From Gideon Rex . . .
Born into the opulent, yet morally compromised, Stark family, Gideon is heir to the vast Food Amalgam, the monolithic corporation that held absolute sway over the Mid-Continent Provincial Territory's most vital resource: food. With his father's sudden demise, Gideon swiftly ascends to the pinnacle of this empire, inheriting not just immense wealth, but a deeply entrenched legacy of ruthless exploitation and systemic corruption that has long starved the masses for profit. His ambition, a cold, calculating force, knows no ethical boundaries. Soon, his iron fist extends beyond the Mid-Continent, compelling the entire world to cower beneath his authority, its very survival dependent on his whims. Yet, as his tyrannical reign solidifies, one chilling question remains: can such absolute power truly endure, or will the seeds of his own cruelty inevitably sow the seeds of his downfall?
Magnus Stark said to the boy, “The world is not kind. Never was. They say there was a time. A thinner world, draped in pleasantries. Smiles like paper lanterns, glowing hollow. Some speak of it still, but their teeth are few and their eyes gone milky with remembering. Such notions are now relegated to the realm of myth, whispered in hushed tones by the old and the foolish.”
They walked the cut rows of MidCon, father and son, boots pressing down the hardpack between dying stalks and synthetic runnels. The sun sat low behind a wall of carbon haze, casting long iron shadows from the things in the field—metal men, their joints hissing soft steam, arms working in practiced rhythm. They moved without pause, without breath, without need. Fingers of alloy plucked wilted ears from browning stalks, bundled them in silence, stacked them high. Machines of old manufacture, patched with rust and wire, born from factories long silent.
The boy watched them. Their blank faces turned to no one. Their hands never slowed. It would be the last time he saw them there.
His father looked out across the rows.
“Too much upkeep, Gideon,” he said. “Easier to have humans. Cheaper. You don’t patch skin. You bury it. They work harder when their bellies cry.”
Gideon didn’t answer. He only watched the metal men, their backs bent in perfect submission as the wind stirred the dust around their feet.
Later, they went on to another field. The sun above them like something hung to punish. A pale eye. No warmth in it. Just heat. It beat down on the land with the slow force of judgment. Once the fields had moved like prayer. Wheat golden and clean. Now, only rows like scars. Marked and measured. Profit drawn in lines of absence. The sky leached of color. A wind flat and hot, pulling the reek of chemicals across the soil. Somewhere, a rig vented steam. The sound like a dying thing.
Ahead was a massive harvester. A great wheel of steel and iron that blocked the sun. The boy squinted at the machine, its blades whispering through the crop-like teeth through hide as it rolled, shredding heads of engineered lettuce with a wet crunch that turned the stomach. The machine’s undercarriage glistened with moisture and grease, dripping in a slow rhythm that matched the thud of its treads. The engine growled low and constant, a mechanical hymn to utility, its breath thick and oily in the air, staining the lungs with every breath. Birds no longer came here. No insects. No worms in the dirt. Nothing but the machines and what they left behind: rutted rows, chemical husks, fields scraped down to the bone. Magnus Stark lit a smoke, watched it curl upward and vanish into the colorless sky like prayer unanswered. No rain, no mercy. Only the yield. The boy said nothing. He didn’t have to. His face was all question, and the world all answer.
They stood there by the field of engineered lettuce, green in the way mold is green. More machines came, moving slowly and heavy, clanking their way through rows that bled when torn. An old man rode one like a condemned priest on a holy relic. His hands shaking on the controls, mouth sunken. He spat. Dust swallowed it whole. Magnus looked down at his son.
“Kindness,” he said. “Gone like rain in a drought.”
Gideon Stark, who would one day be called Rex, came up from a land that broke men like horses and didn’t bother burying the bones. He was born under high ceilings and polished light, silver spoons laid out in tidy rows, but the world outside was ruled by the same hard sun and indifferent dirt that turned the rest of them mean and lean. His bloodline wound back through men who had carved the Food Amalgam out of the bones of old nations, and what they’d built was no company. It was a god. It breathed, it fed, it ruled. The Amalgam was in the grain and the water, in the mouths of children and the sweat of men. It fed a nation and would soon feed the world.
