Sparks swallowed everything.
The Reed mansion was gone. The hearth, the shelves, the portraits—consumed in a flood of molten light. Even the void that had stretched beneath him, endless and devouring, was erased. All that remained was brilliance: a storm without sky, without ground, without direction. Zeke hung within it, though hang was too weak a word. He was suspended, caught in a current that was not air, not water, but raw becoming.
His body was no body at all. It was filaments—lattice-threads unraveling and tangling—each pulled taut by invisible hooks. Every piece of him screamed. Hunger gnawed. Ambition scorched. Fear clutched. His mind split into echoes—one voice demanding he consume, another that he rule, another that he run. They tore at him, but the sparks did not let him scatter. They dragged him inward, forcing him through a shape he could not yet hold.
The mansion had collapsed into light. Now that light became a cocoon.
It wrapped around him, layer by layer, sealing the fragments of his self in a chrysalis woven from brilliance. The storm narrowed, folding tighter, until he could feel the walls of it pressing against him. Sparks seeped into him like molten threads, sinking through the torn lattice, patching splits only to tear them wider and set them again—hotter, truer, stronger.
He convulsed. He had no throat, yet he screamed. The cocoon did not care. It remade him.
Systems assembled before he had parts to hold them. Channels etched through emptiness where tissue would be, then filled as tissue formed around them. Paths promised to carry power without bursting the flesh still being written. Three deep spaces settled inside him like bells being hung—one low in muscle and bone, one somewhere bright behind thought and intent, one in the humming arteries of power threading him. They rang against one another, dissonant at first, then edging toward a chord.
The first self arrived with the taste of metal and ash. Slime—ooze and hunger, amorphous and unkillable—poured into the half-flesh that was not yet flesh. Its lesson was survival: yield, bend, consume, adapt. It remembered what minerals scraped from stone tasted like, the copper-bitter snap of sparks when he devoured predators, the numb persistence of waiting in cold. That memory burned into marrow still knitting. Its echo whispered: never starve.
The second self descended like a brand. Wings of light, tattoos of fire, ambition like gravity—he remembered standing above the world, crowned in radiance, certain of ascent. That lattice slotted into his forming veins, a scaffolding of command etched into nerves: dominate, create, rise. A hotter spark branded his heart as it coalesced, forcing rhythm into the void. There would be order. There would be ascent. Even if the world buckled, he would climb it.
The third self came with the scent of smoke. Horns. Scales. Kinship and fear. Flesh surged across filaments, layering muscle onto bone that had not yet hardened. Golden eyes blinked somewhere in the dark of his mind, whispering kin, warning of rejection. It wrapped his lungs with the promise of breath and the memory of roaring. Faces flashed: Cass laughing at a kitchen table; Aunt Kat's wrists dusted with flour; Uncle Alexi's steady hand on a shoulder; Grandpa's voice threading calm through a crowded room; Zein and Zia racing in the yard. The weight of them pressed against his chest—heavy, warm, terrifying.
The fragments collided. Sparks burst. The cocoon's walls strained until fine cracks spidered across the shell. For a heartbeat Zeke believed he would be torn apart, scattered forever—one part sliding into bottomless hunger, one into cold certainty, one into the lonely need for kin. But a deeper wheel turned within him, slow and implacable. The furnace that had kept him from collapsing now caught the pieces and smelted them. Pain poured through every seam, but for the first time he recognized it not as destruction—only forging.
His skeleton formed—thin but hard, each bone laced with mana that hummed like a plucked string. Flesh followed, pale skin stretched over lean muscle, threaded tight as wire. Scales pressed through the skin, dark metallic edged with faint gold; here and there the sheen went silver if the light inside him tipped a certain way, or deeper when shadow gathered. They rose in symmetrical lines across his chest and shoulders, ribs and forearms—order written in armor, not the chaotic scatter he had seen on beasts.
Something pushed from his skull—horns, black as coal at their roots, streaked with fine lines of silver and gold that pulsed with each convulsion of mana. They curved backward, sharp and raw, cracking the cocoon shell as they grew.
Hair followed—dark as soot, catching a fireglow from within the cocoon. Red undertones glimmered when embers stirred. White-silver threads flickered when brightness surged. When darkness rose, shadows pooled through the strands. Wild and uneven, it framed horns and brow, untamed as he was.
Hands. Fingers.
He had hands.
Not pseudopods, not shapeless tools pulled from slime, but trembling digits tipped with glossy claws. They twitched as sparks carved them true, tendons sliding into place, small bones clicking into their sockets. He curled them inward and for the first time since the human life he barely remembered, he felt knuckles pulse and fold.
