Chapter 1: The Last Relic

Chapter 1: The Last Relic

The silence in the house was a physical weight. It had been three weeks since the phone call, since the world had neatly cleaved into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Before, the house was filled with the scent of his mother’s baking and the faint, sweet aroma of his father’s pipe tobacco. Now, it just smelled of dust and absence.

Leo Vance, at twenty-four, felt like an archaeologist excavating his own life. Each room was a dig site, cluttered with the artifacts of two lives abruptly ended in a tangle of steel and shattered glass on a rain-slicked highway. The official report called it a tragic accident. Leo called it a theft.

Today’s monumental task was the attic. It was the one part of the house his parents had always been strangely proprietary about, a place he hadn’t entered since he was a small boy. They’d laughed it off as their private hoard, "Dad's kingdom of forgotten treasures" and "Mom's archive of everything." Leo had pictured a claustrophobic maze of stacked boxes, old furniture draped in white sheets like slumbering ghosts, and the accumulated detritus of fifty-odd years. He needed to be strong. He needed to face the mountain of memories, sort them, and begin the impossible process of moving on.

His hand hesitated on the brass knob of the attic door. He took a breath, the air thin and stale, and pulled. The door groaned open. A simple wooden staircase unfolded, its hinges protesting with a rusty shriek. He ascended, his footsteps echoing in the sudden, vast quiet.

At the top, he paused, his hand still on the railing, and stared. His breath caught in his throat.

The attic was empty.

Not just tidy—it was unnervingly, surgically bare. The floorboards were swept clean, the thick wooden beams overhead were free of a single cobweb. There were no boxes, no furniture, no ghosts under sheets. The space was a hollow wound in the heart of the house, a stark, clean void that felt more like a lie than any hoarder’s mess ever could. His parents’ casual jokes about their cluttered sanctuary now felt like a carefully constructed deception.

A profound sense of dread, cold and sharp, pierced through the warm blanket of his grief. Why would they lie about this?

His eyes scanned the cavernous room, and then he saw it. In the exact center of the floor, positioned with an almost ceremonial precision, sat a single object: a vintage television. It was an ancient cathode-ray tube model from the late 80s, a bulky plastic box with a convex, bubble-like screen and two spindly rabbit-ear antennas. It was coated in a thick, uniform layer of dust that suggested it hadn’t been touched in decades. A heavy power cord snaked from its back, its two-pronged plug lying inert on the floorboards, inches from the nearest wall outlet.

It was the last relic in a forgotten church.

A bizarre, morbid curiosity pulled him forward. He circled the television, his sneakers silent on the clean wood. He ran a finger through the dust on its top, leaving a dark streak on his skin. He knelt, picking up the heavy plug. It was cold, lifeless. The machine had no power. It was just a piece of junk, the only thing his parents, for some unfathomable reason, had chosen to leave in this empty shrine.

He stood up, a bitter laugh threatening to escape his lips. All his anxiety, his mental preparation for a Herculean task, for this. An empty room and a broken television.

He turned to leave, the dread beginning to subside into simple, weary confusion.

BZZZZZZT.

Leo froze.

The sound was unmistakable. The crackle and hum of a television powering on. It was a sound from his childhood, a noise that should not—could not—be coming from the dead machine behind him.

He turned back slowly, his heart hammering against his ribs.

The screen of the vintage TV was glowing with a sickly, electric blue light, casting long, distorted shadows across the empty attic. A storm of black-and-white static churned on its surface, and from its tinny, dead speakers, a low hiss filled the silence.

His mind scrambled for a rational explanation. A hidden battery? Some kind of capacitor that held a charge for thirty years? But the dust… no one had touched this thing.

He took a hesitant step closer, mesmerized by the impossible light. The static on the screen began to coalesce, the random pixels swirling into patterns. They weren't random. They were forming images.

First, a series of complex geometric shapes, rotating and folding in on themselves with impossible complexity. Then, diagrams of double helices, but they were wrong—intertwined with a third, shimmering strand he didn’t recognize from any biology class. The images flashed faster, a dizzying montage of science and horror. A corporate logo—a stylized, three-pronged helix inside a circle with the words ‘Aethelred Bio-Mechanics’—burned onto the screen for a moment before dissolving.

Then came the faces. A group of scientists in stark white lab coats, standing together. They looked proud, ambitious. Leo felt a jolt of recognition as his eyes landed on one of the men—a severe-looking figure with cold, calculating eyes behind expensive glasses. Dr. Alistair Finch. A reclusive ‘family friend’ who had visited a few times when Leo was a child, a man whose presence had always made his skin crawl.

The image vanished, replaced by a single person.

His mother.

But it wasn't the warm, smiling woman from his memories. This was a younger Dr. Aris Thorne, her dark hair pulled back severely, her face a mask of clinical focus and something else… fear. She was in the same lab, looking down at something just out of frame. The image was so clear, so real, it was like looking through a window into the past. This was the woman his parents had been before they were his parents. This was a secret.

Leo’s breath hitched. He wanted to look away, to run, to smash the screen and plunge the attic back into darkness. But he was paralyzed, held captive by the horrifying, silent film of a life he never knew existed.

The final image began to form. The camera angle shifted, showing what his mother was looking at. It was a sterile, medical containment unit, the kind used for hazardous biological material.

And inside it… was a baby.

No. Not a baby. Not a human baby.

It was something both hideously beautiful and profoundly wrong. Its skin had a faint, pearlescent shimmer, its limbs were too long, its fingers too delicate. And its eyes… they were wide open, a pair of luminous, hazel pools that seemed to burn with a cold, alien intelligence. They were his eyes.

Leo felt a wave of nausea so powerful he had to brace himself against a ceiling beam. His blood ran cold. The static hiss from the speakers sharpened, coalescing into a synthesized, digital whisper. Text began to type itself out across the bottom of the screen, a clean, white font against the horrific image.

SUBJECT: CHIMERA

ONTOLOGICAL STABILITY: POSITIVE

DESIGNATION: LEO

The world tilted on its axis. The hum of static he’d heard his entire life, a faint, high-pitched ringing in his ears that doctors had dismissed as tinnitus, suddenly roared to life in his head, syncing with the hiss from the television.

You. The word wasn't on the screen, but it screamed in the silent space of his mind. That thing is you.

The carefully constructed reality of his twenty-four years of life—of a loving home, of being an ordinary person, of a history major with a slight case of tinnitus—shattered into a million pieces.

He was a subject. A project. A thing in a box.

A guttural roar of pure, animal terror tore from his throat. It was a sound of denial, of rage, of a soul breaking. He lunged forward, his grief-fueled sorrow replaced by a violent, desperate need to destroy the truth. He grabbed the television, its plastic casing humming with an unnatural energy, and lifted it over his head with a strength he didn't know he possessed.

With a final, agonized scream, he hurled it to the floor.

The plastic casing exploded. The glass of the screen imploded with a hollow thump, sending a shower of sharp fragments across the clean floorboards. The blue light died instantly.

Silence, thick and absolute, crashed back into the attic.

Leo stood panting in the sudden darkness, his chest heaving, his body trembling. He stared at the wreckage. It was over. The nightmare was broken.

But it wasn't.

He closed his eyes, and burned onto the back of his eyelids, as clear as if the screen were still glowing in front of him, was the image of the monstrous, beautiful baby in the box. And beneath it, the impossible, damning word: Leo.