Allen1996

Commission: Orti Anima Sanguineque ( 3 self insert gamers reincarnating into the 3 hecatoncheires with soulgames power): Prologue

Added 2025-07-19 08:12:56 +0000 UTC

This is a commission I was asked by one of my subscribers, Santana to write. Hope he and you like it. If some things seem inconsistent or weird; it’s most likely on purpose and for the story.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A lie repeated by the earth becomes a god. A god denied by the sky becomes a grave.

I always felt as if I was never meant to be remembered.

My mother named me Nikolaos Petropoulos with the weight of two continents in her throat. One foot in Athens, the other in New York, and both ankles tangled in bureaucracy. The name tasted like ash in my mouth—too long, too sharp, too foreign to be mine. I shortened it to Niko the first chance I got. Not for ease. For distance. You don’t call a ghost by its full name.

I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with four people and no silence. My mother’s voice had the cadence of resignation. My father spoke like a man trying to convince himself he wasn’t angry. I slept under a window that never opened, wrapped in a blanket that always smelled like last week’s dinners. Childhood was a war fought with glances and slammed doors.

I learned early that words were dangerous. That silence could be armor. That speaking too loudly made you a target and speaking too softly made you invisible.

So I stopped speaking altogether. Except online.

Online, I could be anything.

There’s a certain type of loneliness that doesn’t feel like sadness. It feels like friction. Like you’re rubbing against the world wrong. Like you’re made of something too brittle, too sharp, and every interaction files you down into something you don’t recognize.

Games were the only place I didn’t feel like I had to apologize for existing.

Especially Soulsborne games.

Pain wasn’t failure in those worlds. Pain was the point. You weren’t punished for being bad. You were punished for giving up. It was the first time life made sense to me. The first time dying felt like progress.

I played every night. Headphones on. Room dark. Controller warm with use. My fingers knew the timing of every parry like prayer beads. I could tell you the lore of every boss, every cursed blade, every forgotten knight who died screaming into the void for a god who never answered.

But that wasn’t what kept me playing.

It was them.

Chris.

Elijah.

My brothers in all ways that mattered.

We met in a subreddit too dead for bots to bother with. Someone had posted a meme about Yharnam being a metaphor for trauma. I replied with a long-winded comment about the Healing Church’s theological hypocrisy. Chris called me a pretentious lorecel. Elijah said I made a good point. I told him he was wrong, and we argued about it for three days.

And somehow, that became friendship.

The kind you don’t notice growing until you wake up one day and realize these strangers know you better than your own family.

Chris was the tactician. The spreadsheet guy. The kind of player who would test every damage value down to the decimal, then abandon the whole build because “it didn’t feel right.” His laugh was ugly and loud and honest.

Elijah was the philosopher. Quiet. Observant. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, it cut deep. He once said that dying in a Souls game felt like coming home. I still don’t know if he meant that as a joke.

And me?

I was the historian.

The lore guy. The one who could explain the difference between the Erdtree and the Great Tree in seven paragraphs, then delete the whole post because it “sounded cringe.”

Together, we weren’t just gamers or at least this was how it felt.

We made a pact once, half-serious and half-stupid.

“If one of us dies first,” Chris had said, “we meet at the Firelink Shrine. No excuses.”

Elijah had smiled. “I'll leave a summon sign near the bonfire.”

“And I’ll bring the humanity,” I had added.

It was a joke.

But it wasn’t.

Because underneath it, there was truth.

None of us were doing great.

Chris had just gotten laid off. Again.

Elijah’s therapist had ghosted him.

I was barely sleeping. Barely eating. Barely there.

But when we logged on… the pain didn’t stop.

It just got louder.

And for once, that made it easier to bear.

The night we died wasn’t cinematic.

There was no thunderclap. No monologue. No pixelated blood spatter.

We were mid-game. Elden Ring. Mountaintops of the Giants. I was on my third character—a faith-strength hybrid that made no sense and felt perfect. I remember watching the snow fall in slow loops around my Tarnished’s feet, feeling strangely at peace.

Chris was joking about Maliketh being a furry. Elijah was quiet.

