[StLee]

Night after night, year after year, it was the same. I was me in a different setting, a different life, in places I had never seen or never even existed in the first place. And every time, the Shadow Man would be there. He always looked exactly as I do now. He was not me, though. I could never be him. He was my evil twin, as far as descriptions go. He would kill a different version of me, except that in time, he was not so successful.

You see, he was killing version of me after version of me, but it occurred to me that most of the deaths were in the form of easy victims. Teenage me. A version of me taking a bath. Another version of me trying to help schoolchildren out of an overturned bus. Each time that the Shadow Man would emerge from the shadows, the version of me I was dreaming through would recognize him as myself. That was the initial shock. And then he would just murder that version of me right there.

Dreams can be celestial messages. These dreams were warnings of some sort. Everything seemed to be fragments of millions upon millions of alternative universes. The Shadow Man may have very well been looking to be the only one of us left, just like that movie I remember watching from when movies still existed. It was about some guys who were battling for immortality of some sort, but they had to murder all the other people with the same power, which in turn made them more powerful. Was that what he was doing? He was killing each alternative version of me for him to be all-powerful? No, that made no sense. Would I not be more powerful, too? But...I was. I had some of his powers of vision. Of alternative futures. Of future manipulation. Maybe that was what he was doing. He was seeing each version of the future, and he decided that each person needed his future changed, just like I had done to others in the past before I turned away from that power.

Each morning I awoke from my dreams angry. Each day I sought out the unjust, the bully, the murderer, the evil. I could not find the Shadow Man, but I made it my mission to bring peace back to a land where the governments of the world had failed. I would make peace by snuffing out those who did not pursue or value peace. Violence for a peaceful endgame. That is how I became a warrior of the wastes.