There is no pain like the memory of pain.
It comes not when the wound is made, but when the mind begins to remember what the soul tried to forget. Samael—if he was that now, if that name was not simply another chain—felt it not as fire or blade but as something far worse. It was the awareness that his suffering had meant something, and that meaning had been chosen by someone else.
He drifted in darkness again, not in unconsciousness but in containment. Something had pulled him deeper after the name surfaced. It was not sleep. It was suppression. Yet his thoughts remained. They curled like mist inside a closed jar. He could still feel his body—distant, slumbering, caged in silver and silence—but also the soul-thread stretched across it, vibrating like a harp string tuned to pain.
And then he was dragged upward—or inward—or maybe backward.
It began with a scream.
Not his own.
A woman, wild and radiant, thrashed upon blood-slick stone. Her hair fanned around her like fire made flesh, her mouth wide with agony. He saw her—not as a boy might see his mother, but as a specter might witness the collapse of a star. She was beautiful in a way nothing mortal could survive. Light and sorrow bled from her skin.
Then came the child.
Small, broken, half-born. A heartbeat trying to decide whether to begin. And then the man appeared—eyes blackened with madness, face gaunt from sleepless obsession. His voice cracked with a word Samael could not understand. The light of the woman's body pulsed once—then collapsed into stillness.
Samael's incorporeal presence screamed, but no sound left his soul.
The man wept. Not with softness, but with rage. He tore the world around him, shattered stone, killed his own creations. Then he turned to the body of the child, already cold, and whispered something so low even the stones held their breath.
The ritual began.
What followed felt like an earthquake in his soul.
Samael had not realized how fragile the veil between sleep and awareness was—until it was torn open like a wound. He watched himself—the infant corpse—placed upon an altar of nightstone. Runes ignited around the slab, bleeding red and black. A scroll, bound in the skin of something once human, was unrolled beside him. The man—his father, if such a word could still apply—spoke a tongue that cracked the air like glass.
The soul tethered from the other world flailed.
No, no—this isn't real. This isn't happening. I already died.
He remembered—yes, remembered—the moment of his other death. Rain on metal. A light changing from green to red. A voice screaming behind him. Then—nothing.
He had been gone. Pulled away.
And now he was here.
Bound to a child's body. A soul not his own pressing against his being like oil and water. This was wrong. This was theft.
The merging was agony.
He felt the moment when the spell forced them together. The souls, like magnets spun opposite, slammed and screamed, refusing union. One half raged with modern sorrow. The other with pre-human pain. They did not fuse. They wounded one another and were then sealed, injured and unfinished, into one tethered form.
The first scream he gave was not heard by any mouth. It pulsed through the chamber like a death knell.
And then came the blade.
Samael—conscious, yet invisible to time—saw the man approach the altar again. The child's corpse still twitched, held together by the silver tether. But now the sorcerer held a vial. Within it, three flecks of essence danced—luminescent, terrible. Qilin. Demiguise. Wampus Cat.
"This is the first refinement," the man said aloud, though no one else remained. "Your soul will see. Your sight will shame prophecy."
He did not use a knife. He used a scalpel of light, conjured from runes shaped in the air. And though the child's body did not scream, Samael felt it. The removal of his eyes. Not with pain, but with violation. It was not merely surgery. It was theft. A mutilation of what it meant to be a soul bound to form.
He screamed again, uselessly.
From the vial, the man drew threads—first the Qilin's essence, glimmering with truth. It pierced the sockets first, sinking into the wound. Samael saw the world bend. He could feel truth itself begin to pour into the cavities where vision once lived.
Next came the Demiguise—soft, ghostlike, trembling with foresight. It wept as it was absorbed. Samael felt it die. Its death echoed inside him. Time splintered. He saw himself standing in rooms he had never entered, bleeding from wounds not yet made. A clock inside his mind ticked out of rhythm.
Then, the Wampus Cat. The predator. The beast of mind and claw. Its essence snapped into place like iron into bone. Samael felt it coil in the new eyes, giving strength, fury, command. The child's body flinched, but the chain held him still.
The man stepped back.
Silver light pulsed in the sockets. Not fire, not starlight—but something older. The kind of light that stared back when one looked too long into the unknown.
Samael—watching it all from within—felt his mind tear.
He remembered cities. He remembered code. A name on a diploma. A girl in a library. Her laughter.
Then he remembered none of it.
The silver eyes burned the memory away. The fragments of the other soul recoiled, unable to hold ground. Thoughts from Earth evaporated under the weight of new sight. But not all.
One memory stayed: a glass reflection—his face, human, simple, untouched by myth.
That face was gone.
He looked now through eyes not forged for men. And they saw him back.
Something else shifted—subtly, but deeply.
The boy was no longer a corpse. His lungs did not breathe. His heart did not beat. But the body responded. As though aware, it turned its head slightly on the altar, the silver eyes blinking for the first time.
The man—Ekrizdis—shivered.
"You
live," he whispered. "You live, my angel."
He knelt beside the child and laid a hand on the wrist, upon which the silver chain had already begun to form. It pulsed once, binding tighter. The runes across the walls dimmed. A spell completed.
"Your first gift," the man said, "and only the beginning."
In the shadows of the soul, Samael wept.
But no tears came.
He was not whole. He was not one. And yet he was awake.
Somewhere above, the waves battered the cliffs of Azkaban. Somewhere far in the future, a boy named Harry Potter took his first steps into a world of magic.
But here, in the depths of the island, a godling bled silently into being.
And the first cut had been made.