The world broke in silence.
For a heartbeat, the air stilled—too still, like the moment before a scream, the space between lightning and thunder. The chanting had stopped. The blood on the altar had begun to sizzle. The seal skull, split into fragments, wept steam.
Then the sky opened.
No noise. No warning.
Just light—pure, golden, vertical, and vast—ripping down from the heavens with a fury no prayer could match. It wasn't lightning. It wasn't fire. It was divine precision, a lance of solar judgment that fell with the speed of wrath and the weight of stars.
It struck the center of the circle, and the world screamed.
---
The impact vaporized the shamans in less than a second. Their flesh became vapor. Their bones twisted and charred black, locked mid-prayer, faces frozen in horror, arms raised as if to shield themselves from the very thing they had summoned.
The ring of monoliths surrounding the crater glowed with internal fire, their carvings alive with impossible heat. Symbols of angels, of swords, of suns and demons now pulsed like beating hearts in the stone.
The blast wave expanded outward—not an explosion, but a pushing away of all things impure.
The dogs down the slope shrieked and fled.
The snow within a hundred meters melted, then boiled, then rose into the sky as a thick column of steam.
For a moment, the moon disappeared—hidden behind the brilliance of the beam, now climbing back up into the sky like it had never descended.
Then, it was gone.
Silence. Again.
But the silence had changed.
---
Meighen Island, now scorched at the center, glowed faintly under the moonlight. The air trembled with heat. The stars above had shifted.
And from across the frozen sea, others saw it.
---
Far to the East – A British Survey Vessel, North of Devon Island
HMS Wintermere, a steam-hull exploration ship out of Halifax, was cutting through the floe when the light appeared.
First came the glow—turning the sea gold and the sails into burning parchment.
Then came the impact flash.
Half the crew dropped to the deck, shielding their eyes. The captain ordered the glass lenses packed and sealed, and the radio officer began logging timestamps, eyes wide with awe.
> "Good God," the lieutenant whispered. "Was that the sun?"
> "No," said the ship's naturalist, blinking through tears. "That was something else."
---
South – Inuit Whalers near Bylot Island
They saw the light rise before they heard the ice split.
They fell to their knees, whispering the old words—the ones they had been taught not to speak. One old man wept openly, calling out to spirits long buried.
They called it "Qilaursaaq"—The Sun Wound.
A sign of great change. A warning. A birth. Or a curse.
---
In Greenland – A German Research Station
Two scientists were outside calibrating wind equipment when the pulse hit.
Their equipment shorted out immediately. The sky turned white. The earth beneath them vibrated faintly for three seconds.
The head researcher marked the anomaly, logged it as "Unexplained Aurora Phenomenon – High Magnitude," and sent word to Copenhagen. It would be reclassified five years later as a myth. The researcher would never forget it.
---
In Silence – On Meighen Island
The circle smoked.
Twelve stone pillars stood untouched, though the snow around them was gone. The ground was glassy. Cracked. Warm.
And the crater hissed like a living wound, still bleeding steam into the air.
The scorched earth glowed faintly beneath the rising mist, its edges lined with slush and half-melted bone. Snow no longer fell—perhaps in reverence, or perhaps in fear. The air was hot. Wrong. Buzzing with a silence so loud it pressed against the ears.
And in the center of that silence, he knelt.
A child.
Small. Naked. Bare feet planted on the blackened stone, steam rising from his skin like he was still burning. His body was still. But not slack. Not limp.
Tense. Coiled.
Golden hair clung to his brow in wet strands, the color too vivid, too perfect, like it had been painted by a mad god. His limbs were lean and unnaturally defined—no baby fat, no softness. His chest rose slowly, then paused. Then again.
He was breathing.
And then—his eyes opened.
Blue. Deep. Alien. Too old for the face they inhabited.
He blinked once, twice. His gaze moved slowly across the shattered circle, taking in the scorched remains of what had summoned him.
Twisted black statues—frozen in their final moments, arms up, mouths open, eyes hollow and fused. A dozen of them, charred to bone and ash. They had died praying. And they had brought him here.
Cain said nothing.
But his hands clenched into fists.
---
Memory hit him in fragments.
The smell of promethium and blood.
The sight of a shattered defense line.
A last charge. His arm broken.
The towering silhouette of an Ork Warboss roaring down on him like a god of war.
His saber gripped in a bloodied hand.
And then—flame.
Not just death.
Judgment.
---
He staggered to his feet, small legs trembling slightly as they adjusted to unfamiliar proportions. Every nerve screamed at him—wrong body, wrong muscles, wrong center of gravity. But the power was still there. Condensed. Dense. Waiting.
He turned in a slow circle, surveying the carnage with the eyes of a seasoned tactician.
> "Sorcery," he muttered under his breath. His voice was hoarse, gravel-scratched, and far too calm for a child.
He stepped toward one of the corpses.
Its arms were curled up defensively, ribs exposed like the fingers of a broken cage.
Cain dropped to a knee, reached down, and without ceremony, ripped a long bone free—the ulna or radius, clean and white beneath the burn. He weighed it in his hand, ran a thumb across it, then moved to the crater's edge and found a sharp rock.
