A sound erupted, a sound so overwhelming and powerful that it cut through the night like a razor. It was a silent scream that no one else could hear, no one, that is, except for a single man standing in the forest. As that sound vibrated through every living creature, unseen and unfelt by anyone else, it began to unravel them from the inside out. Their bodies weakened, their essence strained, though they never understood why.
But the man in the forest felt it all. He smiled grimly, accepting the pain as if it were a deserved fate. He had long since given up on his own life, and he understood what the sound was saying: your bodies are fragile, your souls are true, and soon you will be stripped down to the truth of what you are, like ants, fighting against an inevitable tide.
The man stood there, and for a fleeting moment, he forgot who he was. Memories of his childhood, a childhood laced with pain, flickered at the edges of his mind. The more he tried to grasp those memories, the more they slipped away, leaving him in a haze of forgetting. It was as though his own existence was unraveling, his body beginning to crumble and fade.
And then, in that strange dissolution, something small and bright appeared—a tiny spark of soul, transforming before his eyes. New flesh, new blood began to form from that spark, and the man who had stood there only moments ago was no longer a man at all. He had become a small bat, reborn from the remnants of his fading humanity.
The bat, now pulsing with a strange new energy, fluttered awkwardly through the night. In that transformation, he had fallen from the realm of an intelligent human to a lowly creature that could barely think beyond hunger and instinct. He stumbled through the darkness, unable to fly properly and barely able to move with any grace.
As he wandered, what felt like an eternity in this new form, he finally spotted a small rat. There was a brief, clumsy struggle between them, and though the bat was injured, it managed to sink its teeth into the rat. At last, he had found his first meal in this strange new existence.
The little bat was too frail to venture beyond the forest. It was small, weak, and vulnerable, and so it clung to the safety of a nearby tree, never leaving the shadows of the woods for days, then weeks, and then months. In that secluded corner of the forest, it survived by hunting the weakest of creatures: cockroaches, mice, tiny rats, anything smaller and more helpless than itself. It avoided larger animals, hiding instinctively in the dark, knowing that the night was its only ally. No one could see it clearly in the darkness, and so it moved silently through the night, resting by day and emerging again when the world was dim.
Slowly, the bat crept further through the forest. With each meal, it grew a bit larger, and as it grew, it expanded its territory, daring to seek out bigger prey. After a week or two of cautious wandering, it stumbled upon a small village hidden among the trees, a place marked by strange buildings and unfamiliar structures.
The bat sensed, instinctively, that there were strong animals here. It ventured into the village by night, staying in the shadows, preying only on the smallest animals. The moment it encountered anything larger or sensed danger, it would retreat. For the first few months of its new life, it haunted the village silently, a shadow in the night.
In time, the bat gathered enough courage to explore one of the village's odd, made structures. Naively, it chose the smallest house, thinking that the smallest dwelling must hold the weakest prey. After all, the bat had grown considerably larger than it once was, and it felt emboldened to venture inside.
But as it slipped into the dim interior, it came face to face with a snake, one not much bigger than itself but far more aggressive. A fierce struggle ensued. The snake attacked wildly, venom glistening at its fangs, while the bat instinctively dodged and used the cramped space to its advantage. It lured the snake into tangling itself around a piece of furniture, and in that moment of distraction, the bat struck, biting down and eventually overpowering the snake.
With this victory, the bat felt a surge of newfound strength. Feeding on the snake made it stronger still, a creature evolving with every challenge it overcame.
With newfound confidence, the bat ventured deeper into the house. It spotted cockroaches—larger than any it had seen before, scurrying weakly across the floor. Without a second thought, the bat devoured them, for it knew nothing of mercy. It was simply a creature of hunger and instinct now.
As it finished its meal, something fell onto the bat's back, an object it hadn't noticed at all. Even though the bat's vision was poor, in this dim place it could just make out a shape. It flinched backward, expecting another living threat, but soon realized the thing was inanimate. It looked like some sort of lifelike figure, not a real being at all.
The bat, though unable to comprehend what it had found, simply moved on, In its own simple way, the bat recognized that the two figures were of the same kind, one large and one small. It instinctively assumed the smaller figure was a child and the larger one its parent, perhaps a mother or a father. But beyond that faint understanding, the bat's mind could make no further sense of what it saw. It simply noted the resemblance and moved on, driven by the primal needs that now ruled its world.