Jit’s body was blasted back into the lake by the force of the explosion. He was hit so hard that he burrowed through the sand, then through the water where his body collided with rock and cracked the lake floor. Molten lava that was black on cooling issued from the cracks and wrapped Jit completely like it was a sentient thing and pulled him into the Earth.
Jit didn’t die because he was covered in the residue of the light of first creation. He didn’t die, but he was changed. The light of first creation had bonded to the intensity of his negative emotions and as he melted into the molten Earth, he became only those feelings, and his body became black and viscous.
His friends were right about him. Jit knew it, and he was ashamed of it because his father had scolded him for badgering his mother to teach him about the light of first creation, which the man knew Jit only wanted in order to be the envy of his friends. Jit loved recognition for being better at things than everyone else. He was one of many children and it was hard to impress his parents, so he sought the attention of anyone willing to give it. When no one was impressed with him, Jit felt lonely, like he didn’t matter.
At the bottom of the lake, Jit lost his name and chose another as he embraced the darkest parts of himself. Nothing mattered because nothing was as impressive as he was. But he could make everything matter. Everything could become his victim and have the honor of dying at his hand.
When he emerged from the lake, he was an inky, black glob and he seized on the first thing that moved. It was an adolescent giant and when he surrounded the boy, he felt nourished and the bounds of his being expanded ever so slightly.
“I need more,” he said to himself as he sloughed over the terrain, moving toward feelings of anguish that compelled him like sweet smells. “Everyone can give to me and I can spread. I need to spread. I need.”
Hence, the Needy was born, a black blob attracted to feelings of despair where it can make an easy meal of the suffering and be bolstered by the horror of witnesses to its dreadful form.
Before it arrived at a community, Wazad and the Guiding Light appeared.
“There,” she said with a grimace of pain on her elegant, mouse-like face as she inspected the moving tar. “That was the fate of the third boy. It is a powerful cautionary tale for playing with the light of first creation.”
Suddenly, the blob of black formed into the body of a man.
“Come into me, you are nothing without me. And I need you.”
As the figure gurgled wet words, it flung thick strings of black at the powerful entities, hoping to grab them and incorporate them into itself. But both entities easily fended off the attack.
“I cannot rid this world of you,” Wazad said as she moved her furry hands and summoned bands of blue energy. “But I can cripple you. By the Wonders of the First Wazad, I command that your powers only work on the willing. You will take no innocent victims, only those who come to you willingly.”
With that, Wazad and the Guiding Light retreated, and the being known as the Needy was left hungry and desperate to consume.
Over the millennia of its existence, the Needy has learned to adapt to the restrictions created by Wazad and it has only thrived.
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