Since gaining sentience, I could only wag my tail left and right, wiggling my way blindly forward, occasionally bumping into what I sensed in my muddled consciousness to be fellows of the same kind. This meaningless state seemed to last for eternity, my undeveloped understanding incapable of measuring any time, until the space I was in started shaking violently, squeezing the mass of me and my comrades incapable of communication against each other. Number I couldn’t then name, but what I can now recall for sure to be two hundred and five of such swings later, I felt ejected from the only place I knew, from my home, into an unknown.
As we left the cozy darkness where we were united in swimming joyfully around, I felt an irresistible desire to go in a certain direction. I struggled desperately, writhing, squirming, and twisting to where my instincts guided me. I felt brothers and sisters around me weakening and collapsing, their energy supplied from the comforting goo in the place of our home running out, their tails stopped moving, and they were left motionless. Passing more and more corpses of my kin in a struggle for the ‘Nirvana’, oh how naive and clueless I was at the dawning hours of my existence, the Holy Grail revealed itself in my perception, the first thing I met besides my kin.
A giant for my size perfectly spherical object, besieged by a few lucky of my would-be family struggling on their last motions to drill their heads into, an unforgiving wall not letting them inside, indifferently watching the pile of carcasses accumulate around itself. I knew, I was sure of, getting inside that object was my only chance of survival, I had no other option but to gather what remained of my strength and ram into it, motions of the tail that served me well proficient from the time of previous careless frolicking, before I was ruthlessly thrust out into the world to fend for myself.
Despite the speed I then thought to be unmatched, the stubborn wall didn’t let up. The fickle spherical object couldn’t be easily satisfied, it required a Herculean feat to get inside, the space in the center of it providing shelter only for one, in a winner-takes-all competition. Unwilling, I put my now aching head, the first sensation of pain I ever felt, now looking back, it is incomprehensible how could I be made to experience such primordial pain and desperation right from the beginning and have the faculty to persevere, I insisted on drilling into the Sanctuary with now rapidly growing bump in a place that I collided with it, the most impregnable wall in history, that cost untold trillion upon trillions of casualties on its assaulters yearly, as it seemed to replicate endlessly inside the bodies of half the human population. As I almost gave up hope, the motions of my tail sluggish, the swelling lump on my tip eventually excavated a tiny bit inside. My consciousness blossomed with joy as I confirmed it, now each wiggle brought me a nanoscopic distance further forward, with the last move that completely sapped me of energy, I got through the wall and into the bowels of the sphere.
Inside, my body dissolved to combine with egg, the overwhelming sensation of death and despair as I presumed the cruel orb to be nothing more than a trap, unwillingly blacked out my senses. Eventually, I awoke again, my perception upgraded, I had access to a clearer sensation of touch and thinking, could almost ‘see’ the slightly quivering area I was in. Before having time to familiarize myself with the change of my form, a flood of siblings came from the same place I did and washed over my new carapace, the sensation somewhat disgusting now. My former family now repulsed me, and from the looks of it, I repulsed them, as none of them bothered even to move, just lying on me and walls lined with small hair, they stayed still until I felt their lives go out, the merged egg changing my perspective to a one of alienation from them, I felt nothing but glee and a first conscious ‘sound’ came to my mind, the meaning of it simple: good.
What in indefinite lonely darkness and stillness came suddenly, I felt myself split violently, doubling my senses and capacity to think. Disoriented, I didn’t know which one of me was the original until a moment later we merged again, the experience I quickly got used to as later my cells multiplied. I felt my consciousness split all the way until one hundred and twenty-eight of me, after which only the sensation of adding some surface to my being remained, presumably some central cell differentiated itself from the rest, or they started working together. With each cell added to my being, my consciousness improved, and I could start thinking freely well before developing any flesh, which now seems incredible.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
All this time, I felt a multitude of tiny hair gripping me to the wall that I instinctively clung to all this time as I grew, they started moving without any warning as everything that so far happened to me, propelling what I felt myself to be a clump of cells, deeper into the tunnel I was in. On a journey down the fallopian tube and into the womb, body of the Mother grasping me as I felt another burst of intrinsic necessity I had to obey in order to survive, I attached myself to the walls of her uterus, allowing a merger of some of the cells grown as I went down the tunnel specifically for this purpose to hers in an act that my budding intellect repulsed, but understood that I was still very much in a do-or-die situation.