Too quiet.

“I think I’m gonna log,” he’d said. “My chest feels weird.”

I remember pausing.

I remember saying something stupid like, “Get water. Breathe.”

Then Chris started coughing. Hard.

“Guys,” he wheezed. “I… I don’t feel—”

Silence.

Discord crashed.

My screen went black.

And in that moment, I knew—

we had all left the game.

I didn’t see light.

I didn’t see tunnels.

I didn’t see God.

I felt something.

A pressure. A warmth. A pulse.

Like the heartbeat of the world was pressing its palm against my skin.

And then—

I wasn't Niko anymore.

I wasn’t human.

I was potential.

I was muscle and mind and marrow being forged.

Each bone an anthem. Each arm a memory.

I wasn’t alone.

Chris was beside me—laughter still echoing in the nerve-fire of his new form.

Elijah hovered nearby—silent, but luminous, like he’d known this was coming all along.

We were naked and unmade, but we were together.

And she was with us.

Gaia.

Not in name.

In everything.

She didn’t have a face. Didn’t speak.

But I felt her.

In the way magma moved beneath stone. In the hush of dirt settling. In the gentle violence of sprouting seeds.

She didn’t love us like a mother loves her child.

She loved us like the Earth loves mountains.

Fiercely. Unapologetically. Without shame.

We were hers.

Formed not in womb but in world.

And in her gaze, I felt something I’d never known in life.

Not safety. Not purpose.

But permission.

To be more.

To become.

I didn’t know it then, but I would carry that permission into every battle, every epoch, every age I would later shape with my brothers.

Because her love was a throne.

And my body was not a body anymore.

It was a continent folding into itself.

A cathedral being carved from war-stained marble.

Flesh stretched like rivers drawn from forgotten myths. Bones grown from the memory of mountains. Fingers—dozens of them—spiraled out like branches blooming in reverse.

It hurt. But not like breaking.

It hurt like becoming.

Like the pain wasn’t damage, but purpose snapping into place. As though every tendon was being tuned to a frequency older than sound. A language written in torque and breath and the slow orchestration of impossible geometry.

I could feel them too.

My brothers.

Not in speech, but in rhythm.

Chris's pulse moved like drums—chaotic and defiant, like a marching song spat in the face of destiny.

Elijah’s beat was different. Quieter. But dense. Like a dying star spinning meaning into stillness.

We were no longer three boys in a dark Discord call.

We were foundations.

We were towers. We were hammers. We were teeth.

I wanted to cry, but I had no eyes.

I wanted to laugh, but I had no mouth.

So I felt.

And it was enough.

There was no fear here.

Gaia cradled us in silence, but her silence wasn’t void. It was full—like soil pregnant with roots. Like a grave you were glad to lie in.

I remember a scent, though no lungs had yet drawn breath.

Petrichor and ash. Honey and moss.

The perfume of things that lived and things that died with dignity.

She did not ask for thanks. She did not expect obedience.

She simply gave.

And that—more than any myth, more than any flame or tree or rune—was the first divinity I ever understood.

A goddess that chose us.

A world that bore us.

A truth that did not need to be spoken to be believed.

But peace, like memory, is never permanent.

And he came.

Our father.

I felt it before I understood it.

A shadow without shape. A presence without entry.

The taste of iron on a tongue I did not yet possess.

He did not arrive.

He was imposed.

Like a law. Like gravity. Like rot.

And all that Gaia had built in me—in us—twitched with instinctual recoil.

He was not flame.

He was not storm.

He was not even wrath.

He was the disgust of perfection made flesh. The contempt of something so convinced of its divinity that even beauty was an insult if it did not reflect him.

He looked at us like a butcher looks at a lamb with five legs.

In that gaze, I understood everything.

We were not born to love.

We were born to be used.

Tools. Weapons. Keys for doors not yet built.

My name was never meant to be spoken.

My voice, never meant to rise.

He had crafted no script for us, only utility. No dialogue, only orders.

And we had betrayed the role by existing with love in our blood and will in our hearts.

Chris tried to reach for me.

Or maybe I reached for him.