His mother was a pale ghost of a woman, half in this world and half-sunk in some quiet grief of her own. She sat often by the windows, thin hands folded like paper. Once, without looking at him, she said, “Our food feeds them, Gideon. But what feeds us?” Her voice was like the wind sliding under a door.
Gideon did not know the answer but would soon find one.
His father was a mountain. Broad and near silent, with eyes like glass pulled from deep water. His hunger was not for food nor warmth nor company but for dominion, and it spread in him like frost over windowpanes. He moved through the house as if it had been built for his shadow, each door opening before him, each voice going quiet. A king without a crown.
Gideon watched him. Watched how the man’s hand closed around things. Not with love. With claim. From him, he learned that power was not bestowed—it was taken. Like a blade you lifted from a dead man’s chest.
“Control,” he told his son. “That’s all there is.”
Control the land. Control the seed. Control the hand that reached for bread and the mouth that dared to speak thanks. Nothing was sacred. Not love. Not mercy. Only the grip. Only the hold.
They stood out behind the barn where the boards were gray and split and the nails bled rust down the wood. The dry dirt blew in little eddies around their boots, and the sky hung low and hard as hammered tin. His father ground the nub of a cigar into the earth with the heel of his boot, slow and deliberate, and looked at him.
“You think the people love us, son?” he said.
Gideon said nothing. The wind worried at the hem of his coat. Somewhere a dog barked once and fell silent.
“They don’t,” his father said. “How can people eat our food and hate us? No. They fear us.” He showed his teeth in a grin hard and joyless, a grin like a man who had seen the edge of the storm and stepped toward it. “They fear us because we control something they need. Fear’s the only currency that doesn’t lose its value.”
The Stark compound stood like a wound in the land. High walls looped the estate like a noose. Inside, the grass was green, cut clean by machines. Villas sprawled in the sun. The air smelled of oil and citrus. Guards walked the parapets with rifles slung low, dead-eyed in the heat. Inside the walls, Gideon moved like a ghost through a dream built for him. But he knew the truth of things. He’d seen the lines. Seen the gaunt eyes of the workers bent under sun and hunger. The rations like slop ladled into stained tins. He’d seen men kneel for food. Women weep and wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands.
Gideon was not born to ignorance. His father saw to that. From the time the boy could stand on bowed legs, he was taught the ledger and the lash, taught that men were numbers and numbers were to be balanced or broken. “A man’s life weighs no heavier than a bushel of wheat,” his father told him. Gideon rode at his side into the fields where the laborers stooped double and coughed blood into the dust. He watched his father speak to them in the cold grammar of ownership. At night by firelight, the boy recited the rules of survival until the words fit into his mouth like his own teeth. In time, he grew tall and lean with a hard set to his jaw and a hollowness behind his eyes. A young man fashioned from profit and loss, tempered in the cold forge of his father’s will.
One day, he stood by the fence and watched the workers shuffle forward in silence, a slow, broken tide of bodies moving through the dust. He turned to a guard. The man’s arms were knotted with muscle, and his head shone in the sun like a forged slug of lead.
“They hate us . . .” Gideon started, “. . . don’t they?”
The guard spat in the dirt and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Sir, hate don’t matter when the belly’s empty,” he said.
They whispered where they could. In the dark corners of barracks and the stained stalls of latrines, in the muffled hours of smoke breaks, and under the low mechanical groan of the harvesters that never stopped. They said the Amalgam was stitched together with broken backs and drained spirits, that the fortune of the Starks was a thing bought not with ingenuity but with blood and silence and the spent years of men who had nothing left to give.
As a young man, Gideon seldom heard the whispers. The world he moved through was loud with labor and cruelty. He had little ear for anything else. When the words did reach him, they clattered harmlessly off the iron in him, no more than leaves blown against a wall. He would shake his head and laugh.
“Whining,” he said. “The bitter song of the weak. Men too small to shape the world and too proud to be carried by it.” His voice held a scorn, like his father. So clean and sharp it cut the speakers to silence.
