It's dark. I am surrounded by a comfortable warmth, thick like blood and just as vital. I can hear the faint sound of a heartbeat, steady and reassuring, echoing through the viscous fluid that cushions me. It feels safe here, like nothing can harm me. Floating in stillness, time seems to stand still, and I lose myself in the peace of this moment. Neither pain nor suffering exist. No fear. It's only a strange, instinctive feeling that this is the pce for me. For now.

  I can't see anything, but I can hear—and it sounds like... cracking. Faint at first, like distant twigs snapping underfoot, but then louder. Rhythmic. Urgent. The sounds multiply. Something sharp, wet, and alive is happening outside my shell.

  The sound surrounds me—shells splitting open, wet bodies sliding free, squelching against flesh and muck. Muffled cries, high-pitched and sharp, echo through the thick amniotic fluid of the pit. The warmth shifts, growing thinner and restless. The air—or what passes for it—tastes different, tainted with birth and blood and something acrid. I can feel the pulse of new life stirring all around me. Hundreds. Thousands.

  The peacefulness fractures.

  Suddenly, I can't breathe. The comfort turns to pressure—crushing, stifling, suffocating. My chest tightens as an invisible weight presses down on me. The air is gone. There is no air. Panic rises like fire in my throat, hot and desperate. I twist and writhe inside the shell, my limbs filing, desperate to move, desperate to escape. I cw at the inside with fingers I don’t fully control, driven by a wordless instinct that screams: Out. Out. OUT.

  Cracks form beneath my fingers. Thin lines spiderweb through the shell, and then—light. Pale, red, and flickering like a wound torn open to the world. A strange scent leaks in—sweet, cloying, and heavy with musk and rot, like perfumed decay. I push harder, frantic now. My strength surges as fear overtakes me. I burst free when the shell gives way.

  I tumble out onto something alive. The floor pulses beneath me, warm and slick like muscle, coated in a thick slime that clings to my skin. Throbbingly humid, the air is filled with the sounds of screaming and guttural growls of unseen creatures. Shapes loom above me—tall, powerful, glistening with sweat and oil. Their skin shines like polished leather, their faces expressionless, and they have thick metal colrs around their necks. Their eyes are dull, almost lifeless, and they do not speak so much as bark orders in a nguage I don’t understand.

  They move without emotion, scooping up the newborns—creatures like me, small and weak, our bodies raw and trembling. Some try to crawl, others only cry. The towering beings grab us by limbs or tails, dragging us across the fleshy ground and tossing us into rows. Corrals of bone and chain line the edges of the spawning pit.

  I don't know what these creatures are. I don't know what I am. But I feel their cold indifference like a bde. They do not look at us with compassion or care. We are products, not children. Resources, not lives.

  The cries around me blur into a single, maddening chorus. I try to stand, but my legs buckle. The pit is too warm, too wet, too loud. The air clings to my lungs, making it hard to think. I fall forward, and the fleshy ground catches me like a heartbeat.

  I don't know where I am, only that I am not safe. Something vast looms just beyond the haze—a presence too big to see, too old to name. Though I cannot understand it, I feel it settle like gravity over the pit, a pressure that pushes into my bones. She stands on a ledge high above the spawning chaos, silent and unmoving. Her form is blurred by heat and distance, but something about her radiates dominance—sensual and terrifying.

  She is tall, towering above all, with a chubby, plush form framed in bountiful curves that shift like silk with every breath. Puffy, curly blonde hair coils around her head like a golden crown, catching the blood-hued light. Her eyes are pits of bck, with irises that glow an unnatural, icy blue, as though they could freeze fire. She watches the pit not with affection, but with a distant, calcuting hunger, like a queen examining livestock.

  I can... feel her power. It's another instinct, I guess.

  Around me, the creatures, who all look identical to each other, snarl and scrap with one another. Scratching, biting, whipping each other with their tails. I recoil from such things.

  Where the hell am I?