The water in the flooded basement lapped at Valeska’s boots, chilling her to the bone, but it was the icy dread in her stomach that truly held her still. Olek stood a few feet away, his small hand gripping the hilt of her discarded knife, his gaze fixed on the spot where the mercenary had been. A faint, silver mist still clung to his dark hair, a ghostly halo. He’d done it. Not just attracted, not just suffered, but commanded. The Murk had become his silent, ravenous pet. The implications spun a dizzying web in her mind. This wasn't just about protecting Olek; it was about protecting Ostrachova from *Olek*, or at least, the terrifying potential within him. She looked at Casimir, who had pulled himself from the water, his scarred face grim. “He didn’t just draw it,” she said, her voice a rough whisper. “He told it what to do.” Casimir ran a hand over his wet hair, water sluicing down his neck. “I saw.” His eyes, usually so guarded, held a flicker of something akin to awe, quickly masked. “The Murk… it’s drawn to suffering, to fear. But it responds to command only from a source of profound, uncontrolled shadow-essence. Like a beacon, but also a leash.” “A leash he doesn’t know he holds.” Valeska’s gaze hardened, sweeping across the blood-slicked, abandoned workshop. The resonant lenses were a shield, a bulwark. But what good was a shield if the enemy was being bred within the city’s heart? Nikodem’s voltaic-grid wasn’t just attracting the Murk; it was incubating it. The realization twisted into a bitter knot in her gut. She’d been planning a defense, a monopoly. Now, she needed an offensive, a surgical strike. “We need to bring down Nikodem’s grid,” she stated, no room for argument in her tone. “The whole thing. The towers. Everything.” Casimir didn’t flinch. “That means breaking into the Ascendant Spires. His primary research lab, the one he calls the ‘Aethel Core’ in the Volkov Tower. It’s a fortress, and not even the Murk can penetrate its upper floors.” “Good,” Valeska said, snatching a clean rag and wiping the drying blood from her knuckles. “Then it’ll be a good place to start. We need the schematics. The override codes. Whatever gives us control, or lets us burn it all down.” Hours later, under the cloak of a manufactured fog generated by Casimir’s concealed airship, they ascended. The flooded low-district, a sprawling patchwork of grimy lanterns and deeper shadows, shrank beneath them. Above, the Ascendant Spires glittered with pristine glow, a stark, mocking contrast. Volkov Tower, a colossal spire of polished onyx and reinforced quartz, pierced the perpetual cloud cover like a spear. Their infiltration was a symphony of precision and brute force. Casimir, with his improbable agility and custom-fabricated grapple-lenses, scaled outer maintenance conduits while Valeska bypassed security checkpoints with a series of stolen keycards and a practiced ease born from years of desperate improvisation. The Aethel Core, a circular laboratory occupying the tower’s uppermost level, was sealed tighter than a vault. Valeska finally forced the heavy alloy door with a carefully placed concussion-charge, the muffled blast rattling the reinforced glass panels. Inside, the lab was a maelstrom of crackling energy and frantic scribbles. Massive dynamos hummed, their conduits snaking across the floor, feeding a central, pulsating quartz lattice. Nikodem Volkov, once the picture of meticulous genius, was a wreck. His clothes were rumpled, his face gaunt, shadowed by days of unshaven stubble. He stared at a bank of monitors displaying distorted, swirling energy readings—and disturbing biological signatures. His eyes, sunken and bloodshot, fixed on Valeska, then Casimir. “Valeska?” His voice was a raw croak. “You… you’re here.” He scrambled away from a console, his gaze darting to the reinforced door, then to the various monitoring screens. “Marika… she’s got me locked in. She said… she said I was having ‘delusions.’ That the grid was ‘perfect.’” Valeska stepped forward, her hand instinctively going to her hidden knife. “Delusions about what, Nikodem?” she demanded, her voice flat. “The Murk? Your city grid? What have you built?” He swallowed, his eyes wide with a horrifying revelation. “The power… it’s not just drawing them. It’s feeding them. The resonance frequencies… I discovered they could accelerate the Murk’s growth, its manifestation cycles. Marika… she saw the potential for infinite power. She insisted. The city’s conduction towers… they’re not just power sources. They’re incubators. Giant, city-wide incubators, breeding the Murk. Generating power from the essence of their terror and consumption.” He gestured wildly at the screens, where green tendrils of data represented increasing Murk activity across the city. “It’s a continuous harvest, but it’s slipping out of hand. They’re growing too fast. They’re starving.” Valeska felt a cold dread clamp around her heart. It wasn't just a magnet; it was a factory. The Long Eclipse would be their grand opening. “The override schematics, Nikodem. Where are they?” Casimir’s voice was a low growl, his hand on the hilt of his own glass-knuckle-duster. Nikodem pointed a trembling finger at a console. “There. But… you can’t shut it down. Not from here. The core… it’s linked to the central nexus beneath the Spire. Only a direct override there could—.” The heavy door to the lab hissed open. Marika Chernova stood there, impeccably dressed, a cruel smile on her lips, her eyes glittering with cold malice. Two hulking enforcers stood behind her, their weapons already raised. “Well, well, well,” she purred, her gaze sweeping over Valeska, then Nikodem. “A family reunion. And in my husband’s lab, no less. How… quaint.” Her eyes narrowed on Valeska. “Still clinging to the poor, disgraced brother, are we, Valeska? Not content to just steal my quartz, you try to steal my husband’s future too?” “Your future is a slaughterhouse,” Valeska spat. “These towers are breeding the Murk.” Marika laughed, a chilling, brittle sound. “And what a glorious harvest it will be. Infinite power. Total dominion.” She gestured to the guards. “Lockdown the facility. And activate… Protocol Chimera.” A blaring klaxon ripped through the lab. Red emergency lights bathed the room in a bloody glow. From grated vents in the floor and ceiling, a nauseating, inky mist began to seep, coalescing into familiar, undulating shapes. Captive Murk entities, starved and enraged, materialized in the lab, their forms writhing with nascent hunger. They were smaller than the ones in the Drowned Wards, still coalescing, but their numbers were overwhelming. One lunged for Nikodem, who shrieked, scrambling back. “The Aethel Core is sealed!” Casimir roared, slamming his shoulder into the door they’d entered through. It shuddered, but held fast. The guards opened fire on him, but their lead ricocheted off a rapidly deployed, mirrored shield from his arm-mounted device. Valeska drew her knife, parrying a Murk tendril that lashed out at her, its touch burning like acid. “The walls!” Valeska yelled, pointing to the thick mineral-glass panels that formed the lab’s outer shell. “Can you—?” Casimir didn’t answer. He ripped a massive, intricately crafted lens from a device on his wrist – a lens Valeska recognized as the master prototype he’d worked on for weeks, the one he said was too valuable, too complex to ever risk. He slammed it onto the central dynamo, the raw energy of the grid flowing into it, supercharging its resonant frequency. The lens began to glow with an impossibly bright, emerald light, pulsing like a captured star. “Stand clear!” he bellowed, his voice straining. The lens shrieked, a sound of pure, unfettered power. The reinforced quartz wall began to crack, spiderwebbing outwards from the point where the lens was focused. Marika stared with tight-lipped rage and disbelief. The Murk surged, overwhelming Nikodem’s meager defenses, dragging him down. The retainers were caught between the blast radius and the encroaching shadows. With a deafening boom, the glass wall shattered, disintegrating into a shower of brittle shards. A gaping hole opened into the frigid night air, hundreds of feet above the city. “Now!” Casimir yelled, grabbing Valeska’s arm. They launched themselves through the breach, falling into the plummeting darkness. The wind roared past them, the dull embers of the sunken canal basin far below. Then, the sky went pitch black. Every beacon of the Ascendant Spires, every scattered spark across the flooded gutters… they died. The city plunged into an unnatural, absolute void. Marika had done it. She had activated the grid prematurely. The Long Eclipse had begun.

The Incubator