"Widen, say something. Please say something. Don't die, you have to live."
That was the last words I heard clearly before thunder split the sky, before I even knew what hit me.
A white flash ripped through the glass ceiling. The lab filled with a sound like a hundred metal doors slamming at once. The blast threw me across the room, pinned me to steel, and stole my breath.
Sparks crawled over my chest. For a second, I thought my heart had stopped.
And in that space between being and nothing, it occurred to me, my hunger had finally paid me back.
Maybe I should start where I should have started, the thing that ruined me.
I never meant to be worshiped. I meant to work. But people like simple answers, faces to pin their faith on.
"Widen, can I please have your autograph?!" an obsessed fan screamed, her voice cutting through the restless crowd as I tried to walk past and slip into the laboratory where I worked as one of the best scientists the world had ever known.
The cameras exploded in flashes, each strike burning into my eyes.
"Widen, I love you!" another delusional fan cried.
"Please marry me!" a man yelled, his words heavy with a parasocial obsession that almost made me sick.
Pathetic, nonsensical words. They rained down on me but I never let them enter my heart. My mind, my entire being, was focused on my work.
"Please step back! You cannot meet him right now!" my secretary commanded, her arm stretched protectively in front of me. I could hear the tension in her tone as she shoved back eager hands reaching out to grab me.
I never knew fame would feel like this. I had dreamed of recognition, yes, but this was madness. No privacy, no peace. Just eyes watching, voices demanding, and strangers owning pieces of me they never earned.
I was just a normal scientist. A man obsessed with the Stone Age, with the origins of man, with the fragile line between beast and sapiens.
My life should have been simple. But everything changed the day we discovered the tar pit.
The pit was no ordinary discovery as it contained fragments of the past, in that dark pool, we found fossils of a Neanderthal, one of the earliest humans to ever exist on planet Earth.
When my fingers brushed it, something inside me shifted. My hands trembled, my hunger grew uncontrollable, and I felt like I'd been staring at the last page of a book written in a language I could finally read. I didn't want to study him.
I wanted to put breath back where there was only bone.
So we built the machine.
It was massive with steel ribs curving upward like the skeleton of a beast, wires tangled like veins, and a glass chamber at its heart large enough to hold the fossil.
At its core sat a generator designed to channel and amplify energy, to simulate the spark of life itself.
My colleagues had laughed at the idea at first, calling it madness. But I convinced them, it was our salvation and kept at it until there was no option other than to try.
I didn't know it then, but I was feeding the roots of my own nightmare.
That evening, I entered the laboratory.
"Boss, you should head home early," my assistant warned. "There's been a report of deadly thunderstorms."
"Yes… I will," I replied, forcing a smile.
But my heart was racing. I was so close to victory.
A thunderstorm could not stop me from this monumental discovery I was about to unleash upon the world.
I worked into the night, my body trembling with exhaustion.
Hours slipped away unnoticed as I adjusted wires, tuned circuits, and polished the fossil chamber. I tightened bolts with shaking fingers, wiped sweat from my forehead, and listened to the faint hum of the machine as it awaited power.
The machine was my only hope, my pride and my defiance against time itself. I whispered to myself as I worked.
"This will change the world. This will make them remember me forever."
Then suddenly, the storm struck.
The first thunderbolt hit the sky with a roar that rattled the glass walls.
It echoed inside my chest, leaving my heart racing with fear. For a heartbeat, the room lit up white, and I felt the storm's gaze staring directly at me. I almost peed my pants.
I remembered my assistant's warning, but I whispered again, "It's too late to leave now. Nothing will go wrong."
But I was wrong. Another bolt struck with sparks that crawled along the edges of the lab. My heart stopped for a second, but still I pressed forward, twisting a final wire into place.
And then it happened.
The third thunderbolt shattered the glass ceiling, raining shards like falling stars, the sound was deafening, instantly, the bolt found it's way into the machine.
It roared awake on its own. I was stunned, I didn't power it on, so how could it?
The fossil chamber shook as though it had a soul fighting to escape.
"NO!" I screamed.
Then the explosion came like the wrath of gods. A deafening boom tore through the air.
The blast picked me up like a ragdoll and slammed me into the machine, sparks ripping through my body as thunderbolts crawled across my chest.
I felt death staring right into my eyes. I was weak. I couldn't say a word or move my body, I just lay still like a tree log.
Then nothing, that should have been the end. The end of Widen Storm.
The crash had thrown me into darkness, and for a long moment, I couldn't even tell if I was alive.
My chest ached. When I finally forced my eyes open, the world around me spun.
I laid in mud, my machine lying broken and smoking nearby. The air smelled of damp stone and burned metal.
All around me stretched what looked like a lagoon, though most of its water had dried up and filled with shallow green pools.
My body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, and my arms shook as I tried to push myself up but I couldn't.
My vision blurred, but through the haze I caught sight of something far away, a mighty stone tower rising against the sky. Its shape was hazy, almost unreal, like something out of a dream.
Before I could focus, my eyes slid shut for a second.
That's when I heard it, the heavy grinding of stone and a large gate was opened.
Then came the voices.
"Did you hear that?" one called out.
"It came from the lagoon!" another answered, closer this time.
"There, look, someone is lying there!"
Footsteps pounded against the ground, I began to panic but my body wouldn't obey me.
I could only tilt my head slightly, just enough to glimpse dark shapes rushing toward me.
They didn't look like anyone I knew. Their hair was wild, theh wore strange animal skins as a cloth.
One of them gasped loudly.
"What is this?"
"Who is he?" another demanded, their tone filled with curiosity and fear.
"He looks different… and he's injured," another whispered softly.
Their voices tangled in my ears, foreign yet heavy with emotion. Fear stayed in my stomach. My mouth was dry, but I forced it open.
The words came out as little more than a whisper.
I pushed my lips apart. My voice came out as a rasp. "Wh..who are you?"
"Let's take him?"
A woman stepped forward. Her eyes were sharp and bright. She crouched near me."Leave him," she said softly. "He might be one of them."
A man spat on the ground. "Neanderthals wouldn't dare this far," he said. "He is not theirs. He is not… ours."
Neanderthals? Wasn't that part of human history?
The woman reached for my chest. When her fingers touched my skin, she hissed as she noticed the lightning-like marks running through my veins.
"He is marked," she said.
"Marked?" the man echoed, baffled.
"Yes," she said, and her face went cold. "Lightning chose him."
Darkness crept in at the edges of my vision. I felt something cold kiss my throat. A hand held a blade there.
The woman leaned close. Her breath smelled of smoke. "Take him to the council," she whispered. "If he is truly not the one… he must die."
The last thing I heard as the world closed over me was someone behind me muttering like prayer or verdict,
"The Lightning-Born will not be spared."
Then everything went black.