Cold metal pressed against Blake's legs as he sat cross-legged on the med-bay floor, spine rigid with tension. He'd set his shirt aside, neatly folded, and now his exposed skin prickled as the station's recycled atmosphere washed over him in a gentle, chilly current.
"This will feel strange," Eland rumbled from behind him. "But it should be perfectly safe."
Blake fought down a surge of nervous tension. "You keep saying that word 'should.'" He couldn't quite suppress a flinch as Eland's massive hands settled onto his shoulders. Stars, but the alien's touch burned, hovering right at the edge of discomfort.
"Deep breaths. Try to relax."
Right. Because relaxing was so easy with someone about to do... whatever this was to him. Still, Blake fell back on old habits, counting through the meditation breathing that had gotten him through a thousand rough spots before. Four in. Seven hold. Eight out. Simple. Familiar. Safe.
Then Eland's hands went from warm to scalding, and Blake had to grit his teeth. The heat spread outward and into Blake like ripples in a pond, soaking into Blake's muscles. The sensation pushed deeper, past tissue and bone, reaching for somewhere Blake hadn't ever felt until now.
Raw power surged through Blake's body like he'd grabbed a live wire. It wasn't just pain—though there was plenty of that—but the pure, undiluted potential that set every nerve-ending singing. His spine felt like someone had replaced it with a length of copper wire carrying enough juice to light up Chicago.
The thunder of his own pulse filled his ears, and the dim room's lighting seemed to throb in sync with whatever the hell was happening to him. Each breath pulled in something electric, something alive. Blake felt it dance across his tongue, tasted ozone and lightning. The power tore through him, making his skin itch like it might peel right off his bones. His thoughts snapped into razor-sharp focus, slicing clean through the fog in his head. Every idea, every realization felt honed, precise, and lethal.
It was almost more than he could handle. Blake’s fingers clawed into his thighs, gripping hard enough to leave marks as he wrestled for control, sweat carving jagged trails down his temples. Quitting wasn’t an option—no way, not now. Fragments of old lessons he’d once dismissed resurfaced, unbidden but sharp.
Keep the energy moving. Let it flow. Don’t fixate on the whole “burning alive from the inside” part. Just think… washing machines, yeah—everything cycles around and around until it comes out clean. Or it blows apart.
Blake nearly jumped out of his skin when the energy actually started to move. His washing machine visualization was absurd—downright stupid, even—but it was working. Clinging to its ridiculousness, he latched onto the image of a glass-fronted washing machine, watching the water churn and spin in his mind's eye. He let himself sink into it, lose himself in the rhythm, as if his sanity depended on it. It might.
Distantly, Eland said something, but Blake didn't really hear it. After getting no response, Eland seemingly started to push harder, so it must not have mattered.
The pain mounted, and Blake's body was boiling, but he was someplace far away. A memory from somewhere deep.
A laundromat in Saginaw. Autumn 1990.
The radio in the corner was playing the game: the Tigers were up 10 - 3 against the Yankees.
He was just a kid, maybe 7, and for a little while, nothing mattered to him except the rows of machines and the way the water, clothes, and bubbles swirled around and around and around.
The fire surged through Blake’s veins, a molten river gaining speed, churning, boiling, ready to burst its banks. Chimera felt it too, of course. She always felt it. Hard not to, trapped as she was in this miserable, barely adequate vessel. A vessel that had given her nothing but grief since she’d claimed it. Not that there’d been a better option at the time. The only viable host. The only chance. Poor Vylaas was long gone, and survival alone was no survival at all.
With a weary inevitability, she stirred herself, reached out into the storm of power Blake had unwittingly unleashed. His chaos, her purpose. Chimera caught the spinning torrent and bent it to her will, forcing it into a narrow, focused funnel. She’d sacrificed nearly everything to prepare this body, her own bio-mass whittled down to almost nothing. Now, finally, there was enough energy in the system to finish what she’d started. The nanites she’d seeded through the vessel worked tirelessly, her myriad hands shaping, weaving, forcing order from disorder. She shifted her metaphysical bulk, realigned herself, and pulled.
The vessel was flawed, of course. No proper unawakened core like Vylaas had possessed. But needs must. The vessel was weak, underdeveloped, and if it couldn’t compensate for its shortcomings, then Chimera would. She would make it strong. She would become the strength it lacked, bulk up the feeble core with her own essence. The cost would be high. Her own growth stunted, her abilities diminished. But what was a century or two of hardship compared to survival? Compared to freedom?
She compressed herself into a dense shell around Blake’s core, drawing every scrap of power into herself. It burned, oh, how it burned. But pain was a small price. The plan was working. The vessel would hold. They would endure.
And she would not be left to rot in the dark.
The mana tore through Blake’s meridians, a feral torrent carving through fragile pathways. Eland’s hands shook against the boy’s shoulder blades, his grip slipping as the volatile energy bucked and writhed beneath his touch. Sweat slicked his pale, smooth skin, catching the faint glow of the room’s wards.
“Hold it together, kid,” he muttered through gritted teeth, though the words were as much for himself as for Blake. His own core groaned under the strain, the effort to divert the chaotic surge from the boy’s vital channels threatening to overwhelm him.
Blake's body convulsed, his spine bowing violently away from Eland's trembling hands. Every muscle in the boy’s frame locked tight, trembling with strain. The air around them turned icy, the temperature plummeting as the mana's pressure climbed higher, its presence suffocating.
Stolen story; please report.
