His body trembled.
Cold seeped from the ground into his bones, as if trying to rewrite every part of him with a sensation he didn't recognize.
His eyes opened slowly, heavy lids moving as if they'd never been taught to move at all. Above him, a gray sky hung, uncertain of its own purpose.
The earth beneath his back wasn't a bed. This wasn't a mattress.
Or maybe... he had never known the world at all.
But... had he ever truly known the world?
"I know this isn't heaven," he muttered, his voice dry and jagged. "But if this is hell... why does it still feel so empty?"
He tried to move his fingers. One. Then two. Muscles quivered like a newborn fawn. He sat up. Slowly.
The gloomy forest greeted him with silence. Mist clung low, damp and piercing. No wind. No birdsong.
There was a wound on his leg. Dry. Cracked, like earth betrayed by the rainy season.
He touched it. Felt nothing.
The air carried the scent of wet soil and faint drifting fog. The child lifted his head, gaze slowly sweeping the unfamiliar woods.
Then....like a knife piercing memory.....something returned to him.
Fire.
Screams.
The stench of burning flesh.
Unfamiliar footsteps crushing the ground he had grown on.
His village. Set ablaze while still alive. People screaming. Babies wailing.
And he.
he just ran.
Small feet tearing through underbrush. He didn't look back. There was no time.
Now... only silence.
"I have to go back," he whispered.
He stood. Knees weak, body cold, but something in his chest refused to die. That village couldn't be gone. It wasn't possible. He knew where it was. He... used to leave often. To pick wild fruit.
His steps were steady in the direction he believed was right.
But after a few minutes of walking....he stopped.
There was no large rock marking the way.
No small river.
No sign of his village.
He turned. Tried another direction. But it was all the same: thick woods, no landmarks.
No shapes.
As if the world had erased the map from the earth and replaced it with wild, unformed emptiness.
He clenched his jaw. "I didn't forget. I couldn't have."
He remembered his mother's face. His father's voice. The scent of woodsmoke from their cracked stove.
But he didn't remember the way home.
The sky above was still gray. Even the compass in his mind felt like an illusion.
Everything... blurred.
"Why can't I find the way back... when I always knew it before?"
He stared at his filthy hands. Then into the forest.
As if nature were playing a cruel joke. As if the world itself whispered:
"You can survive. But you can't return."
He stood in silence for a long time.
The ground beneath him was cold...but losing direction was colder than anything.
He walked. Staggered.
Each step was small, each one nearly collapsing beneath its own weight.
His stomach howled. A physical pain he truly felt now....an ache that clawed at his gut like a wild beast, burned through his throat, and made his vision tremble.
Beneath the roots of a massive tree, he found mushrooms.
Black. Veiled in ash.
He paused.
"Mother once taught me… which ones to eat. Which were bitter. Which were poisonous."
And he knew....these were the kind he wasn't supposed to touch.
Too black. Too silent.
But...
"I'm hungry,"
he whispered.
Not to anyone. Just to himself.
A physical need he had never known when he was an angel.
He picked one. His hands were shaking.
Then he bit into it.
It tasted like a wound.
Bitter.
The kind of bitterness that lingered on the tongue like a memory....
The taste his father's cooking always left behind.
He didn't spit it out.
He couldn't.
He kept chewing.
Because bitterness... was still better than emptiness.
He threw up part of it.
But forced the rest down.
His stomach needed something.
He kept walking.
This forest had no end.
Not in distance....
But in intent.
Like a maze that never meant to let anyone out.
Then he saw it.
A deer. Or... its corpse.
The large body lay sprawled, stomach torn open. Skin split. Guts spilled.
Maggots crawled through it, devouring with terrifying patience.
He stood still, staring.
His stomach twisted again.
this time not from hunger, but something else.
This time, it felt like he was burning inside.
His hands trembled.
"My body... is writhing. But my throat... refuses?" he thought, confused.
He stepped closer.
The stench hit him like a slap.
Rotten. Sour.
Alive in the worst way.
His head throbbed. His vision dimmed.
His eyes glazed over as he dropped to his knees.
"I'm shaking... but why?"
He clamped a hand over his mouth, trying to keep something in.
Something inside him rejected the corpse.
But another voice...soft, dirty, hungry....begged to taste it.
He sat motionless beneath the old tree.
The tree made no sound, gave no shelter....simply remained, an indifferent witness.
On the damp ground before him, a spider was winding a fly in white silk. Swift. Efficient. Without remorse.
He watched.
Time curved. The world fell silent.
The fly had struggled....only briefly. Now its wings lay bound, motionless.
"The fly fought… but only for a moment. Now its wings lie shrouded in silence...like the rest of the world."
He stared blankly, then whispered,
"Why does silence cover everything?"
