The stolen strength thrummed in O's veins like frozen lightning, a deceptive power that tasted of ash and another man's dying scream. He crouched on the gallery railing high above the Resonator Chamber, the Howling vibrating his bones, the discordant Heart pounding a counter-rhythm against his ribs. Below, chaos reigned – technicians scrambling like insects on a disturbed nest, blue-white energy arcing from cracked conduits, the air thick with ozone and the coppery-sweet stench of old blood and decay. His target: Junction 7. The control panel gleamed under the sickly green light, a beacon of desperate hope and suicidal intent. The suppression kit, dropped near it after the technician's horrific dissolution, was his key.
He coiled the stolen power in his legs, muscles like steel cables beneath unnaturally pale skin. His crimson eyes tracked the roaring updraft blasting from the vent above Junction 7 – a torrent of hot air screaming upwards, distorting the green glow, snatching debris into its vortex. It was his pathway, his insane gamble. *Leap into the maelstrom. Ride the wind. Land on the walkway. Grab the kit. Break the Howling. Break Silas.
He tensed, preparing to launch himself into the howling dark.
Then, the world *fractured*.
Not physically. Not the chamber shaking. It was a fracture inside. A psychic fault line ripped open by exhaustion, trauma, and the violent confluence of stolen life and the Chamber's oppressive resonance. One moment, he was poised on the precipice, the cold fire of vengeance his only compass. The next…
Silence.
Absolute, deafening silence. The cacophony of the Heart, the Howling, the shouts, the crackling energy – gone. Snuffed out like a candle. The oppressive vibrations ceased. The air hung still and cold. The green bioluminescence flickered, then dissolved into pure, blinding **white**.
O gasped, stumbling. He wasn't on the gallery railing. He was standing. Naked. In the center of his sterile white cell.
The familiar, suffocating silence pressed in. The buzzing light overhead was muted, almost gentle. The smell of bleach and chemicals was faint, overlaid by something else… something cold and metallic, like snow.
Moscow.
He looked down. His body was whole, human. Pale, yes, but not the sculpted, monstrous strength he now possessed. This was the body he'd woken in. Weak. Shivering. The phantom ache of his *missing right arm* throbbed dully. He flexed the fingers of his left hand. Normal. No claws.
Am I… back? Did it work? Did I break the Howling? Was it all… a dream?*
The thought was a desperate, treacherous lifeline. Had the escape, the feeding, the terrifying descent, the Resonator Chamber – had it been a fever dream born of starvation and despair? The relief was so profound it felt like a physical blow. He staggered towards the bed, the thin grey blanket rough against his skin. *Just a nightmare. A terrible, vivid nightmare. I'm still here. Weak. Trapped. But… human?
He sank onto the hard mattress, burying his face in his hands. The phantom limb pulsed. The memory of Psi-Nine's psychic death-scream echoed faintly, a ghost in his skull. Just a dream. Just a…
A sound. Soft. Wet. Like snow crunching underfoot.
He looked up.
The heavy metal door to his cell was open. Not swinging wide, but ajar. Beyond it lay not the sterile white corridor, but a vast, frozen expanse. Endless plains of pristine snow under a bruised twilight sky. Moscow. The battlefield. The day after the war.
No. No, no, no!
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. He scrambled back on the bed, pressing himself against the cold white wall. This wasn't relief. This was a different kind of trap.
A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, framed by the snowy wastes. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Wearing a heavy, snow-dusted greatcoat, the collar turned up against the biting wind that suddenly whistled through the open door, bringing the scent of iron and frost. The figure turned slowly.
Mark Velics.
O's breath hitched. Mark's face was hard, etched with lines of exhaustion and fury, but his eyes… his eyes were wrong. Not the cold, determined gaze O remembered. They were pools of utter, fathomless *black*. Like the Succubis. Hollow. Empty. Yet burning with a cold, focused hatred that made O's blood freeze.
"Running only delays the inevitable, monster," Mark's voice rasped, but it wasn't just his voice. It was layered, distorted, echoing with the clinical detachment of the Court's observer and the ancient, icy rage of Silas. "The Door waits. It always waits."
