Page 1 of The Monster You Made
Chapter 1 - Lucian
The bunker hums like a dying animal. The machines stutter, lights flicker, and vents wheeze against years of dust and smoke. Every surface smells of old steel and burned wires. I sit in the glow of my monitors, watching the scaffolding of my world collapse line by line. Protocol Seven is running. A purge I swore I’d never use, now chewing through the backbone of the empire I built.
Red commands bleed across the main screen. Operative rosters, surveillance archives, financial arteries, one after another erased. I lean back in the chair and listen to the hollow groan of systems dying. It should feel like control. Instead, it feels like tearing my own ribs out with my bare hands.
On the far wall, the projector flickers to life on its own timer. Her face fills the concrete. Vera, caught mid-stride outside the courthouse. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She never knew I was there. I should have destroyed the photograph months ago, but I let it loop. A ghost I can’t put down.
The air tastes of copper and ash. I drag a hand down my face, unshaven stubble rasping against my palm. I haven’t kept track of the days since she left. Since the night she vanished barefoot into the fog and left me with nothing but smoke in my lungs. Sleep comes in fragments. Rage fills the gaps.
The Crown will see this purge as treason. They’ll send their knives. I welcome it. They think me broken, but I still have teeth. And behind them, there are older shadows,Cadmus. I’ve heard the name whispered for years, half-prayer, half-warning.
My rebellion won’t just provoke the Crown. It will wake something worse. I let my mind travel through the facts to ground me mentally.
The Crown is almost a literal monarchy with Cadmus as its dark knight. The Crown is a shadow political faction within the government. A clandestine network of politicians, military contractors, and intelligence officials who manipulate events from the inside.
Cadmus is the soleinvisibleenforcer of the crown. Unofficially orchestrating covert operations.
Their aim, to the best of my knowledge, is to consolidate power by propaganda, destabilizing dissent, and creating fear so citizens accept tighter control.
I was fine with it, as it served my purposes in securing my unique place in the world, but now I have brought the apocalypse upon my world.
***
The alert blinked across my console just after midnight, pale white against the dark. No headers, no sender ID, just a packet that shouldn’t exist. I almost closed it. Cadmus’s tricks had multiplied these last weeks, half the feeds poisoned with lies, half with empty noise. Still, something in the hair on my arms told me to stop.
I keyed the decrypt.
The screen filled slow, each line resolving like an old scar torn open. A face appeared, gaunt, hollow-eyed, a scar at the temple. For a second, I thought it was another Crown actor. Butthen he laughed, broken, stuttering. And the sound punched me in the chest.
Cassian.
Eight years gone. Buried in the rain. My brother.
The feed didn’t stop. They had him under light, his wrists bound. A Crown officer off-screen barked words I couldn’t hear, and Cassian’s mouth moved like a puppet’s.
“Lucian. They saved me. They remade me. One day, they said, I’d be their voice.” His eyes flicked to the lens, just for a second, and something in them begged,See me beneath this.
My body froze.
Then, the last line. His voice cracked as if pulled from bone: “Remember the brook.”
The screen went black.
I didn’t remember standing, only that the chair behind me had fallen, its legs splintered. My throat burned, but no sound came out.
The Crown hadn’t sent propaganda. They’d sent a verdict. They had taken my brother, carved him hollow, and dressed him in their mask.
And now every time I closed my eyes, I heard the laugh again, looped, broken, inside my skull.
I pressed my palms into the desk until they shook. The glow of the dead screen lit nothing but my own ruin.
I steel myself to mentally contain it for now; they want me too broken for whatever comes next, but I won't let myself break.
***
An alarm slices through the bunker at 02:14. Breach detected. Not amateurs. The pattern is surgical: thermal sweeps, coordinated entry points. Professionals. Loyalists sent to cut me out before I rot the rest of the tree.
I move without thought. Weapon case. Biometric lock. The weight of steel is familiar in my hands. The bunker was designed for sieges. Tonight, it will serve as a tomb, maybe theirs, maybe mine. Either way, blood will mark the floor.
