The transition from the violent, incomprehensible act of being swallowed to the state that followed was not a passage into stillness but a different kind of chaos. Arkos, or the consciousness that had once been Arkos, found itself suspended in a warm, viscous darkness. It was not the empty void of his initial unmaking, but a thick, cloying environment, pressing in from all sides, muffling sound to a dull, rhythmic throb that seemed to resonate with the fabric of his new, immense form. The sensation was one of being utterly contained, yet the container itself felt alive, a vast, internal organ that pulsed and shifted with a slow, horrifying peristalsis.
His first coherent thought, if such a primal surge of revulsion could be termed a thought, was one of profound disgust. The scholar in him, the part that craved order, cleanliness, and the dry, sterile scent of ancient parchment, recoiled from his prison's wet, organic immediacy. He tried to analyze the input: the rhythmic pressure, the ambient warmth, the faint, unidentifiable organic scent that permeated the darkness. It was a biological prison, a living tomb.
Then, with a clarity that cut through his disorientation, he became aware of the others. They were not distinct forms in the visual sense, for there was no light, but presences, raw and turbulent, thrashing in the shared confinement. He could feel their emanations: waves of primal fear, surges of impotent rage, a chaotic broadcast of distress that grated against his tightly controlled consciousness. These were not the ordered thoughts of scholars or the reasoned arguments of philosophers; this was raw, untamed emotion, an unwelcome intrusion into his unwillingly shared space.
His instinct, honed over a lifetime of seeking solitude in the quiet stacks of the Great Archive, was to withdraw, to shield himself from their chaotic energies. He had no physical shell to retreat into, but he focused his awareness inward, attempting to create a mental barrier, a small pocket of intellectual stillness amidst the emotional storm. He tried to categorize them, these other sparks of being. Were they similar to him, whatever he now was? Their energy felt different, less… structured. More volatile. He cataloged their emotional signatures with a detached, almost clinical precision, a habit from his scholarly days of classifying obscure texts and forgotten dialects.
Entity Alpha: Predominantly fear, punctuated by bursts of unfocused aggression.Entity Beta: A low thrum of despair, a heavy, sinking quality.Entity Gamma: Sharp, erratic spikes of defiance, quickly collapsing back into fear.
He did not know them, had no context for their existence beyond this shared, grotesque imprisonment. They were… disturbances. Unwanted variables in an already intolerable equation. His inherent dislike for close association, for the unpredictable messiness of others, intensified into a cold, simmering resentment. They were not companions in misfortune; they were additional layers to his torment, their raw being an affront to his need for order and quiet contemplation.
Arkos attempted to access his internal archive, the vast repository of knowledge he had meticulously curated throughout his mortal life. Surely, somewhere within the countless texts he had memorized, the philosophical treatises he had dissected, there lay some precedent, allegory, and obscure myth that could shed light on this impossible predicament. He sifted through memories of creation myths, tales of underworld journeys, and philosophical discourses on the nature of being and non-being. But his mortal learning, so potent in the world he had lost, felt like navigating an ocean with a map of a single, small city. The scale was wrong. The principles did not apply. If they had ever existed, the gods of his old world were pale abstractions compared to the raw, cosmic forces at play here.
Frustration, a rare and unwelcome emotion for the usually stoic scholar, pricked at the edges of his consciousness. His most potent tool, his intellect, was failing him. Yet, the habit of analysis, of seeking understanding, was too deeply ingrained to abandon; if he could not understand the why or the how, he could at least meticulously observe the what.
He began to sense subtle variations in his own being compared to the others. While they seemed to be purely reactive, tossed about by their internal tempests, he felt a nascent core of… coherence within himself. A capacity for detached observation that seemed absent in their chaotic thrashing. Was this a remnant of his scholarly discipline, or something new, a property of this strange, powerful form he now inhabited? He could not say. But he clung to it, this ability to step back mentally, to be the observer even as he was the observed, the prisoner.
Time, in this lightless, featureless prison, was meaningless. There were no dawns, no dusks, only the rhythmic pressures and the constant, unwelcome presence of the others. He did not know if they were his siblings, his captor, his father, or that his name was now Arkos, a god among gods. He knew only the suffocating darkness, the repulsive intimacy of shared confinement, and a growing, cold certainty that whatever this new existence was, it was an abomination. His disdain for his unseen, unfelt jailer was matched only by his contempt for his fellow prisoners. He was alone, yet insufferably crowded, a scholar trapped in a barbarian's nightmare, his mind the only archive he could access, and its contents proving woefully inadequate for the horrors of this new, divine reality. The desire for knowledge remained, but now it was a desperate, clawing need for an escape that seemed utterly impossible in this churning prison.