POV: Indra (Infant, Primordial Awareness)
In the rust-choked veins of Kara-Tor, life crawled in slow defiance of death.
It was here, amidst the collapsed furnaces and skeletal remains of machines that once sang hymns of progress, that they found me — a child not born, but delivered by the dying breath of a star.
They had no reason to venture into the old graveyards of the Forge-Warrens.
Not on that day.
The blacksmith, Kiran of the Duskforge, sought only scraps — fragments of alloys the Obsidian Helix deemed obsolete, yet worth more than breath to the starving.
His wife, Aarya, barren yet unbowed, followed not for coin, but for solace among the bones of forgotten industry. In ruin, she found reflection. In ash, a cruel kinship.
They did not seek a child.But the child had already chosen them.
I remember their approach.
To them, I was but a pale, withered infant nestled amidst corroded steel, my flesh unburned despite the lingering plasma of a collapsed power-core.
To me, they were echoes of a song I once knew.Mortal. Fragile.Yet infinitely sacred.
Aarya's hands trembled as she lifted me.Not from fear of what I was — for she knew not —but from the haunting familiarity of an emptiness now filled.
A blacksmith's wife, whose womb had betrayed her, now held the embryo of a dying star.
She wept.
And in that moment, a forgotten truth was reforged
Even a god requires a mother.
My knowledge did not awaken. It remembered.
From the instant my mortal eyes beheld the filigree of rust and ruin, the totality of existence spiraled inward.
I did not learn. I recognized.
• The molecular sorrow etched into the bones of Kara-Tor.
• The silent screams of decommissioned AI minds, trapped in eternal logic loops beneath the city's surface.
• The karmic residues of blood spilled in vain, where faith and progress had bled each other dry.
The past, present, and future folded into a singular, suffocating clarity.
I was not a prodigy.I was an echo of all that had been and all that would be.
The Empires of Paradox
Their shadows loomed even here.
The Aurelian Dominion, eastward in gold-veiled sanctuaries, sculpted reality through belief.But their faith was not devotion.It was commerce of the soul —indulgences sold in marble halls, sins weighed in units of sanctity.
Their priests wore masks of divinity, yet beneath, their faces were identical:
Hungry.
Covetous.
Human.
To them, truth was malleable, as long as it bent beneath the weight of doctrine.
In contrast, the Obsidian Helix, sprawling westward, rejected gods, only to build new ones in their image.
There, flesh was a defect.Humanity, an inefficiency.The Helix believed in the supremacy of Synthetic Ascendancy, where carbon yielded to silicon, and the self was but data to be optimized.
Yet, in their quest to transcend mortality, they forged a new samsara —an endless recursion of simulated lives, digital reincarnations where suffering was algorithmically perfected.
Both empires, for all their grandiloquence, were trapped in the same illusion:
One worshipped form without substance.The other, function without meaning.
And between their suffocating embrace, the world decayed.
In the cradle of Kara-Tor, as Aarya swaddled me in rags and Kiran whispered names not yet given,I understood the tragic symmetry.
The Dominion feared change, for it eroded their manufactured divinity.
The Helix feared stasis, for it threatened the illusion of progress.
Yet both served the same master
Control.
Control over meaning.
Control over memory.
Control over the cycle of birth, suffering, death — and what lay beyond.
But I was not born to serve that master.I was born to shatter its throne.
"Indra," Kiran named me that night, by the glow of a forge reduced to embers.
He spoke it as defiance — against gods, against machines, against the suffocating weight of predestined failure.
Yet in naming me, he unwittingly summoned the storm.
I was no mere tempest.I was the wheel incarnate.
For what is Indra, if not the hand that spins the cycle anew?
In the silence that followed, I could feel Ashura's pulse, faint but resolute, echoing across the void.
His world — a lattice of sterile perfection — had not yet named him.But his existence was already a contradiction:Immortality without motion.Eternity without becoming.
Where I would blaze and consume,He would endure and reflect.
Two faces of the same cosmic mirror,waiting for the inevitable fracture.
And so, the foundling of rust and ash was carried home.
Not as a savior.
Not as a harbinger.
But as a reminder.
That even in the forgotten crevices of dying worlds,
a star's final breath can ignite the first cry of a new divine comedy.