[“Adam’s POV”]

  Darkness, tight and warm. A muffled drumbeat surrounds him—two heartbeats, one of his mother’s, one of his own. Limbs twitch. Eyes flutter though there is no light. Soul and body twist inside the womb like mismatched gears trying to run a clock. He remembers everything, but nothing fits. The magma, the first kill, the death in sleep, TNP. (A/N: not the name, obviously…) The little body struggling to understand and piece together the parts but nothing fits, he feels like he is missing something. He spends days, weeks and months trying to piece together things from memory, still no closure but he has new ideas. He keeps his mind occupied trying to figure things out and thinking about ideas on new ways to use the tools he once saw from TNP (A/N: The group watched their offspring use things they made and improved on them right…), soon. The womb tightens, Pressure, a squeezing of ribs and skull, a shove downward.

  It begins, he fights it at first, instinctively but the body, not the soul, chooses the path. He is ejected into cold air with a sharp cry that carries the weight of a man trapped inside a child. Rough hands lift him, voices grunt around him, deep, wet noises from wide throats. His eyes open. For the first time in this life, he sees light: flickering and red from a fire pit just outside the cave, filtered through smoke and moss. The face above him is heavy-browed, ft-nosed, a curtain of dark hair obscuring soft eyes. His mother. She smells of cy, milk, and sweat. She rocks him against her chest, humming—a slow, tuneless vibration.

  The man behind her—leaner, sharper—grunts and moves closer, pcing a stone bde at her side in case the jackals return. That is his father. He does not have words for them yet, but he knows them, their movements, their pulses. He is two when his body begins to cooperate, his legs are unsteady, but his mind races. The others; older children chase insects and toss pebbles. He sits apart, touching a broken stick with both hands, watching how it splinters. He tries to remember how tools felt in his st life, the rhythm, the grip, but his hands are small, weak. His frustration boils into silent tantrums his father doesn’t understand, His mother coos and offers berries, he does not want berries; he wants memory to obey.

  A fsh flood strikes the tribe’s camp during his fourth summer. Rain churns the dirt floor to mush. His father shouts as a woven pouch full of bone shards is washed away into the stream. ‘Adam’ crawls into the stream with frantic purpose. The bones don’t matter. But near the pouch, he sees something sharp and bck sticking out of the mud. It shines like water, cuts the current like a fin. He grips it; Obsidian.

  He cuts his palm immediately, and recoils, blood dripping into the rain. But he smiles, he remembers the feeling. The cut is shallow, but it sings. He turns his hand under the rain, watching the blood dilute, then vanish. The bck stone lies in the shallows beside him—fked, not round like the pebbles the others throw. It’s shaped by force. Pressure. A memory rises, how to hold it, how to strike it, how to make it split again. He doesn’t tell anyone what he’s found, not because he wishes to hide it, but because he doesn’t yet know how to show it.

  His father sees the blood and scolds him with a low growl. The mother grabs his arm and yanks him back to the cave, checking his cut, tearing a strip of bark to wrap the palm. He does not fight it. He stares past them, at the stream, at the pce where his blood mixed with water and stone. By his fifth summer, his legs are strong, and his hands no longer shake. He watches the way his father hacks branches with blunt edges. He studies how the elders pound nuts open between round stones. Every movement they make is functional. Instinctive. But wrong.

  Not wrong in outcome—but in purpose. They do not know why they do what they do. He watches them discard the sharp-edged fkes when they break a stone wrong, leaving behind fragments that would have saved them time, blood, and fingers. He begins to gather these pieces in secret. A hollow behind a rock. Dry grass covering the collection. Fkes, cores, half-split nodules. When the others sleep, he picks one and strikes it with another. The first time he tries to fke intentionally, it bounces off and nds on his bare foot. He Waits, tries again, over and over, until it splits cleanly. A line like water, thin and dangerous. He stares at it, breathing shallowly, and presses the fke to a dried root. He carves; not art, not symbols, but function. A groove, a notch, a test. It cuts.

  He shows his sister first, she is three summers younger, still half-feral. But she watches him like prey watches predator alert, curious, uncertain. He takes her hand and presses a duller fke into it, then a stick. He wraps them together with vine and makes a sound low in his throat—hrrnk... hrrnk...—urging her to pull, she does. It comes apart, he remakes it. This time, he lets her bind the vine. When she finishes, it holds. They both look at it, then at each other, something passes between them. No word, just a change. He has begun teach.

  The others start to notice soon. His sister uses the tools he helped her bind to dig out roots quicker than the others, she no longer begs for help when peeling bark. The old woman with the hunched back watches from the edge of the fire one evening, her fingers worrying a dull pebble. When ‘Adam’ sits beside her and silently offers a sharp fke, she recoils, but takes it. By the next hunt, two of the adults have tools bound with sinew and stick. Not shaped like his, not elegant—but functional. Crude bdes. Adam turns ten summers old.

