"Another world?" Claire repeated softly, fingers tightening around her now-cold mug of cocoa.
Caelan leaned back, arms folded, gaze cast skyward through the transparent dome above the rooftop. The stars blinked down, impossibly distant, uncaring.
"He's serious," Claire said, turning to her brother. "Isn't he?"
Caelan didn't answer immediately. His jaw shifted slightly, but his eyes stayed fixed on the sky, like he was trying to spot the crack between realities himself. "…He thinks he is."
"That's not fair," Claire murmured.
"It's not unfair," Caelan said. "He's brilliant, sure. A genius. But geniuses can break, too."
Claire fell quiet. The glow from the perimeter lights reflected in her nebula-blue eyes—eyes they shared with Jack.
"It didn't feel like he was lying."
Caelan sighed, finally turning his gaze to her.
"No… it didn't."
They sat in silence, the kind that only clings to families in the aftermath of truths too large to swallow. The kind that waits, patient and watchful, like something had already begun shifting underneath them.
Claire hugged her knees. "What kind of world would make Dad like this? What kind of world would… take Mom?"
Caelan didn't know. But something in his chest stirred—a curious, uncomfortable echo of something ancient, something not entirely his.
He glanced over his shoulder toward the elevator doors that had long since closed behind their father. "Whatever world it is," he muttered, "I don't think it's done with us yet."
*
Claire Ravenwell's POV
Caelan stood, brushing invisible dust from his jacket. "I need some air," he muttered.
"Real air, not filtered through sentiment."
Claire didn't stop him. She watched as he stepped through the elevator doors and vanished into the hiss of magnetic lifts and polished steel.
Typical. He always think alone when the world tilted too far sideways.
She remained seated for a while longer, her breath fogging slightly in the rooftop chill.
Around her, the city glittered like spilled stars its beautiful, yes, but impossibly distant. Just like everything else.
Claire eventually stood, mug abandoned. Instead of retreating to her room like a normal girl after a surprise party, a soul-rattling revelation, and a heated brotherly exit, she made her way downward—beneath the tower. Deeper. To the chambers few ever saw.
To her.
The corridor lights dimmed automatically as she entered the high-security wing, scanning her bio-signature with a muted chime. The air here felt different. Heavier. As if the very walls held their breath.
The reinforced door opened with a soft hiss.
Inside, Eris slept.
Claire stepped into the vast enclosure and looked up—always up. The mutant Tyrannosaur was curled like a nightmare in stasis, muscles taut even in slumber. Obsidian scales shimmered faintly under containment lights, and the silver feather-quills down her spine flickered as if breathing.
Eris's eyes were closed, but Claire knew she was aware.
"Hi," she whispered. "It's me again."
The room hummed, temperature-controlled and silent save for the gentle thrum of life-support systems. Claire stepped closer until she reached the observation platform, just high enough to be face-to-face when the beast stood.
She looked into the stillness, feeling more seen here than anywhere else.
Her fingers brushed the containment glass.
"Dad made you for me. Not as a weapon. Not as an experiment. You're… more."
The faintest shiver passed through Eris's spine, a subtle twitch like the ripple of a dream.
Claire smiled. "He said you were born from science. I think you were born from something else too. Something… wild. Something old."
She sat cross-legged on the cold floor, resting her head against the glass. "Caelan's probably brooding on a rooftop right now, thinking too hard like he always does. He thinks Dad's crazy."
She hesitated.
"I'm not so sure he's wrong," she said quietly.
"But I don't think he's lying, either."
From behind the glass, one massive golden eye slid open.
It stared at her—unblinking, aware, ancient.
Claire didn't flinch.
Instead, she reached out and pressed her palm to the barrier between them.
"I don't know what's coming," she whispered.
"But I'm glad you're with me."
The eye blinked once. Slowly.
Then came the faintest sound—less a growl than a rumble, a distant echo, like thunder far off in the mountains of a world not yet reached.
*
The rumble faded.
Claire kept her hand pressed to the glass.
She wasn't afraid, not in the way most people would be. Not even in the way her father might've expected. The creature on the other side of the barrier was the size of a drop ship, with claws like butchered blades and teeth that could snap composite steel. But fear had never been Claire's language.
