The air buzzed with tension. Arc-lamps flickered overhead, casting long, jittering shadows over the war-table. Dren Havoc loomed at one end, arms crossed, the orange glow of his veins pulsing like a heartbeat. His mechanical arm gave off a soft hum, syncing with his slow breathing. Across from him, Magistrate Virellia stood still as a blade, silver fingers clicking a quiet rhythm on her datapad.
Archivist Arodan Skell waved a hand through a veilband, revealing layered scans of the machines found scattered across the wreck sites. His voice was low, methodical, like a man peeling back a festering truth. "These devices aren't just junk tech. They emit a wavelength outside the neural harmony range. It spikes the mutosterone index in mutant physiology—forces it into a state of chemical panic. That's not instinct. That's a trap. Whoever designed this wanted us to become beasts."
Marshal Korr Thane grunted, shifting his weight. The scarred side of his face caught the light, casting his expression in molten stone. "So you're saying someone planted these things to trigger a riot?"
"Not a riot," Skell corrected grimly. "An eruption. The wave pattern directly interferes with the parahippocampal cortex. Memory, threat response, territorial aggression—it rewires a mutant's perception. Makes them feel hunted. All the time."
Dren's mismatched eyes narrowed. The red one flickered with restrained fury. The frost-blue stared straight into the projection, unblinking. "That's why they snapped. The feral wave made them feel like prey."
Virellia's fingers stilled. "Who gains from this chaos?" she asked coldly. "Who wants Varkath to burn from within?"
"Whoever they are," he rumbled, "they're testing us. And we just failed the first round."
The hour was ripe with rot. Stormclouds strangled the moon, casting Varkath Isle in a bruised and bleeding shadow. All across the war-scarred fortress, the scent of iron and ozone hung in the air, as if the island itself knew what was coming—what verdict had been passed beyond its broken shores.
High above the spires, where the wind hissed like a dying beast, the call came through. Not a voice, not a warning—just the cold, sterile transmission of judgment. Commander Silas Morrigan had spoken.
The Edenian Councils, cloaked in their golden sanctuaries far from the screams and flame, had made their decision. Varkath would no longer be a burden they bore. Ten million mutants, ravaged by frenzy and fear, locked in the grip of a madness no one fully understood—too volatile, too dangerous, too far gone. Varkath Isle was to be severed.
There would be no aid, no rescue, no negotiation. The risk to Edenia's pristine cities and trembling citizens was too great. They would not let the infection spread—especially not to Melathra, whose glittering shores were close enough to taste the ash on the wind.
The Sentinel Corps, with its mechanical armies and storm-shelled dreadnoughts, moved in silence. Steel gates howled shut, reinforced skybridges snapped from their moorings, and every trace of contact—radio, signal, trade—was suffocated in the dark. Like cauterizing a wound too deep to heal.
Commander Morrigan, iron-hearted, god-crowned in the eyes of soldiers, gave the order with the same ease one flicks dust from a sleeve. Varkath would become a dead zone. A prison without walls, floating in a sea of silence.
The transmission burned into the war-room walls like frostbite, seeping into every breath, every unspoken thought. Around the table, the silence was no longer respectful—it was resentful. The council's decree had landed like a guillotine, swift and merciless, and the taste of metal sat thick on every tongue.
Magistrate Virellia was the first to shift, her datapad dimmed but her mind ablaze. Her silver fingers twitched with the ghosts of arguments she knew she couldn't win. She'd upheld law her entire life, carved justice into bone when needed—but this wasn't justice. This was abandonment.
Marshal Korr Thane growled low in his throat, arms folded like iron gates across his broad chest. A war-burned soldier who'd bled on the black sands of Melathra's outer rim, and now they told him to watch Varkath drown. Watch his men—his brothers—get caged in a chaos no wall could hold. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The scowl on his melted face was enough.
But the screen remained static, cold-blue and unyielding. Commander Silas Morrigan did not falter. He stood somewhere far beyond the storm, likely aboard the dreadnought, hands clasped behind his back, his long coat drifting like a war-banner. He was all spine and venom, a man carved from absolutes. To him, hesitation was rot. Doubt was poison. And so he offered no room for either.
Silas didn't blink as the accusations came. Didn't waver when Virellia asked if this wasn't just political cowardice cloaked in military necessity. Didn't flinch when Thane's voice boomed, demanding to know what would happen when the fires of Varkath spilled into the sea. Didn't pause when Skell questioned if the wave-machines were placed by someone who wanted this very outcome.
He simply tilted his head and exhaled, like a teacher indulging a class of panicked children. His final words were as cruelly calm as the steel circling the island. "Lock it down. Burn the signal lines. And if anyone's feeling brave, tell them to swim."