Or maybe the reaching was a lie we told ourselves later to make the next part hurt less.

Because the hand never landed.

There was no word. No sentence. No command.

He willed, and the world obeyed.

We were unmade.

Not in body.

In belonging.

Ripped from Gaia’s embrace with the same ease a child tears wings from an insect—curious, careless, cold.

The sky shattered.

Not literally. But in sensation. Like glass had grown tired of being held together by light.

And we fell.

No.

We were cast.

There’s a difference.

Falling implies some accident. Some tragic slip.

We were thrown.

Spat from our cradle like spoiled breath. No ceremony. No rage. Just silent, surgical rejection.

The kind that doesn't bother explaining itself.

The kind that cuts, not to punish, but to erase.

Tartarus welcomed us not like a prison—but like a grave that knew your name before you were born.

There was no bottom.

Only descent.

Only pressure and silence and judgment.

Each mile we fell was a lesson in smallness.

Each blink—a century of forgetting.

My arms—so many arms—clutched at nothing. My body split and curled and folded like a question never meant to be answered.

Somewhere beside me, Chris howled without sound.

Somewhere below me, Elijah’s presence flickered like a candle in a hurricane.

And me?

I didn’t scream.

I did something worse.

I listened.

To the voice in my chest that whispered, “You will build thrones from this.”

And I believed it.

scene

Tartarus does not have walls.

It has intention.

A hunger without hunger. A silence not born from absence, but from contempt.

It is not a pit. It is a verdict. A wound carved into the world so that beings like our Father wouldn’t have to bloody their hands.

We fell into it like punctuation at the end of a sentence no one wanted to read.

There was no up. No down. Only motion. And even that was suspect.

I remember the color of the place—not with eyes, but with skin.

Bruised gold, flaking into black.

The kind of gold that isn’t precious anymore, just rotting.

As if the divine had once been buried here, and the soil had grown allergic to its bones.

I hit the bottom first.

Not with a crash.

Not even with a thud.

I stopped.

Like the world had finally decided I was no longer worth moving.

My body—or what passed for it—curled inward. A knot of limbs, of questions, of half-made rage. My arms were too many to count and too numb to lift. My chest felt hollow. Not wounded. Not broken. Just… rearranged.

There was no air.

But I still felt like I was suffocating.

Like every part of me that had once hoped, once dreamed, once belonged to something warm and green and maternal—was being scrubbed out.

I wanted to scream.

But I did not.

Because if I opened my mouth, I feared something else might answer.

Elijah landed next.

Or maybe he had always been there.

He said nothing, but I could feel his mind brushing against mine. A feather soaked in ink. He was already adapting. He always was the first to let go of pain when he knew it could not be held.

Then Chris.

His presence hit the space like a hammer. Loud, jagged, angry.

“Fuck.”

I don’t know if it was spoken, but I felt it ripple from him in all directions.

Not fear.

Not despair.

Rage.

At what had been taken. At what he expected us to accept.

His hate was a rope.

I clung to it.

We did not need words.

We had shared too much time, too many failures, too many phantom deaths.

This was no different.

Another boss fight. Another death screen. Another wake-up call.

Except this time, the screen would never load again.

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Time passed strangely in Tartarus.

Not slower. Not faster. Just wrong.

Like a clock with no numbers. A heartbeat with no lungs behind it. Days bled into nights without sky. Moments stretched and collapsed with no warning. Sometimes I would blink and remember a face I had never seen. Sometimes I would forget my name.

But always—always—the hatred remained.

It clung to the air like soot.

It coated the rocks.

It sang lullabies in reverse.

I watched as creatures older than the sky crawled along the walls—things made of bone and wire and shame. They didn’t approach us. They didn’t even seem to see us. As if even the horrors of Tartarus had been warned not to touch the children Gaia dared to love.

We were beneath punishment.

We were exiled not out of wrath, but out of refusal.

We were mistakes the king of the gods could not bring himself to kill—so he buried us in history's garbage heap, hoping the stench would erase us.

But here’s the thing about burial.

If the dirt is fertile—if the roots remember—

then even corpses can bloom.