A shudder tore through him. His chest seized. Something opened—lungs, raw and new. Air did not exist here, only sparks, but he inhaled regardless, reflex older than memory. His chest burned, throat blistering. He exhaled and fire spilled out, a ribbon of light shaped like flame. The breath nearly scorched him from within. He coughed, body convulsing, but the cocoon held him together.
A second breath followed, less jagged. The third came smoother still. His body was learning him as much as he was learning it. Heat pooled beneath his sternum and spread like a sunrise through bone. With each heartbeat the inner furnace turned, catching surges that might have torn him and tempering them until they ran clean.
The cocoon constricted. Sparks cinched tighter. He felt other things come together—delicate valves, sheaths of muscle around vessels of power, slick layers that would let strength slide instead of tear. Under his skin something faint and smooth remained, a glimmering film, the thinnest echo of his old life lining the new: a memory of fluid adaptability lending give to hardening form.
Cracks scored the shell. Light bled out in narrow lines. Through one split he saw a shadow of himself—child-shaped, lean and wiry. No wings. No tail. Only the etched suggestion of a horned silhouette and the glint of scales lying flat and ordered across his chest and arms. He shifted and pain answered, white and sharp, but along its edge he tasted possibility: movement that would be quick and precise, not vast—strength measured, not sprawling.
He drifted in the chrysalis and listened to his own pulse. Every throb drove sparks deeper into seams. Every twitch braided filaments tighter. The storm had quieted into a workshop, relentless and meticulous. He thought, foolishly and fiercely, about faces—the ones that could break him with a flinch. Cass, who laughed like pressure breaking. Aunt Kat, whose sharpest words guarded the people she loved. Uncle Alexi, whose steadiness had pulled him back from edges he hadn't seen. Grandpa, who could turn a room by breathing slower. He tried to say their names. The cocoon took the sound, caught it, and pressed it into the work.
A different pain struck—clean, clinical. He felt himself threaded through with measurements. Not numbers he could see, only the sense of being weighed, tested, filed. Something ticked over. Once. Twice. He did not know if it approved or simply recorded that he existed. The furnace spun faster, catching the surge before it could break him.
Hunger rose—not the gnawing emptiness of the past but a heavy demand. Fuel. The new flesh needed it. The new bones demanded it. He would have to feed this body, and not only with bright sparks that tasted of essence. Flesh. Water. Salt. Heat. Things he had not needed before would become law now. The thought made him tired, and then the furnace turned that fatigue into a copper hum that steadied his breath.
Another crack leapt across the shell. Horns gleamed through. Scales flashed constellations and slid away. Claws scraped the inner wall, leaving sharp grooves that sealed themselves a heartbeat later. He tried to move his legs and found they obeyed, cramped and numb; knees pulled toward his chest, ankles flexed, toes curled—pressure points where nails sharpened to little blades.
The cocoon flexed again and he felt his spine align one vertebra at a time, each locking with a neat, satisfying bite. A second rhythm set in behind his eyes—an undercurrent like the click of an aperture narrowing. He blinked, and vision sharpened. Something in the iris tightened; the world inside the light drew a line down its center. His pupils thinned into vertical cuts of gold-shadow, and the cocoon seemed to tilt around that new axis.
He concentrated and the furnace answered. Heat rose along his forearms. A shimmer rolled under the scales and he sensed thin threads of brightness flowing through channels in skin and bone. He nudged, and light pooled at his fingertips, obedient and sharp. He nudged differently, and darkness slipped beneath the scales, softening edges, hiding seams. He tipped toward heat and a small ember pulsed beneath his sternum. None of it was clean. None of it was easy. But it was there.
He hung in the light and learned himself in pieces. A breath. A clench of hand. A slow narrowing of the eyes to draw the world into focus. He failed at each in new ways, then adjusted, then failed better. The cocoon held him without tenderness. It demanded. He answered, because there was nothing else to do, and because the alternative was to unravel.
Silence settled, thick and waiting. The cocoon held. Outside: no mansion, no void, no sound. Inside: a heartbeat, steady as a drum taught to a child who refused to drop the sticks. He could feel the outline of what he would be, pressed around him, as certain as a mold. Edges remained rough. Seams would need time. A few parts were still missing, names on the tip of a thought. But he fit. He fit here.
He drew one more breath. It came easier. He let it out as a thin thread of warmth tracing the inner surface and vanishing. He did not try to speak. There would be time for words later, if he could find them. For now there was only the shaping, the waiting, the clean quiet after the hammer falls.
The cocoon pulsed once, like a heart.
It was not an end.
It was the breaking of a cocoon.