The sand sucked at his palms as he crawled, black grains grinding into raw flesh, biting into the soles of his feet, the broken tips of his nails. Every movement screamed at him. His vision blurred, a kaleidoscope of black and shadow, edges melting into one another. Blood slicked his palms, ran into his eyes, dripped down his chin — yet he didn't stop.
He moved because the delirium inside him whispered promises of curiosity. A hunger too insane to resist. How much more? How long before his bones shattered into dust? Before the sand drank the last of his marrow and spit his hollow body aside like all the others? Before his heart caved in, tired of the idea of beating for a world that didn't want him? He didn't know. He didn't care. He had to know the limit — the exact moment where his existence snapped.
The forest watched. The carcasses leaned, skeletal limbs stretching toward him, as if urging him closer to the grave he refused to join. Each rib was a jagged warning. Each skull was a prophecy. Their empty sockets followed his struggle — a morbid audience to his defiance. The sand pulled at him harder now. It wasn't just weight — it was hunger. A predator tasting him grain by grain. Every breath felt like swallowing shards of rust and fire. His limbs shook, tendons threatening mutiny. His knees scraped against splinters of bone and sharpened roots as if the forest wanted to carve itself into him.
Still, he crawled. Because stopping now would mean the forest won. And he was too broken, too curious to give it that satisfaction.
His mind… drifted. Like a crack in the world opened.
A small room.
A door slamming.
His mother.
Her figure collapsed, pitiful and wet with her own blood, trembling in the corner of his mind. Limbs too fragile to hold her up. Her screams long gone, replaced by wet, defeated gasps. And his sister — her hands trembling, her face broken, eyes hollow with a weight too large for anyone to carry — staring at him, at what she had no choice but to do.
He didn't linger, didn't think. Just felt. The horror, the despair, the necessity.
Weakness was death.
He had been weak then. He had watched. Done nothing. A beat of rage surged. A beat of disappointment followed. Then the hunger returned — a craving to find the edges of himself and then smash through them.
The sand dragged. The carcasses leaned. And he crawled. Blood oozed from his pores — too much for simple wounds. His nails were gone entirely, raw bone scraping stone. His breath stuttered in short, jagged bursts that scraped his throat like knives. His field of vision pulsed — black, then red, then a flicker of light that might have been hallucination. And still — a grin crawled up his face like a parasite taking root. A grin that didn't belong to sanity.
"How much more…?" The words came out as a crackling whisper. "How far… can I go?"
The forest offered no answer. Silence was its verdict.
He dragged himself towards a rise of black ribs — a carcass the size of a hill. Its exposed spine jutted like a staircase built from the remains of something the world regretted birthing. Each bone was slick with wet shadow that felt like it moved when he wasn't looking. His vision pulsed again. Something gleamed at the summit. Not treasure. Not salvation. Just higher ground. Just a better view of the void. Just a place to crawl until collapse.
Roots wrapped his ankles — testing.
Sand swallowed his elbows — resisting.
The black bones under him tried to shake him loose — rejecting.
Every force wanted him dead. Good. Let it try.
He pushed higher, dragging himself by will alone. His muscles tore — he felt the fibers snap like strings under too much tension. His teeth cracked against one another; the taste of iron became everything. His ears rang with a distant roar — his own pulse trying to tear itself free from the strain.
He pushed again. Inch by inch. Every movement felt like a sin against the world. The carcasses around him seemed to shift — just a fraction — like the forest leaned closer to hear whether he would scream or laugh. He laughed. It scraped the air like breaking bone. His shoulders dislocated. He shoved them back into place against the ribcage — not carefully, not gently. A wet pop, a scream swallowed by laughter.
Still — he climbed.
Then it happened. The world paused and dimmed, as if in the presence of a weight too divine and eerie, and it brushed past the edge of his mind. Detached. Elegant. Cold. Infinite.
"The Codex stirs, its gaze scraping across the marrow of your name. A buried law awakens in answer to your defiance.
You have gained an Innate Ability: Primal Will. "
It did not cheer. It did not scold. It simply existed, a sentence of fact, hanging in the void like frost. Recognition. Observation. Detachment.
Something inside him flared. Not rational. Not fully conscious. Pure instinct, molten and sharp. Muscles hummed in a pitch he'd never heard. Tendons recoiled as if listening to new law. His bones vibrated with a command he had never learned.
A second whisper crawled up from the void, muffled but undeniable:
"In the hollow where marrow once wept, a second strength unfurls.
The unseen takes shape at the whisper of thought, and matter strains to obey.
Wield it, and the world will bend… but it will remember.
A trait awakens: Telekinesis."
He lifted. Not his arms, not his legs. His entire body. The cursed sand clawed and tugged, trying to pull him back into oblivion, but it could not hold him. Not this time. Not now.
He shot toward the carcass — the blackened, hulking shape he had been crawling toward, the object of every agonized inch he had gained. His body projected and slammed against it, rolling across its jagged surface. Blood, sweat, and dirt streaked over its bones. His chest burned as he coughed blood. His lungs fought against a fire that was both real and imagined. His mind quivered. And through it all, the smile widened, teeth showing, lips stretched in delirium.
The world wanted him dead. He wanted to see if it could succeed.
A window appeared, not solid or mechanical, but a ripple of language across his consciousness:
"Here, life is devoured by shadow and marrow. Only those who endure may rise. Seek the heights. Heights reveal hunger. Marrow breaks the meek; Hunger crowns the resolute. Rise, or be reclaimed."
Not an instruction. Not a promise. A quest.
Survival first. Everything else later. The hint of something beyond — the unknown — wrapped itself in metaphor, urging him onward without mercy.
He pressed himself against the carcass, trembling, every limb alien, every heartbeat echoing against a body that no longer felt entirely his. But the spark — the flicker of Will — remained. Pulsing. Alive. Hungry.
And he smiled again. Madness shining in the flicker of blood and sweat.
He had survived. For now. And that was enough.
The cursed carcass hissed faintly beneath him, a warning, a promise, a reminder that the world would not relent. The forest waited, patient, eternal, unseen yet conscious.
And he… he would endure. He would rise.
The Codex whispered nothing more. The path ahead shimmered faintly in his mind's eye. Survival was the first step. Everything else — power, knowledge, answers — would follow.
And for the first time in what felt like centuries, he was certain of one thing:
He was not yet claimed.