HUNGER WITHOUT DEATH

The Void learned his memories.

It began with small mistakes.

A footstep where no floor existed. The smell of red dust. The distant rattle of a laboratory ventilation fan that needed maintenance.

Ren'ō turned toward each sound even after he understood the trap.

Laana appeared most often.

She stood in her white coat, untouched by the destruction, holding two bowls of noodles. Sometimes she asked why he had failed. Sometimes she begged him to wake. Sometimes she said nothing and simply walked away.

Ren'ō followed until she disappeared.

Then he stopped following.

The Void changed tactics.

It gave him his mother. His father. Soldiers from Citadel Nine. Children from the district he had failed to defend when he was sixteen. Every face carried the same question.

Why did you live?

Ren'ō answered differently each century.

"Bad luck."

"Laana made me."

"I do not know."

Eventually: "Because I have not killed him yet."

Hatred kept him intact longer than grief did.

He trained the Divine Remnant with no teacher and no environment. He created resistance by pushing against the Void. He learned to gather light into his palms and discovered that the darkness consumed it. He made another. Then another.

Each light survived a little longer.

He learned to construct weight beneath his feet. A surface no wider than a coin. Then a plate. Then a floor stretching beyond sight.

He stood for the first time in two thousand years.

The act nearly broke him.

Ren'ō took one step.

The golden floor shattered.

He fell nowhere and began again.

His humor changed in the dark. Once it had been a shield kept polished for other people. Now it became a knife he used against despair.

When the Void showed him Laana criticizing his posture, he told the hallucination she had been dead too long to become more annoying.

When his recreated Citadel collapsed for the hundredth time, he looked at the ruins and said, "Still not up to code."

When he forgot his own face, he built one from memory and decided the result looked too serious.

He made himself smile.

The expression felt monstrous.

He kept it anyway.

By the third millennium, the Divine Remnant no longer convulsed inside him. It moved when he chose. Gold flowed through his veins without tearing them open. He could create matter in small quantities, fold distance, and hear disturbances beyond the Void's boundary.

Most were too faint to understand.

One was not.

A woman's voice echoed through layers of unreality.

Not Laana.

Not a hallucination.

Someone was reciting coordinates in an ancient celestial language.

Ren'ō listened for six years before he was certain.

He placed both hands against the dark.

"You took your time," he said.

The voice stopped.

For the first time in five thousand years, something outside the Void had heard him.