I try to stop.
The joy fades.
The ash, once warm and welcoming, now clings like guilt.
My breath is too deep. Too eager.
The manual, once sacred, now feels like a curse.
I feel it in my gut—that hunger not of body, but of soul.
To take. To unmake. To reduce all things to that grey simplicity.
But I remember life.
The whisper of wind through green leaves.
The sting of clean water.
The ache of a human stomach, real and earnest.
And I hate what I am.
I stop breathing.
I clench my jaw.
I try to spit out the ash that coats my throat, but there is nothing else inside me.
Just dust.
The forest from my dream haunts me now, not as triumph—but as warning.
I saw joy in destruction.
And that terrifies me more than the ash ever did.
I curl on the floor of the shack, clutching my sides.
Trying to contain myself.
But something inside has tasted freedom.
And it howls.
It begins as a twitch.
Then a shiver.
Then a growl.
My mouth stretches too wide. My hands twist into claws.
I lash out—screaming without sound. A violent whisper,
The walls tremble.
The floor splits.
The door shatters.
My body moves without my will, possessed by instinct.
Rage. Hunger. Despair.
I tear the cot apart.
I rip the manual to pieces.
I throw myself into the earth like a beast.
And then—
Darkness.
I awaken to silence.
The sun is a blood-blot in the sky. The wind is still.
Ash blankets everything.
I lie beneath it. Buried.
I do not know how long I've been here.
I push up through the thick grey, my fingers breaking the surface like a corpse from a grave.
The shack is gone.
Splinters and scattered bones of wood.
A ruin. A memory.
I kneel in the wreckage.
Hands trembling.
Breath shallow.
The hunger is gone—for now.
In its place: emptiness.
Shame.
I am still becoming.
But what am I becoming for?
What is my purpose that I no longer remember.
Who was I?
And who am I, if I can't remember what I used to be?