Location: Northern Arctic waters, approaching Meighen Island
Time: Six months after the beam of light
---
The HMS Enduring Grace sliced through the steel-gray sea like a blade, her reinforced hull groaning against small floes of spring ice. A faint mist clung to the horizon, half-sea, half-sky, casting the world in a palette of iron and frost. Above, the sun hung pale and low, barely a presence, casting long shadows across the deck.
In the crow's nest, Private Blackmoor clutched his binoculars with white-knuckled fingers, scanning the drift-blurred expanse of the Arctic horizon. He didn't know what he was looking for. Only that he didn't want to find it.
> "Land off the port bow," he called at last, his voice thin from the cold.
---
Below Deck
Captain Elias Harrow stood in the navigation cabin, hands clasped behind his back, studying the expedition charts as if they might change by will alone. The red X marking Meighen Island was surrounded by hand-scribbled notes:
> Beam of light observed – 11:12 PM. Recorded from Devon, Bylot, Greenland. Atmospheric anomaly? Possible auroral fault?
> German interest noted in sector 5-B. Inuit whispers: "Sun-Wound."
He exhaled slowly, a disciplined breath shaped by decades at sea. The logbook beside him was open to a half-written entry:
> "Suspected point of origin for the anomaly has been reached. Expect landfall within 24 hours. Objective: conduct survey, establish cause of anomaly, collect samples, and—if warranted—contain threats."
He didn't write the last sentence that had come to mind:
> If there's something alive, we pray it's civilized.
---
On Deck
Dr. Theophilus Greaves adjusted his heavy spectacles and scanned the horizon with academic curiosity. Dr. Penfold, beside him, scribbled plant growth estimates from the last coastal sample. She'd been quiet lately. Even more than usual.
Near the rail, Sergeant Connor Mallory paced like a wolf. He hadn't liked the feel of the cold here. Too still. Too thick. He'd fought in deserts and jungles, and even a few half-frozen mountains—but this? This silence? This warmth that didn't belong?
It reminded him of ambushes.
---
First Sight of the Island
As the mist parted, Meighen Island emerged.
At first glance, it was what they expected—barren cliffs, pale snowdrifts, stark ridgelines.
But then they saw the colors.
Patches of green, where moss clung to the stone like veins. Cliffs where birds nested in unnatural numbers, crying in a strange, echoing rhythm. Small groves of twisted brush near the base of an icy hill.
And along the shoreline—at the water's edge—
Bodies.
Dozens.
Some upright. Crucified. Others bent backward at impossible angles, spines cracked and spread into wing-like shrines. Bones lashed together with sinew, bound with red-dyed rope and sharpened wood. Their arms pointed inward.
Toward the island's heart.
---
> "My God…" whispered Tremayne, the cartographer, his face pale. "What is this place?"
> "A warning," muttered Corporal Wick, fingers tightening on his rifle. "Or a welcome. Depends how stupid we are."
> "We'll determine that once we're ashore," Captain Harrow said behind them, calm as ever.
He turned to Mallory.
> "You'll take ten men. Establish perimeter. We land in two hours."
> "Yes, sir," Mallory said. But his eyes never left the bones.
---
Below, in the ship's radio room
Operator Hargraves tried for the third time to reach the Arctic relay station in Devon.
Static.
Worse than usual.
He adjusted the frequency. The static deepened—crackling, thudding, almost… rhythmic?
He turned off the receiver. Just for a moment.
And the static didn't stop.
It was still there.
Thudding. Steady. Like a heart beneath the ice.
He stared at the equipment, sweating despite the cold.
> "No," he whispered to no one. "Not possible."
---
Final Notes Before Landing
The HMS Enduring Grace will anchor two kilometers offshore.
The first landing party will include:
Captain Harrow (observation)
Dr. Greaves (documentation)
Sergeant Mallory and 10 marines (security)
Isaac Tremayne (mapping)
Penfold (medical standby)
They will bring rifles, supply crates, and a basic encampment kit.
As the ship's bell rang for landfall preparations, birds circled overhead in silence. The island remained still.
But Cain? Cain crouched on a narrow ridge above the southern shore, the wind rolling gently over him, scattering flecks of bone ash across the cliffside like snow.
He had seen the masts an hour ago. Now, the ship's full shape was clear—iron-clad hull, billowing white sails, belching steam from a rear stack. Not native. Not primitive. No bone. No totem. Just steel. Fire. Arrogance.
He said nothing.
He simply watched.
His skull mask hid his face, but behind it, his lips were tight. Not with anger, but with focus.
After all this was the moment he had prepared for.