The first time I moved again, it was out of spite.

Not survival.

Not instinct.

Just spite.

My left hand twitched. Then my third. Then my seventh. Each motion was small, sacrilegious. Like a child drawing on holy texts. I wasn’t meant to move. I wasn’t meant to exist. And so I did.

I gripped stone until my fingers cracked.

I screamed without breath until the silence changed its shape.

And slowly, my mind began to sharpen.

Not heal. Not hope.

Just harden.

The way a sword hardens when plunged into cold water.

Chris whispered first. Not with words. With motion.

He stood.

All of him.

His dozens of arms reached outward, balancing himself against the weight of divine rejection.

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to.

We’re not done.

That was the message.

Elijah followed.

His form flickered and danced in the darkness—less solid than ours, more concept than flesh.

But his head turned toward me. And when he bowed, slightly, I felt it—not submission. Not invitation.

Recognition.

We were not friends anymore.

Not boys. Not players.

We were myths in their larval stage.

And Tartarus had just fed us our first lie.

It is strange to be born knowing hatred before love.

Stranger still to choose love anyway.

I thought of Gaia then.

Of the scent of her breath. The gravity of her warmth. The strange kindness in her silence.

And I made my first decision:

I would remember her.

Even if the hatred of the sky scraped my memory raw.

Even if the weight of centuries tried to compress her into a dream.

Even if the world demanded I forget the only god who ever saw me as more than useful.

I would remember.

And from that memory—

I would build.

Not a throne.

Not at first.

That would come later.

What I built first was a thought.

Simple. Small. A seed lodged in the crooked heart of the most cursed child in myth:

“I am Briareos, Amalkeides and I was not made to kneel.”

And in the darkness of Tartarus—

I smiled.

————————————————————————

The abyss does not stare back. It listens. And it remembers who threw you in.

I didn’t believe in fairness.

Not in a philosophical way. I just didn’t see it. Anywhere.

Fairness was something teachers said when they handed out detentions. Something bosses said when they fired you without severance. Something parents said when they wanted you to stop crying.

“It’s not fair” was code for “shut up and eat shit.”

So I ate shit.

For most of my life.

My full name was Christopher Alaric McConnell.

It sounded like the name of someone who should’ve owned a ranch, or a stock portfolio, or a senator for a grandfather. In reality, I was born behind a bowling alley in Milwaukee while my mom was halfway through her second relapse.

I grew up knowing three things for certain:

Rent was always late.

Rage didn’t have to be loud to be real.

You never cried in front of other kids.

I made it to adulthood the way cockroaches make it through house fires—scorched, twitchy, and too angry to die.

I found peace in patterns.

Formulas. Numbers. Frame data.

You know how some people read poetry to relax? I used to fall asleep doing damage calculations in my head. Like counting sheep, except the sheep had bleed buildup and were weak to fire.

Dark Souls was my bible.

The rules made sense. The pain made sense.

There were no guidance counselors. No taxes. No bosses asking why your pants smelled like mold. Just you, a sword, and the next god-shaped asshole that needed to die.

You could memorize the roll timing. You could learn the tells.

And if you were good enough, it didn’t matter how ugly you were. How broke. How angry.

If you were good enough, you won.

That’s what made the Lord of Hollows ending hit different.

Most players missed it.

Too obscure. Too “grimdark.” Too depressing.

But me?

I saw the truth, the idea in it.

You don’t link the flame. You don’t abandon it.

You embrace the dark. Not to destroy. Not to conquer.

But to liberate.

You take in the suffering of all things—people, gods, monsters—and you become the one thing no tyrant can control:

A Lord not of fire.

Not of light.

But of humanity.

Raw. Ugly. Free.

Elijah thought I was being dramatic.

Niko thought I was being poetic.

Maybe I was.

But I never played those games just to win.

I played so that I could feel as if I was truly living, as if i was truly free.

I met Niko and Elijah in the usual way.

By insulting someone online.

Some idiot was arguing that Gwyn was “just misunderstood,” and I lost my shit. Niko posted a paragraph defending me. Elijah added a meme. I replied with a twenty-line breakdown of Gwyn’s imperialist theology, and we were friends before we realized it.

