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Enigma · (05-20-2025)

I saw it once

on a throat gone cold—

spiral of bone,

crown of old.

ROCK HILL, NEW YORK

MAY 1, 2025

(OFF CAMERA)

Sev didn’t dream anymore. Not really. Just static behind his eyes – screams twisted into shapes, too broken to name. But that night, there was nothing. No nightmare. No silence. Just—

Open eyes.

The baby's.

Sev woke to them. Inches away. The boy was no longer in his crib. He was in Sev’s arms, swaddled in a threadbare ENIGMA shirt, soft with age and sweat-stained from a life before him. Cradled like a blessing. Or a bomb. The second thought slithered through, and the anger flared. The child didn’t move much, just a whisper of a sigh and those big, bottomless eyes open wide.

“What do you see?” His lips moved but no sound came out.

Unblinking. Unflinching. Those dark eyes so much like his own bored into Sev, as if the child was cataloguing Sev’s very existence. Or maybe he was trying to remember, like he’d already lived this all before and was just looking for the key to unlock the door. Sev had seen this stare before. In mirrors. In crowds. In other men, right before they’d broken. It wasn't vacant. Or curious. It was aware.

He swallowed, his throat dry.

In the ring, he’d faced so-called monsters. Men who’d hid behind masks, pain, violence. He’d been made a monster. Built for horror. But there was something about that tiny, perfect thing in his arms now that unnerved him deeper than any sharpened blade ever could.

What if he isn’t a monster?

What if he’s something worse?

He looked at the child. The child looked back. And for one impossibly long moment—

—they understood each other.

“…Elle?” he croaked. His voice was ash and gravel. The chair beside the bed creaked beneath him as he stirred, leaning forward. Joints screamed in protest but the pain cleared his head a little. “You… you gave him to me?”

No answer. Her breathing was slow. Deep and even.

Sev envied her at that moment, knowing he was going to crash and burn in Florida if he didn’t stop burning the candle at both ends. The hours felt precious now, full of secrets and his hands itched to squeeze every drop of everything from the next twenty-four hours.

The fire had gone out again. The room wasn’t dark even though dawn was still an hour away and at first he thought it was just the migraine halos, back again to erode the last of his sanity. It had to be imagination because it seemed as though a soft amber glow bloomed from the boy’s skin. Warm. Terrible.

Sev’s breath caught. The mark on the boy’s chest— he hadn’t noticed it before but now it stood out starkly, that afterimage burned into his retinas as his eyes closed. Blinked once. Twice.

In the low light, the child’s skin shimmered like heat off obsidian, dazzling with a newness Sev couldn’t look at directly. Not just soft — unreal. Like he wasn’t born so much as peeled from some sacred place behind the veil. And there, just above the infant’s heart, the faintest shape glowed beneath the skin. A crown — jagged, thorned, faint as a thumbprint in dust, glowing like the last coal of a dying forge.

He closed his eyes as a sound rattled in his ears— not aloud, but within. Like steel on steel. Like chains being drawn tight. His knuckles cracked. His vision blurred at the edges. His breath caught, burned in his chest and that nic-fit crawling on his skin ceased in an instant as something ancient and unspoken in him reared up. The true Monster Machine, coiled beneath years of willpower and denial, surged toward the surface.

Claim him, that eldritch voice snarled, before something else does.

The boy was tiny enough to vanish between Sev’s arms. His weight was nothing. His breath, soft as moth wings, lifted and fell against Sev’s chest.

They hadn’t named him yet.

Sev ran his thumb over the mark, staring at it, his pulse slowing.

Not drawn in ink. Not carved. Woven— like a truth treaded beneath the skin, waiting to be revealed. Like something had marked him before the womb. There was something cruel in all of this. Not evil— not yet. Just ancient. Hungry. The kind of symbol that didn’t need to explain itself. The kind of truth you could only inherit.

He ran his thumb along the boy’s chest — afraid to touch, unable to stop.

The child blinked. His eyes found Sev’s. Focused. Too early.

The room felt colder.

But the baby just blinked, calm as dusk, weighing nothing and everything all at once. Sev held him like he might vanish if he breathed too hard. Or worse— change.