Behind him the Light Stone pulsed softly beneath the ground. He had buried it weeks ago, deep beneath the cave, wrapped in bone, flesh, and packed stone. It radiated upward through the rock, invisible to the eyes, but alive beneath his skin.
"Let them think the island is waking. Let them feel the warmth and forget what sleeps inside it." He thought, and he remembered back to his every step, every hunt, and every kill he had done so far.
It was now months ago when the first native scout party had come in silence onto his Islands shore, thinking him a child. Easy to kill and leave dead in the snow, well they were wrong.
And after that he had gone and taken revenge on their village, and foolishly thought that would have been the end of it. He had even mercifully left the ones who didn't fight alive.
And because of his own foolishness a second, braver, bolder, party with black powder muskets and knives carved from whale bone had come for him.
Well the result was the same, but more brutal, no mercy. All of them were left stacked like firewood on the shore, as a warning.
But even that wasn't enough. Soon Women and children had followed, weeks later, searching for the dead, hoping to reclaim bones and dignity.
He gave them a warning to not touch the dead, but they didn't listen. And so he did what the Imperium usually did to heretics, he gave them no second warning.
He only gave them the same silence they gave the Emperor when they turned from Him.
And soon after that he had traveled to their villages. Three in total, from which none now remained.
He had torn them down. Systematically. No ritual. No mercy.
He killed men in their beds.
He killed women with their children still wrapped in hide slings.
He burned nothing.
He left everything. Just dead. Just quiet.
And he found weapons—guns. Powder. Oil. Tools beyond their craftsmanship.
Proof.
> Someone else is feeding them.
> Teaching them.
> Guiding them.
And now, he saw their masters approaching.
The ship bobbed slightly in the current, smoke trailing from its engine like a wound. He could see men on deck. White uniforms. Blue collars. Rifles.
He knew the smell of military arrogance like the back of his hand.
In silence he muttered to himself. "So these are the ones who think they shape worlds with ink and bullets. These primitive heretics? Well no matter, now they sail into my world, and their deaths."
He shifted in silence, stepping away from the cliff's edge.
He had laid twenty-seven traps across the southern slope. Bone pits. Spring spears. Smoke mines made from rendered fat and sulfur scraped from the shore. Obsidian slivers buried beneath moss. Gut-wire snares that cut as they caught.
The cave was no longer shelter.
It was a bastion.
The island was not terrain.
It was a weapon.
And he?
He was no boy. He was a warrior of the light and truth. And now, in reverence he looked to the gray cloudy sky and said.
"Even if I am the last soldier of the Emperor on this God forsaken world. I say, let the heretics come. Let them step on this land of mine. So that I can teach them what lives beneath it."
Then after a long while of waiting Cain watched the the longboats hit the beach. They came with a muffled crunch of wood on gravel and melting snow.
The first boots hit the shore—Sergeant Mallory and six of his Royal Marines, rifles at the ready, bayonets sheathed. Behind them came Dr. Greaves, clutching his satchel of notes, his eyes darting along the shoreline with scientific curiosity already fading into unease. Tremayne, wide-eyed, carried the map cases. And Captain Harrow, silent as ever, scanned the cliffs with the gaze of a man trying to measure something he couldn't see.
They had brought everything a proper landing needed: rifles, rations, flares, tents, shovels, sample kits. The Union Jack fluttered from the mast of the lead boat.
It was the last thing that seemed to move naturally all day.
They stepped ashore under a sun that felt closer than it should have been—not hot, not searing, but present, like an eye watching from behind a thin curtain of clouds. The light spread across the shoreline in an eerie gold, casting long, unnatural shadows that bled into the mossy stone. It should have been bitterly cold. This far north, even in summer, the air should have stung their lungs and frozen their lashes.
But it didn't.
The air was warm.
Not tropical. Not comfortable.
Wrong.
A wrongness of temperature, like heat leaking through the skin of something that was supposed to be dead.
Birds circled above in perfect silence, their wings stretched wide but not flapping. No cries. No wind.
The surf made no sound. The trees—such as they were—twisted little things bent sideways by time and storm, swayed gently, but not in rhythm with the sea.
There was only one sound:
A low, rhythmic thrum.
Barely audible. Felt more than heard.
It came from the earth itself, like the heartbeat of something buried beneath the crust, something asleep, but dreaming of motion. The thrum made the stones vibrate under their boots. It made the dogs in the boats whine and back away, their ears flat, their eyes too wide.
> "Strange weather," Harrow said softly.
> "Strange land," Mallory replied, his eyes scanning the treeline, one hand resting loosely on the stock of his rifle.
They walked past the first totems within thirty minutes.
Bone.