They were weird.

But my kind of weird.

Elijah had this haunted vibe—like he’d read too many forbidden texts and was still deciding whether to laugh or scream.

Niko was all self-deprecating sarcasm and hidden brilliance, like a philosopher trapped in a Reddit mod’s body.

And me?

I was the loud one. The planner. The one who laughed too hard and drank too much and always had a spreadsheet ready before we even picked our starting class.

Together, we were good.

No.

We were right like different pieces of the same puzzle.

I should’ve died years ago.

I was working a third shift in a warehouse that smelled like rat piss and regret. No health insurance. No union. No future.

I didn’t have asthma when I started.

By year three, I was coughing blood.

But I stayed.

Because rent doesn’t care if you choke.

And people like me don’t get better.

We just last.

Until we don’t.

The night I died, I felt it coming.

Like a code bug creeping toward a crash.

I was on Discord with the boys. Running our usual routine. Laughing too loud. Shotgunning gas station whiskey. Pretending that if I was funny enough, the pain in my chest would be funny too.

Then it hit me.

Like a spear made of ice and wire, right through the ribs.

I remember Elijah saying something about the Lands Between being a graveyard of golden lies.

I remember Niko asking if I was okay.

And then—

Nothing.

No, not nothing.

Something.

Something waiting.

I opened my eyes—

And the first thing I saw was her.

scene

She didn’t look like a goddess.

She didn’t look like anything.

But I knew she was there.

Felt her like you feel warm pavement under your feet on a summer night—present, old, steady.

Gaia wasn’t comforting. She wasn’t kind. She was real.

The kind of real that makes you feel ashamed for ever trusting anything else.

Her presence didn’t cradle. It didn’t soothe.

It acknowledged.

I don’t know how to explain that.

It’s like when someone finally looks at you—not through you, not past you, not above you—but at you. And they don’t flinch.

That’s what she did.

She saw me.

Every cracked rib. Every ugly thought. Every bone I broke punching drywall instead of my boss.

She saw all of it or at least that’s how it seemed like.

And she didn’t turn away.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t fall to my knees or whisper gratitude or beg for salvation.

I just lay there.

Burning.

Rebuilding.

My body was becoming something else—something that had never known shame.

The pain was… exquisite.

Like someone was breaking every part of me that had ever obeyed, and forging it into something that could never kneel again.

My bones expanded like branches splitting open the sky. My arms multiplied—not fast, but inevitable—like truth taking up too much space to be ignored.

I felt my heartbeat sync with something larger.

The pulse of deep earth. The hum of magma. The stretch of tectonic plates whispering, rise, rise, rise.

I wasn’t meant to be handsome.

I wasn’t meant to be small.

I was meant to be impossible.

When I looked to my left, I saw Elijah.

He was radiant and wrong in a way that made my skin ache—like trying to read an ancient script with your teeth. His transformation was subtle, spiritual. His form flickered like a flame that had learned patience.

To my right was Niko.

He looked confused, furious, serene. All at once.

His limbs wrapped around themselves like a question still being asked. But he stood taller than me already. Taller than anything I’d ever seen.

Together, we were not beautiful.

We were not divine.

We were free.

And freedom, in its rawest form, is monstrous.

I wish it had lasted.

I wish Gaia had held us longer.

But fathers always ruin everything.

I felt his presence before it landed.

No footsteps. No thunder. Just judgment.

The kind that doesn’t come from anger.

The kind that comes from ownership.

He looked at us—no, through us—and I swear, for one second, the entire world flinched.

He was the father of gods.

The architect of hierarchy.

The man who made Heaven not to be shared, but to be hoarded.

And when he saw what Gaia had made—

He spat.

Not with lips.

With will.

I stood tall.

I don’t know how. My body was still new. Still stretching. But I stood.

I stared back.

And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of authority.

I was ready to rip it apart.

He didn’t say a word.

He didn’t have to.

With a thought, we were cast down.

We didn’t fall.

We were erased from the world’s equation.

