It came as a vibration.
Not loud. Not chaotic. Just steady, like thunder far underground.
Julius, nestled in the warm belly of the soil, froze.
He didn't move. Didn't ripple. Just listened.
Thump.Pause.Thump.
The weight pressed through the mud. Rhythmic. Organic.
Not the aimless twitching of worms. Not the slow drift of planktonic fluff. This was intentional.
A walker.
Something with legs.
Big. Warm. Slow.Cold-blooded. Four limbs. Familiar geometry.A lizard.
Julius held still.
The creature's foot sank into the mud just above him. Soft-fleshed between the toes. Damp. Exposed.
That was the window.
He launched.
A smooth arc. No noise. No warning.
Julius's gelatinous body curled up the webbing like a living thread, slipping beneath the scales and into the tissue beneath. The nerves crackled around him. Instinct tried to resist. Muscles spasmed.
But it was too late.
He was inside.
He moved with surgical purpose, navigating blindly through flesh and fluid.
Blood vessels were highways. Muscles were geography. He had no map, but his instincts compensated. He felt pulses of electric signal around him, sensed heat gradients like sonar.
He climbed upward, inch by inch, towards the spine.
It took seconds. Or minutes.
He didn't care.
He pierced the spinal cord like a scalpel.
The lizard convulsed, violently. Legs kicked. Tail thrashed.
Followed by stillness.
Inside the skull, Julius unspooled.
He wrapped himself along the brain tissue, mimicking it, merging. He didn't destroy it completely, not yet. He needed it to read. To learn.
Nerve patterns fired against him. Primal instincts: sun, warmth, run, eat.
Simple. Pathetic. But usable.
He read every neuron like a book. Saw how muscles were wired. How vision connected. How balance stabilized the walk.
He didn't just absorb knowledge, he overwrote it.
Bit by bit, the lizard's consciousness faded.
And then
sensation.
Sight came first.
It was jarring. Too much light. Too much motion.
The jungle swam in color, warped by lateral eyes with no depth. Everything was green and brown and busy. Insects skittered. Leaves twitched. Wind bent branches.
Julius blinked.
Blinking. An action. Controlled.
He tried moving the tongue. It flicked. He tasted the air, dust, humidity, plant oils. Primitive, but useful.
He stepped forward, slow and clumsy. His tail counterbalanced him automatically. He adjusted.
The second step was better.
The third, smooth.
Within minutes, he was moving like the lizard always had, only now with intention.
"It is mine now.This body. This skin.Mine."
Julius crouched beneath a leaf, feeling the sun warm his new skin.
He should have felt something, joy, fear, awe. But what filled him was colder. Cleaner.
Clarity.
The human voice inside him, the one that had drifted through the void, confused and desperate, began to grow quiet.
"I remember pain. I remember light. A life with a name.But it doesn't belong to me anymore.That name… Julius.It was fading." the creature thought.
He closed his lizard eyes.
And from somewhere deeper, from a place that remembered nothing of Earth or mankind, a new name emerged.
It came without translation. It had no language.But it was his.
Narakul.
He didn't know where it came from. Or why it felt so final.
But the moment he accepted it, something snapped free in his core.
Julius was weak. Julius was lost.Narakul survives. Narakul hunts.
He moved again, this time faster, slipping through vines and brush like a shadow given form.
Every step brought new possibilities. Muscles responded with practice. Vision tracked motion. The world wasn't foreign now. It was a map. A maze.
And Narakul was learning it.