The little chest rose and fell in time with his own, and Sev matched the rhythm like it was a ritual. Like it might protect them both. The mark still pulsed beneath the baby’s skin. Dim and deep. Shifting. Turning into something else. He thought he smelled incense and spent matches like church basements and funeral pyres, the cloying tickle of dust and ash in the back of his throat.

Old pine.

Petrichor and loam.

He knew that shape. Not from dreams. Not from memory. From wounds. It had been carved into enemies. Into himself, in old wars, back when he thought pain made him holy. Back when he thought horror had to be earned. He had bled in circles. He screamed in circles. The broken crown was his, bought and paid for with every drop of blood claimed in the name of THE VOID. This twisted impurity, this goddamn birthright was an afterimage burned into his closed lids and now his son bore it, effortlessly— naturally— as though the world had never meant anything else and he knew the truth. It didn’t come from Elle. This… this thing, this mark, this calling— whatever in the fuck this actually was?

It was his. Unequivocally.

His inheritance. Passed like a curse in the blood. A spiral, endless. A crown of thorns. Twisted scar tissue connecting them even like the phantom blood that pumped through those tattooed veins that had felt so damned symbolic at the time, so clever yet so vague, emerging now as the roadmap of agony that had been necessary and now he saw the fragment of that shared dream, his hands placed on an altar before an empty cradle.

He was shirtless, tattoos flickering like oil on water and as he knelt before the altar, he felt his chest rise with breath that seemed too controlled, too practiced. Like he was preparing for a match. But there was no audience here other than the trees. They were silent sentinels, witnesses forevermore. The cradle rested atop the stone dais, shrouded in linen so pale it almost glowed and although the wind stirred it, whatever was waiting within was hidden from sight. Sev pressed his palms to the cold stone, offering himself. Blood beaded at his wrists— not cut, not wounded, just given. His veins parked like cracks in old earth, blood welling as though summoned. The shrine drank it up. The trees felt closer now. Protecting this sacred circle even as they formed its shape.

“No,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Not to the child. Never.

To the world.

To Elle.

To whatever still listened.

The Machine writhed in him. Old metal memories. Blood rites. Fire. Glory.Not the roar of a predator. Not the howl of hunger. Just a purr – low, ancient.

Pleased.

Pleased that the boy existed.

Pleased that Sev had finally built something that would outlast.

He looked into his son’s wide, unblinking eyes— no tears, no fear, just quiet knowing— and felt something shatter. A flicker of heat ghosted across Sev’s palm.

Then—

I felt it once

in a dreamscape gone mad.

thickened scar tissue,

from a life I never had.

ROCK HILL, NEW YORK

MAY 1, 2025

(OFF CAMERA)

“Sev?”

A voice. Thin. Worried.

Elle.

She was awake. And watching. The room was far brighter though the time on the clock remained the same as the last time he’d looked. That felt wrong. Impossible, even.

He didn’t move when she spoke. Couldn’t. He could feel tears rolling down his cheeks. He could feel the crick in his neck, the tingle in the tips of his fingers – how long had he been sitting here like this? Her voice cracked the surface of him, but the core remained locked. His arms were protective, a safe space, Elle had always told him. His face was in shadow, those massive arms still cradling the child as his mind kept circling the spiral and blooming outward into that bristling crown. He couldn’t bear to look at her. Not yet.

Because if he did, she’d see it. On his face. On the boy. She couldn’t not see that blemish – what he’d passed on.

What he was.

What the boy would become.

“I didn’t… mean to fall asleep,” she said softly. “You— God, Sev! It’s Thursday already? You stayed awake this whole time?”

A small, almost stupid nod.

And then: “He’s quiet.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “He is.”

A pause stretched. Elle shifted in the sheets, trying to sit up. She was sore, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t ask for help. Didn’t reach for the boy.

Sev was still facing away from her, still hiding him. Not out of cruelty. Not even shame. Out of the simplest, most broken instinct: protection.

As if not showing her could somehow delay the moment when her eyes would meet the mark. The spiral. The truth.

Elle’s voice was steady, but lower now. Not quite a warning. Not yet.

“Sev. Let me see him.”

Silence.

