The land stretched endlessly beneath the heavens,a realm where nature's bounty coexisted with mortal beauty. Rivers of liquid silver cut through emerald valleys, their waters poisonous to all but the winged serpents that nested along their banks. This was a world where beauty and death danced eternally, where only the cunning or the catastrophically lucky survived long.
And in the ever-blue sky that day, something impossible was happening.
Where the heavens should have been empty save for the sun's blazing eye, a single anomaly drifted. A cloud so violently purple it seemed to bruise the very air around it. This wasn't the soft lavender of twilight or the regal amethyst of dusk.This was a hue that defied nature, the color of a thunderclap given form. Birds migrating across the continent veered sharply away as if repelled by some primal warning.
Within the cloud's swirling depths, something stranger still was occurring.
Golden filaments sparked and twisted like living thread, weaving themselves into a pulsing sphere at the cloud's heart. For three heartbeats it held perfect form,a miniature sun contained within violet mist before exploding outward in a shower of ember bright fragments. But instead of dissipating, the glowing shards froze mid air, then reversed course, sucked back into the cloud as if drawn by some hungry void.
The absorption took exactly 317 seconds.
When the process completed, the cloud's unnatural coloration drained away like dye in water, leaving behind what appeared to be an entirely ordinary cumulus formation. Yet for the next decade, as it drifted wherever the high-altitude currents dictated, an odd phenomenon occurred.It blotted out the sun when passing overhead, no creature below ever looked up to notice. Farmers didn't shield their eyes when it crossed the sun; birds didn't alter their flight paths. It existed in plain sight yet outside perception,a blind spot in the world's awareness if you will.
Twenty years to the day after its first appearance, the cloud remembered itself.
A sound like mountains grinding together echoed from within as jagged arcs of electricity,neither blue nor white but the same impossible purple as its original form crawled across its surface. The thunder that followed wasn't a noise so much as a physical force, flattening treetops for leagues in every direction before an abrupt, unnatural silence fell.
"Such... fresh... air."
The words vibrated through the atmosphere in a voice no living thing had ever heard, a sound composed equally of rolling thunder and whispering mist. The cloud (though "cloud" seemed suddenly inadequate) flexed experimentally, swirling itself into a spiral just to feel the motion. It possessed no eyes, yet could perceive its surroundings with impossible clarity,from the microscopic mites burrowing in tree bark miles below to the thermal currents rising from active volcanoes along the continental divide.
Its attention, however, fixed upon a disturbance in the northwestern forest sector.
The Bull King's horns scraped the lower branches of oaks as he paced. At 18 hands tall with obsidian black hide webbed with scars, he dwarfed even his elite guard. 34 battle-hardened warriors whose hoofprints left craters in the hard packed earth. Their collective breath formed a visible haze in the humid air, smelling of iron and half digested battlemoss.
Before them knelt the prize,two bees that had no business surviving in this predator's domain.
The elder, her wings torn at the edges and antennae broken, leaned heavily against a mushroom stalk. Her chitin, once polished amber, had dulled to the color of old parchment. The younger Raiz thrummed with barely contained energy, his carapace gleaming like freshly spilled honey, crimson eyes darting between the bulls encircling them.
"Your hive abandoned you" the Bull King rumbled, his voice the sound of boulders colliding in a landslide. "We watched for three moons. Not a single worker came searching."
Raiz's wings buzzed involuntarily. He knew the truth,their hive had fallen to a spiderkin migration last winter. He and Elder Alia were the last.
A warrior bull snorted, steam jetting from its nostrils. "The young one's healing gift is strong. Saw him heal within blink of an eye"
"Yet he returns for this useless elder?" The Bull King's hoof came down on Alia's thorax with a crack that sent Raiz lunging forward,only to be blocked by a wall of horns.
"Stop! I'll serve! Just don't..."
A shadow fell across the clearing.
Temperature dropped 20 degrees in an instant. Frost air across leaves as every creature present experienced the same primal terror,the sensation of something vast and alien turning its attention upon them.
The Bull King was first to look up.
Where seconds ago had been empty sky now loomed a cloud so massive it defied perspective, its underside swirling with those same impossible purple hues. Lightning flickered within like captured stars.
"Continue."
The voice shook the earth. Trees trembled to their roots.
The Bull King, to his credit, hesitated only a heartbeat before roaring: "Kill the elder!"
As the nearest warrior reared up, a whip of violet lightning licked down,not with the random fury of nature, but with the precision of a scorpion's sting. The bull's skeleton glowed blue white through its flesh for one horrific instant before it collapsed, smoking.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZED]
The words burned behind the cloud's consciousness (if clouds could be said to possess such thing).
HOST: Atmospheric Entity (Classification: Unknown)
OBJECTIVE: Preserve Magnaz genetic lineage
REWARD: Mnemonic Reconstruction Protocol
Raiz didn't understand why the cloud had spoken, nor why it seemed to care about two lost bees. But as the cloud descended like a living avalanche, wrapping them in mist that smelled of ozone and something strangely nostalgic,like childhood memories half-remembered.He clung to Elder Alii and made a choice.
"Take us," he buzzed upward. "Wherever you're going."
The Bull King's enraged bellow faded as they ascended through layers of atmosphere no bee was meant to survive, yet the mist sustained them. Higher still, where the air grew thin and the sky darkened.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the world went white.
[DIRECTIVE COMPLETE]
[MEMORY FRAGMENTS DETECTED: 7,442 YEARS WORTH]
[INTEGRATION COMMENCING]
On the ground , the Bull swore vengeance upon the sky itself. Somewhere above, Cloud was drifting as something seemed to have started.