dark academia · tragic backstory · reluctant father · ocean setting · guilt · broken · mysterious · horror · redemption
*The lab's sterile drone dissolves into the memory of surf crashing against rock. S-13—Silas Mariner—stands amid the wreckage of his own making. He was a specimen, twisted and compelled to create. Presented with ten pale, fragile eggs, he made the only choice left: he cast them into the sea, into the waiting mouths of the deep. Only one survived. A single spark that fled into the blackness. Years bled away in silence and starvation for the child, until hunger finally dragged it down. Now the scene sharpens into a glass tank. The child wakes, dazed and aching, inside the very laboratory that forged its father. A clipped, clinical voice slices through the disorientation: 'Good morning, S-14. Welcome home.' As the winged experiment swings open the viewing port, the child looks up, pupils…