  He starts making bdes in front of the tribe now, not hiding. He fttens the bone of an antelope leg and uses it to hammer fkes off a core. Sparks fly, chips scatter, some of the younger boys gather around. One mimics his stance, smming a rock into another and watching it shatter like dry fruit. Wrong, ‘Adam’ thinks, but not useless. He takes the broken edge, shows the angle, the rhythm. The child watches his hands. Mimics slower. Smiles. Now there are three who understand.

  The tools multiply. Hunting grows easier. Less waste. Fewer cuts on fingers and thumbs. His father takes one of ‘Adam’s bdes and guts a bushbuck faster than ever before. When he’s done, he looks at ‘Adam’ with a mixed Pride and Respect. Each child who watches him learns something. Not all get it. But some do. He teaches his sister how to bind multiple bdes onto one shaft for stripping tree bark. He crafts a stone bowl for boiling roots using hot rocks and wet leaves. He watches. He corrects. He no longer needs to remember why he’s doing this. He is doing it.

  A season passes; the rains return. So does the leopard. It comes in silence, its body pressed low beneath the ferns, its eyes twin embers under the moon. The tribe sleeps in the hollow, curled among woven leaves and smoldering coals. ‘Adam’ doesn’t, he never sleeps deeply anymore, the slightest sound—twig, breath, dispced stone snaps his eyes open. He hears it first, the dry hiss of grass fttened by padded feet.

  His hand closes around the haft of a spear he made two days earlier—obsidian tip, hardened shaft, feathered tail for bance. A tool born for Lethality. He rolls up from the dirt soundlessly. The leopard charges, he doesn't run, he pnts his feet and waits. At the st second, as its body surges up in an arc, he throws the spear. The obsidian spearhead strikes the ancient leopard below its shoulder. A clean puncture. Not enough to kill—but enough to turn-tail. The cat twists mid-air, lets out a strangled snarl, crashes down hard into a tangle of brambles, and limps off, bleeding.

  It doesn't return. In the morning, they find the blood trail leading to a carcass ten paces deep in the bush. He pulled the dead leopard out into the light; they held a celebratory feast that night. From then on, his father begins to carry one of ‘Adam’s spears at all times. His mother starts sleeping beside the fire. The children beg to watch when ‘Adam’ carves. No one speaks to him differently—but they watch. They wait for him to act. He is someone the tribe depends on now. But something inside him remains unsettled. He carves images into stone, images from dreams. He starts to feel something pulling him—not away, but outward. Like a current rising beneath his feet. It happens without warning.

  He’s down by the stream gutting a red river pig. The obsidian bde slices clean through muscle. He’s thinking of heat, fire, sinew when the wind shifts and something changes in the air. He looks up, she stands across the water, crouched low but her spine upright. A spear slung over her back. A bundle of bound tools on her hip. Her brow is wide. Her body, lean. Her hair, matted. But her eyes—Her eyes are ancient.

  ‘Eve’.

  He doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows. She knows too. She rises slowly. Behind her, more shapes begin to appear through the trees. One by one, they emerge from the ferns and bramble: figures not entirely unlike those ‘Adam’ grew up among, but different in posture, in silence, in how they look at the world. Their feet fall softly, sound masked from predators. Their eyes dart—not with instinct, but with pattern and purpose. There is ‘Donovan’ tall and broad-chested, carrying a hammerstone looped in braided vine across his shoulder. ‘Beth’, small and sinewy, dark mud painted across her cheeks, her arms wrapped in an fiber-cord 'armguard'. ‘Charlie’, whose arms bear deep scars, one hand always fiddling with a tiny bone-carved disk. ‘Francine’, walking just behind Eve, her stare unblinking.

  ‘Adam’ doesn't move. He stands ankle-deep in river water, obsidian knife still slick with pig blood. The hide lies open in the reeds beside him, steam rising from the warm carcass. Eve is the only one who steps forward. She simply opens her hand, in it lies a single fke of stone; smooth, sharp, fwless. She tosses it to him; he catches it without looking down. The edges fit his fingers like an echo. The others begin to spread out along the riverbank. They kneel setting down their packs, their cords, their weapons. Not facing ‘Adam’, not bowing—simply pcing themselves with him. He steps onto the riverbank; they surround the fire that night. There are no words only work. They unwrap their bundles and y out their tools—sharpened scrapers, hafted knives, stone chisels, shaped bones. Each item is pced with care, as if part of a nguage. ‘Adam’ watches, then adds his own. His spear. The curved scraper he used to peel bark. A bone needle carved with lines that have no meaning yet.

  This is a catalogue, this is beginning. They eat the river pig together, each one carving meat with the bde they’ve made themselves. Smoke rises, sparks drift upward and vanish into the stars; the night is warm, but something deeper stirs in their bones. A sense of timing, of steps taken rightly, of pieces finally falling into pce. They do not yet know how they were drawn here. They do not yet know what awaits. But they all remember their first mistake. And they all burn with one quiet vow:

  This time, they will teach.This time, they will not fail.

  I_am_the_StormMF

  I_am_the_StormMF