Ark's Echo

Lighthouse in Eternal Night

The Arctic's ark facility loomed in endless dark, its searchlight carving the tundra into monochrome shards. The crucifix chip in Alys' hand burned, her birthmark's silver blood freezing into arrows pointing toward the subterranean Matriarch Sanctum.

"Radiation's rewriting my genome." Selene's ruptured mechanical eye captured horrors—Godslayer embryos with Alys' face twitching beneath ice-clad walls, thousands in synchronized gestation.

Kain's silver spine erupted, sand coalescing into Cinder's visage: "Don't touch the—" Searchlight beams crystallized snow into chainsaw tendrils, snaring Alys' ankles.

Hall of Mirrors

The sanctum's mirrored corridors reflected infinite Alys variants—one swollen with a divine fetus, another armored in ice roses. Deepest within, a girl carved her own birthmark with Ilana's scalpel.

"Flawless vessel." Mirror-Alys turned, her Frostfire Scepter fused to a chainsaw spine. "You're the defective prototype."

The real scepter rebelled, frostfire entombing Alys. Kain shattered glass, but the fragments revealed worse—Cinder in a church lab, injecting Ilana's genes into incubation pods.

Scalpel Memory

Alys seized the mirror's scalpel. Its grip awakened buried trauma—five-year-old Alys strapped to a table, Ilana etching containment runes into her own womb, whispering: "Survive. Even as a monster."

Her birthmark ruptured. Silver blood splattered mirrors, reflections shrieking in unison as frostfire vortices swirled. Kain's spine split, Cinder's specter manifesting to claw a half-mechanical heart from the chaos—its surface stamped with cradle sigils.

"Mother's heartbeat..." Alys pressed her bleeding mark. "They made it an engine!"

Godslayer Dirge

The sanctum's ceiling collapsed, revealing a colossal mechanical womb. Thousands of Alys clones, umbilicals rooted in its surface, chanted church canon—sonic waves detonating ice searchlights.

Kain's silver tide consumed the heart, Cinder's specter merging with him. Their synchronized chainsaw strikes tore through memory reels inside the womb—Ilana's labor night, Cinder slaughtering midwives with the Judgment Sword, hiding newborn Alys in a corpse sack.

"So I was..." Alys' scepter clattered, ice roses blooming from tear-soaked frost. "The variable she died to create."