Mark stepped into the cell. His boots left no prints on the white floor. The snow-laden wind howled, but it didn't touch him. The temperature plummeted. Frost began to creep across the walls, spiderwebbing from the doorway, crackling as it spread.
"You think you escaped?" the Mark-Silas entity hissed, taking another step closer. The phantom pain in O's missing arm flared into searing agony, as if freshly torn. "You crawled *towards* it. You *fused* with it. You belong to it. To *us."
O tried to move, to fight, but his body was leaden, weak, human. The stolen strength was gone. The vampiric fury was a distant memory. He was just a broken soldier again, facing his executioner. Mark raised his hand. Not holding a weapon. His fingers elongated, sharpened, turning into glistening black talons like obsidian shards.
"Your hatred is a crutch, O," the entity whispered, the voice now purely Silas's, cold and ancient. "A spark we will extinguish. Your vengeance is dust. Your strength is borrowed." The taloned hand reached for O's chest. "Time to return what you stole."
O screamed, a raw, human sound of terror, scrambling backwards off the bed, crashing to the cold floor. The talons followed, relentless.
CRACK!
The sound wasn't bone breaking. It was glass. Shards of the white ceiling light rained down around him, but they didn't fall like glass. They fell like *snow*. Cold, biting snow that stung his skin. The cell walls dissolved into swirling white flurries. The bed vanished. He was on his knees in the frozen Moscow plains, the wind howling, the phantom arm a gaping wound of icy fire.
Mark-Silas loomed over him, talons poised. "The Door calls, leech. Embrace your end."
But then, another sound pierced the howling wind. Not the wind. Not Silas. A voice. Faint. Desperate. Familiar.
"O! Don't listen! It's the Howling! It's in your head!"
Jark.
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. From the swirling snow itself. From the cracks in the frozen earth.
Mark-Silas snarled, a sound like grinding ice. The talons slashed down.
O flinched, bracing for impact.
The talons passed *through* him. Cold. Empty. Like the Succubis. An illusion.
He looked up. Mark-Silas flickered, like a bad projection. Behind the hollow eyes, O saw something else – a glimpse of sterile white walls, the frantic pulse of green light on monitors, the impassive face of a Court technician observing. A lab.
This wasn't just a nightmare. It was an attack. Silas, or the Court, or the Howling itself, was inside his mind, weaponizing his memories, his fears, his guilt.
"Jark!" O yelled into the blizzard, his voice swallowed by the wind. "Where are you?"
*"Trapped! He's… anchoring deeper… using the feed… your connection to Psi-Nine…"* Jark's voice was fractured, fading in and out, punctuated by gasps of pain. "The Door… it's a focus… don't look at it! Remember the light! Remember the…"
The voice cut off with a choked cry. Mark-Silas solidified again, the talons regaining their lethal sharpness. "The dreamwalker cannot save you. He is being unmade. Just as you will be."
The entity lunged again. This time, O didn't flinch. Fury, cold and sharp, cut through the terror. Using Jark. Torturing him. To get to me.The hatred for Mark Velics, his anchor, flared white-hot, but it was joined by a new, protective rage for the broken dreamwalker who had tried to warn him.
"Get *OUT of my head!" O roared. He didn't have claws, but he had *will*. He focused on the stolen memories, not of Psi-Nine's death, but of the *sensory overload* he'd used against the Succubus. The deafening buzz, the blinding light, the nauseating smells, the crushing pressure. He gathered the psychic residue of his own trauma, the phantom pain, the taste of ash, the hollow chill of the Succubis, and the discordant scream of the damaged Heart, and he shoved it back at the Mark-Silas entity.
It wasn't a directed blast like before. It was a raw, unfocused eruption of psychic noise.
The Moscow plains shuddered. The snowflakes froze mid-air. Mark-Silas staggered, the hollow eyes flickering wildly, the talons dissolving into black smoke. The image fractured again, revealing glimpses of the lab – frantic technicians, Silas's actual face contorted in concentration and fury on a viewscreen, Jark strapped to a gurney nearby, convulsing, wires snaking from his temples.
