Anomaly

Prologue-The Fall

The night was alive with citylight, smeared neon and the dull glow of traffic far below. Wind clawed at his clothes, his hair, his breath, as he tumbled through open air. The world had shrunk to velocity and terror.

He thought he had seconds left. Maybe less.

Then something impossible happened.

At first it felt like pain — like his skin tearing apart, his bones liquefying, his lungs imploding. But it wasn’t pain; it was release. His body unraveled, every atom peeling away, scattering like a cloud of glowing dust in the air.

For a fraction of an instant, he was a thousand billion selves — each molecule an eye, each atom a nerve. The city stretched out around him in impossible clarity: the heat of car engines below, the trace of iron in the steel beams, the whisper of oxygen currents twisting through the street canyon.

And through it all, he was still aware. Still him.

There was no impact when he reached the ground. Instead, the scattered fragments swirled, clustered, pulled together — like a flock of birds finding their shape again. Fingers reknit. Muscles rewove. Bone threaded itself from calcium upward. A heart re-sparked with electricity.

And then he was standing. Whole. Breathless. Trembling.

Alive.

The pavement was untouched, as though the fall had been erased. The only proof was the echo inside him: the knowledge that he had come apart and returned.

That he could do it again.

He staggered backward into the shadows of the alley, his legs shaking as if they belonged to someone else. He pressed his palms against the rough brick wall just to feel solidness, to remind himself there was still flesh, still weight, still heat beneath his skin.

But memory betrayed him. He could still feel it: the splitting, the unmaking. His senses had not dulled in those fragments; they had multiplied. He remembered the warmth of sodium lamps burning overhead, the sharpness of glass molecules vibrating in a window three stories up, the chemical bitterness of fuel lingering on the wind.

Every detail had imprinted itself inside him. His awareness had been everywhere.

A part of him wondered if he had truly come back right. What if something was missing? What if some particle had been lost in the fall — some essential piece of his soul left drifting above the city?

He touched his chest, half expecting his hand to pass through. But his heart was there, racing against his ribs, faster than it had ever beaten before.

The alley was silent but for that pulse and the hiss of a distant train. No witnesses. No footprints. Only the sound of his breathing, too loud, too shallow.

He tilted his head up, searching for the rooftop. The height he had fallen from looked impossible, like a punishment carved into the skyline. From here, he couldn’t see the cracked glass or the figure who had stood behind him. Only the cold shimmer of windows, blind and reflecting.

He whispered, though no one could hear him:

“What… am I?”

The city gave no answer. Only the hum of transformers, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the static of the living night.

But somewhere deep in his blood, or deeper still — in the patterns of atoms that had once scattered like stardust and reformed into him — there was a new awareness. A truth he had never asked for, but could no longer deny.

Something had awakened.

And the fall was only the beginning.