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Kars’ endless drag through empty space ended as his drifting finally led him into a planet’s gravity and pulled him down into snow and storm. There he crashed. There he stayed.
And for a while, there was nothing. Even snow was warmer than the great and endless chill of space, but it did not melt him, not fully. A surface layer, perhaps, the dusting of frost that hid his features. Kars' mind did not awaken. His body did not awaken. He was caught in a frozen contortion, and his never ending diapause proceeded through eternity.
Until he awoke.
Not his mind, that still slept, but his body stirred when a living heartbeat stepped in front of him. Like the bacteria and microorganisms that marked the start of life instinct existed when thought did not. He heard a heartbeat, feeling each beat like the plucking of taut strings. He knew what to do, he had done this when he was a part of a wall with his fellows and as tempting and as alluring as a venus flytrap, and he would consume and live. His body lashed out with hooks and ropes sewn from his skin, stone softened and nothing happened because Kars was encased in ice, not stone. Instinct did not know how to work with ice.
The heart continued to beat and moved on.
But it was enough. The brief flush of life made Kars remember remembering. And so he remembered. Remembered that he was. Remembered that he was sentient. Remembered that he was alive. And Kars remembered his life before…at least in chunks.
He remembered he had a name, but not when it was used. He remembered he was perfection, but not what perfection meant. He remembered not being alone, but not what it meant to not be alone. But he remembered. He thought. He was. Kars opened his eyes. Ice still covered him, distorted his view, painted patterns and whorls.
But it wasn't like there was much to see anyway. Snow from the sky. Snow on the ground. Perhaps a distant light, the glow of civilization. With so little, distortion didn’t matter. Kars’ eyes flickered beneath the ice, following the fall of snowflakes. Tracking them. Reacting to stimulus as memories played in his head.
And he wondered. Wondered what he should do now that he could think. He awoke from an instinct, a desire to devour someone whole, but he didn’t need to feed. He was the endpoint and beginning of evolution. He was immortal. He didn’t need to eat. So what was the purpose of life? Should he just go back to sleep?
Something more stubborn than instinct kept him awake. Something that boiled under his skin. A familiar urge, a familiar sensation that burned so brightly it would’ve melted the ice if it wasn’t just a metaphor. So Kars sat and watched the weather and contemplated his life.
---
Time passed—how much time he had no way of knowing, a couple million snowflakes worth of time—and snow began to pile and cloud his vision. And then the heartbeat came back, with another. The instinct did not surface and Kars waited. Snow was brushed from him and he saw a humanoid. Smaller than him, pale and draped in colors, with bright red lips like the color of sweet blood. Its mouth moved and so close, Kars could feel the vibrations of sound.
Ah. Sound. Hearing. He remembered he could hear and let his ears open. The ice again distorted the world, muffled it through layers and layers, but he made out words, and the syntax of the language followed.
“—for coming out, again.”
“You’re welcome, again.”
“Jacobi hasn’t been talking to me. He’s too worried about Santa and it’s all he thinks about.”
“All of us are! He was staring in the middle of the town the other day, just staring.”
“Maybe the stress is getting to him. It’s rough being happy all the time.”
“Maybe so…I wish he wouldn’t be so creepy though. People are getting scared.”
That was the most interesting part of their conversation. They focused on the mundane afterwards and Kars let his thoughts wander. What did this strange ‘Santa’ have to live for? What led him to be like Kars, to stare into empty space and contemplate life? What led him to walk away instead of sitting and trying to remember, like Kars did?
The people left, and sound continued. Music, though not calming birdsong, an artificial tune that reminded him of when he was last awake, walking down the night streets with…ah yes, with Esidisi, that was his name. The tune was even familiar. Yes, it was a foolish human celebration, a time of joy. A foolish thing, he thought, and listened to the music full of artificial happiness, like it could brighten the never-ending snowfall.
The heartbeats returned. “So this is Steve?”
“This is Steve!”
Ugh. They thought his name was Steve. Kars melted the ice a bit, then wondered why irritation would spark him so.
“So Steve just…appeared here one day?”
“Yes.”
“And this isn’t concerning to you at all?”
“It’s something I can look forward to.” Kars noted that this one was paler than before, bones near visible. His lipstick was still the brightest red, bright as blood. “Sometimes, Steve’s eyes get brighter. Like he’s happy to see me.”
“That’s not possible.”
Indeed. Kars would never be happy to see anyone.
“I know. But again, something to look forward to.”
A pause. “Yeah, I can understand that.”
What a pathetic way to live.
