S E L R I C

AW | The Warrens | Emergence

There was nothing.

Not sound, not silence, not darkness nor light—just a complete absence of thought and shape, of sentience and sensation. By all definitions, he didn't exist. Not truly. There was no self to hold on to, no space to inhabit, and no reason to know the difference.

But then, there was something.

It didn't arrive like a light being switched on. It was far quieter than that—a slow awareness, curling inward from nowhere and everywhere. A pressure that formed around him, and suddenly there were edges—something enclosing him, surrounding him, defining him. The weight came steady and close, wrapping around every part of him as though the world had always been pressing in, and he had only now been given the means to notice.

He couldn't even begin to understand what it meant, only that it was here now. There, and unavoidable. And so the pressure grew, ticking away until it felt like his body—or whatever vessel it was that he could only assume was him—was pushing back.

Something shifted inside the space. Not a thought, not a decision—just a pulse. A flicker of energy that jolted through him and trailed outward in every direction. It came without warning, sudden and strange, as something deep inside him tightened—fibers or strings or whatever it was that bade him move, drawing taut in scattered bursts. Nerve endings lit like sparks against stone, and somewhere in the confusion, something moved. A twitch. A ripple. Motion born from whatever he was.

It startled him.

Not in a way he could name, but in the way that things change when they shouldn't. In the way that the stillness buckled, and with it, everything else.

Cracks formed along the edges of the space around him. Not just physical ones—though they were there too, splitting the hard boundary that held him—but fissures in whatever quiet had cradled him until now.

The silence, once endless, began to fall apart.

A flicker of something came in the space beside him. A zinging, light and thin, like pressure stretched too tight in a single place. He didn’t know what sound was, but it felt like the shape of movement with no touch to go with it. A tickle at the base of his awareness. A fluttering in the hollow behind it.

The enclosure gave way.

Cold slipped in first. It slid along his side, and something beneath the surface jerked in response—an instinctive flicker, more reflex than decision. He didn’t understand what had triggered it—only that the sensation simply came, and his body reacted before thought could catch up.

Light followed shortly after, then sight. Neither made sense. Everything was unfiltered, each stimulus colliding in a rush of color and movement. His body trembled, unsteady beneath itself. He blinked without knowing the purpose of the action, and his eyes caught on things he had no names for: scattered pieces of something solid, strange textures climbing vertical, glistening surfaces that bent the light in ways he didn't understand.

He stayed where he was, curled loosely on a cold surface. His limbs felt stiff, unfamiliar. The rise and fall of his chest came unevenly, as if breath, too, was something his body had to learn. It was quiet around him, and yet everything felt too loud.

There was a strange sensation in his chest—not anything that spoke of discomfort, but a kind of weighted presence that pulsed in time with the air he pulled in. Something important was there. Something central. That, at least, was easy to understand.

A fragment of something slid from his shoulder and clinked softly against the surface that stretched beneath him. Instinctively he turned his head toward the sound, slow and unsure, and watched it settle.

His jaw slackened, but no sound came. He didn't know what he had meant to do—whether to speak, or breathe again, or simply respond to the strangeness of existing. But whatever it was, it passed without answer. He blinked once more, slow and uncertain. Then he stilled.

"Speech."

Round:	N/A
Attempt Made:	N/A
Defense:	None
Injuries:	None

S E L R I C

@Eira

There was no warning. The sound came sharp and sudden, cracking through the silence like lightning through still water.

His head turned.

Not from thought, but from instinct—something learned in the body before it had the words to explain. The same way he had turned when the shard slid from his shoulder, when stillness broke and gave way to movement. It was becoming a pattern: the world spoke, and he listened.

He didn't know what had made the sound. Only that it had erupted from somewhere beyond the moss-draped ridges nearby, louder and sharper than anything he'd known. His body answered by doing the only thing it knew how to do.

It froze.

His limbs stiffened again, not from fear but from the unfamiliarity of it all. A pause. A bracing. His ears lifted just slightly, drawn forward by the sound of shuffling movement and the strange cadence of something else—a noise that seemed ... different.

Not like the waterfall, not like the dripping stone or the soft sigh of air against cave wall.

This was jagged. Broken into pieces. Intentional, maybe.

His head tilted. The sound had meaning, didn't it? Not to him, not yet. But it was shaped in a way that pulled at something he didn't know he had. A kind of hollow resonance in the chest—not his stone, but near it. It lingered there, quiet and unformed.

He didn’t move toward it. He only watched. He could barely see over the curve of moss and stone, but something else had moved out there. Something else had been born.

There was a flicker of interest in his posture, subtle but present. His gaze didn't dart or dance. It held. Curious, not bold. Studying the shape of something he didn't understand but wanted to.

It hadn't occurred to him yet that he could be seen.

"Speech."

Round:	N/A
Attempt Made:	N/A
Defense:	None
Injuries:	None

S E L R I C

@Eira

She changed.

Not in shape—he couldn’t see her clearly enough for that—but in presence. The air shifted, attention folding toward him like a ripple pressed into still water. Her voice came again, jagged and directed, and though the words meant nothing to him, the sound did. It pulled at him, not with meaning, but with gravity. Like pressure through a crack.

He rose.

Slowly. The motion was awkward, uncertain. His limbs knew how to move more than his mind knew why, but the sound had asked something of him—not through understanding, but through tone. It cut through the dark and landed on him, and so he followed it, legs unfolding like stone softened by water.

There was nothing clear to look at. Only shapes in the dark, soft and uneven, like the moss itself might be breathing. He couldn't tell what she was—only where she was. Or where the sound had come from. The silence around it seemed stretched, as though it were hiding something, or waiting.

His ears tilted forward, his breath caught shallow. And though he couldn’t see her, he felt her—like a shift in the room, like a held breath in the stone itself. She had become the shape in the dark, and for a moment, the world seemed to form around her.

He didn’t move toward her. He didn’t flee.
He only stood in the dark, and listened.

"Speech."

Round:	N/A
Attempt Made:	N/A
Defense:	None
Injuries:	None