It's cold. It seems like it has always been cold.

He was curled up with his back against a stone wall. It appeared that he had been buried up to his shoulders with the dirt of the planet. There was no mound of dirt surrounding him, the entire area was flat, including the area around him. His clothes had decayed to mere scraps on his shoulders. He had no belongings with him. He moved his head up from his knees. The sunlight from a rising blue sun reflected off his dull golden eyes. His eyes were unfocused, nothing caught his attention, nothing was important. The windswept, dry, and barren landscape were unseen by his mind. The warmth was no longer there, but the pain was there. Underneath the self constructed mountain in his heart, the pain lay there, dormant. After all this time, he still felt its weight.

The two suns and three planets in the vicinity of this moon went unnoticed as they followed each other across the sky. He didn't move. Then a red streak appeared in the sky. It remained there for several minutes. It was a ship. The ship gracefully touched down in the distance, far from the lone figure. Unbeknownst to him, many humans left the ship and set up a camp. They lived there for a long time digging into the planet and studying the planet's geology. The planet rotated about these two suns in its awkward orbit twenty two times a cycle. It gets dark after twenty two years. He heard the flapping of leathery wings leap into the black sky. These things swarmed the camp and the sounds reached him. His mind processed the noise and filed it away in his memory, but he didn't hear them. The screams, the running, the dying, the quiet of death. After a year of darkness, the suns returned, but still, they remained unnoticed by anyone.

Another ship came, this time it tumbled out of the sky and scarred the land with its shell, closer to him this time. A few people came out, and attempted to survive. A man in goggles walked up to him and looked down at his gold eyes. The goggled man kneeled down and surveyed the head, kneecaps, and shoulders sticking out of the ground. The stranger breathed in deeply through his nose and quickly moved back from the buried figure as his face scrunched up in confusion, a reaction from the smell. This man caught his attention for the first time in a long time. The nearly buried head moved its golden eyes up and met the goggled face.

(Chronicles of Riddick reference)

"Not dead. Not human" the goggled man spoke. "Freaky."

After a few more seconds of observation, the goggled man left.

Days passed, the darkness came, and only three of the newcomers survived to leave in a ship. He didn't care, he moved his forehead back down onto his knees and closed his eyes. And so it continued, as he had seen for countless years before. He left this planet once many settlers arrived and moved on through the galaxy.

He had long stopped intervening in the affairs going on around him a long time ago. He was trying to live what many, at the time, would call a fulfilling life during his first few centuries. Then the millennia passed. He experienced much over the years. How to read and write in the many available languages. How to cook and clean. How to weave and repair. Then how to fight and kill. He was not unfeeling in the early days. He fell in love with a woman, and it was a magnificent time. The beauty of the experience was intoxicating and they enjoyed their time together. Then, as must happen, she died. He mourned her death for many years, and kept to the vows he made to her. Surprising himself, he fell in love again, and again it was beautiful. And again, and again, and again. Each time, some of the intensity was lost. Soon, he stopped loving. As time passed, most of his talents fell out of use, including his ability to express emotion. Times changed, resources changed, but there was always a constant. While weaving clothes and fixing brick walls fell by the wayside, killing was always there. Murder, slaughter, death, and pain were always there. And he became extremely proficient in these skills, this… art. He threw himself into his work. Soldier, mercenary, or bounty hunter, he did not care what he was called as long as he killed. It was the only way to smother the grief for his many dead friends and loved ones. Even when he was with people, he was always alone, always outliving those around him. All of his pain, and all of his grief went into the killing.

He didn't know why he kept living, he just did. And so he waited. Waiting for it all to end.

"Holy shit!"

Sound and light both assaulted his senses. He opened his eyes to see who had disturbed his slumber in his cave. There was rock around his body except the area that had been cleared by the back of his head. The cave had apparently collapsed around him during his slumber.

Is this it?

He thought for a moment but then knew the answer was 'no.' The weight was still there. He felt a pressure against the back of his head.

Don't touch me!

He jerked his head back and broke the rock encasing his neck, throwing the pressure that was a four fingered one thumbed hand off his stiff neck. His golden eyes snapped open. Loud pops from his long unused muscles and bones resounded in the area.

"Woaw there. Don't move. You might be injured."

The light was blinding, but his pupils quickly adapted from his years of darkness and he could now see his surroundings. He was in the ground beneath a metal room. What seemed to be an excavation tunnel extended into the distance with a chain of lights hanging from the ceiling.

He looked around in some confusion, but quickly evaluated the situation.

Metallurgy. Electronics. This is an advanced part of time.

