I am rising.
My head floats upward through darkness, spinning slowly, detached from everything I once called body. The severance should hurt. Perhaps it does. Pain has become indistinguishable from existence, a constant so total it no longer registers as sensation.
Below me, something crumples. Meat and bone and silver light guttering toward extinction. I cannot see it. I am already too far away, lifted by currents that have nothing to do with air or physics or the laws that once governed my understanding of reality.
The Inner Hell ruptures, not explosively.
The failure is quieter than that. Pressure seams giving way along invisible lines. Walls I built over six years of careful, desperate architecture collapsing inward without resistance.
Memories spill from me like dross shaken loose from ore.
They rise with my spinning head, surrounding me in a constellation of moments I tried to contain. Each flash brighter than the last. Each collision more violent. Past and present and futures not yet lived, tangling together until sequence loses all meaning.
I see my mother's face above me. I see Talon's blade descending. I see a throne I have never sat upon, carved from something that screams when touched. I see Raven Five dying. I see them living. I see myself killing them with silver-coated hands while Stagger watches.
Too many. Much too many for such a short life.
The memories float around me like distant stars, some bright, some dim, some flickering between states I cannot name. Paths I might walk. Lives I might become. Deaths I have already died or will die or am dying now.
Before I can look closer, my head turns against my will.
Something else decides where I look.
I see Binah.
But she is no longer the figure I knew.
From her pale form extend dozens of limbs, long and jointed and segmented like the legs of a spider. They bend at angles that suggest more joints than any creature should possess. Her face remains the same. My face reflected back at me with those violet eyes, that white cascade of hair.
But the eyes have changed.
Compound now. Fractured into countless facets that reflect me from every angle simultaneously. I see myself spinning in each one. Headless. Dying. Observing. Remembered.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She is straining.
The spider-limbs do not reach for me. They clutch at something I cannot see. Invisible threads. Hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. Each one pulled taut, vibrating with tension I can feel in my dissolving bones.
I understand without being told.
The strings are real. The strain is real. She is holding something together that must not collapse.
As I watch, reality destabilizes around her.
Binah flickers.
She is present. She is also a memory. Or perhaps memories pour from her the same way they pour from me, the distinction between container and contained dissolving in the space between heartbeats I no longer possess.
I try to separate the possibilities. To understand which explanation is true.
She exists within my Inner Hell.
She is the Inner Hell.
She is the structure that made it survivable.
She is the wonder born from it.
None of these cancel the others. All of them are true simultaneously. The paradox does not resolve because resolution is not the point.
She exists inside me as much as outside me.
She always has.
Another memory surges.
Deeper. Older. More violent than anything I have allowed myself to recall.
I am in the womb.
Not warmth or safety, not the gentle darkness of formation.
Pain.
I am injured. Under attack. Something from outside is trying to kill me before I am born. Pressure and tearing and the blind terror of a thing that does not yet know what fear means, only that it wants to continue existing.
The pain binds moments together.
Being headless now. Being unborn then.
Both are states of helplessness. Both are moments where survival is uncertain. The same sensation spans the distance between them, collapsing years into a single point of continuity.
I scream.
Or I try to scream. I have no throat. No lungs. No mouth except the one attached to a head that spins slowly through darkness while memories spiral around it.
I thrash.
Something thrashes beside me.
The realization comes slowly, through instinct rather than thought. Through the animal recognition that exists before language, before identity, before anything that might call itself Janus Ragnos.
I am not alone.
There is another presence in the womb.
A female presence.
I know without seeing. Without hearing. Without any sense that requires organs I have not yet developed.
She is there. She has always been there.
In pain. In hunger. In the same blind survival instinct that drives me to movement.
I reach out.
This is not tenderness.
This is not companionship.
This is not the beginning of love or protection or any of the gentler things one sibling might offer another.
This is need.
Hunger. Desperation. The first impulse of a living thing that refuses to die.
The womb is not only a place of birth.
The womb is a place of consumption.
What happens next requires no memory to understand. No sequence of events laid out for conscious review. The truth is simpler than narrative. More primal than story.
I reach for her because I am hungry.
I take because I must.
I survive because she does not.
The memories collapse inward, folding into a point of perfect darkness. Past and present and future compressing into something smaller than thought. Smaller than identity. Smaller than the spinning head that carries what remains of my awareness.
In the darkness, violet eyes watch. Compound. Fractured. Reflecting every angle of what I have always been.
I remember...
I remember the first meal.
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