There is no pain.
No warmth.
No heartbeat.
Only stillness.
At first, I think this is what death must be like — a quiet, endless drift in the dark. No fire. No gods. No punishment. Just... nothing.
But then the sensations begin.
A low hum. Faint, like distant thunder rolling beneath the earth.
Cold touches me, not on skin — I have no skin — but as a presence, brushing across something deeper. Deeper than bone. As if the cold touches my very self.
I try to breathe.
I can't.
I try to move.
Nothing happens.
I try to scream — but I have no mouth.
Panic rises like floodwater.
What is this?
Where am I?
Why can't I move?
A strange awareness seeps into me — slow, oozing, and alien. My senses shift. I don't see light. I don't hear sound. But I feel things: pressure, growth, weight, moisture, roots. Roots?
No.
No, no, no.
This isn't real.
This is some cruel joke. A hallucination. A last fever dream from a dying brain.
But it doesn't end.
The stillness doesn't pass.
Instead, something inside me twists. A pull. Like veins digging into soil, groping blindly into damp, rotting earth. My mind reels. I should have legs. Arms. A body.
But I don't.
I have roots.
I have bark.
I am... wood.
---
Part 2: The Awakening
---
Time is impossible to measure here. Days might pass. Or only hours.
But eventually, I begin to see. Not with eyes, not exactly. More like... an awareness. A point of perception.
There is a clearing. Faint light filters through the canopy above — not sunlight, exactly. A dim, grayish glow, like moonlight filtered through fog.
The forest is wrong.
The trees are not green. Their trunks are dark, gnarled, twisted into grotesque shapes like frozen screams. No leaves rustle. No birds sing.
The silence is absolute.
Until the whispers begin.
Soft. Wet. Breathing.
"Yggdrasil..."
The name cuts through the fog like a needle. The sound is familiar, yet foreign.
Yggdrasil. The World Tree.
Why that name? Why here?
I try to deny it. I try to scream that I'm not some god-tree. I'm no divine root of life or whatever myth they've conjured.
But I can't speak.
I can't move.
I'm just a sapling.
Small. Weak. Barely more than a black sprout with a twisted stalk and a single knotted eye where my awareness lingers.
Yet the forest watches me.
I can feel it.
The other trees — dead, dying, slumbering — they're aware of me. Not with eyes, but with presence. And something deeper. Older.
They sense I am not one of them.
And still, the whispers return.
"Yggdrasil..."
"The root that grows in darkness..."
"The one that feeds..."
But I am not Yggdrasil.
I am not holy.
I am not divine.
I was a killer.
Just a man.
And now… I don't even know what I am.
---
Part 3: The Hunger
---
It begins slowly. A pulse from below.
From the soil.
Something is dying near me.
I feel it like a scent — the rot, the decay, the blood.
A rabbit, maybe. Or some malformed thing — half-fur, half-bone — dragging itself through the forest. It collapses near my base, its body twitching.
I feel it.
Warmth bleeding into the ground.
A hunger awakens inside me. Not like human hunger. Not for food.
This is deeper. Primal.
The blood seeps into the soil.
And the roots — my roots — drink.
I don't choose it. It just happens.
One moment I'm still.
The next, I'm feeding.
The creature's life is gone in seconds. Its body shrivels, and I feel stronger. Not taller. Not yet.
But more... alive.
And in that moment, I understand something horrifying:
I don't grow through sunlight.
I grow through death.
---
Part 4: The Name
---
The forest breathes.
Not with wind, but with motion. Like the whole place is alive — pulsing, waiting.
And I am at its heart.
Yet I am not a king.
I am not a god.
I am a mistake.
A broken man reborn into something unnatural.
They call me Yggdrasil.
But I know the truth.
I am not Yggdrasil.
I am something else.
Something the world will come to fear.