Part IV - The God in the Womb
The pain was a fire, but the heat was something else entirely. It was a dry, oppressive heat that had nothing to do with the Southern California summer outside and everything to do with the impossible thing tearing its way into the world through her. It wasn't just in her body; it was radiating from her, a furnace so intense that Dr. Evans, a man she had just met, was wiping sweat from his brow, his eyes wide with a confusion that went beyond medical concern.
"What's her core temp?" he barked, his voice tight and strained.
"I can't get a stable reading!" a young nurse shouted back.
Maria could feel the electronic pads on her skin buzzing, sending a tingling, painful vibration through her. The heart monitor beside her wasn't just beeping with her agony; it was emitting a chaotic, arrhythmic shriek, a sound of pure electronic panic as it failed to process the impossible energy pouring out of her. The lights above spasmed in time with her contractions, casting the room in frantic, strobing flashes of light and shadow.
Dr. Evans leaned toward the monitor. "This isn't a glitch," he muttered, his voice a low tremor of disbelief. "It's a violation of physics."
He reached out to adjust a dial on a machine connected to her, and recoiled with a sharp yelp. A jolt of blue-white static electricity, thick as a wire, had arced from the machine to his fingertips, the crackle loud in the tense room. For the first time, Maria saw genuine fear in the doctor's eyes. His staff was a mess of panicked, shallow breaths, their terror born not just from her difficult delivery, but from the sheer, unholy strangeness of it all.
But Maria's focus was singular. She gritted her teeth, her knuckles white as she gripped the bed rails. This was her son. Her responsibility. Her storm to endure. She would not let this chaos, this impossibility, consume him. She would see him through.
Then, at the peak of the storm, as she gave one final, world-shattering push, every light in the entire maternity ward blew out with a single, sharp pop. The shrieking monitor went dead. The world plunged into a sudden, profound silence, broken only by her own ragged breathing and the thin, disorienting beam of an emergency backup light.
In the eerie quiet, a nurse gasped, her flashlight beam trembling as it cut through the gloom. "His hair… and his eyes…"
Dr. Evans followed the beam of light. The baby's hair was a shocking, pure white, a stark silver against the blood and grime of birth. And his eyes were open. Not the unfocused, milky blue of a newborn, but a deep, unnerving crimson, intelligent and ancient, taking in the scene with a horrifying, assessing awareness. The beam of light drifted up to his face and stopped. On the left side of his forehead, a birthmark in the shape of a jagged flame was glowing with a feverish, angry red light, stretching from his temple to his eyebrow and casting a faint, pulsing glow in the dark room.
As a man of empirical data and logical conclusions, Dr. Evans felt his entire worldview begin to fracture. He did not see a miracle. He saw a biological impossibility, a terrifying anomaly that defied every law he held sacred. He turned to a colleague, his voice a low, shaken whisper.
"Vitals are off the charts. The temperature spike is localized around him. What is he?"
He saw another nurse, young and overwhelmed, quietly make the sign of the cross in the shadows. He couldn't find it in himself to blame her.
The newborn's first cry tore through the silence. It was not the weak, wavering wail of an infant, but a sharp, shockingly resonant sound that echoed like a thunderclap in the small room—a first, defiant declaration of life from a boy whose mother had just fought a war against reality itself to bring him into a world that was already recoiling from him.
The cry faded, leaving a silence that was heavier and more profound than before. Dr. Evans stood frozen, a man of science adrift in a sea of impossibility. The nurses were a collection of wide, fearful eyes, their training utterly useless in the face of this… anomaly.
It was Maria who broke the spell. Her voice was ragged, exhausted, but it cut through the fear with the unwavering strength of a mother's first command.
"Give me my son," she said.
A young nurse, trembling, hesitated. "But, ma'am, the… the doctor…"
"Now," Maria repeated, her voice soft but absolute.
Dr. Evans finally snapped out of his trance. He gave a clipped, almost imperceptible nod. With hesitant hands, the nurse cleaned the infant, wrapped him in a simple hospital blanket, and placed him in his mother's waiting arms.
The moment the baby was settled against her chest, a sense of profound calm descended over the room. The oppressive heat, which had been a furnace just moments before, began to recede. The emergency lights seemed to glow a little warmer, a little softer.
Dr. Evans watched, mesmerized, as the exhausted mother looked down at the impossible child. He saw no fear in her eyes. Only a fierce, profound, and unconditional love. It was the only thing in the room that made any sense. He finally cleared his throat, his professionalism wrestling with his awe.
