The first thing Viridion Skylargh felt was the wind.
Not the stale, recycled nothingness of the Chamber of Forgotten Souls that wretched cage carved from the bones of dead constellations by the devils, where the air tasted like regret and the only sound was the slow drip of eons passing like water torture. No, this was different. This felt so real.
The wind wrapped around him like the world's embrace as if the sky itself had been waiting for him to wake up. It kissed every part of him that he could feel everything, which was already more than he'd felt in the past thousand years, maybe two thousand, who was counting anymore when you'd been locked away in a place that existed outside of time itself?
He hadn't opened his eyes yet.
He was afraid to.
Because if this was a dream, if the Chamber was playing tricks on his mind again, giving him hope just to rip it away, he didn't think he could survive waking up back in that darkness. That endless, crushing nothingness where even his own screams had no echo because the Chamber devoured sound like it devoured everything else.
But the wind kept blowing.
And the warmth kept spreading.
And for the first time in ten thousand years, Viridion Skylargh felt something that wasn't pain or despair or the dull, numbing weight of being a slave to beings who saw him as less than dirt.
"I'm alive," he whispered, and his own voice shocked him. It came out rough, cracked from disuse, like an old door being forced open after centuries of rust. "I'm actually... alive?"
The last thing he remembered was the Celestial War.
Not that he'd been a part of it, not really. He wasn't an Archon, a warrior, nor anything special at all. He had been a servant being that existed only to carry things and clean things and be yelled at by beings who could unmake planets with a thought. The Archons had looked through him like he was made of glass. The other servants had stepped over him like he was furniture. And when the Wheel shattered and the sky bled purple and blue and the screams of dying constellations shook the very fabric of reality...
No one had even noticed he was gone.
That was the thing about being nothing. You could disappear, and the universe wouldn't even blink.
But someone had noticed.
Someone had saved him.
Or maybe not saved—maybe collected him, like a child picking up a pretty rock to add to a pile. The War had swept him up along with all the other debris of the broken Wheel, and Viridion had been tossed into the Chamber of Forgotten Souls like garbage into a landfill, left to rot for millennia while the Serpent Bearer feasted on the fragments of real power.
And now he was here. Wherever here was.
Rider took a deep breath and opened his eyes.
The sky exploded above him.
Not literally. But it might as well have, because Rider had never seen anything like it. The Chamber had no sky, no light, and had only darkness so complete that he'd forgotten what colors looked like. But this? This was violent in its beauty!
A vast, endless dome of brilliant blue that stretched from horizon to horizon, dotted with clouds so white they almost hurt to look at, and the sun blazed overhead like a golden eye watching over everything.
He was moving.
No, wait. He wasn't moving.
Everything else was moving.
The clouds were sliding past him at an alarming speed, and the a carpet of deep green forest that looked like nothing he'd ever seen in his miserable existence was racing beneath him like he was...
"I'm flying?" Viridion breathed, and then immediately shook his head. No. That was stupid. He couldn't fly. He'd never been able to fly. He was a servant, not a god. "But how am I—"
He tried to move his arm.
Nothing happened.
He tried to move his leg.
Still, nothing happened.
He tried to turn his head, to twist his body, to do anything that would let him understand what was happening, and that was when the panic started to creep in like a knife sliding between his ribs.
He couldn't move his body!
"What the—" Viridion's voice cracked. He tried again, straining against whatever invisible force held him in place, but his limbs wouldn't respond. It was like his body had been replaced with something immobile and completely, utterly useless. "What did you do to me? What did you do?!"
He was stuck.
Not tied down nor chained. Stuck, like something was holding him in place from the inside. And there was something else, too. Something pressing against him from all sides, or something that felt almost like walls? A container? He couldn't tell. His senses were all wrong like someone had taken his brain and rearranged it while he was sleeping.
"I can't move," he said, and now there was real fear in his voice, the kind of fear that came from realizing that something fundamental about yourself had changed without your permission. "I can't fucking move! What is this?! What's happening to me?!"
That was when he heard a sound.
Flap. Flap. Flap.
Wings. Big ones. Close enough that he could feel the air shifting around him.
Viridion's blood turned to ice.
He wasn't flying. He wasn't on a ship or a platform or any kind of vehicle. He was being carried. Held in something—no, someone's grip, transported across the sky like a piece of cargo, and whatever was carrying him was big enough that he couldn't even feel the shape of whatever held him because he was too small in comparison.
Was he caged? Was he trapped? Was he being taken somewhere against his will again, after everything he'd endured, after ten thousand years of waiting in that miserable darkness, just to wake up and find himself in another prison?
"NO!" Viridion screamed, and the word tore out of his throat like a living thing. "NO, NO, NO! I didn't survive the Chamber just to end up in another cage! I didn't wait ten thousand years to be someone's prisoner again!"
Flap. Flap. Flap.
The wings were getting louder. And now Rider could hear something else. A low, guttural sound, almost like a purr but deeper, more predatory, the kind of sound a cat made right before it swallowed a mouse whole.
A bird.
He was being carried by a bird!
