He gazed at a spider from atop a branch. It had made its web quite near his nest, but he didn't mind as long as it kept to itself. There were plenty of bugs to go around.

Instead, he watched the spider. He watched it weave its web over the course of several hours and, when a fly inevitably got caught in it, watched as it encased it within a cocoon. He wondered why it had done that. Wouldn't it be better to just eat it?

He looked away from the spider and its web and closed his eyes, settling into his nest for sleep. The crickets began to chirp as the sun set, and the sounds of the city surrounding the park started to gradually quiet, although only slightly.

Just as he started to drift off, he stood up suddenly. Something was wrong. As he looked around the park, he noticed that he wasn’t the only one; almost every single animal there was looking around in confusion.

Just then, he felt the air itself ripple. On instinct, he spread his wings and tried to take to the air, but, in a heartbeat, everything had changed. His surroundings were no longer that of a park in a city; he was trapped within a box just large enough to host a tree.

He was sitting on a branch now, his nest having disappeared. In front of him was a being that he couldn't quite see. He saw its outline, and it was that of a human with feathers, wings and a beak, but he couldn't truly see it. Regardless, a series of sounds reached his ear, and while he had no clue what was happening, he somehow understood the sounds.

It took a while to truly comprehend what they meant, though. He started to go over each word individually, and the world seemed content to wait on him. The first had referred to… the ground? No, it had referred to what the ground was on, but that made no sense. He felt a headache coming on, but, mercifully, the longer he concentrated on the word, the more it opened itself up to him, and he learned more about what the word meant.

The sound meant Earth. The crow shuffled his wings as a feeling of worthlessness struck him. Compared to the scale of the Earth, he was tiny. Regardless, he moved onto the second sound.

It meant… aging? Like a hatchling becoming a bird, or a nut becoming a tree; ascension. The third sound meant… a lot of things. It meant bears, spiders, crows, humans, wolves, squirrels, caterpillars; trees, even, but not everything. Not the enormous metal trees that the humans lived in or the stone and dirt.

Like this, the crow soon pieced together what it meant.

Earth was ascending. All of the animals on Earth were ascending.

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As soon as he fully pieced it together, a thought of the same nature popped into his head; a thought that was thought in the same sounds that the god-creature had spoken in. It took him only a few seconds to piece together this thought, as it continued to remain at the forefront of his consciousness and was considerably shorter than what the god-creature had said.

It was asking what he should be called. It was a difficult notion to understand, but he managed. It was… like a personal designation beyond simply being a crow. He didn't like how the concept was being forced upon him, though, and tried to push the thought aside to try and figure out what was going on, but the moment he did, a searing pain flared up in his mind, and a feeling of urgency flooded him.

Still, he did not choose a name, but, luckily, when he stopped trying to force the question to go away, the pain stopped.

The crow fluttered his wings nervously and thought back to the few sounds he had heard before. They were the only ones that the question would allow. There was the planet, there were the animals, and there was ascension, as well as 'name' and the sounds in-between, like 'the' and 'and', but the latter two weren't allowed and he felt it would be odd to call himself what he was supposed to be calling himself.

He was not the Earth, and to call himself 'ascension' in front of a god-creature felt like the epitome of arrogance, and so he chose animal.

A feeling of identity was burned into his mind. He was Animal. It was an awfully vague word, and he was pleased to know, instinctively, that it wasn't permanent.

For a few moments, nothing odd happened, and he looked around, finding nothing new. He was still sitting on a tree encased in a box, with no way out. The god-creature still floated before him, only its outline visible to him.

And then, weird things happened again. A thought, communicated in the strange sounds once again, was forced to the forefront of his mind, and this time, it was much more complex than the prior two times.

It took the crow until he had begun to feel hungry before he had fully wrapped his head around it. It was… an assessment of him.

It listed his age, sex and species, which were one, male and ‘Turi crow’ respectively, but also listed his strength, durability, intelligence and senses. The first two and last sound-thoughts told him that he was 'average', but intelligence was listed as 'abnormal'. He understood, simply by instinct, that he was being compared to others of his species, and that even an 'average' intelligence human would be smarter than him, but he would probably have greater senses and agility than even an abnormal human.

The assessment didn't go away, though. It stayed at the forefront of his mind, which was annoying. After a few minutes of hoping that it would go away, he got annoyed and tried to force it away, and it… did? No sense of pain filled him, this time, and it simply went away. He could still feel the assessment in the back of his mind, and after he thought about the assessment for a few seconds, it was pushed to the forefront of his mind. This time, though, it brought something along with it.

It was a simple series of sounds, and he understood it after only a brief minute of deciphering. It was a simple question; what aspect of himself did he want to ascend? It wasn't a question posed by anybody. It was sort of like his body was asking what he should improve.

Without hesitation, he chose the intelligence, and a moment later, he blacked out.