The crack was small. So faint it might have been mistaken for nothing more than the sigh of a tree branch breaking beneath its own weight.
Yet in the stillness of the Black Wilderness, that single sound was louder than all the storms of heaven.
The land heard it.
The crooked trees, which had not moved for centuries, trembled as though some invisible hand brushed against them. Their skeletal limbs scraped faintly against one another, a dry rattle like the teeth of corpses grinding in restless graves.
The soil shivered. The blackened ground that had consumed bones and blood alike for ages shifted ever so slightly, as if some vast presence beneath it stirred. Cracks spread through the dirt like veins of a corpse, weeping with dampness though no rain had fallen in a hundred years.
The air thickened. Heavy. Suffocating. Breathing within the wilderness became an act of defiance, each inhale dragging iron chains into one's lungs, each exhale a fight against an unseen weight pressing down from above.
Far above, the heavens darkened. Clouds crawled across the stars, sluggish and heavy, their light dimming until even the moon turned pale and wan. The night itself seemed unwilling to gaze upon what lay hidden below.
The egg pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
The rhythm was not sound, not truly. No mortal ear could have called it a beat, yet the entire wilderness quaked with its presence. It was vibration. It was pressure. It was a shadow pressing against the skin of the world, demanding to be felt.
Roots groaned beneath the soil, twisting as though writhing in agony. Stones cracked open without touch. Pools of stagnant water rippled as if disturbed by an invisible hand.
And then—silence.
A silence deeper than before. A silence so vast it swallowed thought, so absolute it pressed against the skull until the mind itself threatened to unravel.
The beasts at the borders froze. Wolves mid-hunt fell still, their fangs bared yet trembling. Serpents slithered back into the hollows of trees, their tongues flicking wildly in fear. Birds, perched high above, beat their wings in frantic silence before vanishing into the night, fleeing without a sound.
None dared to howl. None dared to cry. The wilderness was no longer theirs.
The egg had claimed it.
It pulsed again. The faint cracks spiderwebbed further across its colossal surface, each line glowing not with light but with shadow. It was darkness alive, so deep it seemed to pull everything into itself—color, warmth, sound, even time.
It had waited. For millennia, it had waited.
It had devoured rivers until they withered into dust. It had feasted on mountains until they were hollowed and broken. It had drained the skies until stars dimmed above its canopy. It had drunk the very marrow of the land until nothing remained but bones and silence.
It had fed on hope. On faith. On time itself.
Now the waiting was ending.
The cracks deepened, the pulse grew stronger. The wilderness itself shivered, and for the first time in uncounted centuries, the ancient silence broke—not with a roar, nor with a scream, but with a whisper.
A whisper that no tongue spoke, no ear heard, yet every stone and root felt. A whisper older than gods, older than the heavens themselves.
The egg… was dreaming.
And in its dream, the world trembled.