Page 1: The glass was three inches thick, designed to contain the chaotic surge of a thousand watts. Yet, even through the sterile, reinforced polymer, Cyrus felt the deep, rhythmic hum of the city's power grid—a steady current he knew Malice Montgomery was constantly monitoring— constantly controlling.
The year was 2003, but here, beneath the gleaming towers of the coastal city, time felt irrelevant. The containment chamber was all stark white walls, black surveillance eyes, and the incessant, high-pitched hum of the dampening fields.
Cyrus sat on the edge of the examination slab, his posture rigid. He was twenty-three years old, but he felt far older, and impossibly fragmented. He wore a heavy, thick green jumpsuit, the uniform of a prisoner labeled 'Subject E.' The color was a painful contrast to his medium-long, layered hair, which spilled over the collar in a wild, unkempt cascade of blonde, almost impossible gold. It was the plumage of the Golden Eagle he had been genetically forced to become, and it was a beacon for the cameras that tracked his every move.
His hands were large, scarred from forced transformations—were clasped between his knees. He was fighting a constant, exhausting war against his own DNA: the surging Elemental electricity constantly battled the quiet, kinetic rage of the Telekinetic infusion, all while his primary Animalia instinct strained for the open sky.
The inner door hissed open.
Dr. Luciel Montgomery entered, a tablet clutched in her hand. Her demeanor was clinical, but her eyes, framed by the severity of her sleek red hair, feeling a flicker of the guilt she was only beginning to recognize. She was unaware of her stepfather's genocidal plan, genuinely believing this lab was a necessary sanctuary.
"Cyrus," she said, her voice cool and professional, but slightly strained. "We need to run the final stabilization check. Your vitals are fluctuating. I need you to remain calm. Remember the protocols."
He didn't look up. "Protocols won't stop the feeling, Luciel. It feels like my nerves are running a live current. What did he do to me this time?"
Luciel stepped closer, forcing herself to be reassuring. "He's perfecting you. The infusions are difficult, yes, but they will give you the control you need to protect the city. Protection requires power, Cyrus, and you are… the most powerful thing we have ever created."
At the sound of the word "created," a raw, sudden spike of anger—the traumatic memory of falling golden wings and the smell of ozone—triggered his unstable hybrid nature. A thin, almost invisible telekinetic crack spider-webbed across the three-inch glass wall, followed by a faint, sharp scent of burning metal.
Luciel froze, her controlled expression momentarily collapsing into fear. The silent alarm began to ring deep in the floor.
"See?" Cyrus whispered, his golden hair catching the harsh light. "I'm not a shield, Doctor. I'm a mistake. And I'm running out of time to fix it."
Page 2: The Doctor's Dilemma
Outside the triple-reinforced containment facility, the lab's corridors were silent, lit by soft, cold blue lights. The air filtration system made the place smell perpetually of clean metal and disinfectant. This was the world
Dr. Luciel Montgomery had spent her entire adult life serving.
Luciel, her red hair sleek and pulled back in a professional manner, walked with an efficient, focused stride. She wore a tailored white lab coat over severe black attire—her personal choice uniform of professionalism. The coat bore the prestigious, but ultimately chilling, crest of the Montgomery Foundation.
She glanced at the tablet clutched in her hand. The screen showed Subject E's vitals: heart rate spiking, neural energy discharge erratic and Unstable.
Luciel was only twenty-four, a highly regarded genetic biologist. She genuinely believed in the purity of her work. Malice, her stepfather, had been meticulous in constructing the narrative for her: the Animalia were victims of an unpredictable genetic anomaly, born with volatile, chaotic powers that posed a threat to themselves and the civilized city.
The "Legendary Being" project wasn't about control; it was about stabilization—using Telekinetic and Elemental energies to provide a harness for the dangerous Animalia core.
Her blind spot was rooted in her fierce dedication to science and her absolute trust in Malice's genius ways.
He was a pioneer, a hero who had stabilized the city's power grid more than once. Why would he lie about the need to protect the population from chaos?
Chaos must be replaced by order, she often thought, echoing Malice's favorite mantra.