He drew a breath, long and shaking. The Machine inside him resisted— wanted to run, to lie, to fight. But Sev didn’t. He turned. And he held out his son.

The light caught the baby’s skin.

The mark shone.

And Sev watched it happen.

Watched her see it.

The world went flat, like the air thinned. Like time backed away from her. First came the breath— caught. Not sharp. Not horrified. But stopped. Then the blink. Then the eyes widening before narrowing again, almost too fast to catch.

Then—

Nothing.

Or rather, she went completely still.

He knew that kind of stillness— the kind that came after the scream. When the fight was over. When you realized the monster didn’t come for you—

It came through you.

He whispered, “Elle, I—”

But she shook her head. Not in anger. Not in blame. Just— no.

Not yet.

She reached for the baby, and Sev gave him over like he was handing her the last of himself. Like he expected her to recoil. To hand him back. To sob. To run. He waited for her to scream. To accuse. But all she did was breathe, like she’d been holding it for a lifetime.

Something inside him shifted. Absolutely shattered.

She cradled him like a mother should. Lovingly.

And finally—

Her lips parted, not in fear but déjà vu. That shape. She had drawn it once. In chalk. Or ash. She remembered a boy her age, with dark eyes like their son’s. The door was open. A name trembling on her lips but vanishing like a dream the moment she tried to utter it. She swallowed. Tasted dust.

Sev held his breath , feeling the fragility of the moment, terrified to move or twitch or even exist and when her eyes locked on his, Elle said four words that changed everything: “I’ve seen this before.”

Not a question. Not a cry. Not a trace of emotion. Just a fact, said aloud for the first time in decades. Maybe ever.

Sev’s heart stopped in his chest.

She’d said it with such calm. With that same strange stillness that had crept into the room the second she’d seen the mark— not as if a monster had been born, but as if something forgotten had returned. Something ancient. Personal. Familial.

The baby stirred, just slightly, in her arms. A sigh, again. That same breath that had started it all. Elle didn’t look down. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes never left Sev’s.

“I’ve seen this before.”

He swallowed, throat tight. “Where?”

Her head tilted, slow. A movement like a pendulum swing, like she was trying to remember without tearing something loose in the process.

“When I was little,” she murmured, eyes beginning to shine with the glaze of memory. “I don’t know how old. I was sick, maybe? We were... somewhere with woods. Pines. Fog. You weren’t there. My mother wasn’t there.” She blinked. “But he was.”

Sev’s pulse quickened. “Who?”

Elle’s brow furrowed— not in confusion, but effort. She was trying to open a door long rusted shut. One hand brushed the child’s brow, instinctively, protectively, as though it helped her find the words.

“My brother,” she said.

The air changed. Sharp. Electric. Charged like a sky seconds before lightning.

But Sev didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

Because he knew. He knew.

That word— brother— cracked something wide open in him too, though he didn’t know why. Just the way she said it. Like it had been missing. Like she had lost him, not just forgotten.

Elle kept going, slow and deliberate, like she was crossing a frozen lake and each sentence was a test of the ice. “I didn’t remember him until now,” she whispered. “Not really. Just... flickers. We were both so young. He had a mark like this. Not exactly the same, but... similar. I saw it once when we were hiding under the stairs. I asked him what it was. He said it was a secret. That if I knew, I’d be taken away.”

The baby yawned in her arms, impossibly serene.

“I thought I made him up,” she said. “Until now.”

Sev moved before he knew what he was doing. One hand found hers. Anchored her. Not tightly. Not forcefully. Just there. Because he needed her to know she wasn’t alone. That none of them were anymore.

The spiral wasn’t just a scar.

It was a map.

A lineage.

An inheritance written in shadow and silence and fire.

And somehow, whatever Elle had buried to survive, whatever he’d fought to become, had circled back again. In this tiny child. In this impossible moment. They had made something neither of them understood.

Something watching. Remembering. Choosing.

Something not born of chaos or hunger— but pattern.

She looked down at the boy again, the faintest tremble in her fingers. “I think... I think we need to find out where this started–”

Sev nodded, solemn. “And where it ends.”

But neither of them said the truth hanging in the silence between them:

It never ends.

Only spirals.

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