He believed in the Amalgam. He walked among the machines with a kind of wonder. Watched the vats steaming and lines running thick with food, and he saw the bones of a new world rising from the ash of the old. The future will be costly, he thought. It should cost everything. He dreamed of the Amalgam swelling across the land, across the nation, across the world. He saw the growers and the millers and the haulers crushed like insects beneath the slow and endless turning of the wheels. He saw them all broken and brought under one hand. His hand. A kingdom of hunger ruled by one king.
He made his plans in the dark and quiet places of his mind. Plans to seize the fields and the factories both. To hold the seed and the harvest and the meal set down on every man’s plate. To build a machine so great and so terrible that no man could live beyond its reach.
Gideon kept his thoughts to himself. Held his plans like a knife against his thigh, hidden from the world. Waiting. Waiting for the right time. After all, time didn’t cost a damned thing.
His tutor, an elderly man named Silas, with hands that trembled from age or memory, once told him, “Progress has a price, Gideon. Always does. Pay it and you will be rewarded.”
Gideon respected the old man. He sat with him in the gray hours and spoke of things he dared not share with others. The fear that he would fail. The fear that he would not.
There was a time when the heat held and the flies thickened, and Magnus killed a man beside the ration shed.
The worker had spoken, just spoken. Said the rations were getting smaller. His voice was calm. That was the mistake.
Magnus stepped forward and broke his jaw with the first hit. It made a sound like dropping meat in mud. The man folded. Tried to crawl. But Magnus kept on. Boot. Fist. Elbow. The dust turned dark beneath him. A tooth landed near someone’s boot. No one moved.
When it was done, Magnus stood there, his chest rising, blood on his hands.
He took a bandana from the dead man’s belt and wiped his knuckles slowly, deliberately, like brushing crumbs from a table. Then he tossed the cloth aside and walked off.
No one spoke. No one mourned. The line crept forward like cattle toward feed.
Later, Gideon sat with Silas in the dim room where the light fell in thin bands through the slats. “Why?” he said. “Why would my father do that?”
Silas watched the dust drifting in the shafts of sun. “Anger’s a kind of fuel,” he said. “Hot. Burns clean. Folks use it to move things in the world they got no other way to move.”
Gideon shook his head. “How can something so wrong be so strong?”
Silas smiled without warmth. “World don’t much care what you think is right. Only cares what you can carry and what you can’t.”
***
Gideon had learned from his father that power wasn’t something granted, but something seized, held with the grip of a man who knew how to break others with the weight of his will. His father had taught him the old ways—how blunt force was sometimes the only way to ensure control was kept, how men had risen not through kindness, but through the calculated use of their fists, their words, their machines.
“A man who can’t make the world bend to him is weak,” his father had said more than once. “And weakness means someone else will make it bend for you.”
Gideon had taken these lessons to heart. They were simple. Direct. Like the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder when the world seemed too large to hold.
Soon, he was walking the halls of the university. The weight of it lay heavy in the rooms like ash. Dead air and chalkdust. The droning of the professor like the call of something blind and old. Eyes upon him. But never knowing him. Never the cut of him. They spoke of nations and causes, of men who ruled by reason or song or the red ache of love. Children’s talk. Gideon had seen the truth plain. What rose from the mire was not vision but violence. Not hope but hunger. The world was for those who took. However they took it.
When he sat in the university’s lecture halls, he was never truly there. His mind was elsewhere, tracing the paths of power. He listened to the professors speak of strategy, of governance, of how leaders climbed their ladders. But it was all theory. Nothing like the dirt of the land, the grind of industry, the weight of control his father had shown him. He had been taught by his father to see through the veils of the world. He saw the game. And it wasn’t played with words. It was played with things that moved in the dark—money, fear, and a well-placed hand on the throat of your enemy.
When the first term ended, he went home and crossed the long fields and found Silas sitting on the porch of his small shack with a cigarette burning down to the filter. Gideon dropped into the chair across from him and sat staring out at the dead rows of corn beyond the fence line.
“I hate that place,” he said.
Silas took a drag from his cigarette and said nothing.
“The courses are worthless. The professors don’t know a damn thing about the world. They talk and talk. None of it means anything.”
Silas flicked the ash from his cigarette. “You’re learning.”
