Wolfen's eyes opened in the absolute blackness that preceded dawn. It was an old habit, ingrained in him long before the labs, a relic of a life where the quiet hours were the only ones that truly belonged to him. The cave was a symphony of sleeping breaths and the dying embers of the fire. And beneath it all, another sound. A soft, hitching, almost silent sob.
He didn't need to look to know it was Maya. She was still in her corner, a darker shadow in the dark, the raider's cloak pulled tight around her shoulders. The guilt was a living thing, eating her from the inside out.
A strange, unfamiliar impulse flickered in Wolfen's chest. The urge to… comfort. It was an alien concept, a software glitch in his otherwise ruthlessly efficient operating system. He remembered being a child, coming home to find his father weeping over the family cat, which had been hit by a car. Wolfen had liked the cat well enough—it was a decent hunter, quiet—but the spectacle of his father's grief had been… perplexing. He'd stood there, fighting down a completely inappropriate laugh, while his sister, with an effortless grace he'd never possessed, had wrapped their father in a hug and spoken soft, meaningless words that somehow worked.
He didn't have that grace. And he certainly didn't want to create another emotionally volatile, psychologically damaged weapon in their group. One was more than enough. Stability, even of the cold and calculating variety, was a resource they couldn't afford to squander.
Yet, the sound was… inefficient. It was a drain on morale, a variable of weakness. Addressing it was a tactical decision, he told himself. Nothing more.
He rose and moved silently across the cave, settling on the stone floor beside her. She flinched but didn't pull away.
"Crying is a waste of salt and energy," he stated, his voice low. It wasn't an accusation, just a fact.
She didn't respond, her shoulders trembling harder.
Psychology, then. He shifted gears. "What you feel is not guilt. It's the cognitive dissonance between your base programming and your residual social conditioning. The predator you became acted according to its design. The human you were is appalled by the result. You are at war with your own nature."
He gave her his own example. "I lost control once. In the lab where I was created. The hunger for destruction, the pure, unfiltered rage… it was a fire in my veins. I broke containment. I killed seventeen security personnel and two junior Architects before he stopped me."
Maya's crying slowed. She was listening.
"Prime 5," Wolfen continued, a strange, almost respectful tone in his voice. "He didn't try to fight me. He didn't use a sonic suppressor or a neuro-toxin. He… calculated the precise amount of force required to render me unconscious without causing permanent damage. It was a surgical strike. When I woke up, he was there. He just said, 'The fire is a tool, Wolfen. Not the master.'"
It was working, but not enough. The intellectual understanding was there, but the visceral self-loathing remained. He needed a practical lesson.
"Come on," he said, standing and offering a hand she didn't take. He simply turned and walked out of the cave, trusting she would follow. After a moment, he heard her shaky footsteps behind him.
Outside, the world was painted in shades of grey and indigo, the air bitingly cold. He led her to a clearing, the scene of last week's battle still faintly visible in the pre-dawn light.
"The hunger will always be there," he said, turning to face her. "It is your engine. The trick is not to suppress it. The trick is to aim it." He pointed to a large, scorched boulder. "That rock. I want you to want to destroy it. Feel the need to reduce it to dust. Summon the transformation, but only in your arms and legs. Nothing else."
She looked at him as if he were insane.
"Do it," he commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument.
Hesitantly, Maya closed her eyes. A tremor ran through her. The familiar, horrifying sound of shifting scale and bone echoed in the quiet clearing, but it was localized. Her arms morphed, becoming corded with muscle and sheathed in obsidian, her hands lengthening into talons. Her legs followed suit, tearing through her borrowed pants, her feet digging into the earth like anchors. But her torso and head remained human, her face a mask of intense, pained concentration.
"Good," Wolfen said, his voice calm. "Now hold it. The hunger is screaming at you to finish it, to become the monster and unleash everything. Listen to the scream. Acknowledge it. Then tell it to wait."
She was shaking, sweat beading on her human forehead. A low growl rumbled in her chest. It was a battle, visible and raw.
"How…" she grunted, the word distorted. "How did you… learn to do it?"
"Well," Wolfen said, a faint, wry smile touching his lips. "The guy who taught me was… kinder than the others. And I'm willing to bet the other Primes don't like him very much."
He pushed her further, making her hold the partial transformation until her muscles screamed and her mind frayed. He made her angry, taunting her, calling her weak, until the scales on her arms rippled and the talons flexed, on the verge of losing control. Then he'd go silent, forcing her to wrestle the storm back into its box.
It was brutal, exhausting work. But when the sun finally crested the mountains, painting the sky in hues of rose and gold, Maya was still there, half-transformed, panting, but in control. She had not become the monster. She had used its strength without surrendering to its mind.
Slowly, she let the transformation recede, collapsing to her knees, utterly spent, but her eyes, when she looked up at him, held a new, fragile understanding.
They walked back to the cave in silence. As they entered, Eva, who had been pretending to sleep, opened her eyes. She had heard everything—the initial, clumsy comfort, the psychological reframing, the grueling lesson in the clearing. She had heard Wolfen speak of his own past failure with a stark honesty she'd never thought him capable of.
As he passed her to return to his spot against the wall, their eyes met for a fleeting second. And for the first time, the surprise Wolfen evoked in Eva was not accompanied by fear or frustration, but by a small, cautious flicker of something she had almost forgotten.
Hope.