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The world was reduced to a roar of collapsing earth and the taste of dust. Jack's only thought was a shield—his own body, curled around Lissa's, as the ceiling of the cavern gave way. He felt impacts on his back, not of individual rocks, but of entire sections of compacted soil and stone. The beast within, already raw and panicked from the Darkhold's assault, reacted with pure, blind instinct, flooding his system with power, reinforcing muscle and bone to become a living bulwark.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the violence ceased. The roar faded into a ringing silence, broken only by Lissa's choked coughing and the distant trickle of settling debris. They were buried, but not crushed. Jack had taken the brunt of the collapse, creating a small, fragile pocket of air in a tomb of earth.
"Jack?" Lissa's voice was a terrified whisper in the absolute dark.
"I'm here," he grunted, the words feeling foreign in his mouth. His voice was his own, but the effort to speak, to form the thought, was immense. The seamless flow between intention and action was gone. It was like trying to pilot a body that was only half-listening.
He could feel the beast pacing just beneath his skin, a caged and terrified animal. It wasn't an ally anymore; it was a traumatized prisoner, and he was its warden once more. The memory of the effortless unity, the power that had cleansed the dam and banished Mephistos, was a fresh, agonizing wound.
A sliver of pale light pierced the darkness above. A shower of dirt rained down as a hole was punched through.
"Jack! Lissa!" Elsa's voice, sharp with urgency.
Hands—Elsa's, strong and sure, and Morbius's, cold and steady—reached down and hauled them out of the makeshift grave. They emerged into the ruined mausoleum, now filled with rubble and dust. The pre-dawn sky was a sickly gray overhead.
Lissa collapsed against Jack, sobbing with relief and shock. He held her, his movements stiff, his mind a frantic negotiation between the human need to comfort his sister and the beast's primal urge to flee this confined space, to run, to find open ground.
"The cult?" Jack asked, his gaze scanning the wreckage.
"Buried," Morbius stated flatly. "The book with them. For now."
Elsa was already checking Lissa for injuries, her professional demeanor a stark contrast to the supernatural horror they'd just endured. "She's in shock, but physically okay." She then looked at Jack, her eyes narrowing. "You're not."
Jack didn't answer. He couldn't find the words to describe the internal schism. The fracture wasn't a physical wound she could bandage.
Lissa looked up at him, her tears cutting clean paths through the grime on her face. "Jack… your eyes… they keep changing."
He knew what she meant. The unified, intelligent glow was gone. In its place was the old, familiar flicker—brown one second, a flicker of feral gold the next. The control was slipping, the tenuous peace shattered.
He had saved his sister. He had survived.
But as he stood in the wreckage of the mausoleum, holding the last piece of his human life, he felt a more profound loss. He had won the battle, but the war within had begun anew, and the enemy knew all his old weaknesses.
The return to the church library was a funeral procession for Jack's peace. Lissa, wrapped in a shock blanket, sat silently in the passenger seat of Elsa's car, staring blankly out the window at a city waking up to a normal day. A day she was no longer a part of.
Jack sat in the back, his body rigid. Every stoplight, every jolt of the car, was a fresh skirmish in the civil war inside him. The beast, traumatized and furious at its re-confinement, saw threats in every passing pedestrian, every blaring horn. It took all of Jack's frayed will to keep it contained, to keep his claws from erupting and his form from shifting in a panicked, violent burst.
Back in the library, the familiar surroundings felt like a taunt. The scent of old paper now seemed cloying, the silence oppressive. This was no longer a sanctuary; it was a cage where he could feel the walls of his own mind pressing in.
Elsa guided Lissa to a chair. "You're safe here."
Lissa looked around the cavernous room, her eyes lingering on the werewolf woodcuts in an open bestiary, the silver weapons displayed on a rack. Her safe, normal world had been irrevocably punctured. "What is this place?"
"It's home," Jack said, the words coming out rougher than he intended. He saw her flinch and felt a fresh wave of self-loathing. He was terrifying her. Again.
Morbius, ever the observer, glided to the desk where the inert lunar crystal sat. "The fracture is not merely psychological," he stated, his voice cutting through the tension. "The Darkhold's attack was a metaphysical one. It did not just frighten the beast; it wounded the connection between your two natures. The 'soul,' if you will, of your power."