She passed Sterling's old office, now locked down. Sterling, a high-level Telekinetic who managed the foundation's corporate law and financing, had been instrumental in securing the funding for this remote facility. She paused for a brief moment, remembering his stern, calculating gaze during their last review meeting.
Sterling had questioned the ethical limits of the Hybrid Infusion protocols—a rare moment of dissent she had quickly dismissed as bureaucratic nervousness. She had been too focused on the complexity of the stabilization algorithms to notice the seed of his eventual defection.
Luciel entered the viewing corridor just outside Cyrus's chamber. She took a deep, practiced breath, smoothing her lab coat. She had been treating Cyrus since the project began; she knew every scar, every neural pathway, every spike in his heart rate. Yet, she never allowed herself to see the boy—the victim—only the Subject that needed her expertise. The truth, that he was a stolen child whose mother Malice had murdered, was locked deep within Malice's personal security servers, a secret insulated by layers of lies she wouldn't even think to question.
Page 3: The Daily Interrogation
The inner door hissed open, allowing Luciel access to the chamber. The shift in atmosphere was immediate: the low, vibrating tension of the containment field felt like pressure on the eardrums.
Cyrus didn't look up, but he registered her presence. The shift in his internal chaos was marginal, but measurable—a brief spike of suspicion mixed with a deeper, unwanted familiarity.
"Vitals check, Cyrus," Luciel announced, her voice pitched to be formal yet reassuring. She moved to the sensor console, avoiding direct physical contact. "I see a 4% increase in the Telekinetic discharge signature since the last report. Are you suppressing the Elemental flow properly?"
"I'm suppressing everything properly, Doctor," Cyrus replied, his voice flat. "But your protocols are faulty. You can't expect silence."
Luciel ignored the little jab. It was their routine. He challenged; she remained clinical.
"The bottle is designed by the world's leading minds to provide stability," she countered, adjusting a diagnostic on the console. "You simply haven't surrendered your primal resistance. Your mind is still fighting it."
"My mind is fighting the lie," Cyrus retorted, finally raising his head. His golden eyes locked onto her face. He saw the genuine anxiety in her expression, the dark circles under her eyes from sleepless nights running simulations. He hated that she had power over him, but he couldn't hate her entirely. She was the one who brought him the nutrient dense paste they call food and occasionally, in a rare break of protocol, a worn, non-fiction book.
"The new serum will begin tomorrow," Luciel said, rapidly changing the subject. "It's designed to introduce a molecular buffer between the Telekinetic and Elemental pathways. It should feel less… volatile."
Cyrus shifted, the movement drawing the fabric of his green jumpsuit tight across his shoulders. "Another solution to fix the problem you created."
Luciel took a breath, struggling against the guilt that tightened her throat. "I created a potential shield, Cyrus. A weapon against the chaos that threatens this city. If you would only cooperate, you could finally be free of the danger you pose to yourself."
"Freedom looks like the sky, Doctor," Cyrus whispered, his voice dangerously low. "It doesn't look like this glass cage. And it certainly doesn't look like the lie your father feeds you."
Luciel stood frozen, the subject's raw honesty challenging the foundation of her belief. The room was silent save for the whir of the dampening field, the unspoken tension between them—his deep-seated suspicion, her profound guilt, and the dangerous, undeniable spark of attraction—filling the space. She wanted to reach out, but she dared not. She simply adjusted her glasses, forced a professional expression, and exited the chamber, leaving him once more to the cold companionship of the humming walls.
The routine was complete, the tension built, and the truth remained locked away—for now.
Page 4:
The silence after Luciel's exit was heavier than the noise. The low drum of the dampening electrical fields seemed to intensify, pressing against Cyrus's eardrums like a physical weight. He knew the protocol.
He was supposed to spend the next four hours meditating on control, focusing on isolating the energies within his body. But meditation was impossible when the eyes of the man who stole your life were on you.
The surveillance wasn't just visual. It was a constant, low-level mental scan, a delicate field that constantly probed the chamber, measuring any kinetic displacement—any unexpected shift of mass that might indicate a spontaneous transformation. And layered beneath that was the static residue of Elemental monitoring, the subtle magnetic field that tracked his internal electrical output.
