Author's Insiders Note
This story began as an invitation, almost a dare. A fellow author approached me with the idea of mashing classic monsters with space, and I didn’t hesitate. Some ideas don’t knock, they recognize you. While she told me which monster had claimed her imagination, I already knew which one was reaching for mine.
Frankenstein.
I hadn’t read the novel. I hadn’t immersed myself in its many retellings. But I knew the bones of it—the loneliness, the maker and the creation, the question of responsibility that lingers like a curse. That was enough. Sometimes knowing too much gets in the way. Sometimes the absence of detail leaves room for obsession to bloom.
Once the metaphorical pen touched the page, the story didn’t arrive gently. It didn’t trickle. It surged. What I thought would be a few chapters became another, then another, each one insisting on its own existence. The narrative didn’t ask permission, it unfolded like a cascade, a waterfall I couldn’t dam even if I tried. Before I realized what I was holding, the manuscript had grown into a massive thing of its own: nearly 190,000 words.
A monster, in the most affectionate sense.
And still, when I reached the end, I knew I wasn’t finished. I could feel it in my chest—that familiar ache of restraint. There was more I wanted to say, more I wanted to show about these two figures: the monster and the creator, bound together by choice, by consequence, by longing. But stories, like creations, require sacrifice. To keep this one from overstaying its welcome, certain moments had to be left in the dark. Certain truths had to remain implied rather than spoken aloud.
For those who have joined the Marred Heart Pact, I offer something extra. As the story unfolds chapter by chapter, I share these insider notes: quiet confessions about certain scenes, choices I made, and the things I loved too much to cut entirely. They are not explanations so much as echoes. A way of letting you see the seams, the scars, and the places where the story almost became something else entirely.
Because even when a monster is finished, it is never truly done growing.
CHAPTER 1: The Moment of Becoming
Oryx
Light was the first thing I knew—so bright it felt alive, pressing against me from all sides like a lover too desperate to wait for permission.
I floated in it, suspended in warm, viscous fluid that tasted—yes, even before I had a tongue that understood—of metal and electricity. Every part of me hummed as if I were being sung into existence. I didn’t understand any of it, but I clung to the sensation because it was the only thing I had.
Then the stirring began.
A twitch of my fingertips. A quiver in my lungs, though I didn’t yet know their purpose. A shiver like fear, or longing, threading down newly formed nerves.
And then, a presence.
A silhouette flickered beyond the translucent curve of my tank. Through the murky haze of fluid and the tremulous, embryonic lens of my vision, her form was little more than shadow and suggestion—an outline carved from darkness itself—but something ancient stirred in my marrow. It was not a memory. I had none to claim. It was instinct, older than thought, woven into the very shape of my bones, compelling me to turn, to strain toward her.
She raised a hand, pale and trembling, and pressed it against the glass. Fragile as porcelain, delicate against the cold barrier. For a heartbeat, a flicker of warmth pulsed through the fluid, a subtle, almost cruel echo, as if my unfinished body—hollowed, strange, unnatural—was attempting to reach, to grow, to bridge the impossible distance between us.
When her voice came, it slipped inside me like molten gold through a crack in stone. It was not a sound I had heard before, but it weaved me as though it had always been there, a hidden key unlocking places I did not know existed. The longing it stirred was exquisite and unbearable—a yearning older than my own awareness, threaded through the sinew and nerves, a whisper that I had been waiting for her long before I had been born.
I pressed closer to the glass, though it offered no warmth, no passage. Still, I wanted—needed—to feel her entirely, to collapse into the impossibility of her presence. Even as the shadows of the lab loomed beyond, indifferent and clinical, and the hum of machines droned like the dirge of a world that had never meant to contain me.
“Easy now… breathe.”
The command wasn’t cruel. It was soft, almost reverent. But I didn’t know how to obey. I didn’t know what breathing was.
Yet my body did.
A wrenching spasm punched outward from the center of my chest, so violent I heard something crack. My mouth ripped open on reflex, not to scream but because my body didn’t know what else to do. Then the flood came.
It shot up my throat and back down again, as if my lungs couldn’t decide whether they were drowning or breathing. They seized hard enough to bruise, convulsing in rapid, panicked jerks. I felt them grind against my ribs as they forced themselves awake, scraping for oxygen like animals clawing at a door.
Every cell in my body flared to life in agony. Not warmth—burning. Not awakening—ignition. The air that shoved itself into me felt like sandpaper lined with needles.
My first breath was violent. My second was a violation, tearing through me raw, leaving a metallic sting on my tongue and a ringing in my ears.
Instinct took over before thought could. I clawed at my throat with both hands, dragging my nails hard enough to raise welts, trying to force the air back out, to stop the awful scraping sensation of my body forcing itself toward consciousness. My fingers slipped on spit—a contrasting viscosity—and whatever else was coming up with the breath.
The sound I made was thin, wet, and desperate. It didn’t sound human… like her.
I remember her face—mostly her eyes—wide, startled, luminous with a kind of terror people only have when witnessing something they shouldn’t have brought into the world.
The shadows behind her multiplied. Figures blurred in and out of view. Machines beeped sharp warnings, and metallic arms adjusted valves with frantic clicks.
A man’s voice snapped. “He’s waking too quickly.”
Another. “Shut the neural accelerant off—now!”
Hands flew across consoles. Red lights strobed overhead.