"Psi-feedback loop! Sever the connection! He's overloading the dampeners!" a distorted voice yelled from the lab vision.
O pressed the psychic assault, pouring his rage, his hatred, his stolen power into the mental connection. He focused on the image of Jark suffering. *Because of me. Because they used him to hurt me.*
"LET HIM GO!" The mental scream tore through the dreamscape.
The Mark-Silas entity shattered like glass. The frozen plains dissolved.
O was falling. Not through snow, but through layers of fractured reality.
He saw flashes:
The Orphanage Cell. Melin stood by the wall, her hand pressed against it, humming softly. Blood trickled from her nose, but her eyes were open, staring directly at *him*, through the layers of the dream. *"Find the light, O,"* her voice whispered directly into his mind, clear as crystal. *"The true light. Shatter the glass."*
The Resonator Chamber: He saw himself from above, still crouched on the gallery railing, frozen mid-leap, his crimson eyes wide but unseeing. Below, a Succubis moved silently onto the Junction 7 platform, picking up the suppression kit. Time had barely passed.
The Body Door: The grotesque structure loomed, larger than life, the frozen, agonized faces of the bodies forming it seeming to writhe. The central seam pulsed like a wound. The voice that had called him before whispered again, but this time it wasn't seductive. It was *hungry*. *"You touched. You fused. You are mine."
Psi-Nine's Memories: The Parisian sunlight, warm on his face. The scent of baking bread. Then the hood, the needle, the cold steel table, the Tall One's eyes. The memories weren't just images; they were *felt*. The warmth. The terror. The violation. They washed over O, not as guilt, but as *shared pain*.
He landed hard. Not on snow. Not on concrete.
He was standing in a **laboratory**. White, sterile, but older, grimmer than the orphanage. Stainless steel tables. Glass tanks filled with murky fluid and indistinct, shadowy shapes. Banks of flickering monitors displaying complex, shifting runes and brainwave patterns. And in the center, under a cluster of intense, cold lights, lay Jark.
He was strapped down, wrists and ankles bound with thick leather restraints bolted to the steel table. Wires snaked from electrodes glued to his temples, his chest, leading to humming machines. His head was clamped in a metal cradle. His eyes were wide open, rolled back in his skull, showing only the whites. Foam flecked his lips. His body trembled violently, muscles straining against the restraints. A low, continuous whine of agony escaped his throat.
Standing over him, one hand resting lightly on the metal cradle, was **Silas**.
He was taller than O remembered from Jark's descriptions. Impossibly gaunt, his face a skull barely covered by parchment-pale skin. He wore a simple, high-collared black tunic. His hair was white, cropped short. But his eyes… they weren't black like the Succubis. They were a pale, glacial blue, so cold they seemed to suck the warmth from the air. They held an unnerving intensity, a vast, ancient intellect focused with terrifying precision. And they were fixed not on Jark, but on a large viewscreen showing a frozen image: O on the gallery railing, eyes wide, caught mid-thought.
"Resistance is fascinating, is it not, Subject O-1?" Silas spoke. His voice was soft, dry, like pages turning in a tomb. It resonated in the sterile air, seeming to bypass O's ears and vibrate directly in his skull. "A predictable, yet energetically wasteful, response pattern. Your psychic surge damaged the primary dampeners, allowing this… temporary incursion." He gestured vaguely at O's apparition. "You perceive this construct of Subject Jark-Alpha's unraveling mind? A crude interface, but sufficient."
O tried to move, to lunge at Silas, but he was insubstantial here, a ghost in Jark's nightmare. He could only watch, rage burning cold within him.
Silas's icy gaze shifted slightly, seeming to look directly at O's spectral form. "You fed on Subject Psi-Nine. A messy, undisciplined act. You absorbed his bio-signature, his neural echoes… his *fear*. It resonates within you. It creates… vulnerabilities." He tapped the metal cradle holding Jark's head. "Subject Jark-Alpha's oneiric faculties provide the bridge. The Howling provides the amplification. And your own stolen vitality provides the fuel for this connection."
