In Between Realms

Seyfe's arms were pinned tightly to his sides, the constrictive suit clinging to his body like a second skin. Every movement felt restricted, like he was being choked by silence and steel. The room was enormous, sterile, the air cold with the kind of artificial chill that seeped into your bones. Fluorescent lights cast a pale glare across the high ceilings, and the hum of electricity buzzed behind the glass walls.

In the center stood the scanner—a monolithic structure of humming metal and blinking lights, almost alien in its construction. Thick cables snaked across the floor, pulsing faintly with energy, as if the thing itself were breathing.

Seyfe was shoved forward by a veiler who remained silent, his masked face betraying nothing. His boots echoed across the metal floor as he was led onto the platform at the base of the scanner.

Doctors—or what looked like them—rushed around the room. Clad in full-body protective suits with glowing visors, they moved quickly, speaking in low, urgent voices. They didn't look at Seyfe. Not directly. As if doing so might contaminate their work, or perhaps out of some quiet dread.

"What is this?" Seyfe gritted through clenched teeth. "Some kind of experiment?"

No one answered. One of the technicians approached him, inserting a key into the scanner's panel before tightening a set of mechanical restraints over the suit he was already wearing. It hissed softly as it locked into place. His legs, torso, even his head—everything was secured. He couldn't move. Could barely breathe.

A synthetic voice buzzed from overhead.

"Neural integrity check initiated. Biometric signature unknown. Cross-referencing incident records. Preparing scan."

A whine rose in the chamber, starting low and rising in pitch until it felt like it was vibrating through his bones. Seyfe clenched his jaw, heart pounding, as lights began to sweep across his body—red, blue, then white, searing his vision with each pass.

He caught a glimpse of a mirrored window above—observers, maybe. Watching. Judging. He couldn't see their faces, but he knew they were there. Government officials. Scientists. Possibly even more veilers.

Seyfe swallowed hard, mind racing. They're trying to see what I saw. Trying to extract it right from my brain.

He tensed instinctively—until the suit reminded him just how little freedom he had. The scanner pulsed once. Then again.

Another voice rang out. "Anomalous neurological activity detected."

That made the doctors pause. One of them turned to the others. "Cross-reference his neural pattern with the Shift logs. Something's off..."

Seyfe's chest tightened. Damn it—they're looking for the Echoform.

He remembered Aki's warning: "If they question you, tell the truth—or they'll make your life worse than death."

The hum intensified.

Then something else happened.

The scanner lights flickered. Just for a moment. Just enough to unsettle the entire room. A sharp crack echoed from the machine—electric, like static suddenly snapping in the air. One of the cables sparked violently.

Seyfe's eyes widened. No way...

A ghost of the Echoform's image flickered inside his mind—a lingering afterimage. The thousand blinking eyes. The mechanical sinew. The... presence. It was as if the machine had seen what he saw. Or worse—what he touched.

Someone shouted in the background. "He's been in contact with something unstable. Possibly integrated."

Integrated.

Seyfe's blood ran cold.

One of the doctors leaned closer to a monitor. "No signs of external contamination, but the neural patterns... they're shifting."

"Could be residual effects from a Class-C exposure," someone else muttered.

The restraints tightened again, reacting to his stress spike. Seyfe gritted his teeth, trying not to panic. They don't know it was me. Not yet. But this machine—this scanner—it was unraveling things even he didn't understand.

The voice returned overhead.

"Proceeding to deep-pattern analysis. Memory retrieval commencing."

"No, no, no—"Seyfe began to struggle. The machine didn't care.

With a final mechanical screech, the scanner surged to life again. The lights pierced into his eyes, and then—

Darkness.

The images flickered like old film—faded, jittery, raw.

Seyfe's mind reeled as his memories were peeled back one by one. There he was, sprinting through the ash-stained outskirts, pursued by scavengers with hollow eyes and rusted weapons. Then, the moment he discovered the infant swaddled in cloth among the bones of a ruined station—its cries barely audible over the howling wind.

Then the twisted birds descended—jagged wings slicing through the air, talons scraping metal, their cries like corrupted sirens. And finally, it emerged.

The abomination.