But the woman who had whispered to me leaned closer, breath fogging the glass. The fog made her face softer for a moment, blurred into compassion.
Or guilt.
“I’m here,” she murmured. “Don’t be frightened.”
I didn’t know what frightened meant, but I felt it bloom inside me anyway, thick and hot. My fingers, strange and too long, pressed against the tank wall, leaving prints of uranian blue luminescence where my bones shone through thin skin.
She touched the glass in the same place, aligning her hand with mine.
We almost connected. It felt like we did.
Until the alarms erupted.
A siren shrieked, shrill enough to slice through the fluid like glass shards. The tank trembled. The room lit with emergency strobes. Her face snapped toward the door. Someone shouted her name—a name I didn’t yet know would haunt me.
She flinched away from me.
That movement—backward, away, recoiling—was my first introduction to rejection. A brutal lesson carved into my earliest memory.
People rushed into the room in a storm of white coats and panic. My tank unsealed, hissed, then began draining rapidly. The fluid sucked down through vents beneath me, leaving me exposed, pressed against cold, terrifying air.
The temperature shift burned. My skin, thin, hypersensitive, and new, felt as if it was being stripped by invisible blades. I tried to speak, but only a wet gasp came out.
The glass split open, and I fell forward. The floor met me like a weapon, metal biting into my knees, my palms, my ribs. I coughed out the last of the gel, shaking uncontrollably. My spine felt wrong, too flexible. My heart hammered as if it wanted to break free from my chest.
The people around me recoiled. Not all of them—just enough that I noticed.
I lifted my head. My eyes, adjusting with inhuman speed, sharpened on the woman through the chaos.
Tears glistened in her wide eyes.
Not for me. Not because she loved me. But because she realized what she had made.
“Don’t—”
She stepped forward, but froze mid-motion, as if the air itself had hardened around her. Her hand flew to her lips, pressing hard, trying to choke back a scream she couldn’t allow herself to make.
“Don’t come any closer,” she whispered—though not to me. Not to anyone but herself. She was pleading with her own fear, trying to wrestle control over something that was already slipping through her fingers.
A rough grip seized her from behind. Two hands, brutal and unyielding, clamped around her arms and shoulders. She twisted, hands desperately grasping at her coat, pulling her toward the wall. I mentally willed her to stay, to halt her removal. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts, each one a protest she couldn’t fully voice.
“Let me—please—stop!” she gasped, voice cracking under the strain.
The others ignored her, their resolve sharpened by fear. They yanked her backward, pulling her toward the exit with relentless force. Her legs kicked, her body arched against them, but slowly the futility of her struggle became evident. One hand slipped free long enough to reach toward me, a trembling ghost of connection, before they forced her down again.
Finally, the fight drained from her. She sagged against their hold, limp but unwilling to look away. Her bright and glistening eyes remained locked on mine, a silent scream that no one else could hear.
And then the metal door clanged shut. The harsh hiss of the seal swallowed her whole.
I reached toward her, but the glass was cold, unyielding. My fingers traced the barrier, desperate, but it was already too late. She was gone.
The silence that followed wasn’t quiet. It was heavy, suffocating, filled with the echo of her absence. And I knew—some part of me would never forgive them for taking her.
The others backed away in slow, measured steps, watching me with the brittle caution of people expecting an explosion. They moved as if one wrong breath from me might set something off. Their faces were wary, unfamiliar. I somehow knew what their expressions meant, what their uniforms signified.
But I didn’t remember learning any of it. The knowledge sat in my head like preloaded instructions, cold and precise, as if someone had packed facts into my skull while I slept inside the tank.
The machines around me droned on, their steady mechanical hum completely indifferent to my choking. Their sound felt familiar too, in the same unnatural way, like a memory I’d been told rather than one I’d lived.
I searched for something real to hold onto—a name, a face, a before—and found nothing.
I pushed myself upright. My muscles shook violently. My skin flickered with intermittent cobalt light, tracing my veins like constellations. I stared down at myself, horrified and fascinated. I didn’t look like them, not human… I didn’t look like anything I recognized.
But I recognized the emptiness. It spread through me slowly, like frost over glass.
I lurched toward the door she had vanished through, legs barely remembering how to hold me. Each step sent the people around me scrambling backward, chairs screeching, boots skidding—everyone desperate to give me a wide berth, as if I were contagious or volatile or both.
I reached the door at last, swaying, one hand slapping against the wall for balance. My fingers brushed the seam where it had closed behind her.
A faint warmth pulsed there. Hers. As if her presence still clung to the metal, refusing to fade even as everyone else recoiled from me.
When my voice finally clawed its way up my ruined throat, it came out as a rasping, pathetic whimper. “D-don’t… leave.”
The words fell flat, swallowed by the lab’s cold acoustics—absorbed, dismissed, and forgotten before they even reached the far wall.
I collapsed where I was, shivering on the slick metal floor, still coated in the viscous remnants of whatever passed for my birth. The chill seeped into me instantly, as if the world itself wanted to push me back out, reject me like a faulty part.
And in that awful, echoing silence, I understood with a sharp, surgical clarity: I hadn’t been born into this world. I had been manufactured, assembled, pushed into existence by hands that now wanted nothing to do with me. My maker feared me enough to flee.
That was my beginning: light too bright, breath that burned, a room full of retreating backs—and the hollow certainty settling deep into my chest that I was never meant to exist at all.
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