Millions of miles away… in the darkness. Empty space of unimaginable size is home to a void outside of our galaxy. In the maddening orchestra of stars, a violent collision of a dwarf planet and a moon begins. It is catastrophic devastation in the wake of these two celestial juggernauts colliding. The decomposition of organic matter releases blasts. The absolute annihilation sparks the conception of an energy. This energy makes a cosmic ray that is shot out into space as it is projected by a devastating shock wave the collision creates. This high energy particle travels at super speed through space. It enters our galaxy. Eventually it enters our solar system. Unbeknownst to Victoria she is about to experience a phenomena event and be the only person to see up-close a lightning strike when combined with an impossible particle. A cosmic ray is traveling from extragalactic reaches of space and it carries with it levels greater than exa-electron volts which is measured to be millions of times more energy than anything that humans can produce on earth. It enters the atmosphere and intertwines with a lightning bolt.

In milliseconds that lightning bolt breaks through the window in the ceiling and rides down the chain hoist. It travels through the metal table, the corpse, the water and into the cable. The large voltaic pile absorbs the electrical current and overcharges. With a flash and a bang “the box” explodes with electricity and fire sending Victoria to the floor and knocking her unconscious momentarily. She is alarmingly awakened far from a comfortable heat. Having breathed in smoke she coughs desperately in search for air. In between each attempt to inhale oxygen she combs the laboratory with her eyes looking for her experiment but sees only fire and destruction as well as a wall of smoke. Through the haze her fingertips lightly skim through the debris of the explosion. Broken glass and ash can be felt as she coughs and moves about until she feels an all too familiar binding by her foot; she sees her journal that she picks up before the flames become unbearable, and the air unbreathable. She wants to find a way to save her experiment. She wants to cross the raging fire to the other side of the laboratory but she knows the high cost would mean her life. She needs more time and then surely there would be nothing that could stop her but there is no time as the fire tyrannically burns to temperatures she can not grapple with. She is left with no choice but to escape with her life now. A clear path to the exit can be seen when she turns around and she cautiously makes her way to the door to leave the lab but stops just before exiting. She turns back, dropping her shoulders as she begins to cry.
“Forgive me!” She yells into the fire and smoke, “Forgive me!” she yells through the tears, “Forgive me!” She yells with heartbreak riding on the trembling decibels of her words.

She runs through the halls of her castle without questioning how the fires reached the other wings. An ever unraveling disappointment of failure takes hold of her as she navigates to escape the burning castle.
She ponders, “Is this where God has disowned me? Has he been here all along and I ignored the presence he took so I may foolishly keep the dead I could not let go? Here I voyage from my deeds without God. My Punishments could be as severe as hearing only noise in the grace of music and I would wallow knowing I deserved it.”
Her sorrowing makes her fall ill as she continues onward down flights of stairs. She continues in thought, “An arrow pulled back, and with my guiding hand it was shot. Shot with good intention and confidence in it’s success but still only just the one arrow. Only one opportunity to hit the target. The brain, it was a person, there was a life there. Memories no one can have. Now, they never will. The days where there were rain instead of sun and the lungs were filled with petrichor. The warm meals with family, never a night alone or without a full stomach. The warming touch of sunlight on the eyes in spring.”

She pauses to weep, grabbing on to a door frame to hold her from falling while gripping her journal to her chest. She weeps uncontrollably as though she has never wept. As though she was attending a funeral.
She presses forward as the flames have followed her and push her out into the gardens. She keeps going stumbling minimally as she continues in her provoked thoughts, “Burden me! I wanted it! I wished for it and sought it out. Burden me with something to love. A child to give love and a purpose to never tire of. Burden me I asked, I demanded, I am strong enough I said. Remove my hand, burn me with frost, drown me in fire and I will show you the meaning of loving and to love. Burden me. I will never tire. Death follows Frankenstein’s.”

Now standing at the back of the castle gardens she watches as all the castle windows spill over with flames.
“Is this God?” She ponders, “Is he ashamed I ask, then he provided, and I could not live up to my self anointed merit? Or was my oversight so horrendously epochal that no act of divine punishment was needed? Or was the hand that sows a puppeteer to my decisions?”
The Fire has grown to be so big that the heat from the flames are too much for Victoria that even standing at the back of the gardens is unbearable.