Real. Human. Stripped clean, bleached white by wind and sun, lashed together with gut-string and sinew. Some were arranged as crucifixes—others as twisting towers of femurs and ribs, formed into unnatural spirals. All of them pointed inward. Toward the center of the island.
Toward something.
A few skulls still had scalp and hair attached—frozen, red, and rotting.
Dr. Penfold, her face pale beneath the rim of her fur hood, stopped in front of a low cairn ringed with jawbones and topped with a child's femur.
> "These weren't made to scare away animals," she said, voice flat.
> "No," Mallory murmured, scanning the earth. "They were made to scare us."
The moss grew thicker as they pushed inland.
It was too green. Too wet. It blanketed the ground in long, coiling patches like it had been grown in a greenhouse. The earth beneath it was soft. Warm. Tremayne knelt beside one patch, brushing his fingers over the leaves. He recognized Arctic willow, stonecrop, even tiny blue flowers he couldn't name.
And something else.
A plant with red veins and pale stalks—a flower not native to Earth.
> "This ground is wrong," Tremayne said. "It's… fed."
He pulled back his hand.
The moss twitched.
They made camp two hundred meters from the cliffs, at the base of a ridge that seemed to lean forward, like it wanted to listen.
The pulse was stronger here. Still faint—but steady. Not imagined. Not mechanical.
Organic.
Like standing atop the ribs of a buried giant.
That night, they built fires.
Set watch.
Unpacked equipment.
Radio operator Hargraves tried the portable transmitter.
Nothing.
Then static.
Then pulsing static—in time with the vibrations in the ground. He pulled off his headset with shaking fingers and backed away.
> "No signal. No transmission," he told Captain Harrow.
> "Equipment failure?"
Hargraves didn't answer.
He just looked at the moss and said, very softly:
> "Something's breathing through it."
At midnight, Private Blackmoor vanished.
One moment he was at his post, standing sentry at the edge of the camp.
The next?
Gone.
No cry. No shot. No sound.
Just… absence.
They searched the perimeter.
No blood.
No footprints.
They found his rifle—unfired, perfectly clean—half-buried beneath a bed of moss that hadn't been there an hour before.
> "He didn't run," Mallory said.
> "Then something took him," Penfold whispered, her eyes scanning the dark treeline.
The next morning, they found the first trap.
A bone snare.
Twisted sinew, sharpened splinters arranged with inhuman precision, hidden beneath a ring of flowering plants. The corpse of a fox lay next to it—its head cleanly removed, its eyes still open. It hadn't been eaten.
Just killed.
Near the trap, carved into the bark of a dead tree, was the symbol:
> A circle.
Split vertically.
Surrounded by flaring rays.
The mark of the Sun-Wound.
Mallory stared at it for a long time.
No one spoke.
By noon, two more marines were down.
One had stepped into a hidden pit—lined with jagged stone.
The other had triggered a harpoon snare hidden beneath a bed of moss.
The weapon wasn't primitive. It was engineered—a blend of bone, sinew, tension, and modern understanding of pressure physics.
It should not have been possible for just anyone to build.
> "You think we're being hunted?" Dr. Greaves asked Mallory, rubbing the edge of his coat with nervous fingers.
> "No," Mallory said.
> "Why not?"
Mallory looked up at the ridge.
At the shape he thought he saw, still and watching.
> "Because he's not hunting."
> "He's waiting."
And far above them, in the thinning mist, crouched the thing they did not know to fear.
Small. Still. Skull-faced.
Wrapped in bone, hide, and silence.
Cain.
His glaive lay across his lap. His mask caught the morning light and turned it to fire. The wind didn't move around him. It stopped. Bowed.
He watched.
Unmoving.
Unblinking.
Unmerciful.
The time wasn't right.
But soon.
Soon. So instead Cain turned his gaze to the ship standing still at the sea. It wasn't that far, well for a normal man it was impossibly far to reach, but for him, not a problem.
Like a silent predator he moved to the shore. Took off his clothes, except his skull mask, and then he walked into the water, and began to swim.
The mist clung low to the ocean that morning, thick and slow-moving, like breath held in the throat of the world. From the deck of the Enduring Grace, only the faintest outline of Meighen Island remained visible, black against the pale sky, still sleeping under a veil of cloud and gold-tinged haze.
Most of the crew slept uneasily in their bunks. A skeleton night-watch rotated every three hours—two on deck, one below, one near the engine, two more stationed near the radio.
They were relaxed now. The camp hadn't called for aid. The pulse over the wireless had faded to a whisper. The mist had dulled the world into something close to calm.
They had no reason to expect a predator from beneath.