"You've got to be kidding me," Viridion muttered, and then he did the only thing he could do: he forced his eyes open again and looked down.
The forest sprawled beneath him like a green ocean. Trees he'd never seen before, their canopies so thick that the ground was invisible beneath them, stretched in every direction as far as his eyes could see. This wasn't Shatterloam. Shatterloam was dead and gray and poisoned, a graveyard of constellations where nothing grew and nothing lived. This place was bursting with colors he didn't have names for.
And he was falling.
No. Not falling. He was looking down. Which meant he was looking at the ground. Which meant the bird was holding him high enough that if he dropped—
"I'm going to die," Viridion whispered. "I just got out, and I'm going to die."
That was when the window appeared.
[You are about to be eaten by an Adorn Bird.]
Viridion stared at the floating text, his brain struggling to process what he was seeing. A window? A system window? He'd heard rumors about such things—tools given by the Celestial Wheel to chosen beings, ways to measure power and track progress and issue commands. But he'd never had one. He was a servant. Servants didn't get systems. Servants didn't get anything.
[Adorn Bird Description: A colossal avian creature standing approximately fifteen feet tall from claw to crown, with a wingspan that can eclipse the sun. Its feathers shift through the entire spectrum of visible light, cycling from deep crimson to brilliant gold to electric blue to poisonous violet, changing color with its mood. Red when angry, gold when hungry, blue when calm, violet when preparing to strike. Its beak is serrated like a steak knife, designed not just to bite but to saw through flesh and bone alike. Its eyes are large and lidless, each one the size of a human head, and they do not blink because they do not need to. The Adorn Bird is not the largest predator in these skies, but it may be the most patient as it will follow its prey for days if necessary, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.]
"KYAHHHH!" Viridion's scream ripped through the air. "I DON'T WANT TO DIE YET! I JUST REBIRTHED FOR CELESTIAL'S SAKE!"
He tried to thrash, anyway. His body still wouldn't move the way he wanted it to, but he could feel something inside him responding to his panic, even if his limbs remained stubbornly unresponsive. The bird above him—because yes, he could see it now, the massive shape blotting out the sun, its feathers cycling through a nauseating rainbow of colors—made that low, purring sound again, and Viridion realized with horror that the bird was amused.
The bird was playing with him.
"It's going to eat me," Viridion said, his voice suddenly very calm, because sometimes panic looped all the way back around to serenity. "A giant rainbow chicken is going to eat me, and I'm going to die again, and then I'm going to wake up back in the Chamber, and I'm going to spend another ten thousand years in the dark, and—"
SCREECHHHH!
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere at once. A piercing, battle cry that split the sky in half and made Viridion's ears ring. The Adorn Bird's grip loosened for just a fraction of a second, and Viridion felt himself slip. He felt gravity reach up to claim him, and felt the wind rush past his face as he began to fall!
And then another bird slammed into the first one.
It was smaller than the Adorn Bird, but not by much, and where the Adorn Bird was beautiful and terrible in equal measure, this newcomer was furious. Its feathers were the color of dried blood and old bruises, and its beak was cracked and scarred from a thousand fights, and its eyes burned with the kind of madness that came from having nothing left to lose.
The two birds collided with a sound like thunder, and Viridion was thrown from the Adorn Bird's grasp.
The wind screamed past him, tearing at whatever strange new body he inhabited. The forest rushed up to meet him, closer and closer, and Viridion realized that he was going to hit the ground—or the trees—and that whatever happened next was probably going to hurt more than anything he'd ever experienced in his long, miserable existence.
"HEY!" he yelled, because yelling was the only thing he could do, the only form of control he had left in this insane situation. "HEY, STOP FIGHTING! LOOK AT ME! I'M HERE! I'M THE THING YOU'RE FIGHTING OVER! CAN YOU PLEASE SETTLE THIS AFTER YOU PUT ME DOWN SOMEWHERE SAFE?!"
The birds ignored him.
Of course they ignored him. Why would they listen to him?
Wait.
Why had he thought that?
The two birds clashed again, feathers and blood and screams filling the air, and Viridion tumbled through the chaos like a leaf in a hurricane. He saw the Adorn Bird's serrated beak snap shut inches from his face. He saw the other bird's talons rake across the Adorn Bird's chest, tearing through those beautiful shifting feathers like they were made of paper. He saw both birds lunge for each other again, and again. And in the middle of all that violence, Viridion realized that he was no longer in anyone's grip.
He was falling.
Free.
Plummeting toward the earth at speeds that should have killed him instantly.
"OH MY—NO! HEY! THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT WHEN I SAID PUT ME DOWN! I MEANT GENTLY! I MEANT DECENTLY! I DIDN'T MEAN—"
[You are falling from the sky.]
"I KNOW!" Viridion shrieked at the window. "I KNOW I'M FALLING FROM THE SKY! DON'T MOCK ME!"
[You are about to land. Good luck!]
"GOOD LUCK?! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY?! GOOD LUCK?!"
Viridion looked down, and immediately wished he hadn't.
