After what felt like an eternity of formless drifting, a new sensation pierced Ray's awareness, movement. He felt a jolt, the amniontic fluid shaking with every tumble, a sense of being carried.
He was correct.
A huge bear, standing six meters tall with glowing crimson eyes and thick purple fur, had found the strange egg and, intrigued, carried it back to its den. The beast had tried to bite into the obsidian shell, testing it with teeth that could crush stone, but it wasn't successful in even scratching the impossibly hard surface. Frustrated, it soon gave up after a couple of weeks, and the egg was kept as a mere trophy in the dark cave, a curiosity amongst the bones and debris.
Time, in any measurable sense, had no meaning for the entity inside the egg. Two centuries had passed in the world outside from Ray's death to his fusion with Ashborn to being carried and left forgotten in the cave, a slow accretion of dust and silence in the dark cave, where the only changes were the slow growth of phosphorescent fungi and the accumulation of the bear's grisly trophies.
Inside, it was a period of profound gestation, of slow, deliberate crafting.
The body that formed was not a recreation of Ray's old form, nor was it a copy of the Tenth's original divinity. It was something new, a unique design forged in the crucible of their pact. The frame was leaner, harder, its potential for power and speed etched into the very fiber of its being. It slowly grew hair, a mane of pitch black that seemed to absorb the faint light within the egg. And beneath still-closed lids, eyes that had once been the flat grey of a dead sky now swirled with the stormy, volatile hunger of the Nyrr and the deep, enduring, persistent green of Life. His irises still retained a ring of that dull grey, a ghost of the boy he had been, but his pupils were now a shifting, luminous green, sometimes flickering with a dangerous red when the Nyrr stirred.
The consciousness within was a layered, complex thing. Ray was the surface, the captain of the vessel, the "I" that controlled speech and immediate action. Beneath him, a deep, silent well of ancient knowledge and simmering wrath waited—the Tenth, now truly Ashborn , true to his word, a silent partner bound by contract, a living library and a source of power.
The first sensation to return to Ray's forefront consciousness was pressure. Not the psychic weight of the primordial, but the simple, physical, claustrophobic pressure of confinement. He was curled tightly, his new limbs pressed against an unyielding, smooth inner wall.
Ray had been banging against the shell for what felt like the last hundred years. His body was almost fully formed, yet in the darkness of the egg, he perceived himself as a baby, watching his own form being meticulously reformed.
'Ughhh!! Just how hard is this eggshell? It feels like I'm trapped in a bank vault!'
The thought was purely Ray's, muttered in the internal monologue he'd missed. He couldn't speak, his new lungs filled with a thick, sustaining, amniontic fluid. He pushed. A fist, small but perfectly formed, fingers tipped with the potential for deadly claws, punched against the impossibly hard inner surface.
Crack!!
The sound was a gunshot in the profound silence of the cave. A single, hairline fracture, no longer than a finger, spiderwebbed across the dark, obsidian shell. In the profound darkness, broken only by the faint, eerie glow of the cave's phosphorescent fungi, the new being opened his eyes. Light—the first real, external light either consciousness had perceived in an age—seeped through, a dull, ambient glow.
'How come this egg cracks after what feels to be an eon??' Ray thought internally.
"You've finally absorbed all the amniontic fluid in the egg," Ashborn's voice echoed, calm and observational. "The egg has sustained you until now. With the fuel gone, the shell's structural integrity fails. It is finally letting you out."
A surge of excitement, wild and human, shot through Ray. He pushed again, and again, focusing his newfound strength. With each push, the cracks spread, a growing web of liberation. With each fracture, a final, powerful surge of energy flowed from the dissolving shell into his limbs, the last dregs of the condensed Nyrr solidifying his form. He could feel his body absorbing the energy, growing, strengthening with every second.
CRACK!
A large, plate-like piece of the shell gave way. A hand, now the size of a young child's, burst through, fingers uncurling and then clenching in the cool, damp air of the cave. The sensation was electric, overwhelming. It was real. It was physical. It was touch.
With a final, concerted effort, he shoved with both legs and his back, his whole body straining. The egg split open with a sound like shattering ceramic. He tumbled out, naked and slick with the clear, viscous amniotic fluid, onto the rough, cold stone floor.
The air of the demon world hit him like a physical blow—thick, heavy, and saturated with a palpable energy he now instinctively recognized. Nyrr. It was everywhere, a low-grade, constant hum in the atmosphere, tasting of iron, ozone, and a thousand conflicting, dark emotions.
He lay there for a long moment, his body shuddering, learning to breathe. In. Out. The alien air was a fire in his new lungs, a glorious, painful confirmation of existence. He was alive. Truly, physically alive.
He tried to speak, but only a dry, rasping cough came out. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, his limbs feeling both utterly alien and yet more intimately familiar than his original body had ever been. He looked down at his hands. They were his, yet not. They held a potential, a dormant strength that Ray-the-boy could never have conceived. His whole body was covered in small, scale-like skin, still not complete but growing and hardening at a visible, rapid rate.
They were no longer just the grey of his old, lifeless eyes. They were the color of a brewing storm, and in their depths, a spark of ancient green life flickered, watching, waiting.
The vessel was complete. The journey was about to begin.