The last thing Alex remembered was the insistent ding of his microwave, signaling that his questionable leftover chili was, allegedly, ready. He'd been hunched over his keyboard, wrestling with a particularly stubborn line of code that seemed determined to break the entire project. One minute, the sterile glow of his monitor; the next, an abrupt, all-encompassing shatter. Not of glass, but of… everything.
There was no pain, just a sensation of being pulled apart and then instantly reassembled in a way that defied any earthly logic. Gone was the cramped office, the lukewarm chili, the nagging feeling that he should probably do laundry. Instead, there was… rock. Cold, unyielding, and pressing in on him from all sides. Except, he wasn't in the rock. He was the rock. Or at least, something inextricably bound to it.
Panic, raw and primal, clawed at something that no longer had lungs to gasp. He had no body, no eyes to see the oppressive darkness, no ears to hear the dripping echo that was somehow… him? It was a terrifying, absolute sensory deprivation, punctuated by the faint, rhythmic pulse that seemed to emanate from the very core of his being – a soft, insistent thrumming that felt both alien and intimately his own.
Then came the whispers. Not audible, not in any language he knew, but a subtle shift in the pressure, a faint stirring in the stillness. Something was near. Something… alive. A skittering sound, like tiny claws on stone, sent a jolt of pure, instinctive fear through his non-existent veins. He was vulnerable, utterly and completely. He was a point of light in the dark, and something was coming for it.
And in that moment of sheer terror, something flickered within the thrumming core. A spark of… something. Not a thought, not yet, but a raw impulse. Protect. The rock around him shifted infinitesimally, a hairline fracture widening, a tiny pebble dislodging. It was nothing, less than nothing, but it was the first tremor of a power he didn't understand, in a reality he couldn't comprehend. His new existence was terrifying, incomprehensible, and utterly, irrevocably… rock solid. And something told him, this was just the beginning of one hell of a bad day.