The thunder split the sky before I even knew what hit me.
A white flash ripped through the glass ceiling. The lab filled with a sound like a hundred metal doors slamming at once. The blast threw me across the room, pinned me to steel, stole my breath. Sparks crawled over my chest, hot and stinging. For a second I thought my heart had stopped.
And in that space between being and nothing, it occurred to me, my hunger had finally paid me back.
******
Maybe I should start where I should have started: the thing that ruined me.
I never meant to be worshiped. I meant to work. But people like simple answers—faces to pin their faith on.
"Widen, can I please have your autograph?!" an obsessed freaky jobless fan screamed, her voice cutting through the restless crowd as I tried to walk past and slip into the laboratory where I worked as one of the best scientist the world had ever known.
The cameras exploded in flashes, each strike burning into my eyes like a hundred tiny suns.
"Widen, I love you!" another delusional fan cried, her voice shaking with desperation.
"Please marry me!" a man yelled, his words heavy with a parasocial obsession that almost made me sick.
Pathetic, nonsensical words. They rained down on me like stones, but I never let them enter my heart. My mind, my entire being was focused on my work.
"Please step back! You cannot meet him right now!" my secretary commanded, her arm stretched protectively in front of me. I could hear the tension in her tone as she shoved back eager hands reaching out to grab me.
I never knew fame would feel like this. I had dreamed of recognition, yes, but this was madness. No privacy, no peace. Just eyes watching, voices demanding and strangers owning pieces of me they never earned.
I was just a normal scientist. A man obsessed with the Stone Age, with the origins of man, with the fragile line between beast and sapiens. My life should have been simple. But everything changed the day we discovered the tar pit.
The pit was no ordinary discovery—it was a graveyard of eternity. A pool of black, sticky death that swallowed time itself. Its surface was thick and slow, like oil that refused to die.
Bubbles broke the skin of the tar, releasing a stench so heavy it clung to the lungs and refused to let go. Around its edges lay fragments of the past—bones curled in frozen agony, teeth gritted as though still screaming for freedom.
And in that dark pool, we found fossils. Strange, powerful things that told stories no book ever could. But one discovery eclipsed them all—the fossil of a Neanderthal, one of the earliest humans to ever exist on planet earth.
When my fingers brushed it, something inside me shifted. My hands trembled, my hunger grew uncontrollable and I felt like I'd been staring at the last page of a book written in a language I could finally read. I didn't want to study him. I wanted to put breath back where there was only bone.
So we built the machine.
It was not just any machine. It was massive—steel ribs curving upward like the skeleton of a beast, wires tangled like veins, and a glass chamber at its heart large enough to hold the fossil. At its core sat a generator designed to channel and amplify energy, to simulate the spark of life itself.
My colleagues had laughed at the idea at first, calling it madness. But I convinced them, it was our salvation and kept at it until there was no option than to try.
I didn't know it then, but I was feeding the roots of my own nightmare.
That evening, I entered my workplace—the laboratory. .The only place that made me feel human, a safe home where I was free from the public gazes and control. The room smelled faintly of dust and metal, its glass walls glowing weakly beneath the shadow of storm clouds outside.
"Boss, you should head home early," my assistant warned, her voice uneasy. "There's been a report of deadly thunderstorms."
"Yes… I will," I replied, forcing a smile.
But my heart was racing. I was close, so close to victory. A thunderstorm could not stop me from this huge discovery I was about to unleash to the whole world.
I worked into the night, my body trembling with exhaustion yet electrified by obsession.
Hours slipped away unnoticed as I adjusted wires, tuned circuits, and polished the fossil's chamber. I tightened bolts with shaking fingers, wiped sweat from my forehead, and listened to the faint hum of the generator as it awaited power.
The machine was more than steel to me, it was hope, it was pride, it was my defiance against time itself. I whispered to myself as I worked: This will change the world. This will make them remember me forever.
Then suddenly, the storm struck.
The first thunderbolt split the sky with a roar that rattled the glass walls. The sound was sharp, violent, like a mountain being torn in half. It echoed inside my chest, leaving my heart racing with a primal fear. For a heartbeat, the room lit up white, and I felt the storm's gaze staring directly at me. I almost pee my pants.
