My name is Aris.
It is a name that sounds like a sigh, forgotten the moment it is spoken. In the world I came from, we were taught that facts were the only truth. There was no God. There was no magic. There was only the mechanical grinding of biology. We were born into a system, we served it, and then we rotted.
But for me, the system broke a long time ago.
I stood by the window of the third-floor classroom, watching the clouds. To everyone else, they were just water vapor. To me, they looked like shards of a ceiling that was about to collapse. I felt a disconnect so deep it made my skin crawl. Why am I here? If I am just a collection of cells destined to be extinguished, why does the "Me" inside this shell feel so much heavier than the body itself?
"Hey, Aris."
The voice was like sandpaper. I didn't need to look. It was Kang, a boy who lived for the hierarchy of the school. He thrived in a world of logic because, in his world, the strong ate the weak.
"I'm talking to you, ghost," Kang said, grabbing my shoulder. His grip was tight, meant to hurt. "You didn't do my assignment. Do you want to die today?"
I finally turned my head. My eyes weren't filled with the fear he wanted. They were empty—two black pits reflecting a world that had already lost its color.
"Do I want to die?" I repeated. My voice sounded distant, even to me. "I was just wondering if I'm actually alive to begin with. If the world is crumbling, does it matter if I'm standing or lying down?"
Kang's face twisted. He hated my words. He hated that he couldn't bully a person who didn't value their own existence. To him, I was a glitch in his perfect system.
"You're a freak," he spat. He shoved me back against the window frame. "Let's see if you feel 'real' when you're hitting the ground."
He didn't mean to kill me. He just wanted to see me break. But as his hands shoved my chest, the old, rusted latch of the window gave way. It was a tragedy that happened in the blink of an eye—a mechanical failure in a world governed by physics.
As I tipped backward, the silence was absolute.
The wind didn't roar; it whispered. I watched the classroom ceiling recede, the stunned faces of my classmates becoming tiny dots. In that moment of falling, the question hit me one last time: What happens beyond the end of logic?
A name echoed in the back of my mind. It wasn't my name. It was a name that felt like it belonged to the darkness between the stars.
Satan.
It wasn't a choice; it was a realization. As the pavement rushed up to meet me, the "Aris" that the world knew—the weak, quiet victim—shattered into a thousand pieces.
I didn't feel the impact.
I woke to the sound of flies. A thick, wet buzzing that filled the air like static. My first breath didn't taste of city smog; it tasted of iron. It tasted of death so fresh it was still steaming in the morning chill.
I tried to move, but my limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated. I wasn't a man. I was small, fragile, and slick with a substance that was far too warm.
I was an infant, lying in a pool of thickening red.
I wasn't in a hospital. I was in a river—a river made of the lifeblood of thousands. I was cradled by the bodies of fallen soldiers, piled so high they choked the valley floor. For twenty years, this land had been a meat grinder. And then, I was born.
In the exact moment my lungs expanded, the war stopped. The screaming gave way to a silence so absolute it felt heavy. I looked up with eyes that had already seen the end of existence. I saw a sky choked with black smoke, and then, I saw the scavengers.
A wolf lurked at the edge of the corpse-pile. It didn't see a "miracle." It saw a soft, easy meal. It stepped over the armored chest of a dead knight and snatched me by my swaddling clothes. I didn't cry. I simply watched the distorted faces of the dead pass by as the beast carried me toward the dark treeline.
"Drop it!"
A ragged shout cracked the silence. A mercenary stumbled from the brush, his armor shattered and his side leaking dark fluid. With a trembling hand, he swung a broken blade. The wolf snarled and dropped me into the mud before vanishing into the shadows.
The mercenary collapsed to his knees beside me. He looked at me—a living child in the center of a massacre—and his eyes filled with a frantic, desperate hope.
"A survivor..." he gasped, coughing up crimson. "After all this death... how?"
He scooped me up with blood-stained arms and began the long walk home. He took me to a small cottage where a woman, Elena, and a five-year-old boy named Joran waited in the doorway.
"He's a sign, Elena," the man whispered, handing me to his wife before his legs finally gave out. "The war is over. I found him in the red... the only thing left breathing."
Joran reached out a small, warm hand to touch my cold cheek. "Is he my brother?"
They saw a miracle. They saw a reason to keep going.
But as I lay in the wooden cradle that night, I didn't feel like a miracle. I felt like a mistake. My mind was a mess of half-remembered logic and the crushing weight of the fall. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have a purpose. I was just a broken thing in a new world, watching the shadows flicker on the wall, wondering why the void hadn't taken me when it had the chance.