And then Kars continued to sit in the snow and only noticed the hypocrisy later than he’d care to admit.
---
The music began to change. It had been a cycle of the same cheery tune over and over, a pattern Kars quickly memorized, but something “caught” and the music changed. It stopped becoming music, for one. The triumphant horns became crackling groans, notes dragged and creaked, it croaked like a dying animal except for the fact that it wasn’t a beast, it was something artificial and fake. In time, Kars would recognize the pattern of this too.
It didn’t come as easily though. The dying excuse for music jumped and scattered, changed pitches and tones and melodies. Perhaps it was a long pattern. Perhaps it was a death rattle, as all things came to an end eventually (except for Kars, of course).
And then, the music took a turn and Kars felt the noise in his blood, it struck him as if it were physical and each note stung. It wasn’t as harsh as the others, it was more subtle, like dry wood being snapped, like dry wood cracking and shattering and it bit at him.
That song was…annoying. Actively annoying. It bit under his skin and boiled his molten blood and he wanted to crush it even though sound did not possess anything to crush. It sparked infuriating memories but Kars could not hold them long enough to understand why.
The song eventually changed and the anger faded. Kars went back to stoic meditation. He dreaded when the demented song would come back again.
---
Incidentally, the people who brushed snow off of him stopped showing up.
It was quite inconvenient.
---
He remembered.
One dark night, just like any other night, he remembered why he hated the music, and everything else came after that.
The twisted sound reminded him of the laugh of one Joseph Joestar. The man with a pathetic grasp of the ripple but full of tricks to make up for it. The man who launched him to space, who caused him to float for so long that he forgot everything in order to save the fragile state of his mind.
Joseph
Fucking
Joestar
That motherfucker.
Kars flexed his shoulders and the ice cracked, a line shattering down his spine. He remembered his purpose. His reason for being. To continue. Living for the sake of living and knowing that he was the pinnacle of creation. Truly, what could be better? He would wait no longer, he would go out and claim this world as his own. It was not the world he grew up in, the world birthed him and his parents, the world that inspired ambition, the world that he lived and loved in, the world he died in, but it would be the one he’d rule as the ultimate being. This was the reason, his proof of existence.
Yes, this was living, this was not just being alive, this was feeling and striving for more. He stretched and pushed himself out of the confines of the ice that froze him for so many years, years that would be more easily understood as millennia. He moved, cracking the shell of his egg. He was ready to emerge, to break free, and he cracked his neck back and shattered the ice around his face. Snow fell in to replace it, foreign and cold and invigorating. He was feeling again, even if it was because he was being buried alive.
Kars breached from the snow as a whale from water and took a deep breath of air, filling his lungs with things no longer needed. The air was crisp and cold and fresh and he grinned so wide he felt the cool air against his gums. He toppled forward and landed on all fours like a beast. He panted like one too, like he was feral. He was allowed to be a beast for a bit, in celebration of his triumph. Kars threw his head back and let out a “wrrrrryyyyy” into the sky as wolves did.
No one gave him an answering wrrrryyyy. Which was expected. He was without his fellows, the men he spent his life beside, men he still only remembered in vague images and feelings and whispers of names. But he called out to the world, to let it know that Kars, The Ultimate Being, was here. To make way for him as he forced his way into this world. He got to his feet and climbed the hill.
He tripped going up the hill because it was steep and his legs were getting used actually moving. But nobody saw him so his ascent was still powerful and dramatic.
He crested the hill and stared out at—nothing. Still just snow. More hills. A treacherous canyon. A barren world, his world. He walked a bit further down the hill, along the canyon, and just turning around the curve of the way a bit, he could see a house. Ah, his world was not as barren as he thought. Perhaps this was the house of one of the people that took care of him. Even if they thought his name was “Steve,” a horrible horrendous crime, he supposed he ought to give them thanks. They reminded him of existence. They deserved to be acknowledged from that. After all, ants were humble creatures, but they still impressed and awed with their tunneling systems.
Kars walked along the thin bridge of stone over to the house and with each step the music grew louder and clearer. Though it still was terrible. The music sounded like someone had fainted on an organ that also had poor pipes that were rusted over. Kars passed a tree, walked onto the porch, and the music faded just a bit into the distance. He looked over his shoulder and peered at the tree.
Ah, his mistake. He thought it was a tree, but no, it was a pole with twin loudspeakers perched at the top, the speakers trembling as the croaking excuse for music groaned out of it. That mystery solved, Kars stopped caring about it and entered the house, stooping to get through the door.
