was still very tired.
The forest came for him slowly. Forests seem stationary, fixtures of the land. But they move as sure as any other living thing. The seeds drop all around and some grow better than others. And some tress die off and others grow big and tall and over thousands of years. In this way, forests creep.
Seri felt the wooden roots curl over him as the forest swallowed him up. His grassy field was gone in a century long blink of an eye, drowned in wood and branches and the dull cries of birds. His view of the sky, once bright and clear, became fixed upon the canopy. He could've cast his gaze through, continuing to observe the movements of the heavens. But instead, he brought his gaze to the branches and leaves.
There was a beauty to the way the trees unfolded themselves. It was a pattern, repeated and infinite, the continuous forking of wood to create the perfect coverage. The leaves drank the sunlight and scattered the rain and fell once a year, only returning in spring. The trees fought each other, jockeying to be on top, to get the most sun, to grow and to live. Squirrels chattered as they ran along the branches. And each individual branch, each individual leaf contained more life than a whole world. Cells pulsating in unison, chemical movements driven by the warm light of the sun. They drank from the air and used it to grow. Plants were solid air and that made the animals that ate the plants solid air too.
Seri watched the trees for a long time, even as more and more roots curled over him, binding him into the deepness of the soil. He watched as a forest fire blazed past, only for the trees to sprout again just as quickly. He saw animals that dashed from shade to shade, drilling their ways into the trees. He saw the rise and fall of species, the deadly dance of evolution. Animals learned to fly before they learned to fall, the discovery of wings met with teeth and talons. Flesh turned to fur turned to feathers turned to scales and back again. The trees swayed overhead. Clouds rumbled past. For all these changes, it was all the same. The core never broke. It could dress itself up in thousands of faces but the principals guiding it was always the same. Things changed and yet they too stayed the same.
And then the trees vanished.
At first, it was a slight thinning. Perhaps attributable to a rough year, a series of unlucky weather. But then Seri blinked and the forest was gone in its entirety. No more trees. No more leaves. The animals crept away slowly, burning in the sun and starving in the now empty field. And in their place grew towers.
Two hands, two legs, and pointy grins. They smiled as they killed, as they reaped. They carved a swath through the world cutting whatever stood before them. The wood became foundations, toolhandles, little figurines on shelves. The animals were devoured, consumed, fragments of corpses left out to rot. Not rot in the way Seri did, a slow process of returning to the earth, but to rot fast and violently, great heaps of flesh boiling over as the souls struggled to break free. And their towers grew and grew and grew, first wood and then stone and then metal and glass. The people smiled as they took, smiled as they built, smiled even as they killed each other.
They smiled as they poured liquid rock over Seri, sealing him beneath their roads. Roads with which they carried their spoils. Seri watched upwards as the towers grew and grew and the patch of sky he could see grew smaller and smaller, lost to the thundering footsteps of thousands, the dull humming of their machines. He watched as the stars grew dimmer and dimmer, swallowed by the far brighter lights of the fires. He watched and watched as the world grew more linear, grew straighter, grew taller, grew darker.
In the middle of the night, a small creature crawled over to him. It died there, starving to death surrounded by the starkest bounty. Seri reached outwards for it through the layers of rock. But it was too heavy and he was still too tired and there was nothing he could do. Nothing but watch as the next day the people trampled it without even noticing. There was an industrialness to their methods, a brutality to the way they were all consuming.
He knew that he could rise up from his slumber. He could crumble their towers. He could throw their world into their sun, their kind sun which they never deserved. Their kind sun which shone on despite the horrors, which never understood the ways its gift was twisted into horror. It would be so easy. All he had to do was move. What was one more horror on the pile, one more victory over evil? He'd deposed tyrants, slain immortal gods who ruled divine over slave empires. He'd faced abominations the size of worlds, whose every breath spread madness. He'd stood before dragons, ghost, and demons of all kinds. He'd done all this before and he was sure that he would again. The process would be easy and familiar.
But he was still so tired. His body wouldn't come back to him. His soul had grown and grown, threading itself deeper and deeper into the earth, bound to the roots they'd failed to pull up. He was as much the city now as he was Seri and he so very tired.
The planet rejected their tortures. It did its best. It threw storms, tidal waves, and earthquakes. The creatures screamed as they burned, rising up with tooth and claw. The people had the audacity to laugh as tooth broken on metal, as their horrible weapons which split the air with lightning roasted flesh. The stars grew further and further away, harder and harder to see. The sun found itself facing impossible walls of clouds, its light scattered to the depths of space. The future faded too, Seri's sight draining out along with his will.
For the first time since he'd laid down, Seri shut his eyes. He let the darkness take him. He couldn't see a point in doing anything. Change was inevitable. Power corrupted. The cycle was nothing new. He could sweep these people from the surface and something else would rise to take their place. Something new and something horrible in a thousand new ways.
He might've slept for a single day. He might've slept for a thousand years. Either way, when he awoke, the planet was barren and flat. Something had burned the surface, scarring the land. The towers had melted and collapsed. The people were long gone, either fleeing to the depths of the sky or trapped beneath the rubble, long since choked out.
Sitting atop the smooth rocks just above him was a single wooden carving of a creature. It was perfect. It was so lifelike that it could almost move. It was a perfect vessel of nature, a perfect snapshot of a world he hadn't seen for a long time. Seri knew that he would never know who had carved it. Seri knew that he would never know who had left it there for him. Seri knew that he would never know what inspired it, what caused someone to preserve the world as it was.
The world was perfectly still. The weather shifted. Wind and rain gave way to a cold night, gave way to a warm day. Somewhere up above, the sun rose and set.
Seri gazed upwards and saw the stars. There was something beautiful about the way they were distant. They'd seen things he hadn't. Where he failed to remember, they would. They knew things he never would. Their gentle touch was a comfort. They would preside over the end of the universe and they'd do it gladly.
Without even thinking about it, Seri sat up and reached for the stars.