And right now, Eris wasn't just reacting. She was listening.
"I'm not even sure what I want to ask you," Claire murmured.
Her breath fogged lightly against the transparent partition. The hum of security systems filled the chamber like white noise, but it only made the silence more intimate—like the whole tower had hushed to let them speak.
She wrapped her arms around her knees. "It's weird," she whispered. "I should be crying or screaming or asking Dad a thousand questions. But it's like my mind won't catch up. I'm stuck."
She stared into the golden eye.
"She's alive," Claire said. "Mom. All this time."
The words left a chill in her throat. It was the first time she'd said it aloud. Somehow it made it real.
Not dead.
Not gone.
Just… somewhere else.
And suddenly, everything—everything—was fragile again. All the walls she'd built from sharp smiles and colder wit felt paper-thin now.
"I don't even know what she looks like,"
Claire admitted. "Just paintings. Memories that aren't mine. She died before we were even two. Or what me and my brother believes. I'm not really sure anymore"
Her gaze dropped. "I used to dream of her. I thought that meant I missed her. But maybe… maybe I remembered something I wasn't supposed to."
A soft shift drew her attention back to Eris.
The mutant tyrannosaur moved—not much, just a flex of the forelimbs, talons twitching as if flexing through a ghost of old memories. She stirred like something ancient coiled under the surface, waiting for a call that hadn't come yet.
Claire rose and took a few steps along the edge of the glass, her eyes tracing every detail.
Eris was beautiful in the way comets were—too vast, too fast, too fierce to touch. Her sleek obsidian scales weren't flat like reptilian skin but almost metallic, layered like armor forged in the heart of some dying star. Veins of pale silver pulsed faintly beneath them, like streaks of molten ore. The feathered quills along her spine twitched and rippled with every breath, bristling like the hackles of some prehistoric sentinel.
And those eyes—gold and fathomless—watched her not like a beast, but like a rival.
Or a mirror.
"I didn't want a pet," Claire said. "I didn't want anything, really. Not a birthday party, not synthetic cake, not a designer monster from the labs beneath Dad's genius ego."
She rested her hand over her heart.
"But now that you're here… I get it."
She tilted her head.
"You're not even a dinosaur anymore."
A long pause stretched between them. Eris tilted her head—ever so slightly—as if considering the same question.
"You're me, aren't you?" Claire murmured.
"Not in the literal way Caelan gets all poetic about… but something made you understand me. Maybe it was Dad's tampering. Maybe it's because you were born for me. But somehow… you already know who I am."
The golden eye narrowed slightly.
"You're not afraid of my silence. Or my temper. Or the part of me that doesn't fit in."
Claire stepped back slightly and smiled—not with joy, but with recognition.
"You're not the creature the world wanted," she said. "You're the one I needed."
A soft chuff of air echoed in the chamber. Not a growl. Not a threat. A breath.
Claire pressed her palm to the glass again.
"Let them think you're a monster," she said. "I know better."
The lights flickered for a second—just a pulse. Long enough to catch the flash of reflected gold and silver, the way their forms mirrored one another across the divide.
Then, with steady poise, Claire turned and walked toward the exit.
As the door sealed behind her, the chamber fell silent once more.
But Eris did not sleep.
*
Jack Ravenwell's POV
The holograms faded, one by one, until only silence remained. The tower's luminous interface dimmed, leaving Jack Ravenwell standing alone in the quiet of his study, bathed in the cool blues and silvers of artificial twilight.
The call with Dr. Astra Lane had ended with the usual report—Rift resonance stable, but no breach.
No sign.
No doorway.
Not yet.
Jack leaned back slowly in his chair, staring through the translucent wall at the far-off cityscape. Neon trails snaked through the night like veins of electric blood. So much had changed in this world since he returned.
But he had not.
He stood and crossed the room, stopping before a seamless panel embedded in the far wall. A brief pulse-scan, retinal confirmation.
The steel face split open with a soft hiss, revealing the hidden vault—his memory crypt.
No digital archives lived here. Only what couldn't be replicated.
Jack reached for the first object a cracked wooden mask, small and ridiculous. Its paint was flaking, bright colors dulled by time. A crooked grin was carved across its face, two uneven tusks jutting from either side.