He began to grind.
Stone on bone.
Bone on rock.
The rhythm of survival.
---
The hide came next.
One of the bodies still had a shoulder wrap of burned seal fur—half melted, half intact. Cain pulled it free, shook the ash from it, and wrapped it around his waist and shoulders, securing it with sinew pulled from the same corpse's wrist.
Primitive.
Disgraceful.
But functional.
> "Until I find something better," he muttered. "This will do."
---
The crater groaned softly beneath his feet. The stones of the circle pulsed faintly, as if watching him. He paused, turning his eyes upward.
The sky above was still parted. The stars looked too close. Too sharp.
He frowned.
> "This is not the battlefield. Not the war I died in."
He looked down at his small hands, then closed his fists again.
They felt wrong. Weak. But beneath the skin—he could feel something stirring.
Something inside him.
Something waiting.
He took a step toward the ridge.
He didn't know what world this was.
But whatever it was—it had called him, burned down its priests to bring him here.
And now that he had arrived, it would learn what it had summoned, but first things first, shelter, food, survival. And as he looked around, scanning his surroundings, he then saw it.
The cave lay just beyond the stone circle, tucked into the side of a blackened ridge.
Its mouth was half-covered by windblown snow and a curtain of mossy rock. No animals lived within. No ice clung to the entrance. The snow at its lip had melted into slush, revealing patches of bare stone that steamed gently, as if the ground itself was exhaling.
Cain crouched at the threshold, eyes narrow.
It was warm.
Not with fire. Not with decay. But with something deeper—geothermal breath, like the heartbeat of the island. He stepped inside cautiously, gripping the sharpened bone spear in one hand.
The cave widened after ten paces into a low chamber with a domed ceiling. The floor was dry. The walls were smooth. It was defensible. Private. Silent.
He nodded once.
"Acceptable."
He took a seat on the stone floor, cross-legged, the hide wrap pulled tight around his bare shoulders. The stillness of the place wrapped around him like a second skin.
He closed his eyes.
And breathed.
---
For the first time since his rebirth, Cain let go of the battlefield. The noise. The commands. The pain.
He stopped thinking of knives and bones and war.
He simply listened.
Not with ears.
With intention.
---
And there—beneath his sternum, behind his ribs, above his heart—he felt it.
A pulse.
Not of blood. Not of lungs.
A second rhythm. Fainter than breath, but steady. Like a sun smoldering in a distant sky. No—it wasn't distant. It was inside him.
It had always been.
He focused.
And the warmth grew.
He opened the door—not with words, not with force, but with curiosity.
What are you?
The answer was motion.
The Core stirred.
It slid upward like a rising tide—not physically, not spatially, but spiritually, flowing through his being until it reached his living heart and merged with it in an instant of perfect alignment.
And then—
He lit up from the inside.
---
His eyes snapped open. The cave around him blurred.
And within, he saw the threads.
Golden. Red. White.
Three rivers of light, invisible to the world, but clear as blood to him, branching through his flesh like glowing veins.
The Gold sank into his bones—infusing marrow and calcium with strength. He could feel his spine realigning, his ribs expanding, his skull locking into place like forged steel. His stance would never falter again.
The Red flooded into his muscles—wrapping tendons, coiling through his limbs. A rush of raw vitality surged through him. His hands twitched. His legs tensed. Explosive force, barely contained, settled just beneath the surface.
The White swept through his organs—his brain, heart, lungs, eyes. His vision sharpened, hearing deepened. He could hear the drip of melting ice outside the cave. He could feel his heartbeat slow to an optimized rhythm.
He gasped once, then controlled it.
He stood.
And the world felt… slow.
Not because it had changed.
Because he had.
---
Cain walked to the entrance of the cave and looked out over the circle of bones and fire-scorched earth.
He moved differently now—each step measured, silent, lethal.
The wind no longer bit at his skin. His body regulated itself, core heat responding in perfect rhythm with the environment.
His hands moved with uncanny precision. Every movement felt refined, as though his new body had caught up to the discipline and purpose of his soul.
He whispered, not in fear—but in confirmation:
> "This is not sorcery."
He looked down at his hands, now steady and strong, and clenched his fists.
> "This is design."
---
That night, in the back of the cave, Cain crouched near the rear of the chamber, where the heat from the earth was strongest and the frost had long receded. He had cleared a space there—a low altar of stacked stones and smooth ice. Nothing ceremonial. Just clean. Clear. Purposeful.
He sorted through the small pile of stones he had gathered from the coastline—selecting only the densest, the smoothest, the ones that felt still in his hands.
He touched each in silence. Waited.
And then he found it.
A flat riverstone, about the size of his palm, veined with pale quartz, cool and heavy. Unlike the others, it did not resist his grip. It felt balanced, as if it were waiting for him.
Cain sat down cross-legged, cradling the stone in both hands.
He exhaled slowly, drawing his breath into his core, letting the rhythm of the fused heart-center steady him.
