The year 2147 pulsed with an undercurrent of impossible marvels and barely contained anxieties. Humanity stood at the edge of myth and science, its cities threaded with veins of shimmering light. Towering spires reached for the stratosphere, wrapped in the soft radiance of floating auric conduits. Hover-trams traced glowing lines across skies of burnished steel. Energy harvested from the stars pulsed beneath the skin of the Earth. Forty percent of the world's population now carried awakened abilities—a legacy of the enigmatic cosmic phenomenon that had rewritten human history two decades earlier. It was called The Aurora Pulse—a storm of light and energy that swept across the planet like a celestial tide, bestowing extraordinary powers upon ordinary people.
With that awakening came The Vanguard Order—an elite corps of paragons trained to keep humanity balanced on this knife-edge of evolution. They stood on holographic stages, gleaming in their regalia, promising order and unity in an age of gods made of flesh and bone. Their existence was a promise: a world where light triumphed over chaos.
But beneath that shimmering veneer, deep under the beating heart of a glittering metropolis, the oldest darkness of humankind—greed, cruelty, and the hunger for dominion—festered in silence.
It was in that silence that Mark Stormvale lived.
For him, the world was not a place of light. It was a sterile, chrome-plated cage, every surface too polished, every angle too sharp. His entire existence was defined by the relentless buzz of fluorescent lights and the metallic tang of antiseptic that clung to his skin like a permanent second layer. He was seven years old, though the number meant little in a place where time was not measured by seasons or celebrations but by the intervals between experiments.
He was a whisper of a boy—frail and slight, with limbs that always seemed chilled and skin so pale it caught the light like translucent paper. His hair was an ashen silver, more from the lab's conditioning than any natural trait, and his eyes—dull, grey, endless—reflected nothing. No spark. No rage. No hope.
To the world outside, his parents were legends. His father, Atlas Storm—"The Titan of Light"—and his mother, Seraphina Vale—"The Divine Healer." The saviors of the Zero Event, sealing an interdimensional rift with a final burst of celestial power. Their faces were immortalized in every Vanguard monument, their names sung like prayers. To Mark, they were nothing more than words spoken in the precise, hollow voice of Dr. Voss, his keeper and captor.
"They died so the world could live," she would say, each syllable clipped, her tone stripped of any warmth. "And you will carry their legacy, Subject Genesis."
Legacy. A word that had no meaning in the cold glow of the laboratory. All he knew were the ceaseless pricks of needles, the numbing chemical burn of experimental drugs, the hum of machines that spoke in a language of pain.
Every day was a ritual of invasion.
Electrodes, slick with conductive gel, were fastened to his temples, wrists, and ankles, leeching warmth from his small body. He would lie there on a restraint table, his breath misting faintly in the frigid air, the overhead lights bleaching the color from everything. Vials of exotic compounds—Auric Stimulants, Psionic Catalysts, Elemental Harmonizers—were hung on sterile racks, their contents pumped into his veins. Each had its own unique cruelty: a searing numbness, a buzzing ache, a metallic aftertaste that filled his mouth and lungs as if he were swallowing lightning.
Sonic emitters hummed around him, vibrating at frequencies meant to stir whatever sleeping power lay dormant within his cells. Focused energy beams traced searing paths across his skin, leaving ghostly, temporary burns. The scientists called it "stimulus." He called it nothing. Because naming pain made it real, and real pain could break him.
They believed power was his birthright. That the son of two of the most powerful Awakened in history must be a living miracle. But Mark remained an anomaly. A puzzle piece that refused to fit the prophecy.
He did not cry.
He did not beg.
He did not fight.
He endured.
And that, more than anything, unsettled them.
Behind reinforced, one-way glass, Dr. Helena Voss observed him like one might a flawed artifact. Her face, carved in angles and severity, rarely betrayed emotion. Her silver hair was always pulled tight, her immaculate lab coat a stark contrast to the cold shadows around her. But sometimes, just for an instant, a flicker of something passed through her eyes—a gleam of proprietary hunger. Not empathy. Ownership.
"Subject Genesis still shows no signs of manifestation," she recorded into her device, her voice a precise monotone. "Energy readings remain stable but inert. All known stimulation protocols have failed to provoke an awakening response. Genetic scans confirm exceptional lineage, yet there is no measurable resonance. Subject remains… inert."
Her lips thinned around that last word, as if it were a personal insult. Because to Voss, Mark wasn't a boy. He wasn't a person. He was a blueprint—the missing piece in humanity's climb to godhood. And he had failed to obey the design.
One session stood out—a particularly brutal attempt to shatter the invisible barrier between him and his supposed inheritance. They combined two of their cruelest methods: a psychic dampener and a high-frequency energy emitter. The dampener clamped around his head like a vice, stripping away the last fragile walls of his mind. The emitter pulsed in rhythm, flooding the room with waves designed to strike at his dormant core.
The pain was unlike anything Mark had known. It was not the sharp agony of a wound but something far deeper—a cellular scream, tearing him from the inside out. His small frame convulsed violently, the restraints biting into his wrists and ankles. His vision fractured into shards of light, each pulse like a hammer blow behind his eyes. His lungs seized. His heartbeat roared in his ears.
A soundless scream ripped through him—a primal terror that no one could hear, because the psychic dampener silenced even that.
The machines whirred. The lights blinked.
And the monitors remained flat.
No elemental flare. No radiant burst. No psychic bloom.
Just emptiness.
When it was over, his breathing was shallow, his vision dimmed to a soft grey haze. They dragged his limp body back to his cell—a padded box dressed up as a room—and left him there, a heap of bones and lightless skin. The door sealed with a soft hiss. Outside, the city above celebrated its heroes. Down here, the failed son of legends counted invisible scars.
He would lie there for hours, tracing the fading marks on his forearms with a detached precision, as though studying the map of a stranger's body. Each line told a story of failure. Of being less than what the world demanded.
He understood what he was.A project. A problem.Never a child.
And in the cold darkness of his cell, beneath the buzz of distant machinery and the faint hiss of air vents, something fragile and furious stirred—not a power, not yet, but a fracture in the silence.
A promise that he would not remain inert forever.