The scent of iron never left him.
Even now, as Aeron lay slumped in his armchair, chest rising with uneven breaths, he could still taste it—the sharp tang of blood, the sterile sting of antiseptic. His laboratory had been more than a workplace; it had been his sanctuary, his battlefield, his shrine. Every table gleamed with polished steel, every wall lined with jars of preserved organs, every page of his notebooks stained with the record of sacrifices no one else dared to make.
Here, beneath the relentless glare of fluorescent lights, he had waged war against mortality itself.
The tether.
That fragile, invisible line that bound flesh to spirit, that mocked him with its inevitability. That whispered each day, each breath: you are dying.
His vision blurred, and his gaze drifted to the cracked ceiling above. Shadows crawled there, twitching at the edges of his failing sight. His mind, weary and fevered, slipped backwards. To his beginning.
He remembered the first time he had held a scalpel. The tremor in his small hands as he opened a bird he had found in the gutter, its feathers still damp with rain. He remembered the fascination—the revelation—that death was not final, not if he could peel back its layers, not if he could understand the hidden mechanism.
His parents had never cared. Doctors, both of them, obsessed with their own careers, too orderly, too cold. He had been an inconvenience to them, a shadow at the dinner table. They taught him, not with words but with silence, that emotions were distractions. That attachment was weakness. That love was a burden for lesser beings.
So Aeron sought meaning in the only thing that did not reject him: the body. The machine of flesh. The puzzle of life.
By the time he entered university, he was already dissecting with a precision that unsettled his peers. They called him prodigy in the open. In the dark, they whispered other words. Ghoul. But none of it mattered. Their whispers were nothing compared to the ones that had already begun to coil around his thoughts.
The tether. Always the tether.
As the years unfurled, he shed friends like snakeskin. Where they found lovers, children, and legacies, Aeron found only silence and the gleam of steel. His notebooks grew heavier, ink smudged with sweat and blood. His experiments advanced. Tissue regeneration. Cellular suspension. Dogs that lived years beyond their span, eyes glazed with unnatural vitality.
Breakthroughs, yes. But never enough. Always a wall. Always the tether, mocking him with its refusal to break.
Decades passed, and the body he had ignored began to betray him. His hands shook when he held the scalpel. His vision blurred beneath candlelight and strain. His hair, once black, grew white in streaks, as if death were clawing at him strand by strand. But his mind burned hotter, brighter, as desperation fanned the flames of obsession.
In his sixties, he stopped pretending at life. No more colleagues, no more lectures, no more society. Only his experiments. Only the tether.
And the whispers.
They had grown louder in the last years. No longer faint, no longer mistakable for fatigue. They slithered in his ears, a choir of voices that did not belong to him. They mocked him, cursed him, urged him forward. Sometimes they promised revelation. Sometimes they promised damnation.
He listened. He always listened.
The final weeks were madness. He barely ate. Sleep was an enemy. His notebooks filled with erratic scrawls, symbols half-carved, formulas smudged with blood. He isolated himself until the world outside his laboratory ceased to exist.
And still… he failed.
The sixty-third heart blackened in his hands. Another experiment ended in ash. Another corpse for the pile.
That night, Aeron sat in his armchair, the leather torn, the springs groaning under his wasted frame. His chest ached with every breath, sharp and uneven, his vision a haze of white. On the table beside him, his final notebook lay open, filled with words no one would ever read. He tried to reach for it, fingers twitching, but his body refused.
The whispers came.
Not faint this time. Not mocking. They were everywhere—woven into the air, the light, the very pulse of his dying heart.
You have spent your life chasing shadows, they murmured. Now you will become one.
Aeron let out a broken laugh, bitter and soft. His lips twisted into a smile that looked more like a wound. "Even now… you mock me. Even now… you deny me."
The pain flared sharper, searing through his chest. His sight dimmed further, edges swallowed by creeping black. But he clung to it—to his obsession—like a drowning man clutching the last thread of breath.
"I will not… let go…"
His voice cracked. His eyes rolled back. The ceiling light above him flickered, cold and sterile, the last thing he saw before darkness claimed him.
But it was not the darkness of death.
It was deeper. Hungrier.
A silence that was alive.
And in that silence, the whispers did not fade. They grew. They encircled him, countless, unseen, drawing tighter, closer, as though the void itself leaned down to taste him.
You wanted eternity, they breathed. Let us see if you are worthy of it.
Aeron's consciousness quivered, raw and trembling, as the void reached for him. The tether he had spent his life trying to sever snapped—not with a whisper, but with a roar that only he could hear.
And then he was falling.
Not into death.
Into something far worse.