The abyss was never silent.
It whispered through teeth it did not possess. Breathed with lungs it had never grown.
Light dared not crawl so deep. Here, time did not flow—it stood still.
There was only instinct.
Only hunger.
The creature was small.
Too thin to bite. Too fast to be bitten.
He had no memories. He needed none.
He woke. He hunted. He hid.
He slept, if the darkness allowed it.
The abyss had shaped him with teeth and scars, teaching him the only truths that mattered:
The slow have no future.
The living earn no rest.
Yet tonight… tonight was different.
The air trembled.
Not with the growl of a predator. Not with the shriek of prey.
A new sound. High. Piercing. Rhythmic.
Laughter.
He froze.
Hunger gnawed at him—always—but something deeper held him still. A throb behind his skull. A twitch in his marrow.
He did not understand laughter.
But something in it burned.
Not fear.
Not hunger.
Doubt.
For the first time, he ignored the scent of blood.
He followed the sound.
Through jagged rocks and gnarled roots he crept, leaving the safety of the known, drawn toward the wrongness of the unfamiliar.
And when he saw them—tall, fire-bearing figures—he did not run.
He watched.
"Look at this!" one shouted, kicking a hollow nest.
"Burn it all!" laughed another, setting flame to old bones.
He did not know their words.
But he knew contempt.
That language, he understood.
When the laughter came again, it did not spark curiosity.
It ignited something hotter. Darker.
Rage.
Then—
A scream.
Not his.
Not human.
From the shadows came the shriek of another—small, thin, fast like him. One of his kind.
Then another.
And another.
The humans had found a nest.
His nest.
Torchlight flooded the crevice, cruel and hungry. Blades flashed. Bones snapped.
Siblings—brothers? sisters? words he did not know—were dragged into the light, their half-formed bodies crushed under boots, their flesh seared by fire.
"Burn the rest!" barked a voice.
A soldier grinned as he ground a writhing form beneath his heel, its cries dying in a wet pop.
The creature could not move.
His claws carved grooves into the stone.
The heat in his chest swelled, pulsing—a second heartbeat made of teeth and venom.
He did not know why.
He had no words for it.
Only this:
"They laugh… while we die."
His eyes—pale as moon-bleached rot—locked onto them.
This time, he did not want to watch.
He wanted to break.
He did not know it yet, but his first thought had been born.
And with it…
Vengeance.
The Nest
It burned.
Not with flame, but with shrieks. With breaking. With the wet snap of cartilage under iron-shod boots.
They had found them—his kind.
The creature watched from the shadows, his body a blade wedged between stone and darkness. No breath. No tremor. Only the slow drip of venom from his clenched jaws.
He had followed the humans, drawn by that sound—laughter—the same that had once prickled his skull with alien curiosity.
Now it carved into him like a rusted hook.
They dragged the small ones into the torchlight.
Pale limbs. Half-formed wings still slick with birthing fluid.
A soldier crushed a skull under his heel—too soft, too young—and the sound was not unlike an egg bursting. Another tossed a squirming sibling into the fire, their laughter rising with the stench of charred flesh.
The same laughter.
The same that had birthed his first thought.
Now it birthed something else.
Something gnarled.
Instinct screamed at him to run. To fade into the cracks where predators never lingered.
But his claws dug into the rock. His ribs ached, as if his own bones sought to pierce him from within.
One soldier turned—careless, swaggering—his armor glinting like the carapace of some overfed beetle. He reeked of smoke and sweat and certainty.
He never saw him.
The creature gave him no time to.
His body uncoiled. No strategy. No grace. Just hunger and hate fused into motion.
His fangs found the soldier's throat.
Warm.
Softer than he'd imagined.
Blood flooded his mouth—thick, cloying, sweeter than any marrow he'd ever cracked. The abyss itself seemed to sigh in approval.
Screams erupted. Steel hissed from scabbards.
He was gone before the first blade could find him, melting into the labyrinth of stone.
But he did not leave empty.
He carried more than blood.
He carried a truth.
It curled behind his eyes, a thorned thing taking root:
"Why do they decide who lives?"
The creature dragged himself into a fissure, his body trembling—not with exhaustion, but with a new, nameless fever.
Human shouts echoed in the distance, but they did not follow. Cowards.
He stared at his claws.
Red.
Not the fleeting red of a fresh kill. This clung. Stained.
Something inside him twisted. Not fear. Not hunger.
Why does this feel like drowning?
Before, killing had been instinct—mechanical, inevitable as breathing. But this… this had weight. A choice.
He licked the drying blood from his talons.
Iron. Salt. Something hotter beneath—
Power.
The abyss knew no stars, no moon. Yet now, he dreamed.
Fragments assaulted him:
—A light that did not burn.
—Voices with no mouths.
—An ache in places no blade had touched.
Once, he dreamed of wings. Not the stunted, skeletal things of his kin—but vast, shadowed, capable of swallowing the sky.
Another night, he dreamed of words. Not the guttural snarls of beasts, but language—sharp and deliberate, cutting the dark like a knife.
He woke gasping, muscles coiled, scanning for threats that weren't there.
Only the darkness remained.
And the echo of something he could not name.
In a cavern long abandoned, he found a pool of black water.
Still. Waiting.
He approached, nostrils flaring. No scent of prey. No rot. Only his own rippling shadow.
Then—
Himself.
Gaunt. Scarred. Eyes like moonlit poison. Fangs bared in a perpetual snarl.
He raised a claw. The reflection mimicked him.
Is this what I am?
A wrongness prickled down his spine. Too small. Too broken. Too…Alone.
He struck the water, shattering the image.
But the question remained.
Days later, a sound stopped him mid-hunt.
Not screams. Not tearing flesh.
Music.
Low. Guttural. A dirge woven from the abyss's own throat.
He followed it, silent as the grave, until the tunnel spilled into a cavern where the air itself vibrated.
There, in the center, lay a creature twice his size—wounded, its obsidian scales weeping luminescent bile. From its throat spilled that song, a sound so heavy it seemed to press against his bones.
He did not understand.
Yet he stayed.
And for the first time, he felt something beyond rage.
Sorrow.
The song faded with the dawn. The great beast died in silence, its massive chest stilling.
But as he turned to leave, his foot brushed grooves in the stone—claw marks, deliberate, arranged in…
Patterns.
Symbols.
He traced them with a talon.
A word surfaced, unbidden:
"Loneliness."
He did not know its meaning.
But the word was his.
And for the first time, he possessed something that could not be eaten or broken