The beginning was not a cry, but a tremor in the fabric of nothingness. Aleth opened his eyes—or what he imagined to be eyes—and the world unfolded before him like an oil painting whose colors had yet to dry. There was no light in any physical sense, only a torrent of awareness that surged through his fragile, newly formed material existence. The ground beneath him resisted his presence with a subtle coldness, its rough texture evoking the scent of ancient soil: a disorienting blend of decay and the pulse of life struggling to carve out a place in this distant world.
He tried to lift his hand and felt the oppressive weight of being, as if the atoms of his body had not yet learned to obey gravity in this plane. His fingers moved like the limbs of an alien creature recognizing its own master for the first time. The air around him was not mere gas; it hummed with the vibrations of other entities—immaterial beings drifting through complex layers of consciousness, appearing and vanishing like phantoms trapped in fractured mirrors.
Movement surrounded him, relentless yet silent in a way that unnerved him. He glimpsed beings shifting with supernatural grace, some dissolving at the edges of his vision only to coalesce elsewhere. None approached him, none offered aid during the labor of his existential birth, yet he felt their gaze. Heavy, calculated, stripped of ordinary curiosity, it exuded a statistical scrutiny, cold and unwavering. He sensed that he was not merely a new entity, but a "unit of consciousness" appended to a system intolerant of error.
Instinct drove him to attempt communication. He opened his mouth, exhaled from deep within, striving to form his first sound—a primal announcement of existence. But it ended in terror: the air tore apart, the voice dissipated before it could escape his lips, as if the surrounding void possessed a defensive algorithm that consumed any unprogrammed vibration. He stepped back, consciousness slamming into the wall of absolute solitude. Was he truly visible, or merely an echo in an empty chamber?
Amid the confusion, his eyes fell upon Nirava. She appeared as though time itself had honed her awareness over millennia. She stood at a distance, her eyes moving with mechanical slowness, observing him with an unyielding neutrality. Her gaze was not welcoming; it resembled the scrutiny of a laboratory test. Aleth felt a subtle signal emanate from her, a mental hesitation he could not comprehend, yet he understood that she perceived something beyond his current capacity—a vision of his end before his beginning.
Gathering his scattered self, Aleth began exploring his surroundings. He reached for a small stone, pushing against it, but his hand passed through it as if through a flame with no substance. He pressed again, channeling every ounce of his emerging will, yet the material refused obedience. This system allowed no arbitrary influence; every motion required adherence to the existing pattern, every action filtered through channels predetermined by consciousness.
Immersed in the struggle to grasp his physical limits, something unforeseen occurred. At the corner of his vision, a thin red thread flickered—a fracture in the sky, a needle-prick in the fabric of reality. It was not mere light, but a silent alarm. A sharp sting pierced the center of his awareness, as if the algorithm of his existence had committed a minor computational error. He had crossed an unseen boundary, or perhaps entertained a thought that the pattern forbade.
Aleth's body froze. The flash vanished swiftly, but the sense of danger lingered. He looked around for reactions, but the others moved in their routine cadence, except Nirava, who tilted her head slightly, recording the moment when the fall had begun.
In that instant, Aleth sensed something watching from above—not a being, but a system, a complete entity. A cosmic eye that never blinks had begun to analyze the small anomaly he had triggered unwittingly. He now understood that his birth was not merely the start of life, but the countdown to something unknown and ominous.
He did not yet know that the flicker had been the first "red point."