The Grimkin Mask.
His lips twitched, caught between disbelief and laughter. Of all things, this was the first to come to mind.
**
The Forest of Hollow Teeth
He hadn't eaten in two days.
The berries he tried had nearly choked him. The stream water made him vomit. The air itself felt like it carried strange spores—his lungs burned with each breath, the gravity slightly off, just enough to make his muscles ache.
Everything here was alien. And beautiful. And merciless.
Jack Ravenwell, the man who'd unraveled synthetic DNA structures and built fusion cores in his sleep, was being outwitted by vines.
His datapad was gone. His neural interface was fried. The only thing he had left was the survival knife at his belt and a mind that refused—refused—to shut down.
He scribbled notes in the dirt. Marked animal tracks. He counted the suns every hour. Even as he bled. Even as he cursed. Even when he curled beneath a tree and thinking maybe this was how it ended.
Then came the shriek.
A shadow dropped from the canopy and landed on a root with impossible silence.
Jack jolted upright, fists clenched. A predator.
But no. It was… smaller than expected. Barely waist-high. Wiry, with leathery skin the color of moss, bright yellow eyes, and a jagged grin that seemed too large for its skull.
The creature wore a vest stitched from feathers and beetle shells, a gourd tied to its head like a helmet, and no pants.
It blinked.
Then it lobbed a half-eaten fish at Jack's chest.
"…What the!?"
The creature bared its teeth. Laughed. Then spoke something sharp and clicky—guttural, like a frog gargling gravel.
Jack blinked back.
The creature repeated it louder, arms wide, then jabbed a finger at its chest and said:
"Blib!"
Then it jabbed the same finger at Jack.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "I'm not calling myself 'Blib.'"
Blib squinted. Then it nodded solemnly and said something else—slower, more deliberate—and gestured around, to the forest, the trees, the sky.
A language. A pattern.
Jack's brain lit up like a flare. He was too exhausted to speak, but not to think.
He opened his field journal, scrawled down every sound, every symbol he could infer. He copied the gestures. Repeated the words.
Badly.
Blib threw another fish.
But it stayed.
Later, under a makeshift lean-to built from massive leaves, Jack offered the little creature the only currency he had left:
Knowledge
He showed Blib how to make fire with flint instead of beetle spit. Drew diagrams in the dirt. Traded gestures for grammar.
They bartered, bonded, argued, laughed.
Days passed.
Jack learned the word for "sun," then "tree," then "not-food" (crucial). In return, Blib taught him how to recognize dream wasps, to avoid egg-moss, and—most importantly—how to survive Grimkin politics.
Which mostly involved running faster than the other guy.
**
The mask felt heavier now.
Jack held it close, his eyes tracing the worn edges where Blib had once shoved it on his face and declared him "honorary fungus-tribe scamp." He had hated it. Cherished it. He had fought with it on, laughed with it on, bled with it on.
He pressed his forehead against it for a long, silent moment.
"I was terrified. Starving. Alone. And still, all I could think about was learning."
"You pulled me into your chaos, Blib. You gave me language. A name. You were… the first to see me as more than prey."
The room's silence didn't feel as heavy now. The memories, sharp and vibrant, remained—etched not only into old wood but into the man Jack had become.
Somewhere far away, under unfamiliar stars, a mischievous voice echoed in his mind:
"Tall-Bleb soft. But smart. Not bad for shiny-brain human."
He allowed himself one more quiet laugh.
The mask rested back in its velvet cradle, the grin frozen, but now less mocking—almost endearing.
Jack reached further into the drawer, his fingers brushing smooth metal… then catching on something jagged. Cold.
Familiar.
He pulled it free.
A crude spearhead.
Not forged—but engineered. Carved from the fanged beak of a Drakhelm cave-crab, polished and set into a split bone shaft reinforced with black resin and hardened bark.
Primitive in appearance.
But efficient in design.
Jack turned it slowly in his hands. The resin still bore faint traces of molecular alignment runes—his own handiwork, etched in moments of stolen rest. He'd tested durability, recalibrated mass distribution, even added a shock-absorbing knot of gut fiber at the base.
"This was the first time I didn't feel helpless."