Cyrus pushed off the slab. The friction of the green jumpsuit against the sterile material was a loud, abrasive sound in the silence. He began to pace. One step, steps, three. He walked the circumference of the chamber, his eyes flicking to each of the eight black lenses embedded in the ceiling panels.
They were Malice's eyes, silent, unblinking, judgmental.
He focused his senses, not through his eyes, but through the deep, wounded core of his Animalia instinct. His inner Eagle, always straining for altitude and freedom, was also a master of sensing atmospheric shifts. He could feel the slight, almost drag of the Telekinetic scan as it cycled across the chamber floor. It was like walking through a current of cold, invisible water.
He reached the triple-reinforced glass wall. He pressed his scarred palm flat against the cool surface, staring out at the empty corridor. Luciel's footsteps had long since faded. He knew that somewhere, in the dark heart of the lab's operations center, a technician—perhaps even Malice himself—was reviewing the data feed, judging the efficiency of his suffering.
Cyrus felt the Electrical residue of the monitoring field intensify slightly near the central lens. It was a pressure point. The place where Malice's power, the very power that had subdued his mother, was most focused. Cyrus stared at the lens, his golden hair catching the harsh overhead light, and he waited.
Page 5:
Cyrus lived his life in patterns. They were the key to survival in the lab, a way to map the predictable order of his captors against the unpredictable chaos of his own powers.
He had learned the Telekinetic monitoring cycle within weeks of the original infusion. It wasn't a constant stream; it was a rhythmic sweep that originated from the central panel every 3.7 seconds. A human wouldn't notice. But Cyrus's hybrid mind, forced to track three clashing energy sources, measured it perfectly.
He was looking for the flaw. Every system had a flaw, even one designed by Elemental genius.
The flaw was in the feedback loop. The Telekinetic system, designed by the Foundation's former Head of Compliance—Sterling, though Cyrus didn't know the name—was engineered for microscopic precision, but it was forced to report through Malice's own Electrical Elemental network, resulting in a tiny, one-millisecond delay every twelve cycles.
Twelve cycles. Forty-four seconds.
Cyrus reached the corner of the chamber, where the two wall panels met. He paused his pacing. He timed the cycle: One, two, three… eleven, twelve.
In that one millisecond of digital silence, Cyrus performed a subtle act of psychological defiance. He didn't move the glass or damage the equipment. He simply straightened his back and let his hyper-vigilance drop.
He closed his eyes, allowed the Golden Eagle instinct to surge, and for that single, perfect heartbeat, he let a memory bleed through—the unadulterated sensation of open sky and raw, cold wind against his skin.
Then, the monitoring sweep resumed, the pressure returning. Cyrus opened his eyes, the memory instantly suppressed, the green jumpsuit again containing the unstable man.
He had tasted freedom in the surveillance's blind spot. It was small, a mental resistance, but it was his.
He began his pacing again, knowing that somewhere, a technician would simply log a tiny, unexplained spike in his latent neural activity, an anomaly easily dismissed as the expected instability of Subject E.
Page 6:
The hours blurred into the next routine checkpoint. The internal tension of containment always resulted in a localized discharge of residual energy, which Luciel would be required to measure. This was the only time—apart from the scheduled daily infusion—that she returned.
The inner door hissed open again. Luciel entered, this time carrying only a handheld meter, ready to test the air for trace elements of ozone and kinetic energy. She moved with more confidence this time, having mentally rehearsed her clinical script.
"Residual check, Cyrus. Hold still."
She approached a wall panel directly behind him. She was close, but still maintaining the required distance. As she ran the meter over the wall, her arm brushed against his. It was a fleeting, incidental contact—her expensive scrub fabric against the rough cotton of his prison uniform.
Cyrus flinched. The contact was shocking, not electrically, but emotionally. He hadn't felt the warmth of another human body, outside of the required restraint during painful protocols, in years. Luciel was the gatekeeper to his torment, but she was also the closest link he had to the world outside the glass.
