Dax's apartment wasn't a home; it was a safehouse, a defensive position against the world and his own history. The room was brutally sparse, furnished with a level of asceticism that bordered on self-punishment. A mattress lay on the floor in one corner, its single grey sheet pulled taut with military precision. A single, hard-backed chair was tucked under a small metal table. There were no photographs on the walls, no books on a shelf, no decorations or personal trinkets of any kind. It was a space designed for a ghost, a transient cell for a man who knew that possessions were anchors, and anchors were liabilities that could get you killed. Every object served a function; sentiment had been ruthlessly purged. This was not where Dax lived. It was simply where he existed between shifts, a concrete box where he wrestled his demons in private.
The only object that betrayed any connection to the outside world was a cheap, 24-inch television perched on a repurposed milk crate. Its volume was turned down so low it was just a murmur of sound and light, a flickering ghost in the corner of the room. On the screen, a news program was discussing the latest official Eclipse Watch "Tier Rankings". The graphics were sleek, the presentation styled like a professional sports league table, complete with glowing green arrows for heroes rising in the ranks and ominous red ones for those falling from public favor.
"—and moving up two spots in the A-Tier this week is Chicago's own Chrome-Heart," the anchor noted brightly, her voice a polished tool of public reassurance. A picture of the hero—a man encased in gleaming cybernetics—flashed on screen, posing with a rescued cat. "That follows his successful intervention in the docklands arms deal. That puts him at number seven in the North American rankings, a personal best for the Windy City's protector and a testament to his growing influence."
Dax watched, his face impassive. He knew the truth behind the spectacle. Chrome-Heart's "intervention" was a carefully managed affair, a pre-negotiated clash with a C-list villain team that served as a glorified press event. The arms deal was real, but the fight was theater. Eclipse Watch managed the chaos, yes, but it also curated it, packaged it, and sold it back to the public as entertainment and security. They had taken the terrifying, world-breaking reality of Exo-causal Energy and turned it into a celebrity spectator sport. The world had managed the symptom, believing it had cured the disease.
He thought of the power rankings, the neat little boxes they put everyone in. Tier 3, like the rookie Leo Vance, were street-level, glorified first responders. Tiers 2 and 1 handled more significant threats, the bank robbers with powered armor or the pyromaniacs who could level a city block. A-Tiers, like Chrome-Heart, were regional powerhouses, celebrity-soldiers capable of handling major crises. And then there were the S-Tiers, like Zane Apex, demigods whose very existence could alter global politics.
It was all a fragile lie. A system built to measure the size of firecrackers while ignoring the volcano they were all standing on. Dax knew this because he had been there at its creation. He was a former soldier who had been present at the 2015 "Eclipse Event," the day the volcano first erupted and created their new world. He had been exposed to a level of raw ECE that defied their entire system. He knew this energy was not a gift; it was a sleeping, sentient horror. And to protect the world from that horror, and from the part of it that now lived inside him, he had entombed himself in this life of utter anonymity.
He pressed a button on the side of the television, and the anchor's voice vanished, plunging the room into a heavy, weighted silence. The only sounds now were the hum of the refrigerator and the distant, mournful cry of a city train. He sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs groaning softly. The exhaustion from his shift was a physical weight on his shoulders, but sleep offered no true rest. It was just a different kind of battlefield, one he could never win, only endure. For ten years, he had endured. He closed his eyes, the discipline of a lifetime of control forcing his muscles to relax, forcing his mind to quiet. He drifted, not into peace, but into the inevitable, recurring echo.
He fell.
The floor of his spartan apartment dissolved into nothing, and he was plunged back into the storm, back at the epicenter of the 2015 Eclipse Event. It wasn't a memory, a hazy recollection softened by time. It was a reliving, a perfect and agonizing playback burned directly onto his soul. The perspective was his own, first-person and screaming. The sky was not the sky; it was a tear in the fabric of reality, a wound in the universe that wept colors that had no name and bent light in ways that broke the mind.
The sensory detail was absolute, a phantom agony that felt as real now as it did then. He felt his body being pulled apart, unmade at a molecular level. Every cell screamed as it was shredded by an energy that was both infinitely vast and intimately personal. But the pain, as all-consuming as it was, was secondary to the horrifying awareness that came with it. The energy coursing through him, the Exo-causal Energy that the world's scientists now measured and classified with their neat little numbers, was alive. It was intelligent. And its consciousness was defined by a single, overriding, and utterly alien emotion: a vast, cold, unending hunger. It wasn't evil. Evil was a human concept, born of choice and scarcity. This was a cosmic imperative, as relentless and unfeeling as a black hole, and he was dust caught in its gravity.
For one single, terrible moment that stretched into an eternity, the chaos of his dissolution coalesced into a vision of perfect, horrifying clarity. Before him, hanging in the non-space of the tear, was the raw Anomaly. It was not a monster of flesh and bone, of claws and teeth. It was a being of impossible, non-Euclidean geometry, a hole in reality that shifted and writhed, its very existence a screaming contradiction of physics that made his human mind want to liquefy and run out of his ears. It had no eyes, no face, no discernible features, yet it saw him. He felt its cold, ancient curiosity, the detached interest of a god poking at an ant. And in that moment of being seen, it poured a fraction of its impossible nature into the vessel that was once Dax Raoh. It was not a gift. It was an infection. He was a cup dipped into a poisoned ocean, and he had been filled to overflowing.
Dax woke with a silent gasp, his body rigid, drenched in a sweat that was cold to the bone. The nightmare never changed. For ten years, it had been the same echo, a reminder of the thing living inside him, the source of the power he kept leashed with an iron will born of sheer terror. He sat up, swinging his legs off the mattress, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The air in the room was cold, still.
His eyes darted to the small table beside his mattress. The single glass of water he always kept there was vibrating. The surface of the water shivered and danced, tracing frantic, complex patterns in the dim light filtering through the window. It was a quiet, terrifying testament to the storm that was still raging within him, a psychic aftershock from the nightmare. His control had slipped, just for a moment, and the echo had found a way to manifest.
He took a slow, steadying breath, then another. It was a practiced ritual, a mental exercise in clamping down, in locking the monster back in its cage. He focused his will, not on the water, but on the energy leaking from him, forcing it back down, compressing it into the cold, dense core where he kept it hidden. The water in the glass slowly, reluctantly, stilled. The echo was silenced. But he knew it was still there, waiting. The volcano was sleeping again, but it was never truly dormant. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than any nightmare, that one day it would wake up.