I remembered my secretary's warning, but I whispered again "It's too late to leave now. Nothing will go wrong."
But I was wrong.
Another bolt struck. Closer, sharper, louder. The sound cracked the air like a whip from the heavens. Sparks crawled along the edges of the lab like glowing serpents, slithering into the wires and feeding on the machine.
My breath caught, fear rising like bile, but still I pressed forward, twisting a final wire into place with trembling hands.
And then it happened.
A thunderbolt shattered the glass ceiling, raining shards like falling stars. The sound was deafening, metal screaming, glass exploding and thunder roaring as one.
Lightning tore into the machine. The contraption, which had been silent and lifeless, roared awake on its own. I was stunned, I didn't power it on so how come.
Lights blazed, gears shrieked, and the fossil chamber shook as though it had a soul fighting to escape.
"NO!" I screamed, my voice cracking with terror.
Then the explosion came like the wrath of the gods. A deafening boom tore through the air.
The blast picked me up like a ragdoll and hurled me against the wall. My bones screamed. My skin burned. I slammed into the machine, sparks ripping through my body as thunderbolts crawled across my chest.
I felt death staring right into my eyes. I was weak, I couldn't say a word or move my body just lay still like a tree log.
Then nothing. That should have been the end. The end of Widen. The end of vanity and in a few seconds, darkness finally swallowed me whole.
****
The crash had hurled me into darkness, and for a long moment, I couldn't even tell if I was alive. My chest burned, every breath tearing through me like fire. When I finally forced my eyes open, the world around me spun.
I was sprawled in mud, my machine lying broken and smoking nearby. The air smelled of damp stone and burned metal. All around me stretched what looked like a lagoon, though most of its water had dried into cracked earth and shallow, green puddles.
My body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, and my arms shook as I tried to push myself up.
My vision blurred, but through the haze I caught sight of something far away. A mighty stone tower rising against the pale sky. Its shape was hazy, almost unreal, like something out of a dream. My head throbbed, and before I could focus, my eyes slid shut for a second.
That's when I heard it, the heavy grinding of stone. Gates opening.
And then the voices.
"Did you hear that?" one called out, sharp with alarm.
"It came from the lagoon!" another voice answered, closer this time.
"There, look, someone is lying there!"
Footsteps pounded against the cracked ground, splashing through the shallow pools. Panic flared in my chest, but my body wouldn't obey me. I could only tilt my head slightly, just enough to glimpse dark shapes rushing toward me.
My vision swam, they didn't look like anyone I knew. Their hair was wild, their clothes strange, animal skins and rough cloth.
One of them gasped loudly.
"What is this?"
"Who is he?" another demanded, their tone filled with curiosity and fear.
"He looks different… and he's injured." another whispered softly.
Their voices tangled in my ears, foreign yet heavy with emotion. I felt my pulse hammering, fear curling in my stomach. My mouth was dry, but I forced it open. The words came out as little more than a broken whisper.
I pushed my lips apart. My voice came out as a rasp. "Wh—who are you?"
" Let's take him?"
A woman stepped forward. Her eyes were a struck flint, hard and bright. She crouched near me, not friendly. "Leave him," she said softly. "He might be one of them."
A man spat on the ground. "Neathandrals wouldn't dare this far," he said. "He is not theirs. He is not… ours."
The word landed like a stone, Neathandrals. Ancient. Vanished. Myth. Yet here it was, spoken with the kind of fear that smells like history.
The woman reached for my chest. When her fingers touched my skin she hissed as she noticed the lightning bolts running through my veins. "He is marked," she said.
"Marked?" the man echoed, baffled.
"Yes," she said, and her face went cold. "Lightning chose him."
I tried to laugh. It was a sound like broken glass.
Darkness crept in at the corners of my vision. I felt something cold kiss my throat. A hand held a blade there.
The woman leaned close. Her breath was the smell of smoke. "Take him to the council," she whispered, voice small and terrible. "If he is truly not the one… he must die."
The last thing I heard as the world closed over me was someone behind me, muttering like prayer or verdict: "The lightning-born will not be spared."
Then everything went black.