Silence.
It was not the silence of an empty room, nor the quiet of a sleeping world. This was the absolute silence that existed between the beats of a dead heart, in the space a soul once occupied. It was the silence of the Void that predated worlds, and it was the silence that now filled the hollowed-out vessel that had been Ray.
For a timeless moment, there was only the echo of his ending. The taste of blood, the grating voice of Lucas, the final, cold certainty of his own extinction. These impressions were not memories; they were ghosts, the last heat radiating from a cooled stone.
Then, the Hunger awoke.
It was not a thought, not a voice. It was a fundamental law of existence, as immutable as gravity. It was the First Hunger, the Primordial Nyrr, and it had been waiting in the spaces between his dying breaths. In the absolute zero of his end, it found the perfect catalyst: a will to live that had been sharpened to a razor's edge by despair. Over my dead body.
The Nyrr feasted. It did not consume the ghost-impressions of Ray's life; it consumed the potential of his death. It drank the despair that was to come, the rage that would never be, the vengeance that had died unborn. It was a banquet of emotions denied, and the Hunger found the flavor exquisite.
From this act of cosmic consumption, a new awareness crystallized. It was not Ray, the broken boy on the asphalt. Nor was it the mindless, primordial Nyrr. It was a synthesis, a terrible alchemy. The raw material of a human soul had been forged in the furnace of an ancient craving.
The thought formed, a sovereign decree in the kingdom of nothingness. ...Ash... I am Ashborn.
A universe away, in a realm woven from the very emotions the Nyrr craved, a tragedy was concluding.
He was the Tenth. The Firstborn. While his siblings had clawed their way into being from the raw, screaming negativity of a million worlds, he had simply… emerged. He was not an emotion, but the source from which all emotion sprang. He was Life.
His realm was not a palace of obsidian and despair, but a single, vast tree whose roots drank from the core of the demon world and whose branches cradled nascent stars. Here, the air hummed with the potential of beginnings, the bittersweet ache of growth, the quiet peace of a single, sustained note.
But the note was about to be shattered.
They came for him together, a congress of calamities. Despair, whose touch unraveled hope. Wrath, who was the living embodiment of the boot that had shattered Ray's ribs. Avarice, Pride, Envy, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, Deceit. They were perfect, absolute, and they hated him for what he was not. He was complexity to their simplicity, creation to their destruction, a reminder of what they had devoured to become supreme.
"You are an anomaly, brother," hissed Deceit, his form shifting from one beloved memory to another. "A flaw in our perfect design."
"Your existence dilutes our purity," roared Wrath, the air crackling around him.
Life did not fight. To fight was to embody Wrath. To flee was to admit Fear. To plead was to validate Despair. He stood beneath his great tree, a sad understanding in his eyes that was more devastating than any curse.
Their assault was not a battle; it was an unraveling. Despair whispered until the leaves of his tree turned to dust. Wrath incinerated the branches. Avarice siphoned the light from the nascent stars. They did not just attack his body; they systematically denied the concepts he represented.
His physical form dissolved, not in a blast of gore, but like a sandcastle succumbing to the tide, particle by particle. His vast consciousness, the wisdom of the first dawn, was scattered to the chaotic winds of the realm.
The Nine Primordials watched, satisfied. The anomaly was corrected. The balance of power, built solely on their nine pillars, was secure.
They were wrong.
A shard of his soul, no larger than a dying ember, remained. It was not enough to think, to feel, to be. It was only enough to witness. Cast adrift on the phantom currents of the demon world, it became a silent eye.
It saw the Purebloods, the loyal children of the Nine, build their great citadels and wage their eternal, senseless wars, their lives a perfect reflection of their progenitor's singular sin.
It saw the Half-bloods, the children of forbidden unions, scuttling in the shadows. They were despised for their duality, yet they possessed a flickering, unpredictable spark that the Purebloods lacked—a spark of something other.
The remnant saw it all. The rise of clans, the forging of empires of misery, the endless consumption of Nyrr. It saw the demon world for what it was: a beautiful, terrible engine, perfectly designed to run on pain. And it could do nothing. It was a thought without a voice, a memory without a mind, a god reduced to a ghost.
Back in the silence that had birthed Ashborn, a new sensation bloomed. A pull. A connection.
The nascent Ashborn, a consciousness born from human death and primordial hunger, felt an echo. It was faint, a whisper of green in an infinite black, a sensation of profound, foundational loss. It was the echo of the Tenth's fall.
And the drifting remnant of Life, in its eternal, passive vigil, felt something new for the first time since its destruction. It felt a draw. Not the greedy, consuming pull of the Nyrr, but the gravitational tug of a singularity. A point of immense, dense potential had ignited in the cosmic dark, a potential that had feasted on a death as the Nine had feasted on Life.
In the absolute silence of his non-being, Ashborn received his first lesson, imprinted upon him not by words, but by the fundamental memory of the Nyrr that now composed him. He understood the hierarchy. He understood the Nine. He understood the crime that had shaped reality.
And he understood one thing more, with a clarity that was both Ray's and the Nyrr, "A world built on murder is one that can't return to purity"