As I watched the small black mark it began to move. Ever so slowly. You wouldn’t notice unless you stared and stared. But there it was deep in the distance, movement. Something in that dark drawing near. There were three liver spots spaced across my forearm; black and deep. Deeper than skin, deeper than colour. And in them something came closer.

I Looked out across an endless mass of hills and forest. This secret place I had made. Beyond the reach of eyes and ears. Hidden away in the cracks, I thought.

I had closed the sky with fire, sealing myself in with a blazing arch of golden flame that bubbled above me, casting an endless warm light. The very edges of the land were sealed with rock and tree unmeasurably thick. A knot of nature that wound its self-made noose around me. There was nothing that could be traced here. I had taken my self to a place beyond borders, and before time.

But it was not far enough.

I knew their faces now. In those dark spots. I could see them clawing their way inch by inch closer. Schnappes his small bites and nips; that which devoured your soul piece by piece. Jaeger the hunter, relentless and unending and Barenfang the bear, the catcher the ensnarer. There is no hiding from the Goblin creatures. They exist but to hunt and through all things they find a way.

Now they had found me, through my own imperfections. A blemish of my pristine soft skin. I laughed. It had been 100,000 years and back again. And now time to face my punishment.

They would simply, cut me open and slice my heart in two. Split asunder and into two forms. One half of a whole forever cursed with a longing for the other. Destined to roam endlessly looking for the other; man and woe they named them. I would never know what I had lost, just that I was.

They would take my bones and scatter them into a hundred thousand parts across the world. Each to become a living beast of nature. Each one’s death I would feel echoing back through time. Designed to breed and die again, so I would relive it over and over, endlessly.

I screamed as they came bursting forth from me; the first birth of darkness, through me. I screamed again as they held me in their tight claws and began to slice through me. I screamed a third time when they reached my heart. That final scream was unlike anything heard before, it melted the roof of my world into liquid thundering downwards, it split the ground and hills into 7 giant forms which spun out into the new oceans. The arc of light was doused except one central spark, which hung floating in the air, drifting and in time slowly too it would fade.

And then, there was nothing left, except it all and the fading echoes of my voice, now just a breath of wind across the earth.