**
The Cleftwoods – Edge of Blister Hollow
They'd tracked the beast for three days.
The "blisterback," as Blib called it, was a lumbering thing—part boar, part insect, all armor. It stank of rot and acid, and it had already chased them up a tree twice.
Jack had no proper weapons. No blaster. No drones. Just knowledge.
And desperation.
While Blib constructed decoys from vines and mud, Jack took apart the hollowed remains of a crab-shell creature they'd found gutted along the marsh. He tested its resilience against stone. Studied how its structure absorbed force.
Then he tested tension lengths with vines. Built a weighted net. Carved and bound the spearhead using local adhesive sap stabilized with sunlight exposure.
He calculated everything—angle, trajectory, gravitational correction, target weak points.
On the fourth night, they set the trap.
And it worked.
The beast fell. Struggled. Screamed.
But the spear—his spear—pierced the under-armor just above the leg joint. Right where he'd predicted the chitin would flex.
Blib jumped on the creature, screaming in triumph and throwing purple moss into the air like confetti.
Jack fell to his knees, gasping, bloodied from the fight but laughing. Laughing—because in that moment, something ancient stirred in him.
Not fear.
But exhilaration.
He was still Jack Ravenwell—in any world.
*
He ran his fingers along the spearhead's jagged edge. It wasn't pretty. But it was perfect.
He held it up against the light, and for a second, he saw his younger reflection in the polished edge—a man wild-eyed, worn, yet fiercely alive.
This was the first relic that made him believe.
That genius wasn't bound to Earth.
That understanding was universal.
That even here—in the savage, unknown wilds—he could build something meaningful.
A soft hum from the study console broke his reverie. A message from Astra's team blinked on standby.
He didn't move to answer it.
Not yet.
Instead, he looked once more at the makeshift weapon and whispered to no one:
"You reminded me… I could win."
Jack gently laid the spearhead back in its cradle beside the mask. His hand hovered for a moment, lingering on the lid before he finally let it shut with a soft click.
He paused.
His gaze drifted to the back corner of the drawer—where something faintly shimmered beneath a fold of old woven cloth. An object he hadn't touched in years. Hadn't dared to.
A pendant.
Silver. Etched with a delicate tree crowned by a crescent moon. Its design wasn't Elven, nor entirely human. Something between.
Something hers.
It wasn't just a trinket.
It had been hers. Once pressed into his hand the night they were separated by fate and flame.
The chain still carried her warmth.
And every time he looked at it, he felt the ache return—a silent, steady drumbeat in his chest that no achievement could ever drown out.
I'm not ready to remember that.
His fingers inched toward it.
Almost there.
The pendant seemed to breathe, catching the light just so, as if it were waiting. As if she were.
"Not now," he whispered.
Then the console pinged—sharp and urgent.
[INCOMING HOLO MESSAGE: Priority – ASTRA//PortaLexus Core]
Jack stiffened.
Duty returned like armor sliding into place.
He shut the drawer without another glance and crossed the room.
But as the screen flared to life, casting blue light across his face, the pendant remained in the dark—glinting quietly.
*
The holoscreen shimmered to life, and Astra's face appeared—sharp-featured, silver-eyed, her head haloed by tight coils of holo-data flowing behind her like a crown of code. She was one of the few people Jack trusted to speak candidly, and even she measured her words carefully.
"Jack," she said, nodding once. "I wasn't expecting a call-back so fast. Portal Sequence Twelve is holding, but we've got… fluctuations."
Jack didn't waste time. "What kind?"
"Quantum entanglement instability on the outbound pulse. It's not enough to abort the tests, but—"
"It's enough to crack the rift if the calculations drift past eleven microns," Jack finished, already accessing the stream. His eyes skimmed the figures projected in midair.
Astra's lips twitched. "You do know we have a department to run those simulations, right?"
"I didn't build a tower to watch it guess."
"Fair," she said dryly.
He isolated a waveform, flicked it with two fingers. "Stabilize the polar loop using a cascading dampener across the fourth sequence node. Then mirror the anchor frequency."
"You're rewriting the protocol mid-iteration."
"I'm fixing it mid-iteration."
There was a pause. A technician in the background whispered something to Astra, but her eyes never left Jack.