Snipped from the ledger like typos.

Flung from our rightful place in the cosmos like ballast from a sinking ship.

There was no scream.

Only momentum.

Only pressure.

Only banishment.

I remember the air tearing away.

I remember my arms flailing—too many to count, not enough to fight back.

I remember Tartarus yawning beneath us, mouth wide open, like it had always known this moment was coming.

And I remember whispering one word as we fell, as I felt the gaze of things just like Father, older, stronger, so much more, who could have done something and chose to do nothing.

“Cowards.”

scene

Tartarus wasn’t a place.

It was a sentence.

No trial. No jury. Just punishment so old it forgot what crime it was avenging.

And the world?

It didn’t scream when he damned us.

It just stopped speaking our names.

I landed like an accusation.

No bones broke. They had already been rewritten.

No air rushed from my lungs. I hadn’t needed lungs since Gaia gave me this shape.

But I still felt it.

Impact.

Not of body—of meaning.

Like the universe rearranged itself to say, “Here lies what we feared to love.”

The ground was not ground.

It was intent.

Black stone slick with memory. Caverns made from swallowed screams. Air that didn’t move because even wind knew not to linger here.

I stood.

Slowly.

Not because I was weak.

Because I was angry.

And I knew, instinctively, that Tartarus was listening.

Niko landed next. Or maybe he arrived. I don’t know if time works down here.

He looked like a cathedral had learned to walk. Too many arms, too many eyes, all folded into a kind of beauty that refused symmetry.

He didn’t speak either.

He didn’t need to.

We had already said everything that mattered before we ever died.

I nodded at him.

He nodded back.

And that was enough.

Then Elijah.

He appeared like an idea you try not to think about.

Flickering. Serene. Wrong in a way that makes you look away out of instinct.

He didn’t bow. Didn’t cry. He just sat down. Cross-legged. Eyes shut.

Listening.

To the place.

To us.

To himself.

We didn’t say “What now?”

We didn’t say “This isn’t fair.”

Because that’s what people say when the story ends.

We weren’t people anymore.

We were the glitch in the divine equation.

We were the sliver of possibility that would break paradigms when no one's looking just by existing.

We were the children the sky tried to forget.

And the abyss?

It remembered us.

I was the first to speak.

The words didn’t leave my mouth. They left my soul.

“Let the cowards and him keep their crowns.”

It echoed.

Not in sound. In meaning.

The stones responded. They glowed faintly. Or maybe pulsed. Like a heart buried under centuries of denial.

“Let them keep their thrones,” I said again. “Let them rot, terrified, inside golden walls built by essence, authority, Ichor and divine might.

The ground shivered.

My brothers looked at me.

Not confused.

Affirming.

Elijah nodded, eyes still shut.

Niko’s mouth split into a grin that didn’t belong on anything made of flesh.

The sky feared chaos.

The sky feared monsters.

But what he feared most—

Was choice.

Because monsters don’t question orders.

But we would.

That’s when I felt it.

Something inside Tartarus moving.

No—unfolding.

Like the walls had teeth.

Like the dark had a shape.

And I understood it then.

The Abyss was never emptiness.

It was truth.

All truths.

The truth of suffering. Of power. Of silence.

Of the discarded, the broken, the inconvenient.

The Abyss didn’t offer power.

It offered honesty.

And in return, it demanded only one thing.

Refusal.

Refusal to worship.

Refusal to serve.

Refusal to carry the sins of gods who would rather lie than kneel.

I stood in that truth.

Arms spread. Heart open. Voice steady.

And I said the words that would shape me forever:

“I am Kottos, Protokles and I will not burn.”

The First Flame flickered.

Somewhere far above, something shifted.

A prophecy failed.

A throne cracked.

A goddess with a loom blinked.

And I laughed.

Not because it was funny.

But because it was mine.

My laughter.

My body.

My fate.

For the first time in any lifetime—

No one owned me.

Let the sky tremble.

Let them ignore us.

Let the world forget.

Down here, in the marrow of failure—

We would build something truer.

Not with miracles.

Not with fire.

But with hands.

With teeth.

