I exist in darkness. Warm, curved walls press against my body, smooth and unyielding. I breathe, but the air is thin, damp, as if stolen from some forgotten place. The rhythm of the world hums around me—steady, low, hypnotic.
A beat. A pulse. Is it my own? Or something greater?
I stretch, but there is no space. The edges of my prison shift and hold. My body folds inward, cramped, contained. My limbs ache, useless against the walls. The sound outside grows louder—muffled, vibrating, incomprehensible. It is not silence. It is something worse.
But there is light.
A pinprick, faint and distant, no bigger than a star glimpsed from the depths of a cave. I tilt toward it, drawn like a moth to a bonfire. My head strikes the wall—softly at first, then harder. The light trembles. Expands. It spills through the crack I have made, jagged and white, searing against the dark.
I peck again. The world outside swells with sound. Too loud. Too alive. I want to stop, but the crack widens, spilling light like blood.
I do not know why, but I must go on.
I am blind when the wall finally gives way. The shell splinters beneath me, crumbling like a brittle lie. The air outside is thick, electric, stabbing into me with scents I cannot name. The light devours me. It is endless, impossible—burning against my skin, my eyes, my everything.
I stumble forward, trembling. The ground beneath me shifts—rough, uneven, cold. I blink against the onslaught of light, the world resolving into harsh fragments. Shapes loom overhead, vast and alien. A sky? A predator? I cannot tell. I only feel its weight, pressing against my existence.
Then, the attack.
A shriek pierces the air, primal and sharp. My body reacts before my mind does, wings flailing, claws scraping against stone—or is it dirt? Feathers lash against me, the weight of another presence. It slams into me, beak snapping, eyes wild.
Pain blooms across my chest. The sound of the strike is hollow, distant, like a drum played beneath water. My wings beat harder, struggling to lift, but my opponent is relentless. I feel it—hunger, rage, survival—all in the arc of its strikes.
The light blinds me still. I cannot see its face, only the glint of its beak, the fury in its movements. I lash back, claws raking against soft flesh. A scream—mine or theirs? The struggle grows distant, disjointed, my body moving on instinct as the world outside sharpens into unbearable clarity.
But then, I see them.
The Tall Ones.
They loom above, peering down with faces I cannot comprehend. They are too large, too alien, their forms jagged and shifting as though they are not entirely here. Their limbs stretch into the horizon like twisted branches, their bodies pulsing faintly with a light that is not their own.
They have no wings. They are nothing like me.
And yet, they are everything.
I hear no words, but their presence speaks in vibrations that rattle my bones. Their gaze is unbearable, searing into the deepest parts of me, peeling back layers of thought and instinct alike. My sibling strikes me again, claws raking across my flank, but I barely feel it. The Tall Ones consume all of my senses.
I see their eyes—vast and faceted like fractured suns. They do not judge. They do not pity. They only watch.
A screech from my sibling breaks my trance. It hurls itself toward me, beak snapping. The attack is wild, desperate. I twist, strike, and my claws find flesh. My sibling collapses with a final, shrill cry.
The light above burns brighter now, etching every detail into my vision. The broken shell at my feet, the blood on my claws, the trembling life I have taken.
And the Tall Ones still watch.
One of them leans closer, bending low. Its face stretches impossibly wide, its fractured gaze drinking me in. For a moment, I think I see a curve to its expression—a twitch of its alien features that might be a smile. But it is not kindness. It is something else.
I am a curiosity. A fleeting existence in a world far beneath theirs.
I try to stand tall beneath their gaze, but my wings tremble. I cannot tell if they approve or if they are waiting for me to falter.
Their faces loom closer, impossibly vast, until they fill the entire sky. Their fractured forms split the horizon, and the ground beneath me crumbles into light. The shell. The nest. My sibling's body. All of it dissolves.
I am alone again, floating in the unbearable brightness of their gaze.
This is the world I fought to enter.
And already, I want to retreat.