But already beneath the Hull there was one. Cain had slipped through the water like a ghost carved from shadow.
Naked, his pale skin dulled to gray by the Arctic light, he moved in long, efficient strokes—silent, without splash or churn. The cold didn't touch him. The pressure didn't slow him. His body regulated itself with Red-White precision, heating his blood as needed, slowing his heart to near silence.
He had swam without breath for minutes at a time, eyes wide open. Seaweed brushed past his arms. Tiny fish scattered. Until finally the hull of the Enduring Grace had risen before him like a drowned tower.
He circled once, like a shark inspecting it's prey.
And then he found the anchor chain, and he climbed.
Hand over hand. Slow. Careful. Bone-thick fingers curling around the barnacled iron with inhuman precision. His feet found purchase against the hull. He moved like something that didn't know how to fall.
No creak. No splash.
Just ascent.
At the deck rail, he waited.
Still. Crouched. Naked, except for the mask.
His breath came slow, misting faintly in the cold air. The bone helm over his face was slick with sea spray and silence. No birds called. No wind moved. Only the faint creak of wood and the soft, lazy hum of a sleeping ship.
Two sailors stood watch.
One leaned on the port rail, his rifle slung too loosely over one shoulder, gazing into the fog like it might answer him. The other near the forward mast smoked a cigarette, its tip glowing like an eye in the dark. He whispered to himself—some half-forgotten hymn, a childhood prayer.
Cain stepped over the rail with the ease of a shadow crossing a wall.
His bare feet landed without sound.
The first never turned.
Cain was behind him before the sea could shift.
One hand clamped the sailor's mouth shut, dragging his head backward—fingers hooked into his cheeks. The other reached under the jawline, gripped the neck at the base, and twisted hard.
There was a faint pop. The sailor's body convulsed. His legs kicked once. Then nothing.
Cain eased him to the deck like a sleeping child, gently folding the limbs, tucking the arm behind the back, turning the face away from the light.
A shrine to silence.
The second sailor turned as Cain rose behind him.
> "What the h—?"
His sentence died in his mouth.
Cain moved forward, fast but smooth, as if stepping through water. His left arm looped over the man's shoulder, down across the chest, locking him in place.
The right hand snaked around the throat—tightening in perfect increments.
The man struggled violently—kicking, flailing, clawing at the arm across his windpipe—but Cain squeezed with a predator's patience, letting his legs absorb the noise of the impact, muffling every thud.
He held until the eyes rolled back.
Held longer.
Only when the twitching stopped completely did he release.
The body slumped into his arms. Heavy. Steaming.
Cain pulled it close, wrapped it in the man's own coat, and dragged it to the rear hatch, where both corpses disappeared into shadow.
---
Below Deck – Engine Hall
The boiler rumbled like a slumbering god.
The engineer, hunched over a pressure gauge, muttered something about fuel pressure. His eyes never lifted.
Cain's feet whispered across the steel plating.
The man turned.
Saw him.
Didn't understand what he saw.
Just a small shape, bone-faced, naked, wet.
Then Cain stepped in, two fingers extended like a spearpoint, and jabbed up under the jaw, into the soft underside of the mouth. The fingers punched through to the brainstem with a wet, snapping crack.
The man collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.
Cain didn't slow.
---
In the crew Quarters.
The corridor smelled of oil, wool, and cheap soap.
Six bunks. Six men. All asleep.
He entered like cold air through a crack.
The first man's neck broke in a breath.
The second awoke to see Cain crouched above him. He opened his mouth to scream.
Cain bit his throat.
Tore into it with his teeth. Not out of necessity—out of message.
The third sat up and reached for his pistol. Cain slammed the butt of a bone blade into his temple so hard the skull fractured inward.
The fourth got halfway out of bed.
Cain grabbed his foot, snapped the ankle backward, and let him fall screaming—then crushed the man's throat with his bare heel.
The fifth didn't wake at all.
Cain simply slid the blade through the ribs, directly into the heart. The man exhaled once. Gone.
The sixth, startled by the wet sound of death around him, managed a strangled cry before Cain dropped from the ceiling beam he'd climbed moments before and drove both knees into the man's sternum, cracking bone. He covered the mouth with one hand, waited for the gasping to stop.
Then silence.
Six dead.
The floor was slick with blood and steam—but Cain's breath was even. His fingers were steady.
> No alarms. No witnesses. Just correction.
---
In the Radio Room.
The door creaked open slowly, hinges groaning like the voice of something long buried.
Hargraves sat hunched at the transmitter, tapping weakly at the key. Static hissed in his ear.
The pulses were back.
Not Morse. Not code.