As if suffering is a secret we're meant to hide. As if wounds have no right to speak."
"Why does cruelty never scream… but just flow, like a quiet current that doesn't care?"
The image of the deer's carcass flickered in his mind. The maggots…
He saw them again....how they writhed, how they fed calmly, without confusion, without shame.
He closed his eyes. The world went dark behind his lids. But the image remained.
The maggots… they never wondered what disgust meant.
They never wondered why rotting flesh was food. They never recoiled at the stench as a sign to stop.
They simply lived.
He looked down at the earth.
"You endure. You grow."
His small hand gripped the dirt. Cold. Damp with his own sweat.
"Am I… lower than you?"
The question settled. No answer came.
That thought was like a black seed. He planted it within himself....not with hope, but with resolve. Something inside him split in two: one part still human, the other… something that learned from the maggots.
The sky shifted color. It hadn't rained yet, but the clouds already threatened.
He moved on. His small feet caked in mud; open wounds crusted and cracked with every step.
Beneath tangled roots, he found a rabbit. Dead.
The tiny body was trapped; its neck snapped, eyes still open.
Still warm.
He stared.
No fresh blood. But the body was whole....unlike the deer, unlike the fragments of his village.
He leaned closer.
His hand touched the rabbit's fur. Soft. There was still a hint of life in its warmth.
Without hesitation or word, he opened his mouth....and bit.
His teeth met hide. Then flesh...but did not break through.
The hide was too thick. The flesh, too firm. Or perhaps... he was just too weak.
He bit again. And again. Only frustration cracked across his tongue.
"Can't I even eat a corpse?" he thought, bitterly. "Am I not even worthy of survival?"
He threw the body against a nearby rock with a soft cry....not anger, but a hushed cry...not rage, but a silent kind of hysteria.
The rabbit struck the stone. It cracked. But did not shatter.
He looked at his small hands. The wounds split open once more. Red. Bleeding.But he did not cry. He could not.
His eyes scanned the ground. A stone. Sharp.
He picked it up. Heavy, but it fit in his fist.
He returned to the carcass. His left hand held the rabbit's body; his right swung the stone against its belly.....again and again.
Flesh opened. Blood flowed. Muscle bulged.
His small hands were no longer just bleeding....they were soaked in something that had once been alive.
He froze, breath turning ragged as the stone slipped from his grasp.
Then he tore at the flesh with his hands. Tried to chew again.
It tasted… salty. Warm. But it was not a meal.
"Is this… how one survives?" he whispered.
Then another small voice spoke.
A voice from far within....an echo from the valley of souls he didn't even know existed:
"Animals live without questioning.
Humans question without knowing how to live.
And I… can do neither."
And the world gave no answer.
Night Fell
The sky collapsed in silence, baring the forest instead of hiding it.
He sat curled behind a bush, hugging his knees, his body trembling...not just from the cold.
Tattered clothes clung to his damp skin. His small hands busied themselves gathering twigs and scraps of cloth left from the burned village.
It took a long time....and a tiny spark from a rock....before the fire was born. Small, dying... but warm.
He stared at it like someone meeting an old friend they'd long forgotten. The fire danced, and for a moment, the world didn't feel as cruel as before.
But the wind still carried the stench of death....persistent, intimate."
The deer carcass still lay where he had found it. It still lay where he'd found it earlier that afternoon. The rain hadn't come, and the flesh rotted quietly. The stench filled his nostrils, clinging to his throat like a nightmare he couldn't vomit out.
And he was hungry.
The hunger was no longer just a feeling. It had taken shape.....a black void gnawing from within.
But what unsettled him more....was how familiar it had begun to feel.
The flame flickered. His gaze drifted to the maggots crawling across the carcass.Their tiny eyes caught the firelight, creating tiny reflections....like false stars strewn across the earth.
"I'm hungry."
Then, without warning, he snuffed out the fire.
He didn't want to see anymore. Didn't want to be illuminated.
The dark was kinder. The dark didn't ask questions.
The dark didn't say it was disgusting, didn't say it was wrong.
He crawled toward the carcass. Each motion obeyed hunger's command....not his own.
The meat was soft. Maggots wriggled between the fibers. The air around him was thick and stale.
He shut his eyes. His hand touched the meat.
His fingers clutched a morsel...soft, unholy.
He brought it to his mouth. His eyes remained shut.
"I just have to swallow. I don't need to think. I don't need to feel."
Then....he bit.
The meat was cold.
Its mucus clung to his teeth.
It tasted like old mud, like blood that had forgotten how to be blood.
But he chewed.
His tongue recoiled, his throat locked up, and his whole body rose in protest.
Yet at that moment....it wasn't taste that arrived, but something far sharper.
Memory.
Then, without warning.....it shattered.
He saw fragments of another world.