“Learning what? How to speak like a fool? How to live with your head in the clouds?”
Silas looked at him. “You don’t have to like a thing to learn from it.”
Gideon shook his head. “It’s a fool’s dream,” he said. “They don’t teach you anything real. Not like my father. Not like you.”
Silas ground the cigarette out on the rail and dropped the spent butt into a jar among the others. “Wait,” he said. “You may yet find something worth keeping.”
And he did.
In the lab, he’d seen it and he knew. Power. Not the kind they wrote about in manifestos or whispered in parliamentary halls but the real thing. The wet, microbial truth of it. The folding of life’s smallest codes into something sharp and wielded. Not just to feed the starved or bolster the sick. That was the lie. The dream they hung like bait from the hook. No. This was for control. Crops that withered unless you paid. Illness that walked only where profit pointed. The others in white coats didn’t see it. Couldn’t. Still clinging to notions of right and wrong like rusted dogma. But Gideon. He saw. He knew the game was older than ethics and deeper than guilt. There was no good. No evil. Just the scale of one man’s reach. And he was ready. Hunger was a coin now. And he meant to mint it.
Hunger’s a choice, he thought, his mind drifting as a professor’s words fell like the steady drip of water onto stone. Only a few can choose who gets to eat.
When he could, he stayed on in the lab, and when the others had gone, he stayed still. The hum of the machines was a comfort to him. He worked in the half-light, the air thick with the smell of ozone and solvents. He pieced together the broken things. He ran tests no one had asked for. He sought the place where the rules broke down and the world revealed itself. He learned what could be learned. He learned everything
Because of this, he had few friends at the university. Most kept their distance. They watched him as if he were a shadow thrown by something larger. There was a darkness about him. They could not name it. But they knew it. He moved through the world like a man already departed, sent ahead of his own dying. He carried silence like a stone in his coat. Heavy. Known to him.
“You ever talk to Stark?” one student asked another.
“No. He doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“Yeah. Maybe he’s got nothing useful to say.”
They laughed.
His education was the kind measured not in grades but in reckonings.
His assigned courses at the university were strict and unforgiving, shaped by his father’s hand, a curriculum of the old world and the new. Cicero. Sun Tzu. Clausewitz. The old voices. And the new.
He learned to speak so that men listened. And to listen so that men forgot they were speaking.
“You pay attention, son,” his father told him.
“Yes sir. I will.”
“You remember what you hear.”
“I remember everything.”
In one lecture, a professor asked him what he thought money was.
Gideon said, “It’s not water. It doesn’t flow.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “It’s a shadow. It moves with the man who casts it. And that man builds a wall with one hand and burns a bridge with the other.”
One time, on another break, when Gideon was home from the university, he and his father sat at the table in the dim of the kitchen. The meat lay cold on the plates. Neither of them touched it. His father’s eyes were like chipped granite.
“What’s the first rule of war, son?”
Gideon stared straight ahead. “Know your enemy. And know how to starve him.”
His father nodded once. A faint curl at the corner of his mouth. Nothing more. The silence afterward said the rest.
He excelled in the work. Journals thick as Bibles, their pages dense with the glyphs of synthetic biology and futures written in the script of the double helix. He read them all. He understood the old dance of genes and proteins, the silent calculus of life. Not in a way to mend them, to make them better, but to break them. He saw how a crop might be turned against its kin, how a field might feed one town and kill another. He knew the chemistry of blight, the mathematics of scarcity. He learned to speak the language of famine with fluency and precision. He dreamed of hunger not as a wound to be healed but a weapon to be sharpened. And he saw how it might be done.
He moved through the laboratory as a man might walk the nave of a church long since burned. The silence there was heavy. Machines murmured in their sleep. Blue light flickered on the walls. He had ceased long ago to think in terms of good and evil. There was only the work. The unlocking of patterns. The deciphering of codes older than men, written in blood and bone, and the green script of leaves.
He saw life not for its light nor its heat but for the cold rigging beneath. The joists and beams. The laced sinews of cause and end. He could look on a field and know how to make it yield or starve. He saw the seed’s betrayal in the name of bounty. The helix twisted like wire round the throat of what was coming. He knew what others would not name. That hunger was not a curse but a craft. A thing men kept alive like fire. Not for warmth but for power.