Eland cursed under his breath as his tenuous grip on the flow faltered. It was like clutching a live wire slick with oil, the energy slipping through his grasp no matter how hard he focused. He funneled more of his own reserves into stabilizing the torrent, his core groaning under the demand, but it only seemed to fuel the storm further. In his spiritual sight, Blake’s meridians burned white-hot, searing trails of uncontrolled power carving through the boy’s fragile pathways.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d done this before—countless times. Guiding someone through their first mana cycling was routine, almost reflexive by now. There was danger in the process with Blake's core as under-developed as it was, but the process shouldn't have been radically different. And yet, Blake was a problem.
His channels weren't those of an unawakened youth, first of all. They were pristine, with no discernable blockages. Wide, too, able to handle more power than Eland expected—and strong enough to not blow out when flooded to capacity. That last part was critical because as Blake's core was awakening, it proved to be a ravenous and untamed force that bucked against Eland’s control like a caged beast desperate to break free.
Through gritted teeth, Eland tried to make sense of the impossible situation. Blake shouldn't have been able to seize control like this. The boy had zero experience with mana circulation, and even with the fortune in nanites Eland had given him—nanites that shouldn't have even properly bonded yet without mana—this level of interference should have been beyond him. If the stubborn fool had just stayed passive and let Eland guide the energy through the proper pathways, they'd be halfway done.
Instead, Blake had somehow developed cycling abilities mid-procedure. The raw power coursing through his system was disrupting everything Eland tried to do. This wasn't even proper technique—just a crude vortex of energy spinning faster and faster, drawing in more mana like a hungry whirlpool.
Academically speaking, Blake's sudden talent was remarkable. But his timing was catastrophic. The wild, untrained cycling threatened to tear apart all of Eland's careful work. His arms shook with the effort of maintaining contact on Blake's shoulders while his mana core strained against the turbulent resonance building between them.
Then he sensed it—a faint pulse, but unmistakable. The same energy he'd sensed back in the junkyard. The symbiote. Recognition snapped into place just as the chaotic surge inside Blake began to change. The storm of power didn’t vanish, but it shifted, the edges smoothing ever so slightly. Control, tenuous and incomplete, started to take hold.
Eland gritted his teeth. He couldn’t halt the energy’s relentless pull as it condensed, compressing toward a singularity, but he could stabilize it further from his end—keep the entire process from spiraling out of control. For now, at least.
"Zeph, log everything," Eland said, though he knew she was already several steps ahead. "Prioritize identifying any anomalies in his core. The second they show up, flag them."
The AI's voice was calm, almost clinical. "What do you think is happening?"
Eland's jaw tightened. "I think you already know."
"Yes," she replied, her tone flat. "The suit has commandeered the untasked nanites still circulating in Blake's bloodstream. It’s using them as a conduit to mediate the awakening process."
A flicker of doubt gnawed at the edges of his focus. "Those nanites... might’ve been a mistake," he admitted, the words heavy in his throat. His pulse was finally steadying, but the unease remained, an itch beneath his skin. He could feel the energy shifting, entwining itself with whatever threadbare excuse for a core Blake had. A patchwork connection, fragile and unstable, but undeniably there.
"I warned you before you handed those over," Zephyr said, her voice laced with dry exasperation. "Ashok is going to kill you if Blake doesn’t turn into a valuable ally for the sect."
Eland forced a smirk, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. "He wouldn’t kill me."
Zephyr arched a brow, unimpressed. "We could’ve fed the sect for a year with the value of that vial. And you gave it to him why? So you wouldn’t have to play charades?"
Eland’s smirk faltered, his frown settling in its place. She had a point. Ashok might kill him.
Blake distantly felt the pain in his body rising to a crescendo before—
-CLICK-
—something fell into place. Something wonderful. Something vital.
Something Blake had never realized was missing.
He breathed in, and when he did, he breathed in so much more than just the stale air of the ship. Mana. He could feel it. That was what it had to be. He smiled. And then he broke out into a peel of joyous laughter as he felt the mana—no longer liquid metal, but cool and refreshing, coursing through him.
He fell backwards, and Eland caught him. Blake opened his eyes to see the muscle-bound whale-lizard man smiling at him. In Blake's current euphoric state the strange alien situation just made him laugh all the harder. This carried on for almost another minute before something started happening in front of his vision that finally calmed him down.
Text flashed across Blake's vision, scrolling past faster than he could process. His euphoria dampened as he tried to focus on the rapid-fire messages cluttering his field of view.
[ Gnosis Matrix initializing... ]
"What the—" Blake blinked hard, but the text remained.
[ Ascension Engine: Core systems online. Awaiting user calibration. ]
He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. The messages continued their relentless march across his vision.
[ Logos System beginning user inference... ]
[ Celestial Codex: Beginning archive scan. ]
Blake's head swam as he tried to make sense of the cryptic notifications. Each one appeared in different corners of his vision, some fading while others persisted.
[ Aeon Interface establishing regional link... ]
[ Enlightenment Grid: Mapping current knowledge base. ]
"I'm seeing... messages," Blake said, reaching out to steady himself against Eland's arm. "Some kind of startup sequence?"
The text continued its parade through his field of view, seemingly unconcerned with whether he understood or even acknowledged its presence. Numbers, percentages, and progress bars danced at the edges of his perception, threatening to overwhelm his senses.
"Empty sky," Eland spat from behind Blake. "They're able to interface that directly with Demiurge?"
"I told you," he heard Zephyr say. "Very high end goods. I could have already learned his native language and been translating, but no. Not fast enough for Eland Turun."
Blake gripped his skull in both hands, willing the deluge of information to slow. "Damnit you two, go argue somewhere else."
Eventually, after another agonizing minute and a half, his vision began to clear. He blinked away tears from his eyes and tried to focus on the only remaining messages in view. The first was short and confusing.
[ Custom OS "Chimera" Installed ]
The second message was longer, a deep golden color, and more confusing by far.
[ Welcome to Demiurge. Your path opens before you. Seek. Learn. Ascend. ]
