Born in the Storm
I will never forget the night they came into the world. The storm howled like a wounded beast, savage and unrelenting, as if nature herself had sensed the arrival of something that would unsettle the balance. Lightning tore the sky apart, thunder cracked like the voice of a god in mourning — and still, it wasn't enough to match the fury of their birth. Even before they took their first breath, Cain and Aclima were a force unto themselves. I should have known then that they would change everything.
It had been three years since Eve and I discovered Eden, three years of peace before she conceived. From the moment she told me, terror gripped me like a fever I could not shake. For the length of her pregnancy, I lived in dread — of the unknown, of the responsibility, of what it might mean to bring life into a world we barely understood. And when the day came, when Eve cried out and her body gave itself over to labor, the skies responded in kind. Darkness fell like a curtain; the wind screamed, the heavens cracked open.
I wanted to be excited — to feel the joy of becoming a father — but fear dulled everything. In the savage horde I came from, childbirth was women's work. Men kept their distance, left the blood and pain and creation to the other half of the species. But Eve and I were alone now, far from the old ways, cut off from the world we had fled. This was something new — something holy, maybe, or something cursed.
The weather had never turned so violent since we first arrived in Eden. It felt, for a moment, as though the land itself was rejecting the very idea of new life—that the storm was a warning, a curse, a guardian rising against us. I began to fear that one of my old nightmares was clawing its way into the waking world. And yet, the house held fast against the wind. And so did I.
I had seen men torn apart in battle, their bodies broken, heads severed in the most grotesque ways—and somehow, that all seemed almost laughable compared to what I witnessed now: the slick, glistening crown of a child slowly forcing its way through a narrow, stretching opening between Eve's legs. I had never felt so helpless, so utterly unprepared. And from the way she screamed—raw, guttural, unrelenting—it was clear she was in a kind of pain no battlefield could rival.
The sound never stopped. Her voice rose and rose, I thought it might shatter, I feared she might fall apart entirely under the weight of it. But she didn't. Even in the thick of her agony, she gestured, commanded—her mind still tethered to the child she was bringing forth. And then her body opened, in a way I could neither imagine nor forget, and the head of my first child emerged into a world that seemed determined to shake itself apart.
Overwhelmed and terrified, with no idea what to do, I instinctively reached for the child, ready to pull him free. But Eve—barely conscious, her face contorted in pain—lifted a trembling hand and motioned for me to stop. She pointed instead to the cloth beneath her, urging me to hold it in place for when the baby dropped. Even in the grip of agony, she remained alert, cautious, and protective. A true mother, even then.
So I waited—helpless, breath caught in my throat—as she pushed through wave after wave of pain. And then, finally, the shoulders emerged. The rest of his tiny body followed in one wet, glistening motion, trailing behind what looked to me like a fleshy vine, slick and strange.
The baby was silent.
For a heartbeat, everything stopped.
Panic surged through me as I reached for him, clearing the mucous and blood from his eyes, nose, and mouth with trembling fingers. And then he gasped—his first breath—a wet, desperate sound that broke into a full-bodied wail. A cry that filled the room and shattered the fear gripping my chest.
I remembered what Eve had taught me. With unsteady hands, I took a knife and severed the rope of flesh that still bound them. Then I wrapped the crying child in a thick cloth, shielding his fragile body from the cold and chaos of the world he had just entered.
I cradled the child in my arms, and something inside me shifted—like waking from a long, dreamless sleep. A strange, overwhelming clarity settled over me. All I could think about was how to protect this tiny life from everything that lay beyond our walls. I looked down at Eve, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I smiled.
The miracle of birth—bloody, brutal, beautiful—would never leave me. No matter how many years passed, I knew that this moment would remain carved into me.
Eve looked up through a curtain of sweat and tears. And beneath it all, she smiled—a faint, flickering thing, but real. For a breath, she seemed at peace.
I stepped closer to hand her our son.
But then her expression shifted.
In an instant, the smile vanished. Her eyes widened, clouded with fear. Pain seized her face again, deeper this time, sharper. Something was wrong.
"Adam," she whispered, breath ragged, "I think… there is another."
For a moment, I froze. Her voice reached me through the fog of awe and exhaustion, but I couldn't process it. She had to say my name again—louder this time—before the meaning struck me like a hammer to the chest. Another child.
My heart stopped—and then lurched back to life.