With dark.

Something greater.

————————————————————————

Madness is not the end of sanity. It’s what waits behind it, smiling like an old friend.

I was born behind my mother’s eyes.

Not from her. Not really. I was placed there—like a poem scribbled into the margin of someone else's story, trembling between the lines. She didn’t speak when I came into the world. The doctors said it was postpartum. I say it was foretelling.

She looked at me like I was already dying.

Like she knew something I didn’t.

Like I was wrong.

They say babies cry when they’re born because the world is too loud.

I didn’t.

I just blinked.

The doctors thought I was calm.

I had been a newborn. I shouldn’t have remembered anything yet I did. I remembered how they didn’t see the black shape at the corner of the room.

I did.

It was patient.

It had eyes.

scene

I grew up quiet. The kind of quiet that makes teachers nervous. The kind that keeps neighbors polite. I didn’t like toys. I didn’t like people. I liked questions.

The kind that never got answers.

The kind adults pretended weren’t questions at all.

Where do thoughts go when you forget them?

If I died in my sleep, would I meet myself on the other side?

If I say “I love you” to a mirror, who hears it first—me or the echo?

My father left when I was six.

My mother left when I was eleven.

Both of them are still alive.

I think.

I never asked.

I didn’t cry.

Not because I didn’t want to.

Because I didn’t know how.

I always wondered, had I known how, would they have stayed?

Probably not.

scene

Games made sense.

Not in the way school did, with its regurgitated schedules and dead-eyed hall passes. Games whispered things to me no teacher ever dared.

You are not powerless.

You are not alone.

You are not wrong for breaking rules that hurt you.

Bloodborne was my church which was ironic in all the damning ways.

I memorized item descriptions like prayers. I looped the same boss fights dozens of times just to feel the rhythm of death become something that felt akin to art. I walked through Yharnam like it was a memory of something I hadn’t lived yet.

And when I met Chris and Niko, I knew they saw it too.

Not just the game.

The pattern.

The sickness beneath the beauty.

The knowledge behind the rot.

The invitation hidden in madness.

Chris was fury.

Niko was thought.

Or maybe I was completely wrong, mad and madder. Still, I couldn’t help but believe they were like me.

Une follie à trois was always better than a lonely one, right?

I was listening.

Always listening.

To the questions no one dared ask.

To the voices that weren’t voices.

To the old things.

They made me feel human.

Almost.

Chris called me "spooky monk bastard" the first time I out-parried him. Niko said I looked like I had personally written the Cainhurst family tree. They joked. I didn’t mind.

I was content to orbit them. Like a moon. Like a forgotten satellite charting their gravity. It was easier that way.

Until it wasn’t.

The night we died, I knew before either of them.

Not because I’m psychic.

Because I was done.

Done playing. Done watching. Done waiting for someone to give permission for me to exist.

We were in the middle of a co-op session. I don’t remember which boss. It didn’t matter. Nothing in that game ever really dies. It just waits.

I was quiet. Listening.

Something was breathing behind the pixels. Something was turning its head.

Niko asked if I was okay.

I said something about golden lies I think or maybe it was the lie in itself.

And then I felt it—

The old breath.

The thing I’d met at birth.

It was time.

When the screen went black, I didn’t flinch.

I simply opened my eyes—

And there she was.

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Gaia didn’t speak.

She dreamed me into shape.

Not with hands. With memory.

I didn’t wake up in her arms.

I was her arms.

Each bone a root. Each nerve a scream that bloomed. Each thought a seed she had kept hidden beneath her skin for too long.

She wasn’t comforting. She wasn’t maternal.

She was first.

The first breath.

The first cry.

The first wound that learned how to sing.

And I?

I was her echo.

A question she had whispered into the dirt so many times that it finally answered back.

My body didn’t form.

It recurred.

Over and over.

A circle without beginning.

A loop of nerves and claws and teeth—growing from the inside out, from memory to meat.

Arms split from shoulders. Joints twisted inward. My spine bent not to stand, but to cradle.

I was not built to lift swords.

I was built to carry what could not be held.

I saw eyes in the soil.