"We need to take him," he said, his voice softer than he intended. "Just for a few standard tests. Apgar score, weight, measurements…"
Maria's head snapped up, her gaze instantly shifting from loving to fiercely protective. Her arms tightened around her son. "No."
"Ma'am, it's standard procedure," Dr. Evans insisted, taking a tentative step forward. "He needs to be checked. Especially given the… circumstances."
"You can check him right here," Maria said, her voice low and unyielding. She shifted the baby slightly, exposing one of his tiny feet from the blanket. "You can weigh him in my arms. You can do your tests while he is with me. But you are not taking him from me."
Dr. Evans found himself in an impossible position. Every medical protocol, every rule in the book, demanded he take the child to the nursery for a full workup. But the look in this mother's eyes, and the memory of the room's physics bending around her, made him hesitate. He looked at the baby, whose crimson eyes were still open, watching him with an unnerving intelligence. He looked at the mother, whose fierce love felt more powerful than any law of science he had ever known.
He made a decision that would get him written up in a dozen medical review boards.
"Fine," he said with a sigh of surrender. He gestured to a nurse. "Bring the portable scales and the kit. We'll do it here."
The next hour was a tense, quiet ballet. The nurses, their fear now replaced by a hushed reverence, performed their duties around the mother and child. They weighed him (a healthy seven pounds, six ounces). They measured him. They took a small blood sample from his heel, an act that earned a sharp, angry glare from the infant but, miraculously, no cry. Through it all, Maria never let him go, her hand a constant, calming presence on his back, her thumb resting just over the spot where the strange, fiery mark lay hidden beneath the blanket.
Finally, the tests were done. Dr. Evans stood over the bassinet, recording a series of vitals that were, impossibly, all within the normal range. He gave a final, defeated nod, but his eyes kept returning to the baby's forehead.
"That mark," he murmured, pointing to the jagged, scorched scar above the infant's eye. "We'll have a specialist look at that. It looks... severe. Like a scorch. I've never seen anything like it."
He shook his head, clearing the thought. "He's… healthy," he said, the word feeling utterly inadequate. "We'll leave you to rest."
As the medical staff filed out, leaving a tray of equipment that seemed like relics from another, more logical world, Maria was finally, truly alone with her son.
Night fell, and with it, a fragile peace. The machines had been reset, the lights restored. In the hallway, the staff spoke in hushed, fearful whispers, their talk a mixture of medical anomalies, bad omens, and half-remembered myths.
Inside the room, Maria, exhausted but radiant, finally held her child. She was the only source of calm in the entire hospital. When a nervous young nurse came in to check the baby's vitals, Maria instinctively shifted him in her arms, pulling the hospital blanket a little higher, as if to shield his face from the light, ensuring the strange mark on his forehead remained covered. It was a small, unconscious gesture of profound and immediate protection.
The nurse, glancing at his crimson eyes, couldn't help but whisper, "The others… they're saying he's a bad sign."
Maria silenced her, not with anger, but with a single, steady look of calm conviction that left no room for argument. The nurse simply nodded and fled.
Alone again, Maria gazed into her son's intelligent, crimson eyes. She did not see a monster or an omen, but a fierce, ancient spark that had no business being housed in a body so small. There was no fear in her gaze, only a deep and immediate understanding that transcended logic. She smiled softly, a weary, triumphant light in her eyes.
"You, my impossible thing," she whispered, her voice ragged but absolute. She brought his tiny, perfect hand to her cheek. "You don't look like you need a mother to name you. You look like you need a prophet's name—a name of vision and redemption."
She paused, her thumb tracing his forehead, a blessing and a promise.
"Isaiah," she whispered, her voice the first gentle, accepting sound he had heard in this new world. "Because you look like you already know the world, and I think you need someone to show you the good in it."
Her thumb gently traced the birthmark on his forehead. He could feel it, a soothing pressure against the angry, feverish heat. Under her touch, the internal glow that felt like a hot coal against his skin began to soften, the light receding until it was nothing more than a dull, reddish ember.
Isaiah's newborn consciousness, a maelstrom of the Titan's memories and the infant's instincts, latched onto the name. The peace he felt did not come from a sense of his own power or a premonition of some grand destiny. It came from the simple, unconditional, and overwhelming fact of his mother's love.
For the first time in two lifetimes, the titan was not alone. His crimson eyes, heavy with the weight of two lifetimes, drifted closed, accepting the first moment of genuine rest he had ever known.
Yet, even in the fragile warmth of her embrace, the Titan's mind refused peace. It knew only one state: analysis. The old world was gone. The new one had to be mapped.