He saw Steam rising from a bowl of porridge. A woman's face.....tired, thin, but smiling.
A trembling hand lifting a spoonful of rice to his lips.
"Mom...?' he breathed, the word tearing itself from old wounds."
The voice wasn't a whisper. It was breath. It was a wound.
He returned to the time when his small body burned with fever, and his mother fed him patiently, even as he pushed the food away.
Salted fish soup. It tasted salty, fishy....
but it was made with a kind of love that no longer existed.
Tears welled in his young eyes.
He didn't know why.
He stopped chewing. The rotting meat was still in his mouth, but the world had changed.
One taste had summoned a whole world.
A world that was already dead.
He wanted to spit it out. But his body... wouldn't let him.
He swallowed.
"Mom's cooking…" he murmured, the sound cracking like glass.
"The meals I used to turn away…"
His small fists clenched tight.
"Now even carrion becomes a blessing."
"And I have to steal that taste... from death."
Why did this feel warm?
Why did a rotting world offer comfort now that Mom was gone?
No hand fed him.
No gentle voice called his name.
Only the bite of night, and a saltiness not from seasoning.... but from tears that never had the chance to fall.
But Mom wasn't there.
No hand, no voice.
Only a corpse. Only the night.
Only worms, and a salt that came from his own tears.
He cried. But not the way children cry.
His sorrow wept without sound.
Like a frozen river.
Like sorrow too heavy for the world to see.
The night sky remained dark.
But something had changed.
It wasn't the sky that cracked.
Nor the forest that burned.
It was him.
He slumped forward, breath ragged.
Rotten flesh still lingered on his tongue....like a sin that prayer couldn't wash away.
His stomach had stopped whining.
But the hunger... remained.
Not hunger for food....but for something ripped from him.
He stared at his palms....bloody, split between the fingers from gripping a sharp stone too long.
The blood trickled slowly, but it didn't hurt.
It almost felt... alive.
For the first time since he woke up, he felt real.
From the stench of rotten meat and the sting of salt tears, something began to grow inside him.
"The world defiled me. So I will defile the world."
Then the wind stirred.
Cold, biting through bone.
But it couldn't put out the small flame beginning to burn in his chest.
A fire not born of twigs,
But of hatred.
Not the loud kind, all screams and rage....
But the kind that grows in silence.
Rooted in the hollow space of loss.
The first shape of something he couldn't name yet....vengeance.
Suddenly, a sound pierced the stillness.
A scream.
High. Fractured. Like flesh being torn....
But not an animal.
Human. Children.
The cry tore through the air, and his body moved on instinct.
No thought. No hesitation.
His feet carried him through thorns and branches, even as they pierced his bare soles.
His heart pounded....not from fear,
but from something else.
A calling.
That voice... it was the same.
The same tone as the screams from the village he'd left behind.
From the night everything changed.
The closer he stepped, the clearer the scene became.
Firelight.
And human shadows.
Under the glow of the flames, a boy....not much older than him....was tied to a tree.
His body covered in bruises, clothes torn, mouth stuffed with a filthy rag.
Two men stood nearby. Laughing. Their boots soaked in blood.
One slapped the boy across the face.
The other stabbed his thigh with a sharpened rod. The boy writhed, crying out.
And Kael....though that name hadn't yet returned to his lips....stood there, watching.
Their eyes didn't see him.
They were too caught up in their game....too sure the world held only two kinds of creatures: predators and prey.
But they didn't know...
that from mud, from corpses, from spoiled flesh and salted tears...
something had risen.
He had no home.
He had lost everything.
And Kael.....though that name hadn't yet returned to his lips...stood there, watching.
Their eyes didn't see him.
They were too busy with their game.
Too certain the world only held two kinds of beings: predators and prey.
But they didn't know....
that from mud, from corpses, from spoiled flesh and salted tears...
something had risen.
He had no home.
He had lost everything.
But for the first time... something stirred within him.
Not anger.
Not empathy.
Not some buried voice of conscience clawing its way out of a grave.
Only the will to destroy.
A shape of release for a soul that no longer knew how to feel....
except by passing that feeling into the world.
He didn't move out of pity. Whether the boy lived or died.....it made no difference to him.
Humans could scream or sob.....
they all sounded the same to him now.
What mattered...
was that there was something to break.
Something that could feel bitterness.
Because if the world gave him meaningless wounds,
then he would give meaning through wounds.
His small hand reached for the sharp stone on the ground.
Still wet with his own blood.
His eyes didn't blink.
His steps made no sound.
And ahead, the two men laughed, their backs to the darkness.
No one was watching the night.
No one was watching the child who was supposed to be dead.
And when Kael's shadow merged with the dark,
when firelight touched eyes no longer hollow....
Something not quite human stepped forward.
A new chapter had begun.