On the viewscreen, the image of O flickered. The Resonator Chamber view superimposed itself – the Succubis now holding the suppression kit, turning away from Junction 7.
"Your physical form hesitates," Silas observed, a flicker of cold satisfaction in his eyes. "The Custodian recovers the suppression apparatus. Your window closes. Meanwhile…" He looked down at Jark's convulsing form. "Subject Jark-Alpha's neural pathways are degrading under the strain of channeling my will and containing your psychic backlash. The Sigma Protocol will salvage what data remains before termination. His suffering, O-1, is a direct consequence of your defiance. His unmaking is your doing."
The words were ice picks driven into O's soul. *His unmaking is your doing.* The truth of it was undeniable. His reckless feeding, his psychic scream, his very existence in this place had painted a target on Jark.
Jark's whine rose to a shriek. Blood trickled from his nose, his ears.
"Stop it!" O roared, the sound echoing uselessly in the spectral lab. "Leave him alone!"
Silas ignored him. He leaned closer to Jark, his voice dropping to a chilling whisper that O could still hear perfectly. "Where is it, dreamwalker? Where is the resonance point? The flaw in the lattice? Show me, and the pain ceases. Show me how the Prime Subject shields you…"
Jark's body arched off the table, tendons standing out like cables on his neck. A guttural sound, not human, ripped from his throat. Images flickered rapidly on the monitors – fragmented, chaotic: a dark forest, a crumbling stone archway covered in glowing moss, Melin's face, serene and ancient, then contorted in pain, the white walls of the cell, the caged light…
*The light.*
Melin's whisper cut through the chaos: *"Find the light, O. The true light. Shatter the glass."*
Not the buzzing cage light. Something else. The *true* light. And Silas was searching for it *through* Jark. Searching for Melin's secret. Her power.
O looked around the spectral lab. The cold lights. The monitors. The glass tanks. *Shatter the glass.* Was it literal?
His gaze snapped back to the viewscreen showing his frozen physical form. The Succubis had the kit. She was turning. Time was running out. Jark was dying.
He had no physical power here. But he had connection. He had the stolen resonance of Psi-Nine's fear, amplified by the Howling. He had his own burning hatred. And he had Jark's unraveling mind as the conduit.
Instead of fighting Silas, instead of trying to break the connection, O did the opposite. He *poured* himself into it. He focused not on attack, but on *resonance*. He focused on the **caged light** in his cell – the symbol of his imprisonment, the source of the sterile white hell. He amplified its image, its incessant, maddening *buzz*, flooding the psychic link with it. He layered it with Psi-Nine's memory of the blinding surgical lights in the Court's lab, the cold white sterility that preceded pain. He pushed the image, the *feeling* of that oppressive, artificial light, directly towards Silas, through Jark.
*"Is this the light you seek, Silas?"* O projected the thought, laced with venom and Psi-Nine's terror. *"The light of your cages? The light of your knives? Take it!"*
The effect on Silas was subtle but immediate. His icy composure faltered. A micro-expression of irritation, of *frustration*, flickered across his skeletal face. The intense blue eyes narrowed slightly. The monitors displaying Jark's torment flickered violently, static washing over the fragmented images. The image of the caged light dominated the screens.
*"Irrelevant noise,"* Silas hissed, his voice losing some of its dry calm. He pressed his hand harder on Jark's cradle. *"Focus, subject! The Prime resonance! The shield frequency!"*
But O pushed harder, flooding the connection with the buzzing, sterile light. He added another layer: the violent, strobing green light of the Resonator Chamber as the Heart surged. Discordant. Chaotic.
The spectral lab around O flickered. The glass tanks vibrated. One, containing a swirling, shadowy mass, cracked with a sound like a gunshot. Dark fluid seeped onto the pristine floor.