"You don't sleep, do you?"
"I did once. It cost me everything."
"…Right."
Astra folded her arms. "The team's wondering. The press too. You built the summoning gate in record time, threw resources at it like a war effort. You've kept everything classified. Jack, what's really at the other end of that rift?"
Jack's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes shifted—steel, shadow, and longing all at once.
"Answers," he said simply.
"That's not enough for most people."
"I'm not building it for most people."
He stepped closer to the screen, voice calm but laced with fire.
"I'm building it because the laws of reality bent once. Because I saw things—real things—that shattered everything science told me was impossible. And because somewhere, beyond that rift, lies the truth I couldn't save the first time."
He leaned back, tone softening but no less resolute.
"If the world wants spectacle, give them dragons. If they want reason, give them progress. But if anyone asks what Jack Ravenwell truly seeks…"
He looked past the screen, past the room, past the world.
"Tell them I'm chasing the echo of a promise I intend to keep."
Astra was quiet for a long moment. Then she exhaled. "I'll prep the stabilization update."
"Send it to my interface."
"Anything else?"
Jack's gaze drifted to the drawer—where the pendant waited in silence.
"No," he said. "That's enough for tonight."
*
Astra Lane's POV
After the call ended, Astra stood alone in the softly glowing dark of her lab.
She stared at the cooling holoscreen, still flickering faint traces of Jack's presence—lines of rewritten code, his voice echoing in her ears. "I'm not building it for most people."
He never was.
She turned, letting the darkness settle, and walked toward the viewport overlooking the Ravenwell Spire—the very heart of humanity's scientific ambition. The tower stretched into the clouds like a blade carved into the sky, humming with secrets.
Her datapad buzzed. A ping. "Protocol Update Received: J.R. Revision – V.37.1. Compiled. Executing."
Typical.
Her mind drifted, unbidden, to the first time she'd heard the name Jack Ravenwell.
[Archived News Bulletin – Circa 2342]
"Thirty-two-year-old bioengineer Jack Ravenwell has successfully grown the first synthetically viable organ transplant tailored on a quantum-level genome signature. The breakthrough marks a new era in medical science—'It's not just medicine,' he told the press. 'It's personalized immortality.'"
She'd been fifteen. Watching from her bunk in a dilapidated orbital research station, the signal flickering through static. Even then, she hadn't fully understood what she was seeing—only that it was something impossible made real.
A man who bent science the way a sculptor bends clay.
[Ravenwell Technologies Press Conference – 2349]
"Today, the world welcomes the Lazarus-Class Genome Reclamation System. For the first time in history, extinct species can be brought back—not as museum curiosities, but as living beings. 'We're not playing God,' said Ravenwell. 'We're just reminding the universe what it forgot.'"
She remembered watching that speech a dozen times. Not just for the content, but for the way he stood—confident but untouchable, eyes lit with something just out of reach. He was the kind of man who didn't chase Nobel Prizes.
He outgrew them.
And yet, when she met him in person years later—fresh out of her postdoctorate, trembling before his infamous gaze—she hadn't expected him to be so quiet. So focused. So… haunted.
As if every success was just a stepping stone toward something more.
[Internal Memo – Ravenwell Spire, Biotech Division – 2358]
"Project WYRM Phase III approved by Executive Order. Genetic acceleration of Class-Alpha DNA samples confirmed. Subject viability: unprecedented. Classified under 'Blackcore Level' clearance. Eyes-only: J. Ravenwell."
W.Y.R.M.
World Yield Reclamation Model. That was the public lie.
The truth? Astra had seen glimpses—hints of scaled things with minds like computers and instincts like fire. Hybrids born of science but shaped by something stranger. Not just dinosaurs. Something… other.
And Jack had smiled, just faintly, when the first one opened its eyes.
She returned to her desk now, staring at the updated protocol Jack had rewritten mid-call. Flawless. Elegant. Like watching God handwrite an equation.
She didn't understand him. Not completely.
No one ever would.
But she believed in him. Not because he was infallible. But because every time the world whispered "impossible," Jack Ravenwell built a machine and proved it wrong.
*
Caelan Ravenwell's POV
The world didn't end when your father told you your long-dead mother was alive in another world.
It just got quieter.
