The air in the hold was a different species of cold than the biting gale of the deck. Above, the wind was a screaming predator, but here, beneath the waterline, the frost was a silent, patient squatter. It clung to the rough-hewn pillars of English oak, turning the sap to ice and the dust to a fine, silver powder. I moved through the gloom, the lantern in my left hand casting a fitful, amber light that danced across crates of salted beef and barrels of brackish water.
In my right hand, the galvanic rifle remained active, its low, thrumming vibration a tether to my own racing pulse. Every few seconds, the aperture in my neck—that silver-rimmed scar that the Synod calls the 'Ignition Point'—flared with a dull, blue radiance. It was a phantom limb, an organ of sense that translated the proximity of the 'First Fire' into a sharp, metallic ache behind my eyes.
He was out there.
I could feel the Creature as surely as a compass needle feels the pull of the magnetic north. He was not a mile distant, crouched perhaps in the lee of a pressure ridge, his vast, stitched lungs drawing in the crystalline air that would freeze a mortal's breath. We were joined by a geometry of pain that defied the miles between us. He was the shadow I had cast across the world, and I was the sun that had burned him into existence.
"You feel him too, do you not?" I whispered, though there was no one to hear me but the rats that scuttled behind the ballast.
My fingers brushed the surface of a heavy, iron-bound crate near the aft bulkhead. It was marked with the seal of the Admiralty, yet as I held my lantern closer, I saw the faint, acid-etched sigil of the charred laurel beneath the official paint. The Synod's brand.
My father's brand.
The memory rose unbidden, a foul vapor from the sepulcher of my youth. I saw Alphonse Frankenstein not as the benevolent patriarch of Geneva, but as the man who sat in the library of Belrive, his silver hair illuminated by a single candle as he recorded the 'behavioral deviations' of his son in a journal bound in the skin of a black calf. I had thought him a man of law and lineage; I had not known he was a curator of monsters.
I set the lantern upon a stack of pelts and knelt before the crate. With a crowbar scavenged from the gunroom, I pried at the lid. The wood screamed—a dry, splintering sound that echoed through the hollow ship like a dying breath. As the lid gave way, I did not find the navigational charts or the extra woolens Walton had promised his benefactors.
I found the ingredients of my own damnation.
Stacked in neat, straw-lined rows were glass carboys of the primordial ichor—the viscous, translucent fluid I had spent years synthesizing in the vaulted cellars of Ingolstadt. Beside them lay a series of copper induction coils, their surfaces etched with the very same labyrinthine symbols that now adorned my rifle and the 'Mark' I had carved from the boy Murchison's flesh.
My breath hitched. The Synod had not merely steered Walton; they had outfitted him. They were using this vessel as a mobile laboratory, a floating womb designed to gestate a second, more compliant generation of the Risen. The 'First Fire' was not meant to be a singular miracle of my genius; it was intended to be a commodity, a flickering candle for the drawing rooms of the undying.
I reached out to touch one of the coils, and as my skin made contact with the cold metal, a surge of static electricity bucked through my arm. The aperture in my neck flared white-hot.
Victor.
The voice did not come from my ears. It erupted from the base of my skull, a resonant, grinding sound like tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth. It was a voice composed of a thousand stolen vocal cords, a symphony of the charnel house.
Victor, the ice is a mirror.
I scrambled back, knocking the lantern over. The flame guttered but held. I looked toward the thick, frozen planks of the hull. On the other side of that wood, separated only by a few inches of oak and the crushing weight of the Arctic sea, something was pressing against the ship.
The wood groaned. A hairline fracture appeared in the ice-crusted timber, and through it, a single drop of black, oily fluid began to seep. It was not seawater. It was the preservative gall that filled the veins of my first-born.
"Is that you, my wretch?" I hissed, the rifle rising to my shoulder. "Have you come to finish the work you started in the shadows of the Salève? Or have you come to warn me of the masters you have finally begun to fear?"
There was no verbal reply, only a rhythmic thud against the hull—three slow, deliberate strikes that mirrored the beat of a human heart. Thump. Thump. Thump.
It was the signal we had used in the early days, before the blood of William and Justine had stained our hands. A signal of recognition. A signal of parley.
I stood, my heart hammering with a frantic, visceral terror that no amount of scientific detachment could stifle. The realization was a cold blade in my gut: The Synod had not captured the Creature. Not yet. They were using me as the lure, and they were using the Creature as the architect of my arrival. We were both being herded toward a destination that neither of us had chosen.
I looked at the carboys of ichor, their contents shimmering in the dying lantern light. If the Synod succeeded in their 'Eternal Resurrection,' the world would not be inherited by the meek. It would be a playground for the ancient, the wealthy, and the stitched.
Suddenly, a new sound erupted from the deck above—the frantic tolling of the ship's bell and the ragged, terrified screams of my host's crew. It was not the rhythmic clicking of the Harvesters this time. It was a sound of wet, tearing meat and the heavy, metallic clatter of falling armor.
"Captain!" Murchison's voice, raw with a new and deeper agony, shrieked down the hatchway. "They're coming out of the water! They aren't men, Captain! They have no faces!"
I grabbed the lantern and the rifle, casting one final, lingering look at the seeping black gall on the hull.
"Stay there," I whispered to the shadow behind the wood. "Stay in the cold, where they cannot find you. I must see to the living before I join the dead."
I turned and raced toward the ladder, my boots thudding on the frozen rungs. As I reached the upper deck, the stench hit me first—the smell of a thousand years of salt and rot, of things that had been preserved in the lightless depths of the ocean and had now climbed back into the air.
The Archangel was no longer white. It was being swarmed by figures clad in suits of rusted iron and kelp-strewn brass. They moved with a jerky, hydraulic precision, their 'faces' nothing more than glass portholes behind which flickered a pale, bioluminescent fire.
And at the center of the slaughter stood a figure I recognized from the darkest sketches in my father's Black Journal. He was tall, thin as a lath, and wore a mitre of bone. In his hand, he held a staff of pulsing copper that hummed with a frequency that made my teeth ache.
"Arch-Rector Valerius," I gasped, the cold air searing my lungs.
The figure turned, the glass porthole of his mask glowing with a sudden, violent violet light.
"Victor," the voice echoed, amplified by the brass of his suit. "You are late for your inheritance. The First-Born has already agreed to the terms. Will you?"
He raised the copper staff, and the deck of the ship began to glow with a terrifying, blue luminosity. I leveled my rifle, my finger tightening on the trigger, as the ice around the ship began to shatter with the sound of a world ending.