A heartbeat.
He stared at the signal, confused, afraid.
Then the room dimmed.
He turned.
There, framed by flickering shadows, stood a small shape, steam rising from bare skin, bone mask glowing faintly from the static's pulse.
Hargraves reached under the desk for his revolver.
Too slow.
Cain threw the knife underhand—a flick of the wrist, smooth and deliberate.
The blade buried itself in Hargraves' neck, just beneath the chin, splintering cartilage and silencing the last human voice on the ship.
Hargraves choked, blood pouring down his chest, eyes wide.
Cain stepped forward, pulled the knife free, and let the body fall against the transmitter, one bloody finger still twitching against the Morse key.
Dot.
Dash.
Dot.
Silence.
---
Above.
Cain stood at the helm, the ship groaning beneath his feet. Steam curled from the vents like incense from an altar.
He stared toward the island.
Fires burned faintly at the camp.
He watched them flicker.
And he knew.
> "Now they are alone."
He stepped back from the wheel.
And melted into shadow.
---
Location: Meighen Island – British Camp → Shoreline
Time: Dawn, one day after the first stealth killings aboard the Enduring Grace
---
In the Camp, just Before Dawn the men sat in worry. Hargraves' last transmission had come in the previous afternoon—a half-code, cut mid-sentence, followed by nothing but that strange rhythmic static.
Captain Harrow hadn't liked it.
But he hadn't panicked.
The ship's radio had always been temperamental this far north. Snow static. Atmospheric charge. Ghost signals.
Still, he'd sent a runner back to the shoreline—a pair of sailors with a flare kit, tasked with checking in with the ship's deck crew. They were expected to return by sunrise.
They didn't.
And now the sun was already rising blood-orange through the mist.
Not breaking it.
Just glowing behind it, like a wound refusing to close.
Tasiq, one of the Inuit guides, knelt at the edge of the mossline near the fire pit. His fingers dug into the earth. His eyes were locked on the distant shoreline.
> "The water is moving," he whispered.
Sergeant Mallory stepped beside him, squinting through the binoculars.
What he saw froze his spine.
The ship—the Enduring Grace—was moving.
It wasn't just drifting.
It was turning.
Slowly. Deliberately.
The anchor was up.
The boilers were live.
The rudder—aimed straight at the island.
> "That's not wind," said Penfold behind him, her voice dry with dread.
> "No," Mallory muttered. "That's a, wait is that a small hand on the wheel."
He lowered the binoculars.
Then, the ship accelerated.
Not wildly. Not chaotically.
But with the purpose of a battering ram.
The first sound was wood screaming against gravel.
The second was the detonation of a boiler pipe.
The ship slammed into the shallows at the mouth of the inlet—right where the longboats had been drawn up. The canvas shelters, crates of munitions, spare gear—all crushed under hundreds of tons of steel and steam.
The longboats splintered like matchsticks.
The munitions cache went up with a dull, wet boom, throwing fire and crates into the air.
One of the sailors, posted near the coast, was instantly vaporized, his body caught under the descending hull.
The ship groaned, listed sideways, half-submerged, half-grounded. Smoke poured from the ruptured mid-section.
The Union Jack burned slowly from the rear mast.
Screams echoed across the mossy field.
Captain Harrow stood frozen in disbelief as half his exit plan died in flame.
> "What—how—"
Mallory grabbed him by the arm, shaking him hard.
> "Sir. That was deliberate."
> "There's no one scheduled to man the ship. No signal. No flares. The watch—" Harrow trailed off.
> "They're dead," Mallory snapped. "They're all dead."
> "How do you know that?"
> "Because someone just crashed our ship into our only way out. And not a single shot was fired."
The camp erupted into chaos.
Tents were torn down. Fires were kicked out. The portable radio—nonfunctional. The relay box: shattered. Penfold tried to organize a medical triage—no one was listening.
Every rifle was now loaded.
Every man had stopped speaking in full sentences.
And worst of all, no one had seen the enemy.
Because Cain had already long ago swam ashore, gotten dressed, dried himself and gotten ready.
His skull mask glistened with dew. His breath fogged once before disappearing into the trees.
He was setting more traps now—gutwire, bone pits, scalp spikes beneath moss. He moved between them like a ghost, bare feet silent on the soil he had claimed.
From his vantage, high in the ridge above the crash site, he watched the smoke rise and the men scatter.
His glaive rested across his back.
His eyes were calm.
His heart was slow.
And the Light Stone pulsed beneath the cave like a buried sun.
> No more boats. No more radios. No more warnings.
> They are in my sanctum now.
> And I will erase them—one breath at a time.