Caelan sat curled in the sunken alcove of his private study, high in one of Ravenwell Tower's upper spires. The walls were lined with sleek holo-bookshelves and archaic paper-bound volumes, some gifted by his father, others scavenged from ancient vaults and forbidden auctions. He liked this mix of past and future. He liked that here, the chaos dulled into silence.
A familiar journal rested in his lap. Handwritten. One of Jack's old expedition logs—though Caelan had never been told where the expedition took place. The entries were cryptic. Diagrams of inhuman anatomy, sketches of beasts that defied Earth's natural order, passages of old Drakhelmic script painstakingly translated in Jack's fluid hand.
He'd read it a hundred times before.
And yet… today, it felt new. Too new.
"Page twenty-four,"
came Echo's voice from the embedded speakers above,
"You always go to page twenty-four when you're spiraling."
Caelan didn't look up. He turned the page. Sure enough—page twenty-four. A sketch of a coiled beast made of wings and spines, its eyes black voids.
"I'm not spiraling," he muttered.
"Of course not. You're brooding, which is spiraling with a better haircut."
Caelan huffed, the corner of his mouth twitching. Echo always had that timing—gentle sarcasm when things got too heavy. He appreciated it more than he let on.
"Did you know about this?" he asked quietly.
"My mother. That she might be alive?"
"Negative. Your father encrypted that tier of memory access. I only know what he allowed me to process, and clearly, this wasn't one of them."
"So even you were left in the dark."
"I'm an AI, not a confidante. But…"
Echo's voice softened slightly.
"…I think he kept it from you because it hurt. Not because he didn't trust you."
Caelan closed the journal and leaned his head back, eyes tracing the artificial stars that shimmered across the skylight.
A silence fell again, but not a heavy one.
More like the kind that filled space after a deep breath.
"I keep thinking I should feel something… bigger," Caelan finally said. "Shock. Anger. Joy. But all I feel is this weird sense of inevitability. Like… of course she's alive. Of course we're about to step into another world."
"That might be your Ravenwell DNA speaking," Echo quipped.
"You all treat impossibility like it's an overdue project."
A beat. Caelan smiled faintly. "Fair."
He let the silence stretch, staring blankly at the screen as it cycled through idle animations—looped imagery of ancient ruins, dragons from mythology, interstellar maps. None of it grounded him. Not after what he saw. Not after the… creature.
He'd seen the records. The anatomy of dragons in fantasy didn't align with the thing in the stasis chamber. It wasn't a dinosaur either—not entirely. Too sleek. Too intelligent. Too... real.
Caelan had tried to classify him—briefly. Cross-referencing him with known prehistoric species, biotech anomalies, synthetic organism templates. But every angle led nowhere. And it hadn't even been a day since he saw him. Hours, really. Maybe not even that.
He haunted Caelan's thoughts like a puzzle missing half its pieces.
"You're quiet," Echo said. "Thinking about him?"
Caelan didn't respond right away. Instead, he leaned back, letting his eyes close, the image of the creature burned into his mind—those deep, obsidian eyes that seemed to reflect not light, but intent.
"I don't know what he is," he murmured. "I don't think anyone does."
"You called him a dragon," Echo pointed out gently.
He haunted Caelan's thoughts like a puzzle missing half its pieces.
"That's just... the closest word," Caelan said.
"But it's wrong. He's not a dragon. He's something else."
"An anomaly?"
Caelan cracked a tired smile. "Yeah. A beautiful, terrifying, impossible anomaly."
*
The elevator gave a soft hiss as it slid open, spilling warm light into the polished corridor.
Caelan stepped out, hands buried in the pockets of his deep gray hoodie, his mind still echoing with fragmented thoughts—about his creature, his father, his mother.
The Tower, at this hour, was quieter. Not silent—Ravenwell biotech never slept—but the hum of activity was dimmer, less performative. Just the real work now.
The kind that happened in the shadows of genius.
As Caelan made his way toward the biodome housing his creature, a familiar voice echoed around the corner.
"...No, no, you're factoring the thermal delay as if it's linear. It's not. It's recursive. Start again."