The home was empty, ransacked, a bed that could only fit Kars’ torso on its small mattress was pulled into the middle of the room, various other dressers had been thrown from the rightful places along the wall and stood at odd angles throughout the room. Kars straightened, hit his head, slid down to a crouch and his foot caught on a piece of paper, crinkling as he slipped on it.
A single piece of paper? Curious. Kars toed the paper over to him and read it. It was a note. A note detailing a failing marriage due to stress and fear at the overwhelming wrongness of things Kars didn’t care about so he crinkled it up and threw the note over his shoulder. Well that was a waste of time. He left the pathetic excuse for a house and back outside into wind and storm and creaking music.
But then. That music returned. That cacophony of wood scraping and shattering that sounded so much like cackling. Kars remembered lava and flame and Joseph Joestar.
Bone slipped out of his arm, vibrating light resonated, and he sliced the speaker with the twitch of an arm. Even if it was not a tree, it fell like one all the same. Though trees did not normally have a death rattle. Kars glared at the speaker as the last notes of music creaked from the speakers, and when it went silent he moved on.
Kars exploration of hills and snow proved mildly fruitful: he found another house. This house was much like the other, the only difference was that it had a decorated corpse of a tree standing proudly in a corner. But no humans. Kars hummed and pushed a note that he would not bother reading with his toe. What could possibly be the reason that they were gone? Perhaps work took up their time. Humans cared about that, yes, he remembered the humans drone on about their meaningless tinkering that they filled their lives with. Ah, yes, of course, they were at work that was the only explanation.
The next house he found looked as if someone had grabbed the front of the house and ripped it off. Shards of wood were scattered everywhere, laying in the snow like little markers. Blood was sprayed across the snow, still bright red and hot.
There was no one inside either. Their blood was probably the blood outside.
Kars looked at the scene and hummed. Perhaps there was an alternative explanation for the empty houses, a more sinister one.
Kars nodded to himself and walked away because he didn’t actually care.
---
Kars’ exploration finally proved that this world he landed on held actual life. Oh, of course Kars had stumbled upon many displays of human intervention: snow gathered into spheres and stacked into a lumpy caricature of man, large glistening orbs of various colors strewn onto the ground, striped hooks catching the sky, but Kars didn’t care about that life. He cared about the life that was actually worthwhile and beneficial. He cared about the trees.
He cared about these large beautiful trees thriving in what seemed to be just a frozen land. The trees grew tall despite the environment and cast large shadows on the ground, cracked spiderwebs in the snow, black on white until the red spotlight cast its gaze upon them and turned it to a more haunting image of black on red.
Ah yes, there was a large castle in the distance with a red light like a probing eye tracing over the hills and valleys and into the village below him. There was also a village too. But the trees were far more interesting, so persistent. Admirable, proud. Nature was far, far better than humans. But at the very least he should explore the small concentration of civilization. He had given up on something so polite as “thanking humans for reminding him how to live” and was more concerned with gaining some followers for an army. He started to walk.
And then. From behind him, Kars heard a sound, a squeak, the sound of air hissing out of…something and wheezing out in the quiet night. Kars turned on his heel, bladed bone pushing through his skin and slicing through the air and—
And just the air. Nothing was there. Kars clicked his tongue. He was foolish for even letting such a thing bother him. He still held the lingering fear of the Joestar worm that gave him his singular defeat. Since when would a mere juvenile noise cause him alarm? It would not before and it certainly would not now that he was the ultimate being. He wrinkled his nose at the town, bathed in red, looked up at the spotlit tower, and went the opposite way.
---
The tolling of a heavy old bell followed Kars, covered by the wind and snow.
---
He found human life. Actually, he found human death, a corpse lying in the snow, with blood scattered around them. Kars gave them a cursory glance for their form was different than the humans he last saw (undistorted by ice, of course), they had a stocky broad torso and long long limbs but a rather small head. Their skin was pale as the snow that covered the ground, but their lips were bright red, though they did their makeup a little too heavy because it looked more like their lips had been smeared with blood rather than painted with purpose. Poor creature, Kars thought, then stepped over the body.
But this world was strange, and that was not where the encounter ended.
The human gurgled or giggled or cooed like a demented dove and Kars turned around to watch them push themselves up to their feet. “You are quite tenacious,” he noted.
They began to laugh, to giggle, though something was terribly off about it. It sounded like laughter from underwater, gurgling and drowning, it caught and was repeating on itself in a way Kars was unsure humans could do. And then it was constant. Not a breath was taken. It just continued on and on as it shambled through the snow, overlapping itself like there were two, no, that had to be at least four, voices in one throat.
