It starts with sunshine, somewhere in a desert, among goats. Heat and dust, long before Christ walked the very same sand. He had a mother, though she didn’t give birth to him. She had found him among the stones, the nameless, child-shaped emptiness. Maybe she wanted to fill her own emptiness with him, that’s why she took the abandoned baby, although everyone begged her not to. Nobody knows where he came from. Some say the rocks birthed him as punishment.

He was surrounded by nothing but despair, the emptiness of the desert, the carcasses of humans and animals scattered all over. He knew that life was lived somewhere else, that others were alive, but he wasn’t. He simply existed, just like the hot sunshine, like the goat shit, like the water you squeeze into your mouth from a dirty rag. He was hungry, forever hungry, and he could never eat enough to feel satisfied. He seemed to be human, but they knew that he wasn’t. That he was empty inside and couldn’t be killed, though many had tried. He knew it too.

His mother sometimes caressed his head, telling him tales about the moon and the stars. He tried to find out where her voice was coming from, how and why it faded into nothingness, into thin air, how it was born in the warmth of the flesh and turned into cold nothing in the air.

He had a knife by then. One night he cut his mother’s throat and devoured her body. That’s when he understood his own nature, though he acted on instinct at first.

He left not a single bite, all of it was absorbed by the emptiness inside him. From every bit of tissue he gained memories, feelings, thoughts, until he possessed all of her, and he turned into the mother himself. He had never felt anything that came close to the ecstasy of consuming a life.

At last, he was someone. He lived on as the mother, eliminating his existence as a child. Nobody could tell the difference, his transformation was so complete.

It was then that he first felt love for a warrior. The warrior didn’t notice that his lover was not human. They were lying on animal fur, the warrior let his lover ride him, because he saw nothing but a young, beautiful woman, and at the peak of his orgasm, the creature slit the man’s throat and devoured his body too.

He was the warrior now, but soon he started to feel bored with this new life. After the joy of devouring there was nothing but emptiness; just because he took someone else’s life did not mean he was capable of living it himself. He could only imitate it, and though his imitation was perfect, it didn’t satisfy him. He could only experience life through devouring others, one life after the other.