Victoria takes to a stairwell that leads to a pier. She dashes to a rowboat at the end of the pier and climbs aboard frantically, setting her journal down in the boat and rowing out onto the lake. She cries as she rows watching her ancestral castle burn down. A castle 300 years old castle that took 200 years to build and only one Victoria Frankenstein to burn it down.

As she reaches the middle of the lake she sees something escape the flames and emerge onto a balcony under a row of flying buttresses on the seventh story of the wing next to the laboratory. She stops rowing and stands in the boat. There is a massive figure silhouetted by the fires. She pauses in awe before celebrating accomplishment with a gasp and a jump.

“Alive? He’s... ALIVE!”

But her celebration is short lived when a few men arrive on the balcony. Victoria watches in confusion from the middle of the lake as the men proceed to attack her experiment mercilessly. Victoria is filled with horror already as she can only stand and watch when the tides turn. A silence smothers the world, as the rain recedes and the clatter of thunder takes a pause when Victoria’s creation explodes with power in retaliation, tearing five men apart.
Her palm impulsively reaches out before her in shock. Her fingers are stretched apart and she can see her hand and arm silhouetted by the fire that engulfs her castle. Slivers of light can be seen emitting from the body of her massive creation… like a monster. The same mysterious light can barely be seen glowing from its eyes. A flood of questions and curiosities whirl like the winds on a tornado in Victoria’s mind.

She asks herself, “Have I birthed a titan so unstoppable?” In the moments as she watches. Victoria tries to decipher what she can of her creation from its movement in the dark. She hones in on some of those thoughts in the hurricane of her mind, “I imagine there is no world that finds itself safe from a creation such as this. 100 feet tall, immeasurable strength and no limits to what more they are capable of. With the blood of all four subjects that I manipulated in an attempt to remove or reduce the drawbacks of the disease and combine them in a single body, there are 4 truths I foresee of my creation’s biology. One, there is no wound it can not heal from as their cells regenerate as fast as a breath. Two, unbridled strength with muscle fibers that imitate the density of steal. Three, mutation. There is not enough I could record in my years of research to understand why different individuals reacted in a unique way to the disease. But there was a pattern, and in three cases they had a mutation that made them deadlier. Four, it will be immune to illness, disease, starvation and mortal wounds. It is immortal. I grow sicker within my bowels and breathing to the sheer imagining my own creation arriving before me. What misery I imbued on it. Is there pain it feels? Is pain a sense for it? How much pain have I caused it? For whatever the motivation may be, I can not conceive that our meeting will be without a shared resemblance to the effortless removal of a mans entrails and dismantling of the human form in one smooth swinging motion. How dare I ask only now, Was I wrong? How beautiful a creature, to curse the world like a form of arts opposite, plant a gaze on horror which unsettles the soul but inflicts a towering fear to turn away. Like soldiers at war, two children in a uniform and placed on the battlefield to look each other in the eyes. Deter their eyes from the other could mean an opponents opportunity to strike the killing blow of a blade entering the heart. They fear to turn away lest doom come for them. So is the fear my creation inflicts. I can feel... the summer of my life begins to drain from my hair, a woman of forty-four sees more in the lessening of ability than that of growing ambition. There now lies among the lost, ones fearlessness to endure.”

Panic rises in her as more towns people arrive to meet the horrors of her creation’s rampage. She can feel that chamber near her heart that holds her dreams, be crushed. The walls that hold up her dreamers soul were before now unbowed and impossible to abandon. Now they beckon to forfeit as those walls begin to crumble and collapse. Single handed gore and blood shed like shes never seen is spread across the balcony. She sinks into an ocean of emotions disappearing further into a darkness that light and air fear from as she drowns in despair. There is no breath she could take that could breathe life back into her broken dreams.
Lightning strikes, bursting in the sky like an orchestra for nature reaching crescendos whenever the towns people are split up the middle and cut down by Victoria’s creation. From the middle of the lake she stands in her row boat under the dark of night while being pelted by the rain looking on with terror into the flames. She feels the death of a part of her within but also the birth of an unexplored era.

The birth of dread.

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