Then, he reached inward, and the Core responded instantly, sending a faint pulse through his chest. He drew a thread of that energy out—not forcefully, but with deliberate intent—and directed it into the stone through the bridge of his will.
He leaned forward, pressing his forehead to the stone's surface.
> "Accept me," he whispered—not a demand, not a plea.
A request.
The stone did not glow.
It listened.
There was a stillness.
A tension.
And then—a hum.
Low, deep, barely audible, more felt than heard.
The surface of the stone grew warm against his palms. The quartz veins inside began to shift—reorganizing, spiraling slowly inward toward a central point. A small bead of light—white, soft, pulsing—began to form at its heart.
It was not bright.
It was alive, but Cain didn't smile. He didn't speak.
He simply closed his eyes and began to breathe with it.
He poured energy into it—not raw power, but essence—his will, his clarity, his belief in purpose and order. He wasn't forcing it into shape. He was sharing himself.
The process took hours.
And yet it felt like a single breath.
But when finally he opened his eyes, the cave felt different.
Warmer. Quieter. Whole.
The stone pulsed gently beside him, its glow visible only when his hand brushed it. The light flowed in soft waves, each pulse rippling outward into the rock around it—like a heartbeat made of hope.
Where the pulses touched, frost receded. A patch of moss at the edge of the cave stirred. A drop of water froze, then melted and became liquid again.
Cain placed the stone into a shallow groove carved into the altar.
It rested there like it belonged.
He sat back, crossed his arms, and watched it for a long time.
This was no tool.
This was no spell.
This was something sacred.
A pact.
A light that remembered him.
One stone.
One anchor.
Enough for him, for now.
And outside, the snow stopped falling.
And though the sky remained gray, the air around the cave grew less cruel. The cold did not bite quite so deep. The wind could not find the entrance.
Birds did not return. Wolves did not approach.
But the stone pulsed. Slowly. Steadily.
And for the first time, something unnatural, something magical bloomed. And soon for Cain time slipped into a rhythm.
Days passed, but they no longer felt like days. There was no sun to mark them—only the gray glow of the Arctic sky, shifting in shades of cold and less cold. Cain didn't count the days. He merely measured time now by pulses—the slow, steady throb of light from the stone resting on its altar.
Like a heartbeat.
Like breath.
And with it keeping his new home warm and livable, he himself had began to work in silence.
Each day began with blood.
A seal laying lazily at the coast would find itself speared by Cain, then dragged back to the cave on a sled of bone lashed together with sinew. Its body was skinned, gutted, divided with precision. Not a scrap was wasted. The meat was eaten raw, the fat rendered over driftwood fires. The bones were boiled, scraped, carved.
Cain constructed racks for drying hide and muscle. He buried sharpened stakes in the snow at the cave's approach. He shaped crude armor from stitched fur and bent rib plates, layering it over his narrow shoulders like a child playing at war—except this child moved like a predator and thought like a general.
He shaped a glaive from walrus tusk and bone.
He braided ropes from seal gut.
He carved symbols into the cave walls—marks of order, of vigilance, of memory. The same shape repeated over and over again: a circle split by a vertical line, surrounded by radiating lines like a sun with a blade through its heart.
And all the while, the island began to change.
At first, it was subtle.
The snow nearest the cave mouth thinned—not from sun, but from presence. The pulses of Cain's Light Stone traveled through stone and earth like warmth through muscle. The air near the cave rose a few degrees. The frost retreated from the inner walls.
Then came the moss.
Small, green, soft. Growing where it shouldn't. Spreading across the stone in spiral patches. Cain didn't plant it. It simply arrived. Responded.
The cave became quiet, not with deadness, but with purpose. A silence that felt held. Holy. The kind of silence found in cathedrals long abandoned but not yet forgotten.
Birds stopped coming near the island.
The seals stayed further away.
Even the wind lost its voice when it crossed the threshold.
---
Cain noticed.
He didn't smile. He didn't speak. But he watched.
Every day, before hunting or carving or sharpening his tools, he would sit at the cave mouth, one hand resting on his Light Stone, and stare out across the island.
The frost still ruled beyond his reach.
The stone circle still smoked faintly in the evenings.
But within a radius of two hundred meters, the world was different. He could feel it. The land was warmer. The silence deeper. Even time seemed to bend—hours slipping like water, drifting into eternity.
He would close his eyes and listen to the pulse of the stone, matching it with his own heartbeat.
They were the same.
And soon he no longer thought of the world beyond. Not of Imperial banners, or endless wars, or screaming green-skinned beasts. Not of medals, or orders, or the face of the Emperor carved in stone above a thousand battlefields.
He thought of the cave.
The Light.
The wind that no longer dared to enter.
He thought of this island, once dead, now breathing through him.
And each night, as the pale moon slid behind the ridge, Cain would kneel on the rock ledge above his lair—wrapped in furs, bone glaive across his knees, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
He watched the horizon.
Not with fear.
But with expectation.
Because something was coming.
He didn't know what.
Only that when it arrived…
It would find his sanctuary waiting.
And it would bleed.
---