The darkened studio hummed like some mechanical cathedral, its walls alive with wires, dials, and blinking red eyes. Winslow sat rigid in the heavy chair, his cape pooled across the floor like spilled ink, the silver owl-mask catching a faint gleam from the console lights. His gloved hands gripped the armrests, trembling—not with fear, but with the desperate, gnawing hunger of a man who had already lost everything. The burn along the right side of his face throbbed with each heartbeat, the flesh still raw beneath the mask, a constant reminder of the press that had chewed him up and spat him out. His throat, ruined, had betrayed him. His voice—his gift, his life’s blood—was ash.

And yet… here he was.

The apparatus waiting before him was alien in design: a sleek, black device of wires, tubes, and polished steel. A voice box. Winslow’s jaw clenched as he reached forward, fingers hovering above the strange contraption like a priest before an altar. He could still feel the ghost of what it meant to sing—his music wasn’t just notes and words, it was his soul carved into melody. To lose that had been worse than the fire, worse than prison. But now—

With a slow, almost reverent motion, Winslow adjusted the straps and metal fittings against his scarred throat. The box clicked into place with a faint electric whine, its edges digging cold into his burned flesh. For a moment, silence. Then, a pulse. A vibration that crawled up through his throat, alien and wrong, as though his body were rejecting this machine. His hands tightened against the device, holding it there, daring it to work.

His breath rasped. A static hum escaped him. He tried again, the sound warping into a robotic stutter. His chest constricted. Was this it? Was this his “voice” now—an electric mockery of what he had once been? Rage boiled, and he slammed a fist against the console, the room echoing with his frustration.

But then—

“Ahhh…”

It was small, distorted, metallic—but it was sound. A sound he had made. Winslow froze, his wide, bloodshot eyes narrowing with a flicker of wonder. He tried again, shaping the syllables slowly, carefully, like a child relearning speech.

“My…” The word grated, harsh but whole. “Music…” The device strained, but it carried the weight of his intent. “Lives.”

The sound cracked, mechanical and unnatural, yet it vibrated through the studio with an eerie resonance. For the first time since the press, since the river, since the mask, he could speak. No—he could sing.

Winslow’s gaze swept over the blank pages of sheet music scattered across the console, his own compositions staring back at him like silent ghosts. His hands shook as he lifted one, crumpling it in his grip. All of it—every note, every lyric—had been twisted, stolen, cheapened by others. Now, finally, he could reclaim it. Through this machine, through this monstrous, electric rebirth, his music would speak again.

The Phantom tilted his head back, letting the modulated hum of his reconstructed voice fill the studio. It wasn’t the angelic tone he once possessed—it was something darker, fractured, mechanical. But it was his.

Winslow grinned beneath the mask, the expression crooked, half-swallowed by scars, half-hidden by steel.

He had a voice again. And with it, he would make the world hear him.