"Father."
His heart didn't forget how to beat. It tried to tear itself out of his chest and run.
Steve's half-finished joke died, then crawled back to life in the ugliest way possible. "Damn, Jack. Legendary stamina, bro. First the princess, now the demon kindergarten? How do you even—"
Jack's elbow found Steve's solar plexus. Air exploded out of him in a strangled whoosh.
"Shut up." Jack's voice cracked, raw, panicked. "Look at it. That thing isn't—"
He never finished.
The star-cracked colossus took one step that made the frost quake, dropped to a single knee, and lowered one clawed finger until it hovered an inch from Jack's heart. Reverent. Like touching a relic.
Then the shell split.
A sound like mountains being born screaming.
White fire—too bright to look at—poured from every fracture. The titan shattered into a storm of black glass and dying starlight.
When Jack could see again, the monster was gone.
A naked child stood in the frost. Six years old at most. Skin polished obsidian threaded with fading silver veins. Bare feet bleeding from the cold. Tiny hands shaking.
And the eyes.
Jack's eyes.
Same storm-grey. Same shape. Same stubborn terror.
Steve wheezed, still folded in half. "Okay. Okay. Now it adds up. Like father, like apocalypse toddler. Congrats, dude. It's a boy."
Jack couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe. His pulse was a war drum in his ears.
The boy swayed, took one trembling step, fingers reaching. Then his legs gave out and he fell face-first into the frost, still stretching toward the man he had waited centuries to find.
Jack's knees hit the ground hard enough to bruise. Inches from the child.
"…What the hell did you do to me?"
Steve dropped beside him, all jokes dead. "Jack… this isn't over."
The boy's mind was slipping, frost creeping into obsidian skin, but memories burned through the dark like knives.
A battlefield lit by dying crests. A man with Jack's eyes—older, scarred, laughing through a mouth full of blood. Wind screaming around him, earth splitting at his command. Golden chains falling from a white sky, wrapping his arms, his throat. He pressed a bleeding palm to something huge and molten. "Find the one who looks like me," he rasped, voice shredded. "My blood will rise again. Break everything."
Then darkness. Centuries of it.
Until tonight. Until the girl fell from the sky and the seals screamed. Until the boy opened his eyes and saw the promise kept.
A tiny, star-veined hand twitched in the frost, still reaching.
Jack stared at it. His own hand—bigger, scarred from bar fights and bad decisions—hovered, afraid to touch.
Steve's voice was barely wind. "Jack. Look."
Elisa, half-conscious in the wreck twenty feet away, lifted her head. Blood crusted her silver hair like rust on snow. Her cracked lips moved.
"Earth… Spirit… Terravore…?"
The name tore out of her like a prayer dragged over broken glass.
Her eyes rolled white. Fresh blood spilled from her nose, her ears, pooling beneath her cheek like spilled ink. She collapsed again.
Jack's world tilted sideways.
The mountain answered.
A low, hungry growl rolled through stone and bone. Frost jumped on the ground. Somewhere beneath them, something ancient shifted, chains long buried rattling in the dark.
Jack's breath came in white knives. He looked at the child—no, at the thing wearing a child's shape—and felt every year of his life suddenly weigh a thousand tons.
Eight years old again. Backyard dirt under his nails. Steve laughing beside him, both of them drawing a crooked circle with sticks and a stolen lighter.
"Bet we can call a real spirit," Steve had dared.
"Nothing happened," Jack had bragged later.
But something had watched.
And it had remembered the shape of his eyes.
Steve's whisper dragged him back. "Jack. You still with me?"
Jack stared at the tiny, freezing hand inches from his own.
"No," he said, voice shredded. "I'm really fucking not."
The boy's fingers brushed his.
The moment skin touched skin, the world inhaled.
Images slammed into Jack's skull like shrapnel.
A man dying laughing while the sky chained him. Molten rock heart pulsing against a palm that looked exactly like Jack's. A promise carved into stone older than gods: My blood. My vengeance. My heir.
The boy's lips moved, no sound, just frost and starlight.
Father.
Jack's hand closed around cold obsidian fingers without permission. Power—raw, furious, patient for centuries—surged up his arm like lightning wrapped in stone. Veins lit gold beneath his skin, then faded.
The boy's eyes fluttered shut. A small, relieved sigh left his mouth, as if centuries of waiting had finally ended.
Jack's voice broke completely.
"I didn't ask for this."
The mountain growled again, deeper, hungry.
Steve stared at the glowing scars racing up Jack's forearm, same pattern as the boy's dying starlight.
"Yeah," he muttered. "But it looks like you were born for it anyway."
Jack looked at the unconscious child in his arms, at Elisa bleeding ten feet away, at the frost spreading from his own knees like infection.
His laugh came out ugly and terrified.
"Steve."
"Yeah?"
"I think we just adopted the end of the world."