How many days have passed.
Months maybe.
I stopped counting somewhere between the third siege and the burning of what used to be the Eastern Ridge. After that the days stopped having separate meanings. They just became — time passing. Distance covered. People lost.
This war.
It's almost over now.
I can feel it the way I feel my own heartbeat. Or what's left of it.
Who am I.
I am one of the Eight Anchors.
If that title still means anything after everything we did to earn it. Everything we consumed to get here. Everything that was consumed from us.
We are eight.
They are four.
Four left on their side.
You would think those numbers mean something simple. You would be wrong.
…Something is interfering with my memory right now. A static at the edges of things. Blurring the details I need. Names. Faces. The sequence of how we got here.
It will pass.
It always passes.
What matters — what I need you to understand before any of this makes sense — is that it started small.
Ours started with a boy who had no family name, no origin, a boy born from the death of his mother, a cursed child, or so he was called by some, his mother's killer.
A yellow-tier Gastro-class Ra that everyone laughed at.
And a stomach that was hungrier than anyone understood.
Including him.
…
Go back then.
All the way back.
To the very start.
To a boy called Ray — sitting alone in a courtyard eating stiff bread and an orange he'd been saving for two days.
To the morning his stomach noticed something for the first time.
To before he understood what feeding it would eventually cost him.
Go back.