It was not a different world.
Not at first glance.
The same continents. The same wars. The same prayers whispered into empty skies.
An alternate Earth — similar enough to be familiar, different enough to be forgotten.
In a nameless village tucked between dark hills and dying farmlands, the night was unnaturally still. No wind stirred the trees. No dogs barked. Even the insects seemed to hesitate.
Above, the moon burned blue.
Not pale. Not silver.
Blue.
Inside a fragile clay hut at the edge of the village, a woman labored against the rhythm of pain and destiny. Her breaths were shallow, fingers clawing at the woven mat beneath her. Sweat soaked her hair, clinging to her face like strands of black silk.
"Just a little more," one of the village women whispered, though her voice trembled.
The oil lamps flickered.
Outside, the sky tore open.
A streak of red split the heavens — not like a falling star, but like a wound dragged across the firmament. It did not fade. It grew.
Someone outside screamed.
The ground began to hum.
Inside the hut, the woman arched forward in a final cry — and at that precise moment, the meteorite struck.
The impact did not sound like thunder.
It sounded like the world breaking.
The shockwave tore through the village in a circular roar. Roofs shattered. Windows burst inward. The clay walls of the hut cracked like dry skin.
And in that violent breath between destruction and silence—
The child was born.
The force of the blast expelled him from his mother's womb before the midwives could steady him. He slid across the mat, crying into a world that had already begun collapsing.
But the umbilical cord did not follow cleanly.
It stretched.
Caught.
Snared against a jagged shard of something glowing — something red — that had pierced through the wall and embedded itself beside the newborn.
A fragment of the meteorite.
Still burning.
Still humming.
The cord twisted around it as though claiming it.
The midwives froze.
The mother did not scream.
She did not move.
When they turned to her, their faces drained of color. Splintered shards of the fallen star had torn through her side and chest. Blood pooled beneath her, dark and spreading, steaming faintly in the strange heat radiating from outside.
She was breathing — barely.
Her lips parted as if to say something, but only a wet whisper escaped.
One of the women rushed to the child instead, hands shaking as she severed the cord. Another pulled cloth from a basket and wrapped the infant quickly.
"Move him away! The stone—" someone choked.
The shard embedded in the floor pulsed faintly, veins of crimson light crawling across its surface like living cracks. The air around it felt wrong — heavy, metallic, suffocating.
They hurried to shield the child from it, turning their backs to the glow.
That was when they saw it...