Caelan rounded the bend and spotted Dr. Elrin Voss, the Tower's senior behavioral scientist, mid-lecture beside a hovering holopanel. He was an older man with skin like well-aged parchment and hair the color of snow, tied neatly at the nape of his neck. A flickering neural monocle glinted at his temple as he frowned at the readout. Beside him stood a flustered young assistant—no older than Caelan himself—frantically swiping at a tablet.
"Dr. Voss, I swear I recalibrated it—"
"If you'd recalibrated it correctly, Quen, the AI's predictive curve wouldn't be collapsing," Elrin snapped, though not unkindly. "If your goal is to make your career disappear into an entropy field, by all means, continue."
Caelan slowed slightly, watching the scene with vague amusement. Quen, the assistant, noticed him first and stiffened like a startled meerkat.
"O-oh! M-Mister Ravenwell," she stammered, fumbling her tablet.
Dr. Voss didn't look up. "I assumed you were headed to the hybrid dome. You're later than usual."
"I had some thinking to do," Caelan replied, tone dry but not dismissive.
"Join the club," Elrin muttered. He jabbed a finger toward the display. "My assistant here is attempting to solve a basic thermal-anomaly prediction for the T-Rex hybrid's aggression triggers. She's failed twice."
Quen looked like she wanted to sink into the floor.
"...It's fine," she whispered. "I've only been here six weeks."
Caelan approached the holopanel, tilting his head as the readout flickered. Layers of temperature graphs, metabolic spikes, and aggression markers scrolled past. His dark eyes scanned it in silence.
"You're using a fixed midpoint assumption," he said. "But that doesn't work with a hybrid model—especially not one with variable neural latency. You need to anchor the curve to the spike pre-rage, not post."
He tapped the screen, adjusted two settings, and within seconds, the prediction curve smoothed into a clean spiral.
The room fell quiet.
Even Elrin blinked. "…Huh."
Quen gawked. "I—I didn't even think to adjust the rage threshold anchor…"
Caelan gave a small shrug. "My dad built the algorithm. It's his signature recursion."
Dr. Voss gave him a long look, unreadable behind his gleaming monocle. Then he turned back to Quen.
"Well? Now you've been embarrassed by a Ravenwell. Consider yourself officially initiated into the Tower."
Quen gave a nervous laugh.
Caelan allowed himself the faintest smile. "It's not a competition."
"Of course it is," Voss replied. "You're just the only one who doesn't need to say it."
The moment lingered. Not uncomfortable, but charged. It was a rare thing to see Caelan Ravenwell speak, rarer still to watch him think aloud. For a flicker of time, Quen wasn't looking at the heir of a biotech empire. She was watching someone unravel impossible code like it was poetry.
Caelan nodded once, then continued down the corridor.
Behind him, Quen whispered, "Is he always like that?"
"Quiet?" said Dr. Voss. "Yes."
"Smart?"
"More than he wants anyone to know."
*
The halls of Ravenwell Tower were never truly silent. There was always a thrum in the bones of the structure—the muted pulse of energy conduits, the quiet whisper of air filtration systems, the faintest resonance of distant machinery humming somewhere above or below.
But here, in the sublevels beneath the tower's core, the silence shifted.
It wasn't the absence of sound.
It was the presence of something else.
Caelan's steps slowed as he moved deeper into the corridor—walls thickened with reinforced alloys, lights dimming in calculated gradients. This level didn't welcome visitors. It warned them.
He passed two sentinel drones standing motionless at a biometric gate, their visors flickering once in recognition. The door unlocked with a low mechanical hiss, and beyond it: stillness.
And pressure.
Not from the air.
From the presence.
He exhaled quietly and stepped through.
The corridor to the containment chamber stretched ahead like a ritual pathway, deliberately long and bare. Not for security—his father never did anything that simple. It was psychological. A place to confront oneself before facing it.
His mind skimmed over the previous encounter—when the light field had warped around the chamber, distorting like a mirage, and the being inside had opened its eyes.
Not glowing.
Not beast-like.
Just… infinite.
Like looking into the gravity well of a collapsed star.
His heart beat a little faster—not in fear, but something heavier. Something reverent.
Each step felt like walking through an invisible tide, drawn inexorably toward the impossible.
The creature didn't roar or rattle its cage. It never had.
It didn't need to.
