Darkness.
That's all I knew at first.
A blanket of warmth. No thoughts. No fears. No names. Just the thudding beat of something massive, slow, and distant—like a war drum in the void. I drifted in silence, untouched by anything real. Unbothered by time.
Then something shifted.
The warmth tightened. The silence broke.
And the first sound I ever heard was screaming.
Not mine. The world's.
A pressure crushed down around me, forcing me to twist and shove and fight through a tunnel of agony. The warmth turned wet. The light—light?—stabbed at my skin, and air, dry and cold, scorched my lungs like fire.
I opened my mouth, and I screamed.
Not out of fear. Not even pain.
Out of instinct.
I didn't understand anything then. Language, thought, memory—all blank. I was a creature of reflexes. But even in that moment, something beneath the surface of my mind watched. A cold awareness. Not yet awake, but patient. Waiting.
Hands grabbed me. Cloth. Heat. Breath.
Muffled voices bounced around the air like echoes in a cavern. I couldn't understand a word. Not yet. Just noise, like birdsong or thunder. I flinched at them, at the sudden weight of existing.
A whisper nearby—soft, low, almost reverent.
Then fingers brushed my forehead, and a ripple of something wrong washed over me.
A pulse. Not from me.
From the world.
And with that first touch of energy, I saw.
Not with my eyes—they were sealed shut, the world still blurry behind skin and light—but with something deeper. A second sight. No, a first sight.
I saw lines. Currents. Glows that wrapped around the air like tangled threads.
Blue, red, gold, violet. They danced through the world around me, through the walls, through the very breath people exhaled. They crisscrossed and knotted and spun like threads in an infinite loom. I didn't know the word magic, but I felt its heartbeat.
And I wasn't just seeing it.
I was understanding it.
Instinctively, as if I had done it in a thousand lives before this one.
It would take years before I gave this sense a name. But even now, at the very start, it was already mine:
Void Eyes.
They showed me everything the world tried to hide.
I didn't know my name. I didn't know what names even were.
The people around me spoke in strange, soft tones—sometimes sharp, sometimes gentle—but the words passed through my ears like wind. My brain didn't catch them. My body was tiny, fragile, clumsy.
But my soul?
It was vast.
And when no one was watching—when the room was quiet and the breath of others faded away—I could feel something within my core stirring.
Not a heartbeat.
A flame.
The days passed in strange loops.
I couldn't tell when day became night. The ceiling above me changed shade, and my body followed the rhythm—eating, sleeping, crying, breathing.
But the energy never stopped.
The threads in the air always danced. Magic. Aura. Something deeper. I didn't have names for them yet, but I felt the differences. I began reaching for them—clumsily, blindly. Not with hands. With thought.
No… not even thought. With will.
At first, they resisted me.
Then, one night, they didn't.
It was cold.
The blanket wrapped around me was damp with my own sweat. My tiny fists clenched, and something inside my chest cracked open.
Three strands spiraled into me all at once.
Not one. Not two. Three.
One burned. It seared through my veins like molten light—hot and chaotic. Magic.
Another surged like wind in my muscles—electric and sharp, yet grounded like stone. Aura.
The last curled in silence—cool, dense, deep. It sank into my spine, wrapped around my soul like a sleeping dragon. Anima.
They entered me.
And changed me.
I don't know how long I lay there, bathed in invisible light, the threads of power coiling within me like serpents. Hours. Days. I was no longer just a baby.
Something else was being born inside me.
And then—on a night colder than the others—I saw her.
Not with my eyes. With something deeper.
A soft warmth, like steam on winter skin. A shimmer of blue and red. She appeared beside me, not walking in, not summoned—just there.
Hovering. Watching.
Long hair that flowed like fire, skin the color of candlelight, eyes glowing with knowledge.
She leaned down. Her lips moved.
I heard nothing.
But I understood.
"Solara," I whispered back.
The word slipped from me like a breath. My first word.
She smiled.
The next day, I cried.
It wasn't pain. It wasn't hunger. I cried because I didn't understand.
No one else could see her. Not the people who came and went. Not the man with rough hands who lifted me. Not the woman with tired eyes and a soft voice who fed me.
Only I could see her.
Solara.
Two nights later, another appeared.
She laughed into existence. Not loud, but bubbling with joy. A wild wind that scattered leaves, a spark of silver and violet light. She flipped in the air above me, her twin-colored hair trailing like comet streaks.
"Hello~!"
Her voice echoed in my soul.
"Aelira," I muttered.
Another name I hadn't learned. But it was right.
Aelira giggled and poked my nose.
I didn't giggle back.
I watched her.
She Watched me.
Because even then, I knew something strange was happening.
Three energies. Two spirits. And I was still not old enough to walk.
Weeks passed. Or months. I can't say for sure.
I began to understand words. First as tones. Then as pieces. Then—slowly—as meaning.
They called me Igris.
The name felt too small for what I was becoming.
But I liked the way it sounded.
Strong. Sharp. Cold.
The third spirit didn't arrive like the others.
She didn't appear with fire or wind or laughter.
She came with silence.
The kind that follows a death.
It was raining outside.
I had grown strong enough to crawl. My fingers gripped the wood of my crib with a strength unnatural for a toddler. The adults around me never questioned it. Or if they did, they whispered.
I sat upright for the first time.
And the shadow on the wall shifted.
She emerged.
Not from light. From the absence of it.
Eyes silver and gold, hair blacker than the void. She stepped from the shadow like a blade leaving its sheath.
"Nyssara," I said.
And she said nothing.
She merely nodded
Three spirits.
All bonded to me before I could even speak full sentences.
Each one made from a different part of me.
Each one—unknowable to anyone else.
They weren't figments. They weren't dreams.
They were real.
And they were mine.
But something else was watching too.
I couldn't see it yet.
But sometimes, in the corners of my Void Eyes, I'd catch a flicker.
A ripple in space that didn't match the world.
A shape.
A flame.
Living shadow.
It never approached.
But I knew it was waiting.
For what, I didn't yet understand.
But I would.
I always do.