The hour was late. The reason had fled. The air was sour with solvents and the slow rot of sleeplessness. Gideon stood over a tray of gene-sequenced corn, a priest at his altar. A young technician lingered at the sink, hands trembling around a cup of cold coffee.
“We can end it, you know,” the technician said.
Gideon looked up. Skin pale beneath the lights. “End what?”
“Hunger,” the tech said. “The famines. The empty plates. All of it. Gone.”
Gideon blinked. “You talk like that’s a good thing.”
Gideon’s eyes moved across the vials. Rows of them. Frozen, labeled, humming faintly.
“You don’t think it is?” the tech said, setting down his mug.
“I think . . .” Gideon rubbed his jaw. “I think biotech like this is a kind of power. People don’t just use power. They wield it. For whatever they want.”
The tech nodded absently, not looking at him.
“Imagine what this could do,” Gideon continued. “Plagues that find only one kind of blood. Fields that wither unless you pay for the cure. It’s a blade. You know that, don’t you?”
The tech turned then. No smile on his face. “I suppose anything’s a weapon, if you’re clever enough.”
There was a silence between them.
“You ever think about that?” Gideon asked. “About where this goes? What this can become in ten years, twenty?”
The tech walked to a terminal. He keyed in a sequence without looking.
“Not really,” he said.
“Don’t you worry about some madman acting like a god? Using technology to wield power?”
The tech stared at Gideon. “We’re not gods.”
“No. Not yet.”
The tech backed a step. “Jesus.”
“Not yet,” Gideon repeated.
And then he was quiet. The tech stood there in the sterile hum of the lab. The lights buzzed overhead. Outside, the wind keened against the windows like something shut out too long.
***
Upon graduation, Gideon came home and went to work at the Amalgam. His parents began showing their age. Fading. The house stood hollow and still. His mother lay in her bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her breathing faint in the gloom. The machines beside her pulsed and clicked. Keeping her alive. She had not risen in months. The world beyond the window might as well have been a world lost to time. Sometimes he would sit with her, her hand small and cold in his. She would stare at him with eyes blurred by fever and memory and say nothing at all.
His father moved through the halls like a shadow bent by the wind. The cane he leaned on might have grown from him like a branch from a dead tree. His back was bowed, his face drawn and gray. He paused often, steadying himself against the wall, the old strength gone from his limbs. He had lived a life shaped by labor and caution, the steady furrow drawn through a hard world. He made no room for folly and less for the dreams of his son.
Gideon watched him one evening as the sun bled out behind the fields, the old man standing in the doorway, the cane planted firm in the dust. “You ought to rest,” Gideon said.
His father did not look at him. “Rest is for the weak and the dying.”
“You can’t do it all anymore.”
The old man turned. Eyes like hammered iron under a sky going black. “The world doesn’t give a damn what a man can do,” he said, “Only what he’s put here to do.” He coughed, a dry rattle in his chest, and shuffled back inside, leaving Gideon alone in the failing light.
He pressed him for a lab. Wouldn’t let it go. Said he needed space, a real place, something vast and wired to the teeth. Much larger than what they already had. Said the old work was dead. That this was new. Said he’d bend the marrow of men like wire, said the dirt would answer him, and the fields would speak his name. Said it was for the Amalgam. For what comes after. He talked like thunder, like judgment. Fire in his mouth, plague in his breath. The old man just stood there. Last scraps of light bleeding out across the land. The fields lay open, endless, their straight rows drawn like scars across the world. Like they’d been carved by God Himself and left to run out to the ends of the earth.
“What more do you need?” he said. “The land provides. Always has.”
“If we don’t move the Amalgam forward, the other producers will push us out.”
“They can’t push us out.”
His father looked at him then, eyes narrowing as if trying to read something written in the air. “They think they know the land,” he said. “But they don’t. Them and their shiny machines, their fancy labs. They don’t know a thing about the dirt, about the way it listens, the way it works with you. They’re just selling promises to people who want to believe. They’ll run their fields into the ground, Gideon. You’ll see. They’re too busy within their labs to notice the soil turning to dust beneath them.” He paused, his hands rough against the wood of the porch. “They can’t push us out. Not while we’ve got the land, and we’ve always got the land.”