"He's right," Elsa said, pulling up the biometric data she'd passively collected from Jack's suit during the fight. "Your transformation metrics are all over the place. Heart rate, adrenal spikes, cellular regeneration—it's chaotic. It's like your body can't decide which state it's in."
Jack leaned heavily on the desk, closing his eyes. He didn't need the data to tell him. He could feel it—the dissonance. The man was exhausted from the constant effort of control. The beast was exhausted from being constantly suppressed. They were both losing.
"I can't... I can't hold it," he admitted, the confession tasting like ash. It was the thing he had fought for years to never have to say again.
Lissa stood up, her shock giving way to a dawning, fierce protectiveness. She walked over to him, ignoring the instinct to recoil, and placed a hand on his arm. "Then don't."
He looked at her, confused.
"You spent your whole life fighting it, right? Locking it away?" she said, her voice gaining strength. "And then you... you made peace with it. That's what felt different about you before. You weren't just the guy with the monster anymore. You were both."
She looked from his tormented face to Elsa and Morbius. "That thing, that book... it didn't like that. It tried to tear you in two because you were stronger together." She squeezed his arm. "So stop trying to lock it back up. It's scared. You're both scared. You have to... I don't know. Talk to it. Trust it again."
The simplicity of her words, spoken from a place completely outside his world of curses and cults, hit him with the force of a revelation. He had been trying to re-establish dominance, to be the warden. But the beast wasn't a prisoner to be controlled; it was a partner that had been violently betrayed.
The war wasn't about control. It was about reconciliation.
And the first battle was to stop seeing the fracture as a weakness, and start seeing it as a wound that needed healing.
Lissa's words hung in the air, a lifeline thrown into the churning sea of his psyche. Talk to it. Trust it again. It sounded naive, like suggesting one reason with a hurricane. But it was also the only path forward that didn't end with him breaking completely.
Elsa broke the silence, her tone shifting from medic to strategist. "She's right. You can't muscle your way through this. The data shows a feedback loop—your stress triggers the beast, its panic stresses you. You need to break the cycle." She began clearing the central space of the library, pushing tables and chairs against the walls. "You need to re-establish the connection. On your terms."
Morbius gave a slow, approving nod. "A controlled environment. A dialogue, not a domination."
Jack looked from their determined faces to Lissa's, which was full of a faith he didn't feel. The idea of voluntarily lowering his guard, of inviting the beast's raw panic to the surface, was terrifying. The memory of the Darkhold's siphon, of that feeling of being unmade, was still a fresh, screaming wound.
But the alternative—a slow, grinding descent back into the tormented man he once was—was worse.
"Okay," he said, the word a surrender and a commitment. He walked to the center of the cleared space and sat on the floor, crossing his legs. He closed his eyes.
The first thing he did was stop fighting. He let go of the white-knuckled grip on his own consciousness. Immediately, the beast's fear surged forward—a tidal wave of primal terror, the memory of the siphon, the instinct to flee, to fight, to survive. It was a deafening roar in his mind.
Instead of pushing it back, he did what Lissa suggested. He spoke to it. Not with words, but with feelings.
He projected the memory of running under the open moon, the wind in his fur, the pure, uncomplicated joy of power and freedom. This is us, he thought-image-sent. This is what we are.
The beast's panic lessened by a fraction, replaced by a flicker of recognition. A memory of its own.
He then showed it the memory of protecting Lissa, of curling his body around hers in the collapsing cavern. The fierce, protective certainty that had overridden everything else. This is why we fight. This is what we protect.
He felt a shift. The beast's terror began to morph into a low, rumbling confusion. The simple binary of fight-or-flight was being challenged by a third, more complex concept: purpose.
It was agonizingly slow work. Like trying to reassemble a shattered vase, piece by piece, in the dark. He wasn't trying to force the pieces back to where they were; the old symbiosis was gone, a beautiful, fragile thing broken beyond repair. He was trying to fit them together in a new way, acknowledging the cracks, building something stronger from the broken pieces.
He didn't achieve peace. He didn't achieve control.
But after an hour of silent, internal struggle, he opened his eyes. The frantic flickering in his gaze had settled into a steadier, if still troubled, glow. The tension in his shoulders had eased.
He looked at Lissa and gave a slow, deliberate nod.
It wasn't a victory. It was a ceasefire. A fragile, hard-won truce declared on the battlefield of his own soul.
The fracture was still there. But for the first time since the cavern, he believed it might not be fatal.
To Be Continue...