Jark's convulsions lessened slightly. The shriek dropped back to a ragged whimper. On the monitors, amidst the static and the overwhelming image of the caged light, a different image flashed – brief, clear: Melin's cell. Melin standing by the wall. But not humming. Her eyes were closed. Her palms were flat against the white surface. And where her hands touched, the wall wasn't white. It was glowing with a soft, warm, *golden* light. The **true light**.
It lasted only a fraction of a second before static swallowed it. But Silas saw it. His glacial eyes widened almost imperceptibly. A spark of cold, avaricious interest ignited within them.
*"There!"* The word was a sharp exhalation. He leaned forward, his attention fully captured by the fleeting glimpse of the golden light, momentarily distracted from his direct assault on Jark's core consciousness.
It was the opening O needed, not for himself, but for Jark.
He stopped flooding the connection with the images of artificial light. Instead, he focused everything – his will, the dregs of Psi-Nine's stolen vitality, his own desperate hope – into a single, targeted psychic pulse aimed *not* at Silas, but at Jark. A lifeline thrown into the storm. It carried no words, only a feeling: *Solid ground. Warmth. Silence.* The memory of Psi-Nine's stolen moment of Parisian sunlight on cobblestones, pure and untainted by what came after.
Jark's trembling eased. His whimper softened. His eyes, rolled back in his head, flickered downwards for a split second, as if seeing something beyond the lab, beyond the pain.
Silas, sensing the shift, snapped his attention back. His hand clamped down on the cradle. *"No! Hold the connection!"*
But the moment of distraction had been enough. Jark's mind, battered but not wholly broken, had grasped the lifeline. With a final, gasping shudder, his body went limp on the table. The violent brainwave patterns on the monitors flatlined for a terrifying second before settling into the shallow, erratic rhythms of unconsciousness, not active torment. The connection hadn't been severed, but Jark had retreated deep, beyond Silas's immediate reach.
"Containment failure!" a voice yelled from the periphery of the spectral lab. *"Neural activity collapsed! Subject Jark-Alpha is non-responsive!"*
Silas straightened. The cold fury radiating from him was palpable, turning the spectral air brittle. He turned his glacial gaze away from Jark and fixed it squarely on O's insubstantial form. The avaricious interest was gone, replaced by pure, undiluted hatred.
"You…"The single word held the weight of glaciers grinding together. *"You interfere beyond your station, leech. You damage valuable assets."* He raised a hand, skeletal fingers pointing. *"Your borrowed time ends. The Custodian has your physical locus. The Howling will feast on your stolen resonance. And I will personally ensure your fusion with the Door is an eternity of exquisite torment."*
The spectral lab dissolved. The icy blue eyes were the last thing O saw, burning with promised vengeance, before the connection shattered.
O gasped, a raw, physical sound. He was back. Fully. Brutally.
He was crouched on the cold metal railing of the gallery, high above the Resonator Chamber. The Howling vibrated his bones. The Heart thumped erratically. The green light pulsed. The updraft roared.
Below, on the Junction 7 platform, the Succubis had picked up the suppression kit. She was turning away from the console, her empty eyes sweeping the chamber, searching. She hadn't seen him yet. Time hadn't stopped, but it had *stretched*. The psychic battle had taken mere seconds in the real world.
But everything had changed. Jark was alive, but broken, suffering because of him. Silas was enraged, his focus now laser-sharp on O's destruction. And the fleeting glimpse of Melin's golden light – the *true* light – was seared into his mind. That was her secret. That was her power. That was what Silas desperately wanted.
He had no weapon but the stolen strength and the desperate knowledge of what was at stake. And the roaring updraft.
Silas's final words echoed: *"The Custodian has your physical locus."*
He saw the Succubis pause. Her head tilted upwards. Those dark, empty pools fixed on his position on the gallery railing.
No more hesitation. No more dreams.
O coiled the power – the monstrous, stolen strength – in his legs. He focused not on guilt, not on fear, but on the icy faces of Mark Velics and Silas merging in his hatred. On Melin's golden light. On Jark's sacrifice.
He launched himself into the roaring updraft, a pale streak plummeting towards the chaos below, towards the Succubis, towards Junction 7, and the heart of the Howling. The hunt was over. The reckoning had begun.