Darkness didn't embrace Kaelen. It devoured him.
He awoke to the suffocating scent of metal and magic. The air was stale, thick with sterilized coldness and laced with something sharper — binding glyphs, perhaps. His wrists and ankles were shackled to a slab of darkstone, cool and unyielding beneath him. The ceiling above was lit with faintly glowing arcane filaments, pulsing like the slow heartbeat of a dying god.
Kaelen tried to move. Pain lanced through his limbs — not from the restraints, but from within his very flesh. As though something had been carved into his bones.
Footsteps. Measured. Unhurried. The door opened with a hiss.
A man in deep violet robes entered, his face hidden behind a silver mask etched with twin serpents. His presence was commanding, not through power, but through precision. He was not a mage of chaos. He was a scientist of agony.
Behind him came another — a woman with platinum-blonde hair, her eyes mechanical, irises turning with gears of golden brass. She carried a crystal tablet and no emotion.
"Subject is conscious," she noted, voice flat. "Resonance patterns holding. Tri-fabric signature stable under suppression."
The man didn't respond. He stepped closer to Kaelen, gaze unreadable.
"You should not exist," he said, calm and quiet. "Yet here you are."
Kaelen said nothing. His eyes tracked every movement. Every twitch of the masked man's fingers.
The woman activated a rune on her tablet. Pain surged through Kaelen's chest. He arched, muscles spasming as burning symbols flared to life beneath his skin. Spatial threads, temporal nodes, and matter anchors — all dissected, measured, catalogued.
"His reaction is still too volatile," the woman murmured.
"He is not ready to be harvested," the man agreed. "We must break the instability first."
Break it.
They kept him under for days. Weeks. Maybe months. Time lost meaning under their hands. They subjected him to cuts through space, made him experience fractured seconds over and over, fused solid steel into air just to see if he could phase through it.
And through it all, Kaelen endured.
He remembered the whispers in the ruins — not the ones from the Rift, but the ones inside himself. That core of him that watched. Waited.
It learned.
Every time they tore him down, it studied.
Every time they triggered his power, it adapted.
And deep within Kaelen's fractured mind, something stirred.
Not rage.
Not fear.
Control.
He began to smile.