The air in the Wasteland of the Forgotten didn’t move; it pressed, thick with the dust of ages and the silence of the long-dead. This was the domain of Malak, the Watcher.
Malak was less a creature and more a convergence of dread, draped in rags the color of grave-soil. His face was a hollowed skull, his eyes two pinpricks of yellow hunger. In his skeletal hand, he held a lantern—an antique cage of pitted brass, whose light was an impossible, warm amber. It was the only light in the infinite black, and it was the problem.
His sole, unending task was to patrol the endless, cracked earth. The cracks weren’t from drought; they were fissures in reality. Beneath the crumbling crust lay the Before, and the things that still squirmed there longed for the air, for a taste of the thin, weary world Malak occupied.
The weirdness wasn’t the monster, but the light. Malak wasn’t lighting his own way; he was illuminating the cracks. And every time the warm glow fell upon a particularly deep, vibrating fissure, he had to stop. He’d bring the lantern close, its heat making the dust shimmer, and listen.
Tap. Tap-tap.
The sound was like a tiny, insistent knuckle-rapping on glass. It was the sound of something from the Before—something with too many limbs and no real shape—testing the barrier. Malak’s duty was horrifyingly simple: if the tapping was too quick, too loud, or if the amber light caught a sudden, glistening wetness oozing up, he had to feed the crack.
Slowly, agonizingly, he would lower his lamp, not snuffing it, but placing it gently over the most active fissure. The tap-tapping would cease, replaced by a sucking sound, and the light—the precious, warm, only light—would dim, then flicker, then be gone. The thing below had consumed the illumination, the hope, of the little flame.
Then, Malak would remain in the absolute dark, his skull tilted, waiting. After an eternity that might have been a minute, a tiny, fresh flicker would reignite inside the empty brass cage. A new spark, a new life, drawn from the sheer, unending need for a Watcher. And Malak would lift the lamp, its amber glow illuminating the next set of cracks, and continue his patrol, knowing that eventually, he would have to feed the light away again.
He was the guardian of the dark, and the perpetual sacrifice of the light.
The Ledger of Ash and Stone
The figure known only as the Scribe of Silence (the lantern-bearer) had a singular, maddening realization: the cracks in the ground were not new. They were the seams of an ancient wound, and the things that crawled out of them had a disturbing habit.
The ruined tombstones scattered across the cracked plain were the first victims. They weren’t merely weathered by time; they had been scoured. Malak, the Scribe, knew the process well, for it was his fault.
A thousand years ago, this was a proud, vast necropolis, a fortress of memory. When the Great Tear first opened, spewing forth the Grave-Flesh—amorphous, hungry, and impossibly patient—the people fled. The priests tried to seal the Tear with prayer. The warriors tried with steel. Malak, then a common grave-tender, watched them all fail.
The Grave-Flesh did not eat bodies. It ate identity.
When it spilled out, it crept onto the grandest mausoleums, the tallest pillars, and the most lovingly carved headstones. It covered the stone like a damp, black mold. Where it lingered, the names disappeared. The dates vanished. The sentimental epitaphs—Beloved Father, True Friend, Eternal Rest—were polished away until the stone was blank and cold.
The crumbled tombstones in the image are the ones the Grave-Flesh has finished feeding on. They are smooth, faceless wreckage, the stone equivalent of a man’s mind wiped clean.
Malak’s curse is that he was the last one alive, forced to watch the final, agonizing erasure of his own people. His lantern’s light is not a guide, but a warning beacon he must shine only on the new cracks. He is searching for any stone that still carries an inscription, an old mark, or a piece of a forgotten name.
His fear is that one day, he will turn his lantern’s gaze upon the shattered remnants of the necropolis and find that not a single stone bears a mark, leaving the Wasteland perfectly, horribly, clean—the final triumph of the Grave-Flesh. And when the memories are all gone, Malak knows, he will be next.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 