It was the storm beneath the silence.
At the threshold, he paused. The reinforced door loomed before him, layered in alloy composites, static dampeners, and phase shielding. His hand hovered over the access panel.
Somewhere in the deep logic of the tower, the system read his hesitation.
Then he pressed his palm down.
The door hissed open with breath-like quiet.
Cold air, unnaturally dry, rushed out to meet him—chilled not by climate control, but by proximity to whatever resided inside.
And then the chamber revealed itself.
And within it… the anomaly.
It stood—coiled, poised, motionless. Not resting. Never quite still.
Its silhouette was long and sinuous, armored in pale, prismatic scales that bent light in strange angles. Its limbs were too long, too jointed, its claws like sculpted blades. The ridged tail shimmered faintly, humming with residual energy like a tuning fork vibrating against reality itself.
There were no wings. No fire. No myth.
Only the sense that it shouldn't exist.
And yet it did.
And it saw him.
Not with eyes that burned—but ones that reflected. Smooth and black as obsidian, they drank in light and gave nothing back.
Not intelligence. Not emotion.
Just focus.
Unblinking.
Unshakable.
It was a question—one no one had asked, but someone had dared to answer.
Caelan's breath caught.
Father made this.
For him.
And not just to impress. Not to dazzle the world.
This wasn't spectacle.
This was legacy.
*
The door clicked shut behind Caelan, sealing the chamber in quiet.
It was a different kind of silence—thick, expectant. Almost like stepping into the deep end of a pool. Not heavy in the lungs, but in the mind.
The creature didn't move. It rarely did.
And yet it filled the room completely.
Its presence was undeniable, as if it bent the world around itself just by existing. Not in size, but in substance. Like gravity had found a new favorite place.
Caelan approached with slow, deliberate steps. There was no fear. Just a careful sort of respect.
"Hey," he said quietly. The word felt oddly small in the space.
The creature tilted its head slightly. Not like an animal. Not quite curious. More like it was weighing the moment.
Caelan stopped just behind the faint marking etched into the floor—the line his father had said the creature never crossed. Not because it couldn't, but because it chose not to.
"I've been trying to figure you out," Caelan said, settling into a seated position just behind the line. "You don't match anything I've seen or studied."
He paused, letting his gaze drift across the creature's form.
It was long and lean, built like something between a raptor and a serpent. Its scales shimmered in shades of silver and white, refracting light in strange, oily ripples. No wings, but its limbs were powerful, with raptor-like claws that moved with silent precision. Along its spine ran three ridged, glowing lines that pulsed faintly, like distant stars seen through mist.
"I've looked at your scans. Checked the logs. Dad didn't just revive ancient DNA when he made you. He altered it, reimagined it. You shouldn't exist."
Still, the creature watched him. Not blinking. Not hostile.
Just aware.
"I think that's what bothers me most," Caelan said. "You're not just a hybrid. You're... something else. Something new. Not a product of evolution or myth. You're a leap. A question wrapped in biology."
He shifted slightly, resting his arms on his knees.
"I'm not afraid of you," he said. "But sometimes, I wonder if I should be."
The creature didn't move.
But Caelan felt something shift in the air. A subtle pressure. Like a thought passing too close.
Then, slowly, it stepped forward. One clawed foot at a time. It crossed the line on the floor without hesitation.
Caelan didn't retreat.
The creature lowered its head, bringing its gaze level with his.
He stared into those obsidian eyes, dark and reflective, like windows into something vast and unknowable.
For a moment, he thought he felt something. Not a voice, exactly. More like an impression. A presence.
Not words, but meaning.
You are not mine. I am not yours.
He didn't know where the thought came from, only that it didn't feel like his.
Another pause.
But we are bound.
Caelan's breath caught.
"By what?" he asked quietly.
The creature blinked.
Once.
Then, another pulse of meaning followed.
By what waits. By what follows. By what we choose to become.
And then the weight in the air lightened again.
The creature stepped back, returning to stillness.
Caelan sat quietly for a moment, absorbing it all.
"…Yeah," he murmured. "I don't know what that means either."
A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
And as if in response, the creature blinked again.
Not like a machine, and not like a predator.
But like something that understood.
Something that was learning.