I am Selith.
To you I am only a fish, cold and small beneath your nets. But I have lived longer than your nations, longer than the cities you build and burn. I have seen your wars, your kings, your golden ages, and I have learned one thing about your kind.
You never stop taking.
For centuries you pulled my kin from the deep and split them open for food and trophies. But when you found me, glimmering with light beneath the black waves, you wanted more than meat.
You wanted power. You struck me with lightning born of your machines and tore my essence apart to see what it would do. You called it energy, science, progress. I called it greed. The day you burned me, I saw your faces, and I cursed you.
Every child born after that day would inherit a fragment of me. Three hundred and sixty five gifts of light at first. Some could mend broken bones with a touch. Some could steady a trembling heart with a word. Some carried quiet strength, the kind that rebuilt villages after fire.
But there is one more, older and darker than the rest. It is not a gift of mending or steadiness. It is a wound made into a weapon. It is born when your hunger becomes sickness, when taking is no longer need but appetite. I call it the three hundred and sixty sixth. You call it many things. It is greed made voice. It is cunning shaped into command. It bends men into tyrants and makes holy causes into graves.
The three hundred and sixty five believe they are good. They carry mercy and skill and the blunt instruments of protection. But the world learned early how to use even mercy as a leash. Those with money and land learned how to find a child, how to name who would carry a power, and how to make morality into a service that keeps the rich rising and the poor shrinking.
Powers do not vanish. They pass. When a bearer dies, the next newborn somewhere in the world answers the beat and takes up that fragment. Empires, priests and families discovered the pattern and then corrupted it. Centuries ago an inventor learned something worse: that death could be timed and that timing could steer power into chosen bloodlines. Electricity gave them a means.
I have watched your emperors and priests and moguls build cages out of kindness. They convinced the three hundred and sixty five that saving men meant saving the system. They taught them to hold order above truth. And all the while the three hundred and sixty sixth watched and learned how to speak to hunger. It has walked among the powerful more often than you admit.
Now the cycle turns again. The method has been polished into law and industry. The system calls itself stability. The system will be called Grey Rock in the end because grey is the color of compromise and the rock is what you hide behind. But names do not change what is done.
Listen. In the deep I remember every promise you broke. In the deep I remember every child born with someone else's grief sewn into them. The world thinks it writes history. It only repeats my wound.
Soon another child will open his eyes. He will be born into rot and rain. He will be unloved and unwanted. He will carry the shadow none of you can hold.
I am Selith. I remember. The cycle will begin again.