Luciel immediately pulled away, rigid with professional severity. She focused intensely on the meter, which was screaming a low-level warning.
"Discharge levels are higher than calculated," she noted, her voice strictly formal. "You are not controlling the suppression sequence, Cyrus.
"Your latent electrical field is erratic.
This complicates the protocol."
Cyrus didn't respond to the technical complaint. He stared at the spot where her hand had briefly touched his arm. He hadn't fought the contact; he had recoiled from the unexpected jolt of external life.
"The buffer protocol won't fix the fear," he finally said, his voice quiet. "Tell me what happens outside, Doctor. what did the sea air smells like today."
Luciel glanced quickly at the central surveillance lens, ensuring their conversation remained mundane. She knew she shouldn't engage, but the request was so raw, so stripped of defiance, that it felt like an appeal from a child.
"The air is clean," she answered, the lie coming easily. "The city is stable. Protected. The sea air... it smells like salt and progress." She turned back to the door. "Prepare for the infusion. And focus on control, Cyrus."
As she exited, Cyrus slowly raised his hand to the spot where her arm had brushed his. Salt and progress. Luciel's words were a lie, but the fleeting moment of contact—the subtle, accidental warmth—felt more real than the cold perfection of the lab. It was a distraction, a weakness, and the first true vulnerability his highly controlled prison had ever allowed.
Page 7:
The nutrient infusion was cold and brief, administered by an automated drone and monitored remotely. Another piece of the routine, quickly dispensed with. But for Cyrus, the afternoon brought the single most psychologically challenging part of his confinement: "Rehabilitation Time," or as the staff cynically called it, "The Garden Visit."
After the drone retreated, the inner wall of the containment chamber slid aside with a muted hiss, revealing a short, heavily fortified transit corridor.
This led not back into the sterile lab proper, but toward the facility's great secret: the Hydroponic Containment Dome, a massive, custom-built greenhouse attached to the northern flank of the lab complex.
Stepping into the corridor was like plunging from an arctic freezer into a tropical climate. The air immediately thickened with intense, controlled humidity, carrying the rich, intoxicating scent of damp earth, ferns, and decaying organic matter. It was a sensory overload compared to the lab's constant antiseptic breeze.
Cyrus could taste the metal of the mist in the back of his throat. His hybrid senses, dampened for so long by the lab's sterile environment, screamed in protest and exhilaration. He felt the fine hair on his arms, hidden beneath the rough fabric of the green jumpsuit, rising as his skin reacted to the sudden shift in atmospheric pressure.
Malice Montgomery had engineered the Dome as a masterpiece of calculated cruelty. It was a vast, sprawling environment designed not to heal or soothe, but to deliberately force the Animalia subjects—Cyrus being the sole occupant currently—to engage their primal instincts in a controlled space.
It contained mature, thick-trunked trees whose roots were anchored deep in concrete planters, high, manufactured grass, a sophisticated fog machine simulating coastal mist, and a shallow, rock-lined stream fed by filtered city water.
As Cyrus walked the transit corridor, the Eagle core within him began to stir, a physical ache in his shoulders demanding release. He knew the environment was meticulously monitored—a sensory trap.
The humidity alone was a tracking system, as any sudden, massive metabolic heat shift (a prelude to transformation) would register instantly on the thermal cameras lining the high walls.
The large, final door to the Dome slid open with a heavy thud, and Cyrus stepped into the brilliant, oppressive light. The sheer volume of the space was dizzying.
Sunlight, filtered through layers of industrial, poly-carbonate glass, created a harsh, overwhelming glare. The ground beneath his feet shifted from polished polymer to soft, imported dirt—the first real earth he had touched in years.
Page 8:
The moment he was inside, the primal ache intensified into a powerful, instinctual urge. His Eagle self was triggered by the light and the expanse. He could feel the familiar, destructive friction building between his three power sources: the Animalia core desperate to fly, the Telekinetic field ready to push against kinetic restraints, and the Elemental current threatening to spark.
