Before the Unborn Ones, there was only the Sea Without Shape — a vast, roaring turbulence without form, without word, without thought.
No "being." No "non-being." No boundaries.
It was not even silence, for silence presupposes sound. It was not even void, for void implies space. It was unutterable.
—Logos
I ran. I ran as if motion alone could stitch meaning back into me, as if each step might press a thumbprint of self onto that indifferent grey and make it hold. My legs tore through the landscape — grey that was not colour but weather, a thing that bled into everything — cutting toward a distant thread of green like a fin cleaving a turbulent sea. Each breath came ragged, shallow; my lungs were coals and every inhale licked fire along my ribs. The air tasted of ash and old iron. My throat felt sanded raw.
"You might want to pick up your pace," Logos said, her voice flat as a shard of glass in the wind, drifting over me like an accusation dressed as advice.
"Huh… what do you mean?" The words scraped from me. Smoke had lodged in my chest; the furnace that was my lungs refused mercy.
"You have to cover about forty-two kilometres in three hours," she said, the casual cruelty of someone who measures a life by metrics. "You would have to be experienced — a marathoner — to accomplish that. You are neither that nor a superhuman, except…" Her sentence frayed, deliberately unfinished. The silence at the end felt like a lid slammed over my ribs.
"What?" The single syllable came out raw. "Am I being set an impossible task?" I spat on the ground. The taste of iron and disappointment rose with it. Muscles cramped, knees wobbled. My body threatened to give up around me.
"Your life, or existence, is in no immediate jeopardy," Logos intoned. The sentence was a verdict in kindly clothes. "Handle this yourself."
Handle this yourself. The phrase sat in my gut like a stone. Not a request. Not guidance. An order. I had no margin. There was only me, the grey, and the knowledge that whatever clock governed this had no interest in my breath.
I collapsed against the rough bark of a fallen trunk. The world spun. My limbs felt hollowed out, as if someone had scooped marrow from my bones. Brambles had taken me; my skin was a map of red lines. My chest hammered like a mallet on glass.
Bzzz.
Reality snapped—like a live wire across my face. Pain lanced through me: electric, absolute. Muscles convulsed. My teeth ground together with a metallic taste. White braided my sight for a heartbeat, and then everything folded into a room I now knew as a cage of testing: cold concrete, instruments, the sharp scent of ozone and disinfectant. The grey I'd been running through was gone. I was somewhere clinical, bright, watched.
"F-2.35," the woman said. Her voice had the dry flatness of someone reading out data. "What are you doing? You have not completed your task."
She stood over me like a tribunal. Smooth features, efficient movements—no cruelty, only procedure. The man behind her — taller, silent — held a strange book and watched as if parsing a line of code.
I tried to move. The shock had braided itself into my muscles; every fibre refused my bidding. Foam pricked the corners of my mouth. I wanted to howl my confusion, to demand why they set impossibilities and logged my failing like a specimen. My voice obeyed nothing. Instead a wet animal sound escaped me.
"F-2.35, you attempted the first activity and underperformed," the woman said. That measured critique cut deeper than any shout; it exposed a failing not of courage but of worth. "Good effort. Endeavour to improve."
She smiled — the smallest curl at the corner of her mouth — and it made my shame flare into something like defiance.
"Now," she continued, breezy as assigning a child a chore, "lift this."
She pointed. The object was a three-dimensional trapezoid of dull alloy, ridged and cold. I set my hands on it and heaved. For a moment it slid as if it were smoke. Then my sternum clenched; muscles burned. At eighty kilos my arms locked. Breath came in rasping, ragged bursts. The woman glanced at her colleague; pens scratched.
"Okay," she said. "Spar with the man at the far end. A controlled match. We need to test endurance and response."
My hands shook. Two men entered, the sort bred to press a human body to its limits. Ordinary in bone, extraordinary in purpose. One offered a look that might have been pity. It lasted a second.
The room brightened to a single spotlight. They had made theatre of my sweating, my failing. Like a beaten dog learning to stand, I rose.
"Understood," I managed. My throat was raw.
The first man lunged — economy in motion, each strike precise. I met him with what I had: clumsy, desperate defence, flailing born of panic rather than craft. Old reflexes flashed, muscle memory half-remembered; for one bright beat I found a rhythm. Then pain: elbow into ribs, breath stolen. I tasted blood.
"You're hesitating," the woman murmured, almost indulgent. "Don't anticipate the fail. Move."
I could have told her that I was unsure which part of me belonged to me anymore. That the running had hollowed me out and the shocks felt less like punishment than calibration. I said none of that. I kept moving. The second man pressed, and my body answered with teeth and nails and a savage, unladylike scrabble. Each strike I received was logged — not only on physical parchment but in whatever deeper ledger these people kept: cardiac responses, minute changes in gait, the colour of sweat.
Between rounds she offered small observations: "Grip too high. Hips not engaged." "Better footwork." "Cardiac response suboptimal."
None of that measured what mattered. No algorithm registered the stubborn, useless fact that I kept getting up, that despite everything I ran toward green as if motion were a prayer. No ledger noted the small, private revolts.
I was fascinated by their tools — arcane instruments that read flesh like they read weather, as if modern science and old magic had been braided together. How could they take such readings in a place that felt medieval? It made no sense and yet here it was: the future tucked into the bones of a world otherwise old.
When they let me slump, sweat salted my eyes and hands trembled. The trapezoid gleamed in the corner, mocking. The woman scratched into her notebook and looked up.
"We continue tomorrow," she said, voice neutral. "Increase pace by five per cent."
Tomorrow? I had thought it morning when they dragged me in hours ago. The grey sky — fake, real, a screen? — churned questions. Logos' voice hummed like a machine far off and patient; the grey would be waiting when they decided I was to run again.
Sleep came as both mercy and threat. My body, a ledger of missed marks and earned bruises, folded inward. Machines hummed. Pens scratched. The drum of footsteps kept time with the lives they measured.
Dinner that night was barley bread and thin vegetable stew, oatmeal and water — food enough to remind me I had eaten. It was not a feast; hunger was the best spice, they said, but their maxim tasted thin when pleasure was a luxury I could not afford. I ate in the room where I had woken, where happiness felt like contraband. My thoughts drifted and, against the ache, something stubborn flickered: I would run again.