It began as pressure. A crushing, wet darkness that squeezed.
Then came the Noise. A deep, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum that wasn't sound but a vibration in the liquid warmth, a pounding drum that was the whole world. It was too much. It pressed on the soft, forming bones. It echoed in the not-yet ears.
He wanted it to stop.
He moved. A twitch. A jerk. A claw he did not know he had scraped against the soft, confining wall.
The drumbeat stuttered. A new sound pierced the wet dark—a high, sharp cry that was not his own. It was pain. It was fear. It tasted metallic and bright in the fluid.
Stop. Make it STOP.
He pushed. He tore.
The world erupted into a cacophony of Sensation.
Cold. A shocking, brutal invasion that stabbed his skin. It was a thousand needles after the warm nothing.
Light. It was a white, screaming agony behind his four new eyes. He squeezed them shut, but the red blaze of his own blood vessels was a violent sunset against his lids.
Sound. The drumbeat was now a ragged, wet gasp. The cry was a continuous, weakening siren. There were other sounds—a chaotic rustle, a low, resonant hum that felt like indifference given a voice.
Smell. Copper. Salt. Something sweet and decaying beneath the metal. Fear had a scent. It was his first breath, and it was poison.
He writhed, tangled in cords of pulsing heat. His wings, sodden and heavy, flapped against a yielding surface. His feathers were gluey, clumping into jagged, sensitive points.
He opened his eyes.
Sight. Blurred shapes. A vast, pale landscape of quivering flesh. A dark, spreading stain like a night sky blooming wrong. Above, a face. Contorted. Eyes wide with a feeling he would later learn was terror, but now was just a crushing, overwhelming signal of STOP LOOKING AT ME.
The humming sound spoke. Words were meaningless, but the tone was clear. It was cold. It was assessment. It was a dismissive flicker in the universe.
The face above him—the source of the drumbeat, the warmth, the first cry—made one last, guttering sound. A whisper. It held something soft. It held something that made the cold, humming presence shift with mild interest.
He did not understand. He only knew the Overload. The cold was a tooth. The light was a drill. The smells were claws in his nostrils. The fading whisper was a weight he could not bear.
He screamed. His own voice was a raw, tearing thing.
And the world answered.
The stone beneath the flesh trembled. Dust sifted from a ceiling he could not see. The air in the room grew heavy, thick, and tasted of ozone and buried things. The very molecules of reality shuddered in tune with his distress, a harmonic of pure, undiluted calamity.
He was born. He was aware. And his first act of being was to unravel the peace that contained him.
The Cold Hum drew closer. A sharp, elegant shape cut through the blinding light. A claw, dark and polished, touched his forehead. It did not bring comfort. It brought a label. It brought a Name that was not a name, but a verdict.
Darkness.
The word meant nothing. The feeling it carried did. It meant alone. It meant other.
The cold claw withdrew. The humming faded, footsteps echoing into a distance that felt infinite.
He lay there, in the ruin and the red, under the terrible, silent sky of a stone ceiling. The overload did not cease. It found a new, steady rhythm: the frantic rabbit-beat of his own heart, the shiver of his own breath, the constant, low-grade scream of a universe he could feel pressing in on him from every side, waiting to be told what to destroy next.