DM01

A Chapter by M C Nallo

A violent and traumatic birth

Dragonmarked

1.
His consciousness did not gently come to him. It crashed into him with the force of a landslide. The raging and violent reaction when said landslide is made of ancient, glacial ice, in boulders the size of houses, rolling uncontrolled into the blistering heat of a seething magma pool within the crater of an active and angry volcano. It came to him with a rush of searing pain and uncontrollable rage. Also present was fear, from an unknown source. It was not his fear, he was detached from it. He was separated from the cold icy sensation that goes with a deep and abiding, instinctual mortal fear, but aware of it. There was panic as well, and behind the terror he sensed, an unrelenting urge to fight with all he had at his command. But, what DID he command? To be aware was one thing, to be able to make use of that awareness was something else altogether. He knew that he existed, he knew pain, and he knew rage. But beyond that, what else was there to know?
It was dark; he knew that there was more than darkness to his existence, because the darkness would sometimes not be so all encompassing, pervasive. It seemed to run in cycles. This was a light cycle. This was when the sensations of movement he sometimes felt were common. But this was a prolonged and violent sensation, punctuated by heavy, bone crushing impacts. And after every impact, there was the sound. A sound of absolute hate, a sound that would make others flee, blindly, knowing that only in escape was their safety assured. It was more than a shout, a scream, or a wailing. It was the sound of rage; if rage could be said to have a sound.
He could taste blood. It was not his, it was mixing with the warm fluid he was suspended in, and it was getting stronger as the bellows of rage became weaker. He sensed a change in the external emotions he was feeling, a shift from the rage and the panic. It was now a feeling of resignation, and the urge to flee. There was a change in the motion he felt, the crushing impacts had transitioned to a motion he had come to recognize as flight. It was not the peaceful, soaring feeling that he had become accustomed to. It was like short hops, as if that was all that could be sustained. The period between the short flights began to stretch into longer and longer durations. There was one final, brief flight, and then there was, finally, no more. The return to earth was not controlled. He felt the impact, even within his warm cocoon of fluid. Then he was tumbling. He heard the sounds of bones snapping, fragmenting, as the muscle that surrounded them went slack, doing little to absorb and blunt the impacts. He could hear the tearing of flesh, as he was turned over and over and over, unable to do anything to arrest the momentum that carried him along. Then there was a sudden influx of blood, massive amounts of it, tasting of copper and iron. It increased his own rage, even as it soothed the pain he experienced. He took note of this. He had accepted the scathing, burning sensation that had accompanied his transition from an unthinking and unaware fetus, to sentience, as the way his existence was intended to be. But this was different, this was…better. While his rage grew, the pain diminished. He could not tell if the blood fed the rage, and the rage masked the pain, or if the blood itself soothed the pain, and the rage was his alone. It made no difference to him. The relief was in the blood, and he craved more.
Suddenly, the warm fluid which had surrounded him drained away, along with the soothing effects of the blood which had inexplicably been introduced to his environment, and was replaced with something else. His space was now refilling with a new fluid, a foul, sulfurous, and viscous fluid. It was thick and cloying, sticking to whatever it touched, and it touched all of him. It spread across his skin, into his mouth and sinuses. It was in his eyes. He was enveloped and saturated with it, both within and without. It filled his stomach. It flooded into his lungs. It spread to his organs. There was no part of him which was untouched by the vile and noxious fluid.
This new fluid redefined him in ways he would never, ever understand. It forced him to revise, and reject, his previous definition of pain, and what level of pain was acceptable for continued existence. What had passed for pain seemed to be a fading, and by comparison, pleasant, memory. It had begun slowly, as the blood had, then burst into his awareness, again, similar to the sudden gout of blood which had soothed his pain, just moments ago. He began to realize what it meant to suffer. He burned. We writhed. He struck out with claws. He snapped powerful jaws, shredding whatever lay before him. He raked his claws across his own chest, his face, and his legs. Heedless of the damage he was causing to himself, to the eye, gouged from its socket, the teeth and claws, ripped from his jaws and hands, the horns he snapped off from his own skull. He continued to strike out, to seek an escape, any escape. It was a primal urge, instilled from centuries, from untold millennia, of evolution and the refinement of his species into the powerful, deadly, unrelenting and enduring creatures they were today. The fluid was changing him on his most basic level. And it was not gentle in doing so. It caused him to surpass his, as yet, unborn potential. He was becoming more than he was intended to be, and he was still within the womb.
This new level of pain also redefined what he thought he had understood to be rage. What he had felt before was as a puddle, when compared to the sea. He wanted only to destroy, to kill, and to consume. He wanted to slash and burn, he wanted to rend and tear. He wanted to diffuse his allotment of pain into the world, driven by the belief that that would somehow lessen his torment, and make his existence bearable.

He burst into the world, accompanied by the wet, ripping sound of his claws tearing through the abdomen of his mother’s corpse.