Divine Singularity || Reader x Murder Drones

VI

What were you?

The question looped in your mind, ceaseless, insistent, clawing at the edges of your thoughts like an animal gnawing at its own limbs. Over and over, the words turned, spiraling deeper, an unrelenting echo in the vast hollow of your mind. You had asked yourself this question before, but now—now it came with proof.

A lumbering mass of flesh and feathers, dragging itself across the damp forest floor, your body shifting and undulating with every strained movement. Your misshapen form that had replaced your old frame pulsed, as if alive in ways beyond the mechanical imitation of life you had once known. And trailing behind you—like an afterthought, like a relic of a past life—your former Worker Drone body dangled limply, tethered to you like a discarded husk, a shadow of something you had long since shed.

You hated looking at it.

You hated the thought of what it meant, of what it implied. You hated that you weren't inside it, that it wasn't you.

But then, had it ever truly been you?

You thought back to the dreams you had before the nightmares. The memories of a past life you didn't know. The voices that seemed to know you—or at least, the voices that knew your body.

The stream J had spoken of stretched before you, winding and glistening beneath the pale light of the moon. Not too far up, a dam of pebbles and rocks had formed, creating a natural bridge where cane toads leisurely hopped from stone to stone, oblivious to the eldritch beast watching them from the shadows. You felt an odd pang at the sight, some strange, distant part of yourself envying them—their simple existence, their freedom from self-awareness, from the concept of knowing.

Your massive form lowered, limbs bending unnaturally as you leaned toward the water's surface. And there—staring back at you—was the answer to your unspoken fears.

A hulking thing, warped and unrecognizable. A mass of shifting tendrils, of sinew and bone, of too many eyes blinking out of sync, their glow cutting through the darkness like embers in a dying fire. A maw, jagged and sharp, curling slightly at the edges in something resembling a frown. Feathers—white, glossy, like liquid silk spilling onto skin—coating portions of your twisted flesh, a mimicry of wings never meant to take flight.

You flinched.

It flinched back.

Your chest tightened, something inside you coiling with disgust, with unease, with the gnawing uncertainty of not knowing where the line was drawn—between what you had been and what you had become.

What were you?

You didn't know.

And worse, you didn't know how to know.

What did you do when the thing you feared most had already happened? When the nightmare was real, when the change was irreversible, when the mirror no longer showed something you recognized?

Your clawed hand shot forward, breaking the water's surface with a sudden, violent splash. Droplets flew into the air, catching the moonlight like shards of glass before scattering across your feathers, your flesh. The cold was immediate, sharp, biting against your too-sensitive skin. You inhaled sharply, an instinctive gasp slipping past your jagged teeth as you shivered from the sensation. It was jarring, overwhelming.

And real.

So painfully real.

This wasn't like before, when your Worker Drone body had dulled sensations to manageable levels, reducing them to data points, to logic, to ones and zeroes. You could feel in a way that you had never felt before. Every drop of water sliding down your form, every shift in the wind against your exposed skin, every individual leaf pressing into your body as you lay against the forest floor. It was all too much, too intense—