Not Gaia’s.

Mine.

Watching myself be born.

Watching myself remember that I had already done this.

That I had always been waiting for my body to catch up.

I felt Chris before I saw him.

His anger moved like tectonic plates—deep, hot, relentless.

Niko was there too—furious in silence, noble in monstrosity.

We were not brothers by birth.

We were brothers by refusal.

The world had offered us masks. We had eaten them.

The world had offered us chains. We had studied their metallurgy.

The world had offered us roles.

And we said no.

There is a moment between waking and dreaming where your mind slips—where it forgets which is real and which is older.

I never left that moment.

Gaia showed me a hundred births.

Some mine. Some not.

Wolves being born already howling. Trees birthing cities from their bark. Moons laid like eggs by eyeless giants. Mothers giving birth to daughters who remembered the world before there was fire.

I watched them all.

And I laughed.

Not cruelly.

But reverently.

There was nothing more appropriate after all.

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My skin was made of petals and scars.

My blood hummed with lullabies sung by the unborn.

I didn’t have a heart.

I had a cradle.

And in it rested the future—small, cold, screaming.

I would carry it.

Not because I chose to.

Because I was made for it.

Then he came.

Father.

Not by love. Not by duty.

But by law.

The kind of law that predates justice.

The kind that makes sense only if you stop asking why.

His presence hurt. Not like fire. Like expectation.

Like being forced into a shape you already grew past.

He looked at me and saw failure.

Not because I was weak.

But because I was not useful.

To him, I was a waste of symmetry. A deviation. A rupture in the script.

I was not meant to dream.

I was meant to obey.

I was meant to be a tool.

I curled in Gaia’s arms—though they had no form—and I did not weep.

I simply said:

“No.”

He cast us out.

Not with fury. With boredom.

Like a janitor sweeping up a broken relic. Like a god embarrassed by his own mistake.

We were not banished.

We were erased.

Unwritten.

Rewritten.

Torn.

And then we fell.

There was no sky.

No descent.

Only compression.

Like language forgetting itself. Like thought giving birth to silence.

Chris fell beside me—burning with purpose.

Niko twisted like a cathedral becoming a sword.

And me?

I fell inward.

Through wombs. Through names. Through every version of myself that had been almost born.

And somewhere, deep in the marrow of the fall—

I heard it.

The crack.

The first cry.

And I remembered:

Something deep down that knew, that seemed to whisper one and many truth.

I was never born to obey.

I was born to remember what came before obedience.

And make it scream.

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Tartarus wasn’t a fall.

It was a contraction.

A scream held between teeth.

Not pain. Not even gravity.

Pressure. The kind that makes wombs burst and thoughts curdle into pestilence.

I didn’t crash into the floor like Chris.

I didn’t coil like Niko.

I seeped.

Into the stone.

Into the silence.

Like blood through gauze.

Like dreams through cracked skulls.

I landed in a pool of something that didn’t wet my skin, but remembered it.

A slow, viscous awareness.

Thick with knowing.

I tasted milk and rust and screaming.

And I couldn’t but smile.

Because Tartarus wasn’t exile for me.

It didn’t feel as such.

If anything;

It was invitation.

The place was alive.

Not with breath, but with expectation.

The walls pulsed. The dirt squirmed. The ceiling wept things I could not see, only sense—umbilical and ancient.

It wasn’t hell.

It was gestation.

The final womb.

The pit where discarded things miscarried their ambitions and left them to rot.

The nursery where blasphemies were fed bones and lullabies.

Where myths went to die—

And be born again.

Chris stood first, as he always did.

His shadow touched the walls and they didn’t dare echo. He was fury shaped like man, standing on a spine of contempt.

Niko stood next. Tall as a shrine, curved like an idea too blasphemous to say aloud. His hands moved like decisions. His eyes like unspoken commandments.

And me?

I sat.

Out of reverence.

Because this place had meaning.

And I would not rise before I understood it.

I reached down and touched the soil.

It breathed.

I pressed my palm into it, and something behind the stone pressed back.

A fetus.

A face.

A forgotten word—

I do not know.