Starlight

We should be hunting. But ever since we lost the others, Saint avoids hunting at night if we can avoid it. Especially in the forest out there, too many variables, she says. She likes it more when we find their nesting places in the day and execute them while they sleep. While I gotta say, there’s something about getting to them where they think they’re safe and killing them, I much prefer them to die fully aware that I’m the one ending them. It’s more satisfying that way.

But we’re doing that less and less these days, out of caution. Saint has a point, there are only four of us now and there won’t be any more when we’re gone. The creatures already figured out how to prevent that fatal mistake.

Tonight is the first night I”ve been able to look into the night sky and not be hunting. We see it differently than humans now, fringes of color on the ultraviolet spectrums. Things float through my mind, like the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox but I don’t recall learning them. Saint says things like these are the residuals of who we used to be. Back when we were still human.

I know that the lights I see are from stars long since dead. Almost poetic, when you think about it, dead lights falling on a dying planet. Beautiful and indifferent to who or what wins this war. They’re not worried about where the creatures came from or if humans will find a way through this. They’ll be here either way, once we’ve all killed each other and leave this planet nothing more than a graveyard without answers. Covered in the remains of empires and monsters from places unknown. A dead world lit by dead stars.

Church says that we’re becoming immortal through every victory. Strange through, we’re winning a war for those who’ll never know existed. How would that look, monsters killing monsters for humanity? Not a good marketing campaign, in my opinion. And yet here we.

The world doesn’t mean anything, really. I have no memories of it and no interaction with it. My world is the creatures we hunt day and night in the ruins of lost cities and in the wild wastelands between them. Maybe someday we’ll kill all of them. Or maybe someday they’ll kill all of us.

At least the stars will still be there.