Prologue
The abyss was never silent.
It whispered without mouths, breathed without lungs.
Down there, where light dared not crawl, time did not flow.
Only instinct. Only the edge.
The creature was small.
Too thin to bite. Too fast to be bitten.
It had no memories. It needed none.
It woke. It hunted. It hid.
It slept, if fear allowed.
The abyss shaped her with teeth and scars.
Taught her there was no future for the slow, no rest for the living.
And yet… one night was different.
The air trembled.
Not with the growl of a predator, nor the scream of prey.
A new sound. High-pitched. Rhythmic.
As if something were laughing.
She froze.
She was hungry—always.
But something—a throb behind her skull, a twitch in her bones—held her still.
She didn't understand laughter.
But something in it burned.
Not fear.
Not hunger.
Doubt.
For the first time, she didn't follow the scent of blood.
She followed the sound.
Between rocks and roots she crept, leaving the safety of what she knew, drawn toward the danger of what she didn't.
And when she saw the tall, fire-bearing figures—humans—she didn't run.
She watched.
They spoke.
Shouted.
Laughed.
One kicked an empty nest. Another set fire to bones.
She didn't understand their words.
But she understood the look.
Contempt.
That was her first language.
When the laughter came again, it didn't awaken curiosity.
It stirred heat beneath her ribs. Something nameless.
Not hunger.
Rage.
And then—
A scream.
Not hers.
Not human.
From behind the rocks came the shriek of another—small, thin, fast like her. One of her kind.
Then another.
And another.
The humans had found a nest.
Her nest.
Their torches lit the crevice with cruel firelight. Blades flashed. Bones cracked.
Siblings—brothers? sisters? words she didn't know—were pulled out, stomped, burned.
A voice barked something.
A soldier laughed as he crushed a half-formed body under his boot.
She couldn't move.
Her claws trembled against the stone.
The warmth in her chest grew hotter. Wilder.
She didn't know why.
She didn't have the words.
Only this:
"They laugh... while we die."
Her eyes, pale as moonlit rot, locked onto them.
This time, she didn't want to watch.
She wanted to hurt.
She didn't know it yet, but her first thought had been born.
Chapter 1
The nest burned.
Not with fire, but with shrieks. Bones. Blood.
They had found them—her kind.
The creature watched from the shadows, body pressed tight between wet stone and trembling muscle.
She had followed the humans, curious. Not afraid. Not anymore.
But curiosity turned to stillness. Stillness to rage.
They dragged the small ones out one by one. Pale limbs. Half-formed wings.
A boot crushed a skull that hadn't yet hardened.
Another was set ablaze.
Laughed at.
The sound scraped her skin like broken shell.
The same sound she had once followed.
The same that had once sparked her first question.
Now it ignited something deeper.
Older.
She should've run. That was what she had always done.
But her claws curled against the stone.
Her chest hurt. Her breath shortened.
One of the soldiers turned—casual, unguarded.
He wore light armor and reeked of smoke and confidence.
He didn't see her.
He didn't get the chance.
She lunged.
No plan. No hesitation. Just raw motion.
Her fangs found his throat—soft, so terribly soft.
Blood poured, thick and sweet, as if the abyss itself rewarded her.
Screams erupted. Blades drawn.
She vanished before the steel could find her, darting into a crack in the rock.
But she didn't leave empty.
She carried more than blood.
She carried victory.
And a thought. A real one.
A sharp, cruel shape that settled behind her eyes like a seed pressed into soil:
"Why... do they decide who lives?"
The taste of human blood burned in its throat like an unquenchable fire.
The creature dragged itself into a narrow crevice, its battered body trembling with adrenaline.
The humans' shouts still echoed in the distance, but they weren't chasing it. Not this time.
It looked at its claws.
They were stained red.
Something inside it shuddered. Not fear. Not hunger. It was... something else.
Why does this feel different?
Before, killing had been mere survival—an instinctive act, like breathing. But now... now there
was intention. A flicker of something it didn't understand.
It raised a claw to its mouth, slowly licking the dried blood.
It tasted of iron. Of fear. Of power.
The nights in the abyss held no moon or stars, but the creature began to dream.
Fragmented, senseless images: bright lights that didn't burn, voices with no source, a deep ache in places where it bore no wounds.
Once, it dreamed it could fly.
Another time, that it could speak.
It woke gasping, muscles taut, scanning for invisible enemies. But there was only darkness, and the echo of something no longer there.
What is this?
It had no words to name it.
Yet every night, the dreams returned. And every morning, it lingered a little longer, a little more still, before the hunt began.
In a forgotten cave, it found a pool of stagnant water.
It approached cautiously, sniffing the air. No danger. Only stillness.
For the first time, it saw its reflection.
A gaunt figure, draped in pale scars. Eyes like two drops of liquid moonlight. A mouth of jagged fangs.
It lifted a claw. The reflection did the same.
Is this... me?
Something about that image stirred a strange sensation. As if something were missing.
As if something were... wrong.
It slashed at the water, shattering the reflection.
But the question remained.
Days later, as it crept through a narrow tunnel, a sound brought it to a sudden halt.
It wasn't the crack of bones or the shriek of prey. It was... music.
Slow, distorted, as if the abyss itself were singing.
It followed the sound, shadow-quiet, until it reached a chamber where the air thrummed.
There, in the center, lay a creature far larger than itself—wounded, its scaled body oozing a luminous fluid.
From its throat spilled that mournful song, a lament that echoed off the walls.
The creature didn't understand. But it stayed. It listened.
And for the first time, it felt something that wasn't hunger or rage.
It was sorrow.
The singing ceased at dawn. The larger creature died in silence, its eyes dimming.
But before leaving, the protagonist saw something on the ground: marks carved into the stone by the dying one's claws.
Shapes.
Symbols.
It didn't comprehend them. Yet it touched them, tracing the grooves with its sharp fingers.
A word surfaced in its mind, unbidden:
"Loneliness."
It didn't know what it meant. But the word was its own.
And for the first time, it possessed something that wasn't flesh or bone.