The rain never stopped in the slums. It soaked the cracked concrete and the torn cloth that served as roofs. The smell of wet trash clung to everything. My first memories were cold, wet, and full of pain. My mother's hands were hard, her words sharper than the wind cutting through the streets.
"You are nothing," she spat one morning and I felt the sting of the slap more than my hunger. "A mistake. A waste."
From the moment I opened my eyes the world had been against me. The smell of rotting food, the screams of children, the cracks in the walls where rats slipped through all of it was my life. Nothing was given freely. Nothing was ever kind.
Even in that darkness I noticed something else. A flicker, a warmth that pulsed when my mother's anger hit me, when I felt fear, when the world tried to crush me. I did not understand it yet, but something watched with me, waiting.
I spent the days hiding in corners, trying not to breathe too loud. Hunger gnawed at me. My ribs ached from it. Sometimes I found pieces of bread in the garbage. Sometimes I went without. Sometimes my mother kicked me for asking. Sometimes she laughed when I fell in the mud.
That night Lira appeared. She was smaller than me but sharp, a shadow moving through the wet streets. She crouched beside me, sharing the scraps she had found. "You are staring again," she said quietly.
"I am thinking," I muttered, clutching my stomach. "Thinking about how much they hate us. About how the towers get to live while we rot."
She did not argue. She only handed me a piece of bread and for the first time I felt a small warmth that was not fire.
Even as I ate, I felt the shadows in the alleys move. Rats ran faster than usual. I heard voices arguing, the low growl of someone taking what little we had found. The city was alive and it was hungry. And so was I.
Sometimes I dreamed of the towers, the white lights so clean and so cruel. People inside them did not know fear. They did not know hunger. They did not know what it was to be invisible. They did not know what it was to be born unwanted, to have the world breathe down your neck and squeeze the life out of you before you even had a chance.
I hated them already. I hated the towers. I hated the city. I hated the air for being too thin and the rain for being too cold. I hated myself for being born into it.
And even then I felt something stirring, a flicker in my chest when anger rose too high, when I wanted to scream or strike back at a world that had done nothing but spit on me. I did not know what it was, only that it was mine and it was waiting.
I did not sleep that night. I only listened. The city breathed around me. The rain tapped like a drum. The gutters gurgled with waste. And somewhere below the surface, unseen, Selith stirred in his prison, sensing the first sparks of the 366th awakening.
I did not know it yet. I only knew the hatred that had been bred into me since birth and the world I was born to challenge.