Then he saw the person kneeling next to him.

Humans? Still? Hmm… How interesting.

"Hey, can you understand me?"

He did not know what the man was saying, but that did not surprise him. Personal experience had shown him that languages usually change only twice as slowly as empires. Even quicker when empires were spread across multiple planets, but this would not be a problem. All he had to do was hunt down as much information as he could about this cycle and read it. The neural implant he received many thousands of years ago would take care of the rest. Compatibility was a nonissue. The area around him appeared to be under construction.

That must have been how they found me. They were digging up the floor and found my collapsed cave. So, either an expansion or a still developing area. How long was I asleep for this time? The cave was spacious at the time, sturdy rock, and on an unpopulated world. I slept for a long time. Good.

He turned his gaze upon the person in the room.

Human male, clothed, and electronic weapons of some kind.

The clothed man seemed about to collapse underneath his penetrating gaze despite him having a slab of rock atop his shoulders. After bodily shaking himself, the man came to his senses.

"Well, I guess not. I didn't know that there were other miners down here before us. There must have been a cave in and you were trapped. Damn, you look like you've been down here for a while. Oh shit, right! Stay right there! I'll go get the doc!"

The gold eyes watched him leave, waiting for his chance to act without drawing attention. Once the man was out of sight, he moved his arms with inhuman strength, causing large cracks to form in the rock slab and then shattering it. He lifted his chiseled form from the new hole in the ground and made his way down the tunnel in a crouch, ready to lunge at a moment's notice. He did not want to be seen by living people yet.

Need to get out of here before draw more attention. Need to planet hop again. Need more sleep. It's not over yet.

His hand brushed the wall as he moved on.

Clean cuts, the result of intense heat or extremely sharp metals. Perhaps they have lasers of sorts.

He reached a four way intersection and quick footsteps came from the left. Without hesitation, he leapt up to the ceiling, grabbed onto the cables, and flattened his body out so that he was parallel to the ceiling. A group of three people ran underneath him, one in a white lab coat.

The three people went off to where he woke up, not noticing the naked man on the ceiling. He dropped down silently and walked down the hallway the people had come from. The hallway the people had come from seemed completed and led to a room with display panels and several tables. He ran over to the panels and began running his eyes over everything on screen. The complex electronics in his head memorized everything he saw and began working out the language. He began hitting buttons essentially at random to access different screens of information. Data flashed before his eyes and was burned into his memory.

"The… words. English. I'm… speaking… English. Alphabet. Language. I… learned… the English… language… Russian? Chinese? Yes."

"Good for you."

He spun around and saw the woman in the lab coat that he had seen before. She was standing there in the entryway to the half finished tunnels with her arms crossed, gazing at him with intense scrutiny. The two men he had noticed flanked her, one was the man who had found him and the other was new.

"Damn" the new man muttered. "He does exist."

He turned to his comrade.

"Looks like I owe you fifty."

He narrowed his eyes at this exchange, finally understanding the words.

"What an exquisite specimen" the doctor murmured, tapping her index finger to her bottom lip as she looked the golden eyed man up and down.

He felt a stab on his neck and he ferociously snapped his body around, anger on his features, and grabbed the extended arm of another human, blonde, in a lab coat, but the stinging was still there. He threw the human away from him into a wall and reached up to his neck. He pulled out a hollow glass tube with a metal needle at its tip, the plunger had been pushed nearly all of the way down. He turned back to the female and smirked at her.

"Interesting."

As the word left his lips, his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fell forward. Before his face hit the metal floor, two hands grabbed his shoulders and gently lowered him to the ground. His world began to fade away.

"Thank you Doctor Ruvik. Though was that entirely necessary?" the female voiced.

"Perhaps Doctor Chunhua, but I didn't want to wait to find out. Plus, he could be injured and I wouldn't want…

Night encompassed his vision and he collapsed into his drug induced sleep.

He used to dream. He stopped doing so a long time ago; he simply had too many memories or shut them all out. But now he was waking up from a long sleep; his mind was becoming more active. So he found himself in the council room housing all of the representatives of all the governments of all of the planets in the Terran Dominion. They were bickering among themselves about the exterior threats they were facing. The Zerg creatures mostly. These beings were advancing across every border and were spreading unchecked across the galaxy. He ran into the center of the chamber and yelled at them to unite against this common foe. He had been campaigning for years to have them mobilize and marshal their forces to defend themselves. It didn't work. It took some rogue captain and Zerg woman hybrid to save the galaxy that couldn't save itself. In the long run, it still didn't matter. Many years later, the galaxy was still wiped clean. Cold… So cold.