An unspeakable form, grotesque and erratic—like a collapsed god stitched together from void and voltage. A mass of malformed flesh, mechanical sinews, and an uncountable number of blinking eyes. Its presence alone was enough to make reality stutter.

But just as the memory began to play out the fight—the most critical part—it glitched.

The memory contorted, warped. Like the moment itself was too volatile to be replayed.

The scanner trembled.

Then the feed collapsed, violently retracting from the moment of confrontation like a wound too raw to be reopened. Static flooded the monitors.

That's when a blood-curdling scream rang out from one of the doctors.

"Code Red—we have a Code Red!"

Chaos followed.

The scanner lights went wild—alarms blaring, red flashes washing over the room. One of the lead physicians stumbled back from the console, his voice cracking.

"His internal vitals—look at them!"

Seyfe's body, still restrained, jerked slightly. Monitors displayed his vitals—pulse skyrocketing, blood pressure spiking—but the worst was the imagery of his organs. X-rays and scans began to show them blackened, scorched at the edges, veins twisted like scorched circuitry. Patterns—vague, arcane runes—began to faintly etch themselves into the tissues.

The veilers standing guard all turned in unison.

"Pause the procedure now!" another doctor shouted. "We can't allow the echoform to complete imprinting! It's attempting to brand the host!"

The scanner hissed as its systems were forced into shutdown. Sparks erupted from its base. One of the veilers rushed forward, pulling emergency restraints loose while another barked into their comms.

"Prep a stasis chamber and a cryo-salve injector. We need to bleed the runes from his body before they root into the nervous system!"

Seyfe, barely conscious, drifted in and out—caught between the real and something far deeper, darker. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt it still watching. The abomination.

It hadn't just died.

It had latched on.

And now, the price of killing it—or merely touching it—was starting to show.

As he was rushed down a metallic corridor surrounded by lights, shouting, and needles preparing for emergency treatment, Seyfe could only think one thing through the chaos:

"What the hell am I becoming?"

Seyfe's body was lowered into the Stasis Chamber—his breath ragged, skin clammy, the blackened veins across his chest pulsing faintly beneath the flickering lights. His limbs convulsed subtly, twitching with the echo of something not quite human.

Above him, metallic arms whirred into position. The Cryo Salve Injector hissed to life, releasing a freezing mist that condensed instantly against his fevered skin. With a sharp, mechanical puncture, the needle drove itself into his side. A moment later, his entire body jolted as the salve coursed through him—designed to arrest the spread, not to heal it.

Monitors beeped erratically.

"Stasis induction in progress. Cryo-salve flow stable. Imprint contamination—stage three."

Technicians worked fast, but their faces were pale. This wasn't standard procedure. Echoform infections were rare. Controlled. Studied only in cases where seasoned Veilers reached their limit.

Not a boy.

Seyfe had no weave core, no regulator mesh, no trained resistance. He was a scrap of flesh and stubborn instinct—and yet here he was. Still breathing. Still fighting.

One of the researchers spoke, nervously flipping through a glowing datasheet.

"He should've gone feral by now," she whispered to a colleague. "No one survives an imprint this strong without augmentations. Especially not a civilian. It doesn't make sense."

The other glanced at Seyfe's face through the thick stasis glass, eyes narrowing.

"Unless… he was contaminated in more than just contact."

Those words landed like a dropped scalpel—silent but sharp. The surrounding staff paused, stealing glances at one another, each unwilling to be the first to say what they were all thinking.

Echoform infections were known to spread through violent proximity—blood, exposure, psychospiritual residue—but this... this suggested something deeper. Something invasive. Intentional.

As the salve hissed and chilled mist crept along the seams of the chamber, Seyfe's body arched once—then dropped into stillness, breathing shallow but present. Symbols glimmered faintly beneath his skin, pulsing in sync with the stasis rhythm.

Veiler affliction from echoform exposure typically began with neuro-spinal degradation. A slow burn. Veilers had protocols. Dampeners. Specialized cores to regulate the effects after each kill. But even they knew the risk of cumulative contact. Some Veilers, after too many kills, began to see things—ghosts, echoes, entire ruptures in time. And eventually, if left unchecked… they would become what they fought.

But Seyfe wasn't a Veiler. He didn't even want to be one.

And that made him dangerous.