The first thing Lucien lost was the sense of time.
At first, he tried to count the hours—watched for shifts in light, in air, in sound—but there were no windows in Facility Null-6, no clocks ticking gently on the wall, no changes in the stale, still air to tell him whether it was morning or night. Time did not pass here. It stayed.
There was no sun. No moon. No seasons.
Only the machines.
The whirr and click of sterilized instruments. The soft hiss of a syringe. The dull hum of fluorescent panels overhead. His days were measured by the needle—by the cold kiss of metal sliding into skin, by how long the burning lasted after the liquid fire entered his veins.
And then—he lost his name.
Lucien.
The sound of it faded from the mouths of the people in white coats, lost beneath the rustle of clipboards and the tapping of data pads. They stopped saying it, stopped acknowledging it. As if names were dangerous things—seeds of humanity they could not afford to let survive.
Now, he was Subject 42-Black.
Just a designation. A black number against a white backdrop. Something catalogued, analyzed, processed.
There were others, too. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. Sometimes their screams would drift through the sterile corridors—howls of pain, sobs of fear, broken laughter that echoed like lost ghosts through steel and stone.
But Lucien never saw them.
He saw only the same white walls, the same metal slabs, the same blue-gloved hands that moved like spiders over his body. He saw the scientists behind frosted glass, their eyes sharp, curious, and cold.
And he saw his brother.
Caged like him.
Strapped to a slab just far enough away to be unreachable, yet close enough that their suffering became a duet. The Facility had designed it that way. Deliberately. Carefully. So that each cry of agony would be shared.
Lucien screamed for him in the beginning—called out to him through tears, through bloody throats and trembling lungs. He begged for mercy. For answers. For someone to stop.
But nothing ever came.
His throat bled too many times. The pain burned too often. Eventually, even his voice abandoned him. He stopped calling. Stopped weeping. Stopped hoping.
The restraints on his wrists and ankles bit into his flesh like teeth, cutting deeper each day. Most days, he couldn't feel his legs. They were always pumping something into him—cocktails of chemical agony and experimental horrors. Sometimes it made his vision burn. Sometimes he saw things that weren't there—walls that pulsed like lungs, veins glowing beneath skin, the air rippling like heatwaves.
He felt his blood scream. His skin boil. His eyes crack with light.
> "Fascinating," one doctor murmured with unsettling delight, adjusting Lucien's vitals on the monitor. "An anomaly in every respect. A mutant with no clear origin. We've never seen anything like this."
> "Creation power," said another, circling the slab with a clipboard. "In theory, limitless. In practice… Let's find out."
They treated him like clay to be shaped.
They carved him.
Sliced open his skin with surgical ease. Peeled away layers of muscle and nerve to see what sparked beneath. They dug under his fingernails. Drilled into his spine. Wired him to machines that hissed and hissed and burned.
They injected him with fire.
With poison.
With silence.
And when he survived, they exchanged uneasy glances and muttered beneath their breath:
> "He's still alive?"
"Increase the neural dampeners."
"We can't risk another Subject Delta incident."
Lucien would have welcomed death.
Begged for it, once.
But death—death was not permitted here.
They would not let him die.
---
And it wasn't just his body they sought to break.
They came for his mind as well.
There were days when he thought the real Lucien—the kind one, the one who gave his last piece of bread to his brother in the dark days of hunger—was still in there somewhere. Hiding. But with each passing hour, he felt that boy slipping further away.
Bruises layered over bruises. Scars became maps. Pain rewrote his very soul.
What grew in Lucien's place was something different.
Something quiet.
Something that did not scream or cry or pray.
Something that watched.
The other subjects wailed. Cursed. Pleaded.
Lucien did not.
He observed.
He remembered.
And slowly—so very slowly—he learned.
Where the sedation tubes led. How often the guards rotated. The exact angle of the surveillance blind spot at 02:13 every day. The way the suppression field weakened when the room dropped below a certain temperature. The way the light flickered twice before a power shift.
His body may have been shattered.
But his mind was still sharp.
Sharper than they knew.
Every cry from his brother was a mark in his memory.
Every cut, every burn, every shock was another brick in the structure he was building within—a blueprint not of escape… but of vengeance.
---
And then it happened.
It was a day like any other. They called it a "chemical stress assay"—a session designed to overwhelm his nervous system and observe the fallout. They strapped him down tighter than usual. The serum burned like liquid lightning through his spine.
But this time, something changed.
Lucien did not scream.
He laughed.
The sound startled the room.
It was raw. Croaking. Wrong. The laughter of someone long past sanity—or long past fear.
One of the scientists spun toward the monitor.
> "What the hell? His vitals—he's stabilizing—"
> "He should be writhing in agony," another stammered. "His autonomic system—this isn't possible—"
Lucien's lips curled, blood drying in the corners.
He looked up at them with hollow, burning eyes and rasped:
> "You're not curing the disease…"
> "…you're feeding it."
> "Keep going."
> "Please."
And in that moment, Lucien understood something profound.
He was no longer afraid of pain.
And worse—he had begun to crave it.
---
Later that night, when the machines powered down for scheduled diagnostics and the blue lights dimmed to grey, Lucien lay still.
His gaze drifted across the cold space to his brother's fragile shape.
Still breathing.
Still alive.
Still human.
But for how long?
> "They will take him too," Lucien thought, staring into the dark. "Piece by piece. Until nothing is left but bones and wires."
He clenched his jaw until blood seeped down his chin, thick and warm.
And in the quiet, in that void between torment and silence, he made a vow.
> "I will become something they cannot bind."
"I will become what they fear to name."
"And I will burn this place to ash."
---
That night, Lucien did not sleep.
He dreamed while awake.
He did not dream of home.
He dreamed of machinery—of circuits woven through veins, of shifting DNA spiraling into new shapes. He dreamed of skin that healed with thought. Of energy bending around will.
He dreamed of power—raw, pure, unshaped.
Of ideas too vast to be caged.
And somewhere, in the deepest recess of his ruined, mutilated body, something stirred.
A light—cold, dark, and eternal—flickered to life.
It was not born of blood.
Not of muscle or bone.
But of will.
A single, silent truth blooming like a dark flower in the void:
The first Seed had been born.