He had never touched anything born in a lab. He trusted the old powers. The soil and the iron and the grit in a man’s hand. He believed in industry. In chemicals that burned the pests from the land and made it right. That was the law and the order of things. Anything else was heresy.
“You think this is the answer, Gideon?” he said, his voice failing at times. “It isn’t. Why would I spend so much money for you to sit in a lab all day. It’s reckless. A reckless tampering with forces best left alone.”
The air between them was thick with the years and the things left unsaid, a slow war for the soul of the Amalgam. Gideon felt the hard hand of his father’s caution, the old man’s will clamped down on him like iron. He wanted to break free of it. To drive the Amalgam past the old ways, past mere survival. To make it into something else. A power that could shape the world anew. The land was no longer just a field of grain. It was a weapon. A judgment.
He told Silas that night. “My father sees only the bottom line,” Gideon said, his voice low and burning. “He’s chained to the past. I see what’s coming.”
Silas stroked his graying beard, and the words came slow. Deliberate. “Your father’s bound to the old ways,” he said. “He’s married to what’s dead and don’t know it. Clings to old things like they’ll rise again. He don’t see what’s comin’. The future’s a wild dog, Gideon. Hungry. It don’t beg and it don’t wait. Feed it what it wants and maybe it lets you be. But starve it and it’ll come for you all the same. Remember that. You listen to me. The future don’t honor the past. It replaces it. Always.”
The words stayed there in the air. Gideon felt something stir inside him, some dark new thing uncoiling from its sleep. He knew the truth of it, knew it had been waiting in him all along.
The days slid by. He understood what must be done. One evening when the light drew long over the fields and the ground seemed to hum beneath his boots he went to his father. The old man sat in his chair, bowed by the years, the cane leaning against the frame. Gideon stood before him, his voice calm and sure. “Silas has shown me the way, Father,” he said. “The world’s changing. The Amalgam can be made into something different. We’ve fed the old beast long enough. It’s time to feed the future. I need you to help me do that.”
“Silas is an old fool,” his father sneered. “You listen to that nonsense? I don’t know why I’ve kept him around. A man like him can’t see past his own shadow.” His voice rose as if noise alone could smother the thought. “This past isn’t some beast to be fed, Gideon. You don’t feed the past. It feeds you.” His eyes hardened, the long years carved deep in his face. “And what do you think will happen if you go on trusting this future of yours, eh? It’ll eat you alive. Same as it’s eaten better men. Crazy thinkers.” He struck the cane against the floor, the sound sharp in the room, the fury in him sharper still.
Gideon left the chamber with his father’s voice clawing at the dark behind him. The cane’s crack rang on. He pitied the old man. A relic. Still, something cold turned in his gut. Not doubt in the cause. Only in the road ahead. The Amalgam had to change. The world would not be healed. It would have to burn.
But what Gideon didn’t know was that his talk with Silas a few nights past would be the last of its kind. There’d be no farewell. No reckoning. Just the silence that follows when one man vanishes from the world of another, and the wind moves on like nothing was ever there at all.
The next morning, he went to visit the old man and found him on his porch. He was broken. Twisted in a way that spoke of violence. Skin torn, bruised, bleeding. The marks were cruel, as if the land itself had turned on him. No tool, no clear cause. Just the stillness after something awful. And in that stillness, something in Gideon began to turn.
Gideon stood over his mother’s bed. The machines muttered their low song in the stillness, and her body lay there strung with wires like some broken marionette. Her chest rose and fell in fits. A life pared down to the barest terms. His hands trembled at his sides. In the hush of that sterile room, the fury in him gathered like dark weather over open plains.
“Silas is dead, Mother,” he murmured, his voice low and rough. “Dead because of him.” He slammed his fist against the wall, the sudden force making the air feel thicker, heavier. “I knew this would happen.”
She barely stirred, her eyes flickering open for a moment, her voice a rasp as thin as paper. “Gideon . . .”
