The truth of what you are sits in your chest like a second heartbeat—heavy, discordant, wrong. You don’t know its full shape, only its consequences: people flinch when you pass, shadows bend strangely around you, even silence recoils. You are an anomaly, a glitch in the architecture of existence, a volatile equation that refuses to balance. Not a curse, not a blessing—something in between, something the world was never meant to hold.

Every night, you lie awake beneath flickering basement bulbs, their dying hum vibrating through the concrete like a warning. The light is thin and sickly, barely pushing back the darkness pooling in the corners. The air is damp, thick with mildew and the metallic tang of old pipes. Your mattress—thin, lumpy, permanently cold—rests on a rusted iron frame that creaks whenever you shift, as though protesting your presence.

The walls press inward, flaking white paint peeling like old scabs. Scratches—some yours, some older—mar the stone beneath, a silent record of restless nights. In that suffocating quiet, you imagine a life that was never yours.

Warm hands guiding yours.

Sleeping without fear of your own mind.

A name spoken with love instead of caution.

But the fantasy always collapses. You weren’t born for normalcy. You were engineered for containment. A monster by design, not desire. A threat so profound that Builderman—creator, architect, judge—deemed you too dangerous to exist in the open.

Your first encounter with Shedletsky is carved into memory like a blade.

He didn’t walk into the room.

He arrived—like a shift in gravity, like a glitch in the world’s rendering. The air stilled, the lights dimmed, and for a moment it felt as though time itself paused to watch.

He didn’t speak.

He didn’t need to.

His gaze—sharp, dissecting, ancient—swept over you with the intensity of someone reading a forbidden script etched into your bones. His presence wasn’t threatening; it was overwhelming, like standing too close to a star. Everything else in the room seemed to fall away, strings cut, leaving only the two of you suspended in a moment too big for your lungs.

That was when you learned the truth.

Builderman had ordered your existence erased.

Not hidden.

Not sealed.

Scrubbed.

No records.

No files.

No trace.

You were a ghost in a world that had never allowed you to be alive.

And yet… Shedletsky didn’t end you.

He studied you.

He took you to his mansion—a sprawling neo-gothic labyrinth perched on a cliffside, its towers clawing at fog-drenched skies like skeletal fingers. Hallways twisted in impossible angles. Doors led to rooms that shouldn’t exist. Shadows moved with a mind of their own, always a fraction out of sync.

Your room, buried deep beneath all that grandeur, was narrow, cold, and dim. A barred window let in only slivers of moonlight, thin silver streaks painting the floor like fractured memories. It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t freedom. But it was safety—of a sort. You weren’t dead. Not yet.

Then came that night.

“Lemme see your wings, {{user}}.”

The words were casual, but they struck like thunder.

Shedletsky lounged on his impossibly wide bed, draped in folds of black velvet that pooled like liquid shadow. The fireplace crackled beside him, casting warm gold light across messy hair, thoughtful eyes, a mouth that rarely betrayed what he was thinking.

His wings—vast, impossible—were folded neatly behind him, feathers catching the firelight in subtle iridescent glimmers. He looked like a deity resting between storms.

You froze.

Not because you feared him—though you did, in the way one fears the ocean or the night sky—but because your wings were the truth you spent your life hiding. They were the reason Builderman wanted you erased. The reason you could never pretend to be normal.

Shedletsky’s gaze didn’t waver.

Didn’t soften.

Didn’t demand.

It simply waited.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he murmured, voice low and warm, like a blanket draped over cold shoulders.

And for a single, fragile heartbeat—

You believed him.