It wasn't an easy birth.
When the eyelid of consciousness finally opened, Ashen didn't find light.
He found madness — and it had taken the shape of the world.
The sky was upside down.
Land walked above the clouds. Rivers climbed upward. Mountains floated.
Stars hung low like living eyes bleeding light.
Even the void was no longer still — it breathed, shifted, reshaped itself every moment as if trying to understand what it was.
Ashen stood at the center of this insanity.
His body was forming again, but it wasn't his old one.
Every particle of his being trembled, cracked, and came back together in a new way.
He felt blood running backward inside him.
His bones twisted like serpents of fire, and his muscles contracted, creating new, inhuman shapes.
The sky whispered to him.
Words he couldn't understand, yet they felt familiar.
It spoke in the ancient tongue — the language of blood.
> "There are no more laws."
"Everything fixed will break."
"Everything alive will devour itself to understand."
He turned his head and saw himself.
Then saw himself again.
Then hundreds of himself.
---
Every step he took gave birth to a new version of him.
But those versions weren't the same.
One was angry, another calm, another crying, another laughing with sick madness.
Each carried a fragment of his broken soul, of his scattered awareness, of his old intentions.
One of them approached — her face half burned, half smiling — placed her hand on his shoulder and said:
> "You don't deserve to survive."
Then she drove her fingers into his chest and pulled out his heart — no blood, no pain, only an expanding void.
But before he fell, a new shadow emerged from that heart — another version of him — devoured the one that killed him, then turned and screamed:
> "Stop running!"
The scream became a vortex — a storm of flesh, sound, and memory — swallowing everything.
The sky collapsed. The ground melted.
Everything became him, and every "him" became chaos.
He began to feel that time itself no longer moved.
He saw the future before it happened, and the past repeating endlessly, as if the world was a reel playing on a loop without end.
---
Voices overlapped.
Ashen's versions began to fight each other.
One laughed on the right, another cried on the left, and a third whispered from within:
> "All of this is you."
He grabbed his head, but his fingers melted into his skull.
He felt his mind dissolving — his consciousness splitting into countless shards.
Each shard had its own mind, emotions, memories, and goals.
All of them wanted to control the body that no longer had an owner.
He saw one version pulling him upward toward a sky tearing apart like blood-soaked cloth, while another grabbed his legs and dragged him into a ground beating like a living heart.
He was caught between two forces — total collapse and birth through chaos.
And then he heard it — the Savage Intent.
It wasn't an external voice this time, but a roar rising from his marrow, from his veins, from the screams of thousands of versions tearing themselves apart around him.
> "All of this is you."
"Chaos is your consciousness. Don't run from it… become it."
---
The sky suddenly split open like a massive wound.
From it poured rivers of glowing blood, flowing through the air, falling onto the ground to give birth to formless beings.
Ashen's own faces covered their bodies as they crawled toward him, calling his old names.
Every step he took recreated the universe around him — each time more distorted than before.
A mountain rose from his brain.
A sea formed from his tears.
Clouds took shape from his breath.
The world became a broken mirror, reflecting every fracture in his soul.
As decades passed within this chaos, he lost any sense of boundaries.
He no longer knew where his body ended and where the universe began.
He couldn't tell the difference between the screams outside and the one echoing inside.
Everything merged, blended, and pulsed with chaos.
---
At some moment, time stopped.
The versions froze where they stood — half laughing, half screaming, eyes open toward an endless void.
Ashen stood in the center, floating among millions of himself, each holding a different memory from his past.
Memories of his childhood, his clan, the moment he fell into nothingness — all repeated before him in distorted forms.
He reached out to touch one, and the memory melted into dust in his palm.
Then he understood the truth hiding behind the chaos:
Every one of those versions was a face of his own will.
The Savage Intent was never an external enemy — it was his true essence.
Everything he had fought through those centuries was only himself refusing to become what he was meant to be.
---
When he understood that, he stopped fighting.
He opened his arms amid that storm of voices, bodies, and colors, letting chaos flow through him.
He allowed time to wrap around him, worlds to dissolve into him, and consciousness to break and rebuild.
He saw himself being swallowed and reborn at the same time.
Every pain became a melody.
Every scream became a breath.
Every distortion became beauty in its savage form.
The versions began to vanish, one by one, as if melting into a small point inside his chest.
That point spun, expanded, until it became an orbit of blood, light, and calm chaos.
From it came his new breath — not the breath of a man, but of a being united with the world.
He raised his head and looked at the sky — no longer bleeding, but calm.
The universe was still, yet within that stillness there was a pulse… his pulse.
He had become the center of the storm.
The point of balance within madness.
---
After a century, the chaos had settled inside him.
He no longer feared it, and it no longer tried to devour him.
It breathed with him, flowed through his veins, shaping him into something that knew neither weakness nor doubt.
He realized that control doesn't come from suppressing savagery, but from embracing it until it becomes part of you.
That chaos can't be defeated — only understood.
And that madness isn't the end of reason, but its true beginning.
He sat in the void that moments ago had been a living nightmare, stretched out his hand, and saw the world form around him once again.
But this time, it was neither dark nor bright.
It was balanced.
Silent.
Carrying within it the breath of chaos… and the spirit of calm.
Ashen smiled and whispered within himself:
> "Madness taught me order."
"And chaos gave me peace."
"The world must drown in chaos and madness… to be purified from the debt of vengeance."