The wilderness had not recovered from the last pulse when the egg trembled once more. The cracks upon its shell spread wider, splitting across its surface like veins of lightning carved into stone. Each fissure echoed through the clearing, not with sound alone but with weight, a pressure that rattled the marrow of the world itself.
The air thickened, heavy with essence too old to be named. The barrier flickered, runes flaring weakly as though their time was almost spent. They strained against the outpouring, but the tide pressed harder, hungrier, refusing to be denied.
A sound followed—a slow, splintering groan—as the egg's surface caved.
Fragments fell, dissolving before they touched the earth, as though even matter rejected what lay within. From the widening gap spilled not light, not shadow but something between, something undefined, something that made the wilderness shudder in fear.
And then it emerged.
The first form crawled out, vast and terrible. Wings stretched wide, blotting out moonlight, feathers dripping with abyssal fire. Its eyes were endless pits, each one holding galaxies that burned and died in silence. A roar built in its throat—yet no sound came. The world rejected it, and the shape collapsed, crumbling like ash into nothingness.
The second form writhed into being—a serpent vast enough to coil mountains. Its scales glittered with the echoes of stars, constellations shifting across its hide. It opened its maw to swallow the sky, but its body fractured, shattering into shards of black light before it could draw breath.
The third rose, taller than the trees, horns spiraling from its head, claws dragging scars across the earth. Eyes bloomed across its skin, blinking in silence, weeping darkness. Its limbs twisted, broke, reshaped into endless configurations. And then, as swiftly as it appeared, it fell inward, devoured by its own weight, dissolving into mist.
Again and again, the forms came—beast, shadow, god, abomination. Each birthed from the egg, each failing, each rejected. Reality trembled under their weight, unable to bear them, until it forced them back into the shell.
The barrier quaked. The wilderness moaned. The egg pulsed again, a heartbeat that did not belong to flesh but to eternity.
The shell broke at last.
It did not shatter in an instant, but peeled away, fragment by fragment, disintegrating into dust. With every piece that vanished, the essence within pressed harder, as though eager to flood the world, to drown it in hunger. The runes flared in desperate protest, their glow flickering like dying embers.
From within, the shifting silhouette began to collapse.
Not into nothing, but into something smaller. The wings shrank. The coils folded inward. The horns snapped and withered. The vastness of the forms compressed, coiled tighter and tighter, as though eternity itself was being forced into a vessel. The process was violent, tearing at the wilderness. Trees bent until they cracked, rivers split their banks, the earth shook as if choking.
Still it compressed.
The silhouette writhed, shrank, screamed in silence. From mountain-sized monstrosity to beast, from beast to shadow, from shadow to something fragile, something that trembled under the weight of its own birth.
The barrier held one last time. The runes flared bright—and then burned out. Silence followed.
Where once the shell had loomed, only fragments of essence floated, fading into nothing. And at their center lay a figure.
Small. Frail. Human.
A boy, no older than seven or eight in appearance, curled upon the barren soil. His skin was pale, veins faint beneath the surface, fragile as porcelain. His hair spilled long around him, darker than the night, swallowing even the faint light of the moon.
His eyes opened.
Not wide, not in wonder or fear, but slowly, as though the act itself carried the weight of eternity.
They were black. Not the black of color, nor of shadow, but of void. Bottomless. Empty. They reflected nothing—no light, no wilderness, no sky. Staring into them was to stare into the end of all things.
He did not cry.
He did not wail like the newborns of mortals, announcing life with sound. He did not laugh, nor gasp, nor tremble. He simply opened his eyes and looked.
And in that silence, the wilderness recoiled.
Beasts fled into the distance, tearing through brush and stone without care. Birds scattered into the night, their wings ragged with panic. Even the wind died, afraid to move in his presence.
He sat up slowly, each motion deliberate, as though he was not learning to move but remembering movement after a thousand eternities. His gaze swept the clearing, empty yet suffocating, and the trees bent as though bowing under its weight.
No words came. No sound. Only the soft rustle of his dark hair in the airless silence.
He was human. And yet—he was not.
The frail body held no power in its appearance. It was weak, small, pitiful even. But the emptiness in his eyes, the pale stillness of his skin, the unnatural silence that clung to him like a second skin, whispered otherwise.
He was something else. Something that the world had tried and failed to reject. Something forced into a vessel too fragile to contain it.
The boy blinked once. Slowly.
The wilderness trembled.
The world had gained a child.
But it had also birthed its doom.