The forest was gone. No. The forest had ended, and in its place was a wide, churning river. Its surface was broken by rocks and rapids and the kind of white water that could crush a person's bones without even trying. And he was falling directly toward it.
"I CAN'T SWIM!" Viridion screamed, because of course he couldn't swim, why would he be able to swim, he'd spent ten thousand years in a dark chamber and before that he'd been a servant who wasn't allowed near water because the Archons didn't want their precious floors getting wet. "I CAN'T SWIM, I CAN'T FLY, I CAN'T MOVE MY BODY, WHAT CAN I EVEN DO?!"
He closed his eyes.
He didn't want to see the water rushing up to meet him. He didn't want to feel the impact. He didn't want to know what it felt like to drown, to have water fill his lungs, and to die again so soon after being reborn.
But the impact never came.
Or rather, it came, but not the way he expected.
The water hit him like a fist, but it didn't crush him. It embraced him, wrapping around his strange, immobile body and pulling him under, and Viridion waited for the burning in his lungs and panic of suffocation.
And waited for his end.
And waited...
And waited...
And waited.
He could breathe.
Wait, what?
"What—" Viridion's voice came out bubbly by the water, but clear enough to understand. "How am I...?"
The river answered by spinning him in a violent circle, dragging him along with its current like a leaf caught in a drain. Viridion's head—if he still had a head, he wasn't sure anymore—spun with it, and he felt something rising in his throat that wasn't water.
He was so dizzy.
"Why is this life so hard?" Viridion moaned, but the water turned it into a series of incoherent bubbles. "Why can't anything ever be easy? I just wanted to be free. I just wanted to breathe fresh air. I didn't ask to be dropped from the sky by a rainbow bird and thrown into a river I can't swim in!"
The river didn't care about his complaints though. The river kept dragging him along, spinning him, tumbling him, until Viridion couldn't tell which way was up and which way was down and which way was just more water.
"Can I take a break?" he thought, his consciousness starting to fray at the edges. "Just for a second? I feel like I'm going to pass out."
The universe, as always, did not care about his feelings.
Then, something caught him.
Something scooped him out of the water like a ladle scooping soup from a pot, and Viridion felt himself lifted into the air again and then dropped onto a hard, rough surface that smelled like fish and old rope and sweat.
"What now?!" Viridion yelled. His body was still spinning even though he was no longer in the water. "What is it now?!"
"Ah, I only got two fish, and a stupid weird seed after putting the fish net overnight!"
The voice was rough, like gravel being ground together, and it came from somewhere above Viridion'a head. He tried to look up—and failed, because his body still wouldn't move.
"Stupid," the voice continued, and now Viridion could see the source: a giant of an old man with hands the size of dinner plates and a face that looked like it had been carved from old wood. The man was holding Viridion and staring at him with an expression of profound disappointment. "What am I gonna do with this? Are you delicious to cook? Guess not. You look unnecessary."
"WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?!" Viridion demanded.
The man didn't respond. Didn't even flinch. It was like Viridion's voice was just a background noise. Like he wasn't even there.
"Release me now!" Viridion yelled desperately, and his hopes all tangled together in his throat. "Release me, or I swear on the broken Wheel itself, I will fight you the way the Archons fought back in the old world! I will—I will—"
[But you are no longer on Shatterloam.]
Viridion froze.
[And you're stupid.]
"SHUT UP!" Viridion screamed at the window, which had appeared again, floating serenely in the corner of his vision like it had all the time in the world. "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!"
The old man blinked, looked around, and scratched his head.
"You hear something?" he muttered to himself. "Must be the river water in my ears."
"I'm talking to you!" Viridion shrieked. "I'm right here! In your hand! The thing you called a stupid weird seed! That's ME!"
Wait, stupid weird seed?
Weird seed?
SEED?
The old man turned Viridion over in his massive palm, inspecting him like a farmer inspecting a potato.
"Weird," he said. "Never seen a seed this color before. Probably not worth eating."
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[Congratulations! You have obtained the survival chance mode of being a fightless being.]
Viridion stared at the window. "The what?"
[Bury yourself alive and you'll get your reward real soon.]
"WHAT?!"
[WHAT?]
"DON'T COPY ME! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! WHY SHOULD I BURY MYSELF?! AM I THAT STUPID?!"
[YES.]
[YOU ARE A SEED NOW.]
The words hit Viridion like a physical blow.
He was a seed!
That was why I couldn't move? That was why my body felt different? That was why the bird had been carrying me, why the river hadn't drowned me, why the old man was looking at me like a piece of produce?
He wasn't a person anymore.
He was a seed.
[You are soaked in water. Your body is now decaying or sprouting.]
[MISSION: Be buried in soil for the next 7 days. Fail to complete the mission will face consequences.
REWARD: Absorbtion skill.]
"WHAT?!" Viridion's scream echoed across the river, across the forest, across the entire stupid, insane, impossible world. "AM I A FUCKING SEED NOW?!"
The old man yawned.
He tucked Viridion into his pocket, before getting out of his boat and walked home.