Today, the idea of twins might seem ordinary, even expected. But back then, it was anything but. In the horde, and among the scattered settlements beyond, ancient superstitions still ruled the minds of men. One of the most feared: when a woman bore more than one child, the second was said to be an evil shadow of the first—a cursed mirror that had to be destroyed by fire before it could grow strong. I had seen it happen—tiny, wailing infants thrown into the flames, their only crime being born alongside a sibling.
But that wasn't what terrified me.
What gripped me then, what turned my blood cold, was the knowledge that most women who bore two children with a single pregnancy rarely survived. And after what Eve had endured to bring the first into the world, I feared—no, I knew—she had nothing left to give.
She saw the fear in my eyes—just as I saw it in hers. It was the first time she had looked truly afraid since learning she was with child. And yet, in her gaze, there was something more than fear: a flicker of resolve.
I didn't care about the old superstitions—the nonsense about second children being evil shadows of the first. Let the world believe what it would. I cared only about her. Her survival was all that mattered to me.
She looked at me then, sweat-soaked and trembling, and gave a small nod. A silent message passed between us: she was ready. Ready to go through it again. Ready to fight.
Age may have weathered my memory, blurred the edges of so many days—but what she said next will stay with me until the end of my days.
"This isn't the world we knew," she said, her voice thin and trembling, each word wrapped in breath. "This is Eden. We're home now. Things are different here… impossible things become possible. And here—here, mothers don't die. Not today."
Her words washed over me like a calming wave, dissolving the fear that had gripped me. For the first time that night, I believed we might survive this. I gently laid my newborn daughter on the wooden floor beside us—her cries barely audible over the roar of the storm, which had surged as if the heavens themselves were bearing witness to what was unfolding.
Then I turned back to Eve and knelt between her legs, bracing myself once more.
She had been right. This was Eden, not the brutal world we had left behind. And here, the impossible had become possible.
With one final, agonizing effort, Eve brought forth our second child. And it was not a cursed shadow, not a twisted omen of the old world—but a beautiful, perfect girl.
She collapsed back, spent and pale, her breath shallow. Then she looked at me—eyes clouded with pain but still burning with purpose—and beckoned me close.
I leaned in, and with the last strength she possessed, she whispered an instruction into my ear that made my stomach turn.
There was still blood inside her. Too much. It had to come out. I had to reach into her and draw it out with my hands.
As I knelt beside her, my hands slick with blood and life, I wondered how the women of the horde could ever abandon their children to such a place. I had been beaten, starved, branded, and broken. I had learned to bury every tear, every flicker of feeling, behind a mask of silence. In the horde, emotion was weakness. And for years, I had no reason to feel.
Until that night.
Not since the day I was forced to kill my friend Philip had I cried—but now, tears fell freely. Not from pain or guilt, but from something I had never known before: grace.
Fate had given me a son and a daughter in the span of a single storm-tossed night. And unlike the fathers of the horde, cast aside and forgotten in the making of life, I would be part of theirs. We lived in another world now. A different world. A better one.
Eden had blessed us with a son and a daughter. We named the boy Cain, and the girl Aclima. They grew swiftly, strong and full of life, untouched by illness or misfortune. Not once did they give us cause for worry. Eve was a natural mother—gentle, tireless, and instinctively wise. She fed and bathed them, soothed their cries with old songs from a world now lost, and carried them as though her arms had been made for nothing else. Watching her, I often wondered if motherhood had lived quietly within her all along, just waiting to be summoned by their first breath.
I, on the other hand, was a stranger to fatherhood. Among the horde, I had never known a man who raised his own children—if any had, their names had long been erased. I had no example to follow, no voice of reason to guide me. I stood at the edge of a new life, uncertain and unprepared, forced to ask myself what kind of man I wished to be—and what kind of people I wanted my children to become.
Eden was safe, untouched by the cruelty and chaos I had escaped. But the world beyond our mountain walls still existed. I could not pretend it didn't. And so I made two choices. The first: to raise Cain and Aclima to be as strong as I had once needed to be. The second: to teach them that they were different—set apart from the world they had yet to know.
I made many mistakes. Too many. What was right and what was wrong were no longer simple matters—outside the horde, the rules were unwritten. Often, I chose wrong because I didn't know better. In the horde, morality bent to the will of the strong. I rejected that world. But I feared the opposite: that in shielding my children with gentleness, I might leave them too soft to survive.