Provided with nutrition from the Mother’s flesh, I grew rapidly, the constantly changing and dividing cells evolved into limbs, head, nose, ears, all organs that should be there were there just in the time they were supposed to be there, although I didn’t perceive it like that back then. When my heart started beating, finally propelling my own blood through my own formed body, the constant rhythm of proliferation of my limbs and the malleable nature of my form made me expect further changes that never came, like a third hand, tail, flippers, or wings as I now try to understand that weird urge back then, but sadly or fortunately, everything I had from then on only grew bigger and bigger, no interesting mutations.
As my stomach appeared, the urge to swallow in search of the food’s consumption came, the circle of what I now imagine a phantom hunger and equally placebo satiety as logically everything needed was delivered to me from the placenta directly into the bloodstream even if Mother didn’t eat, where I woke up intermittently from sleep to the unchanging state of paralysis and the constant ticking beat of my heart that instead of soothing my emotions, made me furious. I kicked and clawed all around, feeling my sanity slip away with each moment spent in this container, I was desperate to stop the dull, loud sound that was just there, invading my previous ‘sacred’ and ultimately peaceful void, I was mad at the increasingly common emotions and feelings that I was bombarded with since my brain fully formed, and the fluids very different from what I felt during my ‘true birth’ shamelessly weighing down on my feeble limbs, making movement of anything strenuous to the point of driving me crazy with inaction, accustomed the high-octane, dynamic beginnings, the lack of any kind of innate guidance on what to do during these dreadful, challenging months, was in retrospect what molded my future life the most.
“Victor, Victor, Victor…” repeated phrase coming from somewhere I could envision separated from me only by a thin layer reverberated inside the space I was in, interrupting my attempts to ignore the sound my heart made. It was my Father putting his lips on the Mother’s belly to communicate my name to me. From then on, every day, I could hear music and words spoken to me or around the woman that carried me, my ears had grown enough to make that possible. A connection, however slim, to the outside, calmed me greatly, I had things to look forward to, listening to the voices and with my perfect memory assembling a prototype of language that turned out to be mostly wrong after I came out, but well, what can you expect from a barely grown fetus?
“Please let us go, we served house Bathory for generations!” screams and shouts in the Slovak language awoke me from one of the lengthy slumbers that I resigned myself into.
“Know your place, peasants! Honey, proceed, we have to give little Victor everything we can!” a shrill voice of my Mother containing a multitude of emotions, joy, determination, arrogance, contempt, love, and excitement drilled into my ears. Choir of shrieks that lasted for hours followed, a cacophony that I then mistook for music, a comforting and greatly welcome noise compared to the hated beating of my own heart. As the screams stopped, I awoke from the placid nap they invoked in me, just in time for a stream of energy to enter my Mother’s womb that flashed red before my closed eyelids, the first colour I experienced, before plunging into my body with an unknown purpose. I didn’t feel any different than before, but I did know this power to be spread evenly within my cells because of my extraordinary attunement to the changes within.
Finally, my Mother’s water broke, shortly after leaving me sliding down amidst her contorting muscles, an effort to unshackle me from the prison I spent nine months in. Freedom, freedom at last from the darkness, my limbs that I long didn’t bother to try and move released from their restraints, a sensation other than that of a marinating cucumber as I would sum it up replaced by air enveloping and caressing my skin gently convinced me that existence is supposed to be something more than this unbearable state I had to suffer for what felt like an eternity. Not long could I immerse myself in the moment, as something hit me on the back painfully, the audacity of the deed made me gasp, but the stiffness of my chest prevented the exhale. I had to focus, try and cry outward, spitting out the fluid I had in my stomach, eager to see who dared to cause me pain for the first time since becoming one with the egg, I puckered my face and opened my eyes.
I was born.
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