Chapter Text
'PREFACE'
There wasn’t any light, not at first.
There wasn’t any sound or shapes. No before, nor was there an after.
Just an intense, burning pressure without any weight. A deep silence without an end, and the vague, impossible sense that something had been torn open where nothing had ever been meant to exist.
In the instant a boy in white had been cast screaming into a void of darkness and nothing else, something else had been born. Born the moment reality split itself open like a wound that refused to close.
She didn’t wake. Not in the beginning.
She was just… suddenly there. A flicker of spiralling lights in the dark.
She hadn’t been asked for, nor had she been named. With no body and no mind, she was only a being of gathering potential, folded tightly into itself like a thought that had never learned how to think.
Her lights were the only stars in the black space, disturbed only by a tear of energy that brought her to become drifting points of awareness, suspended in an endless darkness. She did not move, nor so much as tremble, responding to forces she couldn’t yet perceive. To her, there was no language, no memories, and no sense of self.
Time passed, if it could even be called that, but she didn’t mark it. It slid past her like water over stone, completely unnoticed and unmeasured.
She slept without dreaming.
Yet, somewhere beyond her, the world sealed itself again. The wound finally closed. The screaming ended. The boy fell into nothing, and only the dark remained - and so did her faintly glowing lights.
Nothing seemed to be happening.
Then something changed, and she finally stirred. Her lights flickered rapidly, and her very self burned like an exploding star. There was no awakening gasp, nor anything like a sharp intake of a child’s first breath. Nothing of that sort.
Still, consciousness came to her the same way frost crept across glass. It was slow, quiet, and inevitable. She hadn’t the ability to be surprised. She only had a faint awareness of space and feeling.
Then the dark was no longer empty. Once a place where there had been nothing at all, it now had texture. Whatever she pressed against, it pressed right back.
For the first time, she felt something - and that is how she learnt to be startled. There was no pain nor pleasure, but the realisation that something new had evolved from her, something vast and unformed, was overwhelming. It responded when her lights shifted and pulsed faintly brighter. The void, or what it once was, bent - and in bending, it began to take shape.
This wasn’t creation by design, but a mimicry. Pure instinct.
Somewhere far away, beyond this veil of shadows, a small town existed. Bricks, timber, roads, and houses with wires that hummed quietly over and under like a spider’s web. She didn’t know any of this yet - she truly knew nothing in this moment - but she felt its echo, like an imprint left behind when the wound had been cried open. Her lights reached for that memory like a child grasping at a shape on a wall.
And so, her domain had taken that shape.
Buildings rose in skeletal reflections, shaded and hollow, coated in growth that breathed and twitched. Streets stretched out, mirroring their outer-world counterparts with unsettling accuracy, frozen in the shape they had been when the world had last brushed against her.
The clocks didn’t tick. Leaves never fell. Everything was caught mid-breath, suspended in a moment that would never complete itself.
The moment energy had plunged right into her, and she had woken up. Like when all things are born, she didn’t decide anything. Nothing but this.
This world wasn’t her home. Someone could never be their own home. No - this place was an extension of her very being. The tunnels were her nerves. The air was her breath, thick with spores that carried sensation where thought had not yet been formed. When something shifted, she felt it like a ripple in water. When something broke, tore, or burned, she recoiled without knowing why.
Pain came before understanding, and awareness followed soon after.
She - the lights - learned quickly. Faster than she should have, maybe, though there was no one to measure her against. Her lights brightened and dimmed as she experimented with new sensations: pressures, movements, and more. She learned that she could reach out. That the domain around her responded when she willed it to, curling and uncurling like muscle.
But there was something else, too. A presence near her domain that pressed in from the edges of her very awareness. Vast and cold and watchful. An ancient thing that moved through her the way a current does through a river, leaving behind patterns she couldn’t decipher. Her lights sensed it without recognition, and yet she accepted its influence without understanding its true intentions. It never spoke to her. It never needed to. She wouldn’t understand it anyway, not then.
Curiosity bloomed before fear did.
Her lights moved across her domain constantly, finding the windows next. They were thin places in the dark, shimmering membranes where the other world pressed close. Through them, she saw everything - small, warm shapes that breathed and spoke in strange tongues, and changed their faces with astonishing speed.
Humans weren’t something she knew, but she studied them anyway. Their light was different. Much more fragile and finite than hers, and it fascinated her.
She watched for a long time before she even dared to reach out, even when the other, more ancient presence hissed its protest. But she cared little for its opinion.
When she did reach out, it was a clumsy thing.
Something like a gate tore open where her focus lingered too long, and it was a little painful, but not unbearable. It was jagged and large, bleeding into the other side.
