Darkness. Then, not darkness, but an unmaking. The scholar Arkos had felt the final, sharp punctuation of his mortal life, the cold steel, the bloom of red. What followed was a sensation not of absence, but of being utterly undone, then violently remade. There was no gentle transition, no ethereal journey. One moment, the fading scent of dust and old parchment, the next, an overwhelming, impossible cacophony of being.
If "he" was still the right word for this raw, formless awareness, he was vast, a consciousness suddenly expanded beyond any conceivable human limit. Raw and untamed, power coursed through him, a terrifying, exhilarating torrent he couldn't comprehend or control. Sensations, alien and overwhelming, bombarded him. He didn't see with eyes, but perceived a roiling, incandescent chaos, a universe in violent, screaming birth. There were no walls, sky, or ground, only an infinite, churning maelstrom of nascent energies.
Panic, a primal terror far beyond any scholarly fear of discovery or inquisitorial wrath, seized him. His mind, the meticulous, ordered instrument of Arkos the scholar, scrabbled for purchase, for any familiar landmark in this impossible new existence. There were none. Logic fractured. Language dissolved. This was a reality for which his lifetime of accumulated knowledge offered no lexicon, no framework.
Then, through the chaos, a new sensation: a monstrous, gravitational wrongness. It was a pressure, an immense, crushing presence drawing nearer, a void threatening to consume even this new, terrifyingly vast state of being. He had no body to shrink, no voice to cry out, yet every particle of his awareness recoiled.
The approach was swift, inexorable. Before he could even begin to process the nature of the threat, it was upon him. A colossal, gaping maw of absolute nothingness, yet paradoxically, of immense, devouring presence, loomed. It was not a physical mouth of flesh and teeth, but something far more fundamental, an abyss opening in the fabric of this new reality.
He was being pulled in. The force was irresistible, a cosmic tide dragging him towards an unimaginable fate. He felt other nascent sparks of awareness around him, equally powerless, equally terrified, being drawn into the same horrifying vortex. Were these… siblings? The fleeting and alien thought was drowned in the sheer terror of the moment.
Then, the swallowing. A cataclysmic rush of pressure, a sense of being utterly engulfed, compressed, and plunged into a suffocating, internal darkness. The chaotic energies of the outside were replaced by a thick, cloying blackness, a confinement that was both immense and crushingly intimate.
He was not alone.
Within this living prison, other presences thrashed, raw and new like himself. He could sense them, indistinct but undeniably there, their fear and confusion a palpable miasma in the oppressive dark. Were these the same sparks he had felt being pulled in alongside him? The proximity was unbearable, an intrusion on his very essence. Arkos, the scholar who craved solitude, who found solace only in the silent company of books, recoiled internally from these unseen, unknown others. His ingrained aversion to familial entanglement and the messy, unpredictable nature of close bonds flared even here in this impossible, shared doom.
He tried to think, to analyze. Where was he? What was he? The questions were meaningless. His scholarly discipline, his lifetime of dissecting texts and unravelling complex arguments, offered no tools for this. Though he knew it not, he was a newborn god, already consumed by his father, Kronos, the Titan who devoured his children to forestall a prophecy of his own downfall. But Arkos knew nothing of Titans, prophecies, or the cruel ironies of divine lineage. He knew only the crushing darkness, the terrifying presence of others, and the cold, sharp core of his undiminished, bewildered self.
The scholar Arkos was dead. Something new, vast and powerful, had taken his place, only to be immediately imprisoned. The universe had a horrifyingly different kind of archive in mind for him.