“Has someone unlocked your limitations? I used to do that in my spare time. It can get rid of your ability to breathe.”
They kept laughing and stumbling towards him.
“Your point has been proven. You will stop that now. Only one man has laughed at me and has lived. I will not let that number increase.”
They were right in front of him and they thrust their arm out. They were holding a small red and white curved stick that had been sharpened to a wicked point.
Ah, they were stabbing him, how quaint.
The shiv shattered against his abs. The human stopped laughing.
“Was that supposed to mean something?” Kars asked and walked forward. This human was not worth showing off his light mode. This human only deserved to be devoured by his body with no fanfare.
Kars might’ve been a little concerned about what the condition of that creature could mean for the state of this world, when that creature with pointed ears seemed so different than the one that called him “Steve”, but it also might’ve been indigestion since it had been so long since he actually ate someone.
---
The bell’s ringing went “ding-ding,” a heartbeat pause, then “dong.”
---
Kars discovered something that was actually something that deserved being worried about: undead reindeer.
Kars was familiar with the act to make creatures undead. He had done it many times before, it was a delightful hobby to have in between searching for the key to the ultimate evolutionary being and slaughtering tribes of ripple users, but he at least made sure to let them remain whole. This reindeer was not allowed such compassion. They were missing chunks of flesh that openly bled onto the ground. They hobbled along on broken legs, their neck was a mess, like multiple times in their life their necks had been broken and not set properly, leaving juts of bone with flesh stretched over it, looking like humps on a camel except on their neck.
The reindeer turned their glowing blue eyes toward Kars. It let out a bellowing groan and charged, stumbling through the snow with surprising ease and speed. The pathetic creature lowered their antlers to gore him, then seemed to finally recognize that they were before the ultimate being, turned, and ran away from him. A good strategy. A good attitude, the only choice of action. Even if their body was broken, their mind still remembered instinct.
And normally he would let that be the end of it. But that creature was broken and suffering. To leave them alive would be shameful. Kars tapped into the power that had remained useless for so long and turned his hand into a squirrel and chucked him at the fleeing reindeer. The squirrel was just a speck in the air when he landed on the reindeer, and the reindeer let out a distant groan of pain as the squirrel’s Kars-genetically-modified sharp teeth dug into their broken flesh.
Kars watched nature take its course, thought, and turned his other hand into another squirrel and chucked her at the reindeer as well. The current inhabitants of this world did not impress Kars. They were deformed and pathetic. He would birth his own creatures and let them populate the land. That was how a true creator treated his creations.
---
In the distance, a heavy bell rang. He was getting closer.
---
Kars found himself in front of a toy factory, found it utterly juvenile and boring and reluctantly walked back to the town. He didn’t actually go into it; he was just disappointed with the cold iron cube of a building.
Toy factory, really.
---
Really, Kars should’ve met the bell’s toll as he doubled back, but sometimes it was more about the following than the catch.
---
The town was soaked in the red from the spotlight. Kars felt like he was being watched by that light and wrinkled his nose. This town was displeasing in all ways. From what he could tell, all the buildings were as empty as the homes he found in the white wasteland. There was even one that looked like someone had charged straight through it, leaving holes in the walls.
Kars stood in the middle of this pathetic abandoned town, and he finally heard the bells that had been stalking him. But he heard the scream before that, a deep primal yell that seemed too deep to come from a human, that echoed somewhere in Kars’ stomach rather than his ears.
Kars looked over his shoulder. “Yes?” he asked as a man began running towards him. He was tall, as tall as Kars, an oddity when the houses were made for someone the size of his torso. He ran in the red light, wore a red suit that was flecked with the darker red of blood, red red red all around. Except for his eyes, one which wasn’t an eye because it was an empty socket and the other which was bright white. Each step he took was punctuated with the clang of a heavy bell at his waist.
He was also carrying an ax.
Kars turned around as the man raised his ax to hack at Kars, took a step forward, and that was the end. His light mode flashed out for a second, plenty of time for Kars to slice him in half. Kars looked down at the man as he continued screaming. “Were you someone important?”
The man screamed, pawed at his ax, screamed some more, and then was quiet.
“Well, no matter.” Kars poked at the body with his toe, then decided to pick up the man’s hat. The white fur along the brim was speckled with dried blood, but it was a fine hat nonetheless. It was not what he usually wore, but his ears were awfully cold. Kars batted at the pompom at the end of the hat and put it on his head.
Kars continued on, unaware at how easily he had survived the planet of bloodthirsty Santa.