Then, with the slightest, sardonic curl at the edge of his mouth, he added—"Look on the bright side—less paperwork when everyone's dead."
Meanwhile, next morning far from the wailing coasts of Varkath and its unraveling soul, deep within the sanctum of the Hall of M, Commander Silas Morrigan descended into shadow.
The chamber was built like a tomb—no windows, no warmth, just stone and silence wrapped in layers of forgotten power. The air was stale with memory, where Professor M waited—cloaked in his usual stillness, like a relic too dangerous to bury, too useful to destroy.
Silas approached with boots echoing thunder, cloak dragging whispers in his wake. The Professor didn't look up. He didn't need to. He always knew when the bloodhound of Edenia entered the room. "Tell me what you know," Silas said—not as a request, but a final invitation before accusation.
But Professor M remained unmoved. He was a mind that once mapped dimensions, a man who had peered into rifts where thought and nightmare blurred. And yet, now, even he was blind.
"There is... nothing conclusive," he murmured, voice like parchment torn in half. "Whatever is happening in Varkath—it was not seeded by any known vector. No virus, no curse, no relic, no psionic echo. The machines planted there... are not ours. Not Edenian. Not even mutant-born."
Silas narrowed his eyes, jaw tight as wire. "Then whose?"
Silence. A pause heavy enough to drown in. Professor M's eyes flicked toward the slow-turning holoimage of the Varkath waveform—chaotic, red-laced spirals pulsing like screams frozen in time.
"It behaves like a predator," the Professor finally said. "Not an accident. Not a system failure. A design. Something old. Familiar... but buried. It doesn't infect—it provokes. Forces the mind to remember its most ancient instinct. Fear."
Silas didn't flinch. "So someone found a way to weaponize evolution?"
"Or awaken it," the Professor replied.
What followed was a war of philosophies—cold science against militarized certainty. Silas demanded names, motives, coordinates. The Professor offered only theories, riddles half-formed and laced with dread. The tension wasn't just intellectual—it was chemical. Two titans trapped in a room too small for both of their truths.
Silas slammed a hand against the console, the steel groaning under his gauntlet. "Ten million mutants howling like beasts, and you're telling me we have nothing but poetry and maybes?"
The Professor finally looked up. "I've seen this before," he said softly. "Not here. Not in this world. But in the echoes... from beneath the skin of time."
Silas stared at him, unreadable. For once, the commander didn't mock. Didn't sneer. Then he turned.
Silas glanced over his shoulder and broke the silence with his usual venom-laced smirk. "Next time I want mythology, Professor, I'll raid a library. Until then, sharpen your facts—or I'll start reading entrails instead."
Professor M reached his desk—less a workspace and more an altar of forgotten knowledge. From beneath a stack of neglected records, he pulled an old newspaper, the paper brittle and yellowed with age, but preserved like a relic. The ink still bled clarity. A headline carved like a prophecy. "Mysterious 'Signal' Found in Phantom Isle: Dr. Elias Wrench Uncovers Mythical Resonance, 1273."
He handed it to Silas, who had half a snarl prepared for more cryptic relics—until his eyes fell on the printed waveform. It was identical. Not similar. Not vaguely reminiscent. Identical.
The jagged frequency signature—the way the peaks mimicked neural surges under duress, the tremor-like oscillation resembling a scream held in repeat—was a mirror image of the Varkath anomaly. Even the distortion pattern at the end of the sequence, like a howl tapering into silence, was there. Layered in ink from forty years ago.
Silas read the article with a slow-brewing dread, words hitting like stones. "Initial exposure triggered increased aggression in wildlife. Later experiments on controlled mutant subjects induced rapid glandular mutation, followed by extreme emotional volatility... Primary resonance targets parahippocampal cortex, simulating a constant state of mortal threat. Subject behavior degrades into feral state within seventy-two hours."
The paper trembled in Silas' hand. He tried to rationalize, to reject it—how could this have been known, buried, yet ignored?
He turned, eyes like gunmetal ice. "Why wasn't this flagged in Central Archives? Why wasn't Wrench's research sealed under Watch Protocol?"
Professor M's voice was low, almost mournful. "It was. Redacted. Suppressed under Edenian High Code. The Council called it unnecessarypanic."
Silas paced, the paper crushed in his fist, veins like steel cords under his skin. "So someone had it. Someone resurrected this goddamn signal, built it into Varkath's infrastructure, embedded it into mutant tech—"
"—And waited," the Professor finished. "Until the right population density. The right emotional climate. The right spark."
For a long moment, Commander Silas said nothing. Not even his usual cynicism could rise to meet what now stood before him. All his sharpened instincts, all his battle-honed pragmatism—none of it made sense of this.