“Don’t say my name like that,” he snapped and stood, pacing the room, his voice rising. “You don’t get to say my name anymore. You’re not the one who has to live with this. Silas is gone. And I know who’s to blame.” He stopped in front of her, glaring down as if she could offer him some kind of answer, some relief. “Father . . . that damn fool. He doesn’t care about the future. All he cares about is his damn chemicals, his soil.”
She closed her eyes again, the weight of his anger sinking deep into the silence. “Gideon . . . your Father only wants . . .”
“Don’t you see,” he said, fists clenched tight, his voice sharp with anger. “He’s the reason Silas is dead. He’s the reason I’m this way. He’s the reason we’re all this way.” He stepped back, the room seeming too small, too tight, the walls pressing in. “He doesn’t care. All he sees is the land, the earth like it’s some goddamn altar to worship. And Silas . . . Silas just wanted to help. He wanted to make something better. Something that wasn’t just about surviving. He would’ve helped me to change things, to fix things.”
His mother sighed and turned her head away from him.
There was nothing but the quiet hum of the machines now, the sterile air heavy with unspoken words. Gideon sank into the chair by the bed, his shoulders slumping, exhaustion overtaking him. “Silas trusted me,” he whispered. “And now he’s gone. And I’m left with nothing but this.”
***
Magnus Stark’s death came swift as a storm, the kind of end that caught the breath in your throat. Some said it was a heart attack, the kind that eats at a man from the inside, fed by years of too much and not enough. Others spoke quieter. Their words heavy with suspicion—poison, untraceable, they said. A slow-acting death, administered with care. A son watching, waiting, eager to claim what was his. But no one knew for sure. In MidCon, truth had a way of slinking off into the shadows, leaving only rumors behind.
The house felt emptier than it ever had. Gideon entered the dim room where his mother lay, her face was pale, hollowed, eyes sunken with the sickness that had claimed so much of her. The air in the room smelled of medicine and dust.
He stood by the bed for a moment, watching her struggle for breath, hearing the machines drone on, before sitting down in the worn chair beside her. The silence between them was thick, but he knew better than to force words. She didn’t need them. She’d never needed them much in the past.
“Change comes, Mother,” he said, breaking the quiet at last. “Whether we like it or not.”
Her eyes flicked to him, the old history strung up between them like a wire. He could feel her looking at him, still keen in her way though her body had long since turned against her.
“You think I don’t know what you’ve done?” she said, her voice a shadow of its former strength, cracked and thin.
He leaned forward, elbows pressing into his knees, eyes locked onto hers. “What, Mother? What have I done?”
She coughed then, a sickly, hollow sound that made her whole frame shudder. After a moment, she spoke again, her breath wheezing in the quiet room. “You know what you’ve done. I don’t have to tell you. One day it’ll catch up with you. Just wait. It’ll end and there’ll be nothing left.”
“It’s all going to end, Mother. This . . . what’s left of everything you’ve ever known. The way we live . . . it’s soon going to be over. It’s no longer enough anymore, don’t you know.” He sighed. “There’s nothing left to hold on to but memories. And memories don’t feed you.”
She was still, her breath a shallow thing, the pause between them stretching longer. The room felt colder. The machines clicked and groaned, their presence more ominous than ever.
“You’re an abomination,” she muttered, barely audible, her eyes sinking shut, her words heavy with contempt. “A monster.”
Gideon’s jaw tightened, his lips pressing into a thin line. He looked at the machines again, the wires and tubes keeping her tethered to life, the same machines that had brought her to this state, that had replaced the life she once knew.
“We’re all monsters, Mother,” he said, his voice thick with something bitter. His gaze fell back to the machines keeping her alive, the pulsing heart of the room. “You know . . . machines wear out if not cared for.”
Her eyes opened just a fraction, the weight of her gaze like stone, and for a moment, Gideon saw the woman who had raised him, fierce and unyielding in her strength. She breathed in shallow, broken gasps, her fingers twitching at the edge of the blankets. “Leave,” she said, the word sharp and final, like a verdict. “And take your lies with you.”
