Tiger of the Underworld

I was cast into this realm where primal magic courses through every root and clawed beast prowls the twilight. An orphan cradled by the world's raw edges, I bear no kinship to elemental sorcerers weaving their five-phase tapestries of metal and flame. My curse—or gift—manifests in the shuddering of marrow: flesh rippling into feathered symmetry, irises splitting into reptilian slits, bones contorting into predatory perfection when the waning moon bleedsilver across the wastelands. They stir now—those primordial things that should have remained carvings in forgotten monoliths. Their scaled limbs unfurl from continental fissures, lichen-crusted hides mirroring temple frescoes reduced to dust. Their guttural hymns vibrate in my teeth, echoing the bone-flute dirges I uncovered beneath the orphanage's rotting floorboards—a childhood discovery that now feels like fate's cruel blueprint. This is no age for innocence. The prophecies our elders deemed campfire tales crawl from stone wombsthirsting. Why do glyphs carved in epochs past now pulse with venomous life? Why must I, whose very blood rebels against human form, become both hunter and hunted in a world where myths sharpen their fangs? To survive, I must learn the language written in claw marks and eclipse winds—the grammar of becoming more and less than human with each heartbeat. The answer, perhaps, lies not in resisting the metamorphosis, but in letting the beast within outpace the apocalypse.