Creatures slipped through it - extensions of her, though she didn’t understand that either. They moved with animalistic instinct, listened only to her, and were driven purely by hunger and noise. She watched their paths with distant interest. Yet while they roamed the other world, her lights were too frightened to follow them. The other world was too large, and much too loud.
Sometimes, when she watched through the windows, there were men adorned in white cloth. Sometimes the windows showed machinery that hummed and screamed, tearing at her senses when it came too close. She learnt to hide from those. She learned that some lights burned hotter than others. She didn’t like the heat.
Then, when she only grew more curious, she decided to experiment.
Her lights dimmed significantly and drew together, collapsing into a single point of will. Around that point, matter answered. It came willingly, drawn from her domain itself, torn from walls that bled spores and sinew. Flesh knit itself together with wet insistence. Bone pushed outward, shaping a frame it didn’t yet understand. Blood crept into newly formed veins - thick, cold, and sluggish, as if unsure whether it was meant to move at all.
A body assembled itself around her.
And it hurt.
She learned pain further then - being forced into edges and limits where none had existed before. Her awareness, once vast and uncontained, now pressed against skin stretched too tightly over joints that resisted movement. Breath shuddered into new lungs, and the sound startled her enough that she stilled completely, listening to herself truly exist.
Hair followed after. It spilled down in a pale, colourless fall, growing too fast and too thick, as though overcompensating for something she had missed. Her skin settled into a hue drained of warmth, as if the dark still clung to it no matter how carefully she shaped it. She gave herself eyes last.
She had watched the humans through her windows - their soft faces and symmetrical features, the way their eyes shone with moisture and light. She tried to replicate that. She tried very hard. But darkness was what she knew best, and so darkness was what looked back at her. Her eyes had whites, yes, but her irises and pupils drank in light rather than reflecting it - vast and black and bottomless, echoing the endless corridors of her domain.
She studied herself in town - in the window of one of the many hollow, lifeless shops - with the same detached curiosity she had given the humans. She tilted her head. Flexed her fingers - twelve at first, before she realised and made them ten. They trembled at the painful change, then steadied. This shape was more acceptable.
It wasn’t perfect, though.
At first, she couldn’t decide. Faces came and went, forming and reforming as she tested them. Some were too sharp, others too soft. Some made her wonder if humans would recoil in disgust at the sight. Others made her wonder if they would tremble and scream. That thought made something tight and restless coil in her chest.
It took the better part of a day - an entire stretch of cold, unmoving time - before she settled on a form that felt least incorrect.
This shape, she decided, was the one she liked best.
Then more pain came - not because she shifted again, but because her domain cried out in shrieks and stank of fire. It burned her very soul and tore a scream from her human lips. Nearby, her creatures howled and screeched as their connection with her very self sizzled and blazed.
When she found the source, she saw humans coming through her gate. Dressed head to toe in strange clothing that covered every inch of them. They wielded weapons that spewed a bright, hot element over her domain, making her reaching vines shrivel and die instantly.
Her lights reared, and she resisted their flames - not out of maliciousness, but confusion and desperation. Fear returned, and her fleshy human insides ached with something she hadn’t found a name for.
When they noticed her, gunfire tore through the air. Tiny metal things ripped through her delicate skin, and it hurt like nothing had ever hurt her before.
Then the humans died.
Their blood spilled over her domain, and their limbs were torn from their bodies, feeding her dying land. Creatures came and fed on the rest.
After that, she recoiled into herself, her lights dimming as her domain settled into uneasy stillness once more. Fear rattled through her every time a white coat entered through her gate - a gate she had no idea how to close. This was the first time she had known such pain, such fear.
Even the other presence mocked her for her naivety in a series of hisses and whispers. She ignored it, bitterly. It went silent after that.
She could still feel the burns, even after her human flesh healed over minutes after. They echoed like agonising memories.
After that, she learned to kill the humans. To devour them and use their blood to feed herself. She dimmed her lights, hiding them beneath her new body. She learned patience. Stillness. To listen. To wait. The gate remained, but she no longer went near it unless she had to. She let the creatures in her hive defend her. To feast on the intruders.
Curiosity dulled into caution like a passing breeze. Though she still didn’t know words like fear or loneliness, she certainly felt their shapes settle in. They hollowed her out and made room for something else to bear fruit.
She lingered in the shadows she created, neither asleep nor truly awake, watching the other world from behind thin, trembling veils. She watched humans pass by, unaware of the darkness that pressed so close to them. Her lights flickered as life continued on the other side - and for the first time, she understood absence.
What she didn’t count on next was a boy - small and frightened - falling into her domain and giving her a new purpose. A new sense of curiosity.
And when that moment finally came, when his terror brushed against her very being and her lights flared in recognition, something ancient and inevitable completed itself.
The dark was no longer empty.
She wasn’t alone.