Gideon stood for a moment, his eyes lingering on her frail form, the hardness of her words settling like dust in the air. A slow, almost imperceptible smile tugged at the corners of his lips, something soft and sad in it. He leaned forward, his hand brushing the edge of her bed, and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead.
“Your body is held hostage by time as much as your mind,” he whispered.
He turned and walked out of the room, leaving her in the silence of her machines, and the door clicked shut behind him with a finality that felt more like an echo than a choice.
***
Gideon stood in his father’s office, the weight of the place pressing down on him. The heavy oak desk, the leather chair worn by years of his father’s sitting. The air still clung to the faint scent of cigars, stale smoke lingering in the corners. He looked around, his eyes tracing the familiar lines of the room as if something might reveal itself in the quiet.
“Did you see it coming?” he whispered to no one in the stale air. There was no answer, only the silence, thick and unmoving.
He moved behind the desk and ran his hand along the edge. The varnish cracked beneath his fingers. In the window’s reflection, he saw the door was open, though he had closed it behind him. He turned.
His father stood there, or something that wore his father’s shape—tall, broad, though the years had been stripped from him and he seemed carved from old sorrow. His suit was the same dark weave he was buried in, the tie knotted hard against his throat. His eyes were black, and they did not blink.
Gideon did not flinch. “You’re dead,” he said.
“I know,” said Magnus.
The words came like stones falling into water. Gideon leaned back against the desk, arms crossed. “You here to tell me I made a mistake?”
His father stepped forward—the floorboards did not creak under him. “I know what you’ve done,” he said. His voice was rough with earth as though it came from deeper down. “And the Almighty knows too.”
Gideon tilted his head, studying the ghost. “If the Almighty has a problem, he can come down and tell me himself.”
“You think this is courage.” His father’s face was empty of malice. “It’s something else.”
Gideon shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it is. Doesn’t matter much to me.”
The ghost moved closer. The air grew colder, the breath tightening in Gideon’s chest. Still, he held his ground. He could see the wounds on his father, blooms of black blood dried like tar—the wounds that had been covered by the embalmer. He wondered if the dead chose their scars or if they were forced to wear them forever.
“You’ve set things in motion you can’t undo,” his father said. “Blood answers to blood.”
Gideon’s mouth twisted in a grim line. “I answer to no one. Not anymore.”
His father watched him with a silence that filled the room like rising water. The clock on the wall had stopped, the second hand frozen mid-tick. In the hallway beyond, the house murmured and settled, old bones in the walls.
“You are not afraid,” his father said.
“No,” Gideon said. “Not of you. Not of anyone. Not of your Almighty.”
The ghost of his father seemed to lean back as if weighing him on some old balance. Then it nodded once, slowly, as though something long decided had only just now been admitted aloud.
“You will be,” the ghost said. “Trust me. You will.”
The office door swung wider on its hinges, and the thing that had been his father turned and walked through it. Gideon stayed where he was, his heart hammering in his ribs. He waited for the door to slam, for the ghost to scream, for some final terror to clutch at him. None came.
He was alone again.
He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and rubbed at his face with both hands. When he dropped them, he saw that they shook.
Gideon crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of scotch, the same one his father used to sip from when the nights grew long and heavy. He poured himself a glass with hands that barely steadied and drank it down. The fire of it did little to settle him.
He looked back at the desk. The chair sat empty. The ghost was gone. He told himself it had been a trick of the mind. A trick of memory and grief. A man standing too long in the house of the dead.
Still.
He sat down hard in the leather chair, the smell of old smoke rising up around him like a second ghost. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling, at the yellowed plaster, the cracks that split it like river deltas.
Maybe he was going crazy. Maybe the Almighty had sent a messenger after all. He laughed low in his throat. A bitter sound.
“You hear that?” he said aloud to no one. “You’ll have to do better.”
The room answered him with silence.
He stayed there for some time, glass loose in his hand, the fire dying in the hearth, the darkness growing thick and whole around him. Somewhere deep in the belly of the house, a board gave a long sigh.
And Gideon wondered if madness was not a punishment but a gift.
Something to keep a man company when all the rest had fled.
Then the sound of footsteps and a voice.
“Sir,” a servant said. “It’s time.”