There was nothing… except awareness.

  He drifted without a body, without a voice, without feeling. A mere thought lost in the void, uo touch the world or affect it. He tried to remember how he had e to be, but there was no before to recall. He did not know who he was or what he had been—only that he existed.

  But he was not alive.

  For the first time, he felt hunger. Not for food, but for existeself. He wao be, to break free from this invisible prison. He searched… reag out for something to bind him to reality, something he could bee.

  Then, he found it.

  A body. A human one, barely ging to life. It was weak, broken, hardly fit for survival. But it was something. It was a beginning.

  Slowly, his awareness seeped into the body, like a whisper slipping into the cracks of existehen, all at once, sensation flooded his mind—pain, cold, numbness. Lungs vulsed, a heart trembled, and eyes that were not his own… opened.

  He had been bain. But he was weak. Too weak.

  And he would have to ge.