For a second, he stared, unflinchingly so, at the azure sky. It was half obscured by the earthly, umber grime.
His eye twitched, flashing across the delicate innards of his cradle engine. The glass holds. A spiderweb fracture radiates outwards.
It all rushes back to him. Suspension. Birth. Sentience. This is not where he belongs. Not here. Not in...wherever he is.
A mechanical scream pierces his ears. Klaxons blare and fire. The generator had died, and so has the backup oxygen reserve.
He snapped out of his stupor, and stood. Survival instincts kicked in. Air gushed downwards in voluminous inhalations, enriching his arcane biology to an extent far greater than it will for the mortals of this world. The boy smells smoke. He chokes and gags. He sees a trickle of some fluid from above, the same fluid that he stood knee-deep in.
How long has he been here? An hour? Two?
He pushes on the shutter. It does not budge. He tries to slide it away, but it has been jammed for good. He looks underneath it. A few cracks had been formed. That was how the fluid had drained.
Despairing, the boy punched the broken, malfunctioning thing out of pure instinct. It was annihilated, blown out of the way by the sheer might of his strike.
His sacred blood slithers down the sides of his fists as the twisted metal opened his knuckles to the bone.
A surge of a forgotten hormone, engineered during the Dark Ages to be at least twenty times stronger than its evolutionary predecessor- an adrenal surge of such potency that it shadowed most amphetamines - is produced. It spikes his blood, granting him a transient immunity to pain as the heat radiates from his hand to his head.
The pain is extreme, but he does not care.
It elevates his strength to obscene heights, and the boy emerges from the smoldering hulk. A blur, alabaster-white. His feet barely touched the ground as he covers ten meters before the first drop of blood made landfall.
Daylight strikes the bottoms of his eyes for the first time in more than a standard year. The boy-ghoul writhes in the open as he adjusts to the heat – an arm flies up and shields his face from the sunlight - he howls and
He opens his eyes once more. Their constricted pupils flared with pain as the boy's eyes tried to adapt to the sudden, piercing sunlight. They metamorphosed into pinpricks, then to the size of dinner plates, and then some more through several iterations as it shrank back. The boy looked around, withdrawing his hands from his eyes.
Clear as crystal.
Red like roses was the color of their leaves, and their barks were umber as the soil is dark and brown. For as far as his eyes could see, a sea, a scarlet forest stretches out, out, and out.
He begins to make sense of his environment. The boy's perfect teeth sparkled under the midday sun as he devoured the oxygen-rich air that surrounds him through great, strenuous breaths. It dissolves into his lifeblood through an impossibly dense and convoluted network of gene-forged capillaries before passing through his body in great, slithering arterioles that twist and twist until nothing is left. The eternal gradient is maintained on the edge of a knife.
His gaze fell downwards upon his once-bleeding fists. The lacerations had been sealed in a matter of seconds, his slick blood dried and turned to dust.
And then, there was a sound unlike any other.
The throttle of a primitive turbine alerts him to the presence of something different.
The orderly roar of the engine juxtaposes against the backdrop cacophony – nature's cacophony, in all its myriad forms and chaotic frequencies, from the melodic calls and chirps of the cuckoo to the cantankerous clamor of the cicadas.
The boy feels as his antediluvian forefathers once felt, in the earliest, darkest jungles of time immemorial. He acts and feels as they felt, towards ships long forgotten and weapons that blasphemed the Gods, towards oceans once uncrossed and metals undiscovered.
He feels fear, for what is perhaps both the first and last time.
He knows, with frightening clarity, that he is not alone.