Cyrus looked up. The sky was the problem. Instead of infinite, shifting blue, the Dome terminated in a colossal, heavily reinforced arch of diamond-patterned steel and layered glass. It was beautiful in its imitation of freedom, but absolutely, frighteningly impenetrable. It was a permanent, visible reminder that his flight had a ceiling, his potential had an end. Malice had built the perfect mirror of his own limitations.
He began to pace the dirt path, the soft ground a welcome change from the unrelenting concrete. He walked toward the deepest section of the Dome, where the air was thickest and the shadows longest. He tried to focus on the simulated sounds of nature—the distant, digitized roar of surf (a cruelty in this coastal city where the real ocean was mere miles away) and the mechanical hum of the wind machine—but the effort of not shifting, of not allowing the powerful Eagle wings to burst forth and test the reinforced ceiling, was nearly impossible.
The strain was corrosive, not just physically but psychologically.
He stood by the rushing stream, watching the filtered water flow over the manufactured rocks. The containment field that suppressed his powers was deliberately weaker here, stretched thinly across the vast dome. This was by design: Malice wanted the subjects to feel the full, agonizing burden of their own self-control.
Here, the internal chaos was marginally easier to manage because the field wasn't fighting as hard, but the cost was heightened psychological exposure.
Cyrus closed his eyes, allowing the full sensory detail of the air to wash over him. The scent of salt, barely perceptible through the manufactured humidity, brought another flash of memory: not the trauma, but the sensation of cold wind and height—a fragmented image of his mother's pure, powerful wings banking over a sun-drenched coast. It was a momentary anchor, a reminder of the raw, untainted power Malice had stolen. He was not a monster; he was a being robbed of his sky.
Page 9:
Cyrus was not alone in the Dome. The surveillance here was less subtle and more active than in the sterile core lab, reliant on brute force contingency rather than delicate sensor sweeps. High above, near the main support struts, were two distinct figures stationed in observation booths. Their presence was a constant source of pressure, a manifestation of the two non-Animalia factions that ruled the city.
The Geo-Elemental Guard was stationed on the south wall. Ronan's role was purely physical containment. He was a sturdy, thick-set man, typically seen wearing heavy-duty composite armor designed to withstand both kinetic impact and high heat. His power was Earth. If Cyrus shifted, Ronan was prepared to instantly flood the floor with liquid concrete, creating an immediate, seismic-proof stone cage, neutralizing the Eagle's ability to fly or run before it could damage the reinforced glass dome. Ronan rarely moved, an immovable force representing the hierarchy of the Elementals
The Telekinetic Monitor Stationed on the north wall, near the main exit, lena's focus was precision and intervention. Her Telekinesis was trained for detecting microscopic vibrations. Armed with advanced sensors calibrated to detect sub-sonic vibrations, she was looking for any tremor in the ground or shift in the air that indicated Cyrus was preparing to use his Telekinetic infusion to damage the Dome's infrastructure.
Her constant, distant, controlled power was like a needle pointing at his chaotic heart, always ready to exert himself or deal with temporary paralysis if his energy output exceeded predefined parameters.
Cyrus knew the rules by rote: 60 minutes. No spontaneous shifts. No damage to the flora or the glass. Any deviation resulted in immediate, painful restraint via Ronan's Geo-Elemental power and increased sedative protocols back in the chamber.
He walked past the large, simulated rock formation. He could feel the Telekinetic field intensify slightly around him, a warning from lena. He had to assume that every moment of his rehabilitation was being live-fed to Luciel and, more frighteningly, to Malice's personal monitors. This was less a test of physical strength and more a test of psychological obedience.
He reached a dense cluster of artificially tropical ferns and paused, allowing the humidity to soak into his jumpsuit. He felt the cold, calculating focus of lena weighing on him, judging his every involuntary muscle twitch. He knew her sensor system, engineered for ruthless efficiency, was likely a predecessor design by Sterling—the brilliant, methodical Telekinetic who had once managed Malice's compliance protocols.
The thought solidified the conspiracy: even the guards, even the systems designed to monitor him, were all creations of the same monolithic power structure.
