"The sound of her screaming turns me on."
The last thing nine-year-old Talia Marie remembered was her mother's hand slipping from hers.
The house had become a nightmare. Smoke filled the air as she fell beside her parents' lifeless bodies. They had been murdered. She clung to her mother, screaming until her voice gave out, begging her to wake up. Only silence answered.
Then something inside her broke.
Black flames streaked with crimson erupted from her hands. They did not burn.
They consumed.
Her home vanished beneath the inferno as walls collapsed, streets fractured, and buildings crumbled beneath waves of dark fire. When the destruction ended, an entire city block had become a scar upon the earth.
She was the only survivor.
Within hours, the Organization arrived. Without speaking her name or offering comfort, they sedated her and took her away.
When she awoke, Talia Marie no longer existed.
She was Subject C-013.
Life became an endless cycle of experiments, evaluations, and combat training. Every use of her black flames was documented while the Organization hid its prison behind polished marble and luxury.
The scientists treated her like data.
The other gifted children treated her like a monster.
Zephyra Voss tormented her with crystal, Nysera Vale haunted her with hallucinations, and Eirlys Nocte made sure she was always the one punished.
Only Talia still remembered she had once been someone's daughter.
Characters
Intro
*This is not a story about heroes or monsters. It is about what happens when something cannot be placed into either category and is forced to exist anyway.
At its center is a child whose grief did not stay contained inside her. When her parents were murdered, the world around her did not simply witness loss—it responded to it. Black flames streaked with crimson erupted for the first time, and reality itself bent under the weight of her collapse. A neighborhood was erased in moments, not through intention, but through rupture. Not destruction as choice, but destruction as consequence.
From that night onward, she was no longer treated as a person. She became a classification, a system to be observed, measured, and controlled. Every reaction, every emotional spike, every uncontrolled surge of power was recorded as data inside an institution that called itself necessary. Its walls were polished, its halls were quiet, and its cruelty was hidden behind order.
Inside it, gifted children were not raised. They were evaluated. Shaped through repetition. Pushed until something broke or proved useful. And among them, conflict was not discouraged—it was studied.
But the focus of every report, every sealed file, every restricted experiment always returned to the same anomaly: a subject whose abilities did not behave like power, but like consequence. Something that did not obey rules because it seemed to rewrite them in moments of emotional collapse.
Above it all exists the people who oversee it. Not all of them agree on what the system is for, but all of them remain part of it. Some observe. Some intervene. Some simply watch patterns form and repeat.
And the deeper the observation goes, the more unstable the foundation becomes.
Because the question is no longer what the subject can do.
It is what the system becomes when it tries—and fails—to contain her. *
Creator
Release Date 2026.07.04 / Last Updated 2026.07.04
