The first scream came from the ice.
Not a human scream
—ice does not have lungs—but a sound like the world splitting its teeth. Dr. Ericson stood ankle-deep in snow older than history and smiled as the glacier answered him. The instruments on his wrist howled in protest, needles thrashing like trapped animals. Radiation where none should exist. Heat where cold should reign. And beneath it all, a pulse—measured, intelligent, alive.
"Found you," Ericson whispered.
For centuries, humanity had prayed upward and cursed downward, never realizing both heavens and hells had always been here—just folded sideways into reality, occupying the same planet like rival thoughts in a single brain. Angels nested where the world forgot warmth: waterfalls frozen mid-fall, mountains that pierced the sky like white spears, ice fields that hummed with impossible harmonics. Demons thrived where the Earth bled: volcanoes, magma seas, deserts that could cook bone to ash. Different thermodynamics. Different physics. Same planet.
And now—discovered.
Eric was called mad because madness was easier than fear. A geneticist turned exile, a man whose theories made universities quietly erase his name, he had stopped asking for permission years ago. What he wanted now was communion.
The angels came first.
They emerged from the cataract behind him, light folding into anatomy—tall, faceted beings whose wings were not feathers but layered prisms of frozen air. Their eyes were calm in the way avalanches are calm. They did not speak with mouths; they spoke by rearranging the cold.
WHY DO YOU STAND WHERE YOU DO NOT BELONG?
Eric did not kneel. He adjusted his goggles, hands shaking not from fear but triumph.
"Because belonging is a boundary," he said. "And boundaries are meant to be crossed."
The temperature dropped another ten degrees.
The demons arrived with fire.
The mountain's opposite face cracked open like a wound. Lava veins flared, and from the heat stepped creatures shaped by hunger and pressure—horned silhouettes flickering as if reality struggled to keep them rendered. Their voices were laughter layered over screams, sulfurous and intimate.
A MAN WHO SEEKS BOTH SKY AND ABYSS—one demon grinned, teeth glowing—IS EITHER A GOD OR A FOOL.
Eric spread his arms wide, standing between frost and flame on the highest peak Earth had ever named.
"I'm a scientist," he said. "Which means I'm both."
He had chosen this mountain because it pierced every layer—air, myth, arrogance. Here, angelic cold and demonic heat could coexist without annihilating each other. Here, equations held.
"I know what you are," Eric continued. "And I know what you are not. You are not eternal. You are not complete."
The angels shifted. The demons grew still.
"You are extremes," he said. "Perfection without change. Chaos without direction. But humanity—humanity is synthesis. We adapt. We evolve. We survive."
Silence. Then the ice spoke.
WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE, MORTAL?
Ericson's smile widened into something feral.
"A covenant. A new species. Not angels. Not demons. Something… better."
He showed them the data: DNA helixes spiraling like twin galaxies, gene sequences glowing where divine entropy met infernal resilience. A humanoid form capable of surviving vacuum, fire, cold, radiation. Wings of compressed plasma and cryo-light. Minds that could calculate and dream, rage and reason.
"Give me fragments of yourselves," Eric said softly. "And I will give you descendants who can walk every world."
The contract was not signed in blood.
It was etched into reality itself.
The first prototype screamed as it was born.
In Eric's underground laboratory, carved deep beneath basalt and ice, the humanoid tore free from its amniotic chamber, wings unfolding in a storm of steam and frost. Its eyes burned white-blue, and when it inhaled, the room's temperature spiked and crashed simultaneously.
Eric wept.
"Beautiful," he whispered. "You're beautiful."
He named them Nephryx—children of up and down, of halo and horn.
For a while, the world did not know.
But secrets rot.
Dr. Mira Voss, his assistant, watched the Nephryx learn faster than any human child. She saw them lift steel with one hand and calculate orbital mechanics with the other. She saw Eric's journals—the plans, the bitterness, the growing obsession.
"They'll never forgive us," she said one night. "The governments. The world."
Eric didn't look up from his console.
"I'm not asking for forgiveness."
She transmitted the files anyway.
Within weeks, satellites shifted. Drones appeared like insects in the sky. A single message cut through every channel:
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT—STAND DOWN.
Eric laughed.
He had already won.
The laboratory shuddered as engines ignited. The mountain split open—not in destruction, but revelation—as Eric's true project rose from beneath the Earth. A city of steel and light, anti-gravity cores screaming against gravity's leash.
The Nephryx boarded without fear.
As jets screamed overhead, too late, the entire complex lifted free and vanished into the red glare of space.
Mars welcomed them with silence.
Kade stood beneath a domed sky, watching his creations build cities in hours where humans would take centuries. He looked back once—at the blue dot of Earth.
"They chose fear," he said.
Behind him, angels watched through frozen lenses. Demons watched through fire.
Eric smiled, cold and burning all at once.
"Now," he whispered, "I choose revenge."