---
The static came first.
That low, crawling hum that vibrated somewhere between sound and sensation — the kind that settled behind the teeth and refused to leave. The screen flickered once. Twice. Then the pixelated glow of that weathered display steadied itself, casting its pale, greenish light across the space like the ghost of something that had no business still being functional. And yet, there it was. Alive. Watching.
Then the voice arrived.
---
"Look here, brat."
It came through with the practiced, unhurried cadence of a man standing before a lecture hall — one who had delivered this particular speech far too many times to feel anything resembling urgency about it. The tone carried the dry, institutional weight of chalk dust and overhead projectors, of someone who had long since stopped expecting his audience to keep up.
"There are things that exist within the fabric of your world," the voice continued, each syllable measured, each pause deliberate, "things that were never meant to be uncovered. Never meant to be known. Not by ordinary eyes. Not by hands that were never supposed to reach that far."
A beat of silence followed — not empty, but loaded. The kind of silence a professor lets breathe before delivering the sentence that changes the entire meaning of the lecture.
"Your carved path. Everything that brought you to this precise and unfortunate moment." The voice shifted then — subtle at first, like a current changing direction beneath a calm surface. What had been academic and detached began to carry something else. The trembling undercurrent of a man who had just turned over a stone and found something extraordinary beneath it. The reverence of a scholar mid-discovery, fingers hovering over an unearthed artifact, voice dropping half a register as the magnitude of what he was looking at began to register.
"It was never meant. Originally — the very alignment of forces, the orchestration of events, the quiet performance of something far older than either of us — those who spent lifetimes attempting to part the veil between the mortal and the celestial, who devoted entire existences to reading the architecture of what had not yet come to pass — none of it pointed here. None of it pointed to this."
The screen pulsed faintly. The voice aged — or rather, it revealed age that had always been there, buried beneath layers of artificiality. It became the voice of something that had watched eras fold into one another like pages in a book no living person had finished reading. An expert sage draped in centuries, speaking from the accumulated sediment of generations.
"And yet — it was always indicating. In its own quiet, unrelenting way. The mandate. The legacy that vanished so completely from the record that most forgot it had ever existed at all." A pause, heavy as iron. "Destined to return. It was always going to return."
Then — like a broadcast cutting to a different channel entirely — the voice sharpened. Became clipped and precise. The energy of someone who had just connected the final thread of an investigation that had consumed years. An investigative reporter standing before a board of evidence, tapping the photograph at the center of it all.
"Aubrey Voss — descended directly from that lineage. The presumed inheritor. The one every reading, every calculation, every whispered interpretation pointed toward as the destined vessel of that returning legacy."
And then it happened again. The shift. Faster this time, and altogether more unsettling — because what replaced the reporter's sharp certainty was something almost childlike in its giddiness. The barely-contained, wide-eyed delight of someone who had just unwrapped something they had been searching for across an incomprehensible stretch of time.
But you — of all people — you turned out to be the one I've been looking for."
What followed was not quite laughter. It was the simulation of laughter — synthetic, hollow at its edges, carrying the particular wrongness of something mimicking amusement without fully understanding what amusement was. It crawled through the static of the screen like an old recording played at the wrong speed.
And then, riding on the tail of that laugh, came the words — shaped like a proverb, delivered like a verdict:
"How exquisitely ironic. That the one who spent his entire existence grasping for solid ground — for something unmovable, something that would not be taken from him — turns out to be the very soul through whom salvation can only arrive by tearing every false foundation apart."
---
Elijah's jaw tightened.
"What am I?"
The question came out quieter than he intended. Stripped of its armor by everything that had just been said.
---
The screen flickered. And the voice that returned wore a different mask entirely — the sigh of a man profoundly exhausted by the incompetence of the world around him, laced with sarcasm sharp enough to draw blood.
"Oh, look here. Let's be absolutely clear about something."The irritation was architectural. Carefully constructed. "I am not the one responsible for the device running beneath your skull. You were one of thousands — thousands, you understand — of experiments conducted on children carrying even the faintest trace of Sutran bloodline. Thousands of brats, just like you."*
The register shifted again — not dramatically, but in the way a politician's smile shifts when the cameras are on and the contempt is being very carefully managed. The voice took on the practiced, patronizing smoothness of a man addressing a crowd he privately considered beneath salvaging.
"Mr. Marcus. You are not remarkable by design. The circumstances that led to your particular situation were not engineered for you specifically. The fact that those sanctimonious, hypocritical lunatics took you in — gave you shelter beneath their ideology — and that one among their own ranks ultimately fractured, turned against the very institution they served —" a deliberate pause, allowing the weight of it to settle *"— and in doing so, reached into your Orrhion chip and rewrote it. Restructured it. Bent its original architecture into something it was never constructed to be."
The voice dropped. Became something more precise. More careful. The instinct of a detective piecing together a sequence of events from fragments.
*"If I am not mistaken — and I rarely am — that deviation is what triggered the cascade. One thing displacing another, and another, and another, until the chain reaction had traveled far enough to land you here. That corruption of your Orrhion chip's original purpose is, in all likelihood, what set the dominoes falling in precisely the pattern required to name you as the candidate. The inheritor of the mandate."*
---
"I don't care about any of that."
The words came out with venom, sharp and immediate — a reflex more than a declaration. Elijah's patience, whatever remained of it, had worn to a thread.
"How do I learn to use it? The power — how do I—"
"Marcy."
The name hit the air like a closed door.
"Marcy. Marcy. Marcy."
The scolding cadence of it — slow, rhythmic, the tone of someone who had caught a child reaching for something they had been told repeatedly not to touch — settled over the space with an almost suffocating familiarity.
Something moved across Elijah's skin that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. The name dragged something upward from a place he hadn't opened in a long time. Goosebumps traced the length of his arms without permission.
"Did you or did you not train at their institute?"The voice continued, unhurried, as though the answer were already known and the question was merely formality. "And if my recollection serves — which it does — your memories of that place have returned to you. The discipline. The sequences. The language of movement they drilled into your body until it became reflex rather than thought." A beat. "That foundation is still yours. It did not leave when the memories did. You only need to reinforce it — to let this new power settle into the same structure. Strengthen the vessel. Fortify the interior architecture of who you are."*
A pause. When the voice returned, it had descended into something looser. Something with less polish and considerably more edge — the kind of voice that belonged in a back-alley conversation rather than a lecture hall.
"What I have chosen to call it is Aetherstrium."
Another pause. Briefer. Then —
"To control it — don't overthink it. Be exactly who you are. And let every fracture, every humiliation, every year you spent being moved across the board like a piece in someone else's game — let all of that go. Direct it. At the ones who earned it."
Something in the static seemed to smile.
*"And speaking of things earned — you do want to know, don't you, Mr. Marcus? About your real parents. Who they actually were."*
---
The screen held its glow.
Elijah stood in the wash of it, and somewhere behind his ribs, in the place where calculated decisions were made, a single thought formed with perfect and profane clarity:
Why in every forsaken corner of reason do I feel like I've just been strapped into the centrepiece experiment of a man whose relationship with sanity is purely historical — and handed a set of instructions I never agreed to follow?
He did not say it aloud.
But he did not walk away either.