Ixatu

When Ixatu first appeared in the world, there was, already, not much left of it.

A planet once rich with foliage and arbor was now bereft of life, a vast unpalated desert of hardpan crags and eroding edifices; scars of earthquakes, torrents of dust, a fell wind that sang along the angular mountaintops that penetrated the horizon like a demon's teeth.

Perhaps this was one of the many images of the last men that inspired Ixatu's being.

Men, of course, were hardy, though the world had changed, and they were no longer what they once were in times of health. They were paying penance. They were shorter now, and thin as the bare branches of petrified forests once pregnant with life. Twigs of men knowing fear, starvation, and endless toil. Their flesh was sallow; their dreams filled with incessant nightmares. Black hearts pumped their thick and oily blood. The air had changed too, and this had changed their lungs. Many died in infancy from horrible mutations. Some abominable creatures born of women still lurked the hardpan deserts.

There was, of course, little to eat. Many creatures had no thirst for life, succumbing to the blissful sleep that death entailed. The soil was dry and poisoned with radiation, phosphorus, and all manner of rot. It turned to dust where it did not become marshes of cancerous footing and air.

Creatures that remained were, like men, changed. If they were not both difficult to kill and unpleasant to eat, then they were, themselves, murderous and difficult to flee from. High technology had abandoned men, who were now utterly capable of intelligence, forming extended family units, forging crude weapons, using old weapons, but otherwise running about with a savage idiocy that was, for all purposes, far less noble than man's humble beginnings.

And it was perhaps these things—most especially the nightmares of men at those horrible mountaintop teeth and the despair at life which overwhelmed the general populace—that inspired Ixatu into being, that brought it into the world to fulfill its duty.

Ixatu came with one mission: to feast. To feast on the detritus of dying worlds.

It preferred organic matter first.

Being from other planes of existence, Ixatu had the good fortune to be able to act simultaneously in different places upon the planet Earth. It always found it easier to start in natural deserts and make his way outward. Of course, apart from the hardiest creatures, deserts had little; dying worlds had even less. The eradication of natural deserts was Ixatu's most tedious task, but the departure from this climate into those less arid always provided him with more satisfying compounds to ingest.

Ixatu started in two deserts at first: that which was once Egypt, and that which was once California. It started slowly, grudgingly almost, considering what this planet would have to offer as its feast, its banquet.

The first, withered trunk of a human it encountered was an auspicious sight indeed. That first human looked at Ixatu with a mad an incomprehensible horror, his eyes widening at it with such a vice-like violence that the dry and livid flesh of his eyes peeled open. His nose bled at the sight and he fainted before Ixatu could take his first bite.

To describe what this ill-fated human saw would misrepresent what Ixatu actually was, being only a strangely contorted and folded manifestation suitable for this plane of reality. Its body was that of a grotesquely enormous, furless canine. Its mouth is what made it especially fascinating and horrible. Extending for yards, its Cheshire teeth seemed to emerge from the aether, opening and closing as it chewed and digested the world.

And it always grew wider and wider with each feast. Now that Ixatu was out of the natural deserts, it was organic matter first, raw substance later, when nothing living was left. It was not sure whether or not this was policy, or strictly the procedure it adopted in its mealtime.

In time, Ixatu was surprised to find men slightly less destroyed than those freakish imbeciles it dined upon so mercilessly in moderately invigorating hunts. In the American midwest it found a few tribes that had adopted what remained of religion into a strange and crude fetishistic religion; in Africa, it found the lingering traces of their ancient religions, again perverted into crude fetishism; in Asia it found waste and things that would refused to live after birth.

With the two tribes, Ixatu had to act in the same manner. A display of power made resistance less likely, and there was nothing more futile, in the presence of one of Ixatu's ilk, than recalcitrance. It ravaged the dead, hardpan countryside, where the bones of shrubs and trees made testament to times beyond the memory of men. Men and women, fleeing from its horrible presence, were snatched up and devoured with horrifying alacrity.

The remaining humans spoke of it in what remained of their language. Ixatu felt them in its mind, and felt their speech, and decided to pay their encampments a visit.

To each, he gave the same general speech in their crude, simpish language:

“I am Ixatu. I am the World Eater. I have come as part of my sacred duty to see your world into the void. You may run as you will, you may fight as you will, but your fates are all the same. My teeth will gnash you and I will eat you. I am Ixatu. I am the World Eater. Fear me.”

It was the only way Ixatu could ever deliver the truth, and it was the truth Ixatu believed. It had never encountered the magnanimous heights of spiritual organisms, and could not reason with the creatures it encountered by arguing that their fate was bound up in the fate of the universe; it didn't need such reasoning, it only needed to instill fear to make its work easier.

In most instances, a shaman of sorts would confront Ixatu with some crude, unimaginative spell. Ixatu would scoff and eat the shaman first. With the spiritual leader of their tribe dead, the humans would scatter, and Ixatu would eat and chase, like a kitten learning how to use its claws.

And when Ixatu had feasted well, it would multiply his manifestations, growing in power and consuming the world with greater speed.

Even when men were gone, Ixatu was voracious; after all, its mission was not bound up with the fate of men, regardless of what degree of responsibility they held for this planet's rot and, ultimately, Ixatu's presence. This was not for the creature to know or care about; it was no real consideration. Feasting was the only real consideration for Ixatu's ilk.

So, Ixatu ate until the world was no more. And when it stood on the last bit of earth, on a floating, cooled rock from the planet's cooled and dead molten core (which it too ate with limited satisfaction), Ixatu stopped. It reconciled all its manifestations into one form, leaped up, and charged mouth first into that last bit of iron, disappearing with its final bite. In the blink of a galaxy's eye, in the vast panoply of milky and iridescent stars that, when approached, are burning oceans of particles, Ixatu, too, was no more a being than the planet it had devoured. It would come back, of course, for other worlds. Or perhaps one of its siblings would take on this task. They were, in the end, all as one.

And what more is there to tell? This is the work of Ixatu, the World Eater.

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