In the silence, I watched my own reflection. The darkness, the cold, the uncertainty of the next moment... were irrelevant to my thoughts. Nothing moved except my memories, slowly stacking upon each other like a half-built tower. There were ancient ideas mixed with recent data, mental structures rearranging themselves in silence while my gaze drifted into the void.
I remembered that I once existed, or perhaps I invented it in a feverish dream.
My body no longer responded to the old definitions of "flesh" or "form." It was something symmetrical and alien, as if a superior mind had tried to give shape to a concept within matter and had only achieved a crude approximation.
My eyes, black and dull, showed a triangular iris: the right one pointing upward, the left one downward. Their shapes were a copy of an idea rather than a symbol or a purpose.
I was in a trance, in a state where I was real and yet only a fantasy imagined by a madman, as real as the stars and as false as a delirium.
When the illusion that was me became real, a name was whispered to me, but it was not the name I had once carried as a human. It was more like an idea named beneath a sea of voices trying to speak to each other.
That name that was given to me is not something I can say without disturbing this fragile world, so I refused to name it before others.
I then gave myself a title, which might as well be only a vague way of describing me, a mere shadow of what is real.
But one name was not enough, nor were two, because existence stands on three pillars: the body, the mind, and the soul.
Thus, Adrian became the name of the body,
The Artificer the name of the mind,
and the name of the soul would only be known by him.
Recognizing his own existence for the first time, Adrian turned his gaze away.
Tired of his own being, his tall form resembling that of one of the angels of that god of war among men, he stood up.
His senses, beyond the physical, showed him the way out. The place was familiar not because he knew it, but because every piece of the landscape recognized him as something more than mortal.
…
The morning sun touched my almost naked body. The salty breeze, along with the faint taste of storms, told me there was a sea near this place.
But I ignored such things to put my thoughts in order.
I had no plan in this world, nor in this plane, but that had to change, for this universe is a danger in itself.
From the cultists to an ancient warlord between the living and the dead, sitting upon a golden throne,
the worshipers of machinery, children of a metal dragon bathed in lies,
the tide of mad fungi marching in infinite ranks for the next war,
beings swift as the wind itself, sunken in the depravity of endless pleasure-seeking,
those four great stains upon the firmament, accompanied by their eternal whispers of temptation.
He frowned as the list went on and on.
From the dying who sold their souls to gods of metal and radiation hungry for spirits,
to the creatures that only desire to devour the cosmos and empty the heavens of life in their infinite hunger,
and to that idealistic race that never knew where it stood within the stars.
Adrian sighed as the infinite dangers resurfaced in his mind. Knowledge was a curse, but also a tool to be used.
He walked through the undergrowth until he reached a clearing. The land had been burned long ago, barely healing.
He walked in circles while speaking his thoughts aloud, as if addressing an invisible audience.
"A world that seems far from the galaxy in flames," I exclaimed.
A translucent image of the planet was projected into the air, an illusion that, the longer it lasted, the farther it drifted away, revealing the entire galaxy.
"A being severed from its former shape... that is what I am now."
He opened his hand.
A leaf fell from a nearby tree and stopped midair, suspended as if time itself had forced it to halt.
Its structure fragmented into lines of shining ether: fibers, sap, cellulose...
Each fragment dissolved into white ash that burned with black fire, and the compression struck me as a new understanding.
"Innocent powers of a deity, yet... gods are a farce. I am only one of the many failed products of the universe's entropy: a consciousness that should have died, but did not. That simple."
The fire went out without smoke, leaving only the ashes scattered in the air.
"But devoid of purpose," I murmured.
"An idea with no direction beyond the instinct to preserve itself."
He turned his gaze to the ground, blackened and withered.
He did not wish to end up like this, forgotten in the pages of a story.
He needed power for that, he needed more and more, or he would end up like these insignificant lives.
A weapon was my first goal in this world, a goal I set for myself by my own will.
He knew how to use his powers with almost instinctive precision. I raised my hands to the sky.
A tricolor light—white, black, and scarlet—illuminated my form.
The scattered light quickly wove itself together as his mind envisioned the purest steel.
A faint tremor passed through the clearing while the air took on the taste of ozone, and the once clear clouds turned scarlet red.
The air hummed as a rain of metal fell upon that small clearing—spheres of many sizes made of refined steel rained down for an instant, yet none ever touched him.
I felt the pull of my own form dictating how far I could alter the truth of the world.
It was not a great punishment, but incredibly annoying: for an instant his breath became heavy, something human, while my knees gave way under the weight of my own body.
A reminder that he was not a god, but an incomplete idea trying to sustain a form within this world.
"A lie turned into reality," he murmured. "That will be enough for now."
And thus, his first act of creation ended, with those metallic pearls waiting to be shaped into something more useful by their creator.