Page 10:
Back in the sterile core of the lab, in the dimly lit monitoring station, Luciel watched Cyrus's progression through the Dome. She was flanked by two other technicians, their faces bathed in the harsh, data-heavy glow of the monitors. She watched the eight separate feed screens: thermal, sonic, kinetic, and visual.
Luciel hated this part of the routine. It was the least scientific and the most morally ambiguous.
The necessity of the Dome, Malice argued, was to prevent decay of the primal core, ensuring the hybrid was battle-ready if ever deployed. Luciel translated that as: forcing a creature to desperately crave freedom so it never forgets the value of control.
On the screen, Cyrus stood motionless by the stream, his golden hair a brilliant spot of color against the drab green and brown.
Luciel focused on the kinetic sensor graph: a near-flat line, but with a rapid, cyclical increase every three minutes, followed by a sudden suppression. She knew he was fighting the urge to transform.
"Report that suppression cycle variance to 0.4," she instructed a junior technician, her voice crisp. She ignored the way her own stomach twisted with guilt. Just Subject Epsilon stabilizing.
She zoomed the thermal camera onto Cyrus's face. She noted the fine sheen of sweat and the desperate tension around his mouth. She saw the exhaustion, she wanted to acknowledge the pain. By protocol this was categorized as "Subject Compliance Stress," a necessary metric.
But her heart, increasingly battered by the weight of Malice's secrets, saw the pure yearning of a creature longing for its natural habitat.
Luciel pulled up Malice's personal notes on the Dome's design. The text was brutal in its honesty: Maximize primal craving while total containment. The subject must learn that the reward (relief from containment field pressure) is conditional upon self-imprisonment.
This was not protection. This was tyranny.
Luciel knew that her attraction to Cyrus was illogical—the doctor to the patient, the jailer to the prisoner—but it was rooted in this dissonance. He was the living proof that Malice's perfect order was built on lies and trauma. Her desire to save him was inextricably linked to her desperate need to prove that she, Luciel, was not complicit in a genocide—that her life's work was not a fraud.
Page 11:
With five minutes remaining in the sixty-minute cycle, Cyrus felt the Telekinetic pressure from lena intensify. He knew they were looking for an excuse to sedate him. He decided to give them a distraction not an attack, but a moment of defiance only he would truly understand.
He walked to the artificial rock formation near the perimeter wall. He placed his hand on the rough, simulated stone. He closed his eyes. He didn't focus on suppression. He focused on memory.
He let the image of his mother's falling wings come into full, terrible clarity, but this time, he added sound, the faint, digitized roar of the ocean outside the containment dome. The noise of the ocean, paired with the violent memory of Malice's electrical attacks, was the ultimate psychological trigger.
His body seized. The Elemental current spiked, overwhelming his Telekinetic controls. He didn't shift, but a small, localized, uncontrolled surge of kinetic force. A miniature, focused shockwave hit the artificial rock formation. The rock didn't break; it simply vibrated, emitting a sharp, audible CRACK sound.
On the monitoring screens, the graphs went wild.
In the north observation booth, lena, the Telekinetic guard, reacted instantly. She slammed a button to prepare for localized restraint, but the surge was too fast.
In the core lab, Luciel saw the spike. The surge was chaotic, but it was directed at self-punishment. a controlled break in compliance to assert autonomy.
Luciel realized he wasn't trying to escape; he was trying to communicate his distress.
Luciel slammed her hand down on the microphone button, overriding lena's pending action. "Protocol Breach! Subject requires immediate unscheduled sedation. Do not engage containment protocols—risk of severe kinetic backlash!"
It was a lie. She had just saved him from the painful restraint and sedation he would have received, trading it for the "softer" punishment of being returned to the sterile chamber early. She had just used her authority to protect him from the rules she had helped enforce.
In the Dome, Cyrus opened his eyes. He saw the red light flashing on the exit door—rehabilitation was over. He had paid the price, but he had asserted a small, private victory. He had disrupted their calculated order.
As he walked the transit corridor, returning to his sterile cell, he knew he had pushed the line. But he also knew that Luciel, the doctor who feared her own guilt, had lied to save him. The vulnerability between them was a new, dangerous variable Malice had never calculated.