The jungle blurred beneath him.
Wings beat in controlled pulses, broad and sleek, fused from feather and sinew. They arched from the monkey's shoulder blades, stretching wide over the canopy, catching wind like sails of living flesh.
Narakul had flown before.
But never like this.
This was no bird.
This was a primate in flight.
Muscle, memory, and the impossible stitched together.
[Wing membranes reinforced with beetle chitin.Shoulder rotators aligned with musculature.Flight stabilizers from avian spinal reflexes.And the monkey's brain… handles it all.]
He soared in silence. Below, the jungle thinned.
And then changed.
First, it was vines giving way to clearing.
Then steel.
Fences. Posts. Faded paint. Human technology, half-reclaimed by moss and time.
His wings folded.
He landed on all fours, sniffed the earth, and followed the unnatural wind, the kind shaped by metal edges and memory.
A cage emerged through the trees.
No. Not a cage.
A compound.
Its gates were wide, heavy, rusted. Slanted bars tall enough to hold beasts larger than anything he'd yet consumed.
And at its edge… something enormous had passed.
Narakul's fingers spread over the soil.
A footprint.
Wide. Deep. Clawed.
Three talons. Seven inches apart. Pressure lines from a creature built for velocity and precision.
Raptor.
His breath caught.
He circled the perimeter, eyes darting.
He was too large, to pass and the cage had no visible door he could force.
But Narakul was not bound by form.
He segmented.
The monkey form twitched, then peeled. His ribcage unlatched. Bones disassembled like unfolding origami.
One arm slipped off, a crawling limb of bone and sinew.
Then a leg.
Then the spine, uncoiling like a rope of muscle.
Each piece, autonomous, slithered between the bars, silent.
It took time.
But time was a tool.
Piece by piece, he reassembled inside.
It was quiet within.
Dead quiet and within the compound he saw A long-abandoned research holding zone. Sunlight filtered through roof beams, highlighting bones, vines, shattered fencing.
And more prints.
Not just raptor.
Others.
He crouched near one: a wide, circular indentation. Brontosaur? Stegosaur? No its too shallow. But big.
He traced the edge, and then it hit him.
A pulse.
In the brain.
In the blood.
A memory.
A flickering screen.Gloved hands.A man's voice: "It's Julius, right?"A clipboard with the name: JULIUS FLETCHERAnother image:A cage, like this one, holding a massive silhouette.Someone shouting, "Stay Back! It's testing the doors! keep the tranquilizers ready"He heard sirens, then a woman screaming. A shattering sound of steel rent the air, followed by a guttural roar, a sound far too primal to be human, and far too close.
He gasped.
For a moment, he wasn't in the jungle.
He was somewhere sterile. Somewhere controlled. or well not so controlled, somewhere lost.
"So that was me. That was the name.I was human once. Julius.A man inside a lab. Behind glass. Watching monsters walk behind stronger glass." he thought
He stood slowly, the balance returned.
He looked around with the new eyes.
This wasn't just a jungle. This was an experiment left to rot.And I am what grew in its bones.
Narakul walked now with calm, collected steps.
The monkey's face bore no emotion.
But inside, the storm churned.
He was remembering how humans planned. How they feared what they couldn't control.
He could feel the flaws in the holding research centers around him. The decay in their logic. Their desperate attempts to contain what they couldn't predict.
He exited the broken research research center and entered deeped inside the huge compound.
Birds fled at his sight.
Something had changed.