Time was a blur of sensations: hunger, wetness, warmth, cold, pain. His body betrayed him again and again.
There was the shame of soiling himself. He would feel it building, the tightening inside his gut, and he could do nothing. His limbs flailed, his chest heaved, but control never came. The hot wetness spilled, soaking his legs, filling the air with a sour stench. And then the worst: hands lifting him, peeling away the soiled cloth, wiping him clean like an animal.
Each time, humiliation cracked something inside him. You had an office job. You signed documents, wrote reports, carried a briefcase. Now you can't even keep yourself clean.
Worse still were the nights.
When the cries rose in the distance—cries not of children but of beasts. Deep rumbling growls, carried through the night like thunder. Sometimes a screech that clawed at his ears, high and sharp, too fierce to belong to any bird he remembered. The walls did not silence them. His body froze each time, tiny fists trembling, heart pounding with terror.
And once, in the lull between cries, he heard something else. A sound that shook him to his marrow.
A boom.
Deep, rhythmic, measured. Like mountains striking mountains.
The air itself seemed to pulse with it, as though the ground quaked in time. Then came voices—shouting, guttural, yet deliberate. He couldn't understand the words, but the cadence was sharp, precise, like commands on a battlefield.
He whimpered, curling into himself.
The world outside his crib was not safe.
Sometimes, when the man's voice spoke near him, he felt vibrations in the air, subtle but strange. Not mere sound. The way it thrummed made the gray inside him stir uneasily. It was as though the voice itself carried weight beyond flesh, like a current pressing against his bones.
Once, while fever burned in him, he opened his eyes to see the man seated nearby. The man's hands moved slowly through the air, tracing shapes he could not comprehend. With each movement, the air seemed to ripple, faint light flickering along his fingertips.
It lasted only moments. When the fever overtook him again, he could no longer tell if it had been real or dream.
But even in dream, he felt it: the air was alive.
When hunger gnawed, he cried. Sometimes the woman came quickly, soft voice murmuring, arms wrapping him in warmth. Sometimes she was slow, her footsteps hurrying from far away. And sometimes, she didn't come at all—only after endless screaming did she arrive, her face drawn and weary.
On those nights, he tasted loneliness sharper than the gray of his old life. Helplessness gnawed him raw.
And yet—each time he was fed, each time the milk filled him, he felt something faint in the liquid. Not just warmth, not just fullness. A shimmer, a pulse. His tiny body tingled faintly, as if each swallow left threads of fire stitching into his veins.
It terrified him.
It fascinated him.
He did not understand it. He could not name it. But he knew, even in his infant fog, that it was not ordinary.
This world was not gray.
This world was alive with forces he could not grasp.
And he was trapped in a body too small, too weak, too broken to reach for them.