Beneath the Ice 1944
The cold was deeper than death.
A black wind howled across the Antarctic plateau, hurling snow like shards of glass. Somewhere within that frozen nowhere buried beneath tons of white silence stood the facility: Aesir Zwei, carved directly into the rock beneath a glacier, sealed from the world like a mausoleum built by madmen.
Inside, the lights were red. Everything was red.
Not from design but from blood.
They dragged him down the corridor by his arms, boots skidding, limp with exhaustion. His uniform was torn, charred at the collar where the grenade had gone off. The right side of his jaw was a ruin shredded, raw, weeping with slow, unnatural regeneration. His lips were gone. His teeth were exposed in a skeletal grimace. But he wasn't dead. He should have been. They couldn't figure out why.
"Er lebt noch? Nach dem?"
"He's still alive? After that?"
"Er hat nicht einmal geschrien. Nicht einmal. Nur... gesehen."
"He didn't even scream. Not once. Just… stared."
They stopped outside a blast door. One of them turned to the glass window set into the steel.
The man behind the glass smiled.
He was too clean for this place. Pale. Immaculate. Dressed like a doctor but standing like a priest.
"Bring ihn hinein. Der Amerikaner ist unsere letzte Karte."
"Bring him in. The American is our last card."
They strapped him to a table in the heart of the lab, beneath a ceiling of pipes that dripped with ice. Overhead, the swastika hung side-by-side with something older a black serpent eating its tail.
Monitors blinked. Vats hissed. Tubes pulsed with something orange.
One of the scientists young, sweating, trying to mask the tremor in his hand leaned toward Elias's ear.
"Can you hear me?" he whispered in rough English. "You… you from the States?"
Elias blinked slowly. His one good eye twitched.
"Yeah," he rasped. "Name's Krieg. Elias Krieg."
The young man nodded once. "They say you're lucky. They say you lived. But they don't know why."
He leaned closer.
"They don't believe in God anymore. Just code and blood and this."
He looked at the largest vat Ignis Vitae. The orange serum swirled like liquid flame, glowing with heat no frost could dim.
"They're going to put it in you," he said. "You understand? They think you'll survive it. If you don't…"
He looked away.
"You won't be able to die."
The door slammed open.
The clean doctor entered.
His voice was calm, clinical, Germanic to the core.
"Letzte Vorbereitung. Injizieren Sie ihn. Langsam."
"Final preparations. Inject him. Slowly."
Elias groaned, trying to move. His muscles refused. Leather straps held him tight. The young scientist looked afraid. Looked back once more.
"You don't speak German, do you?" he asked.
Elias gave a twisted, bloodless grin.
"No."
The scientist hesitated then flicked a switch.
Pain. It wasn't fire. Fire was kind compared to this.
The serum drilled through his veins like liquid razors. His eyes rolled back. Bones cracked. Skin twisted. Nerves lit up like flares. Something crawled under his skin not alive, not quite. A machine built of instinct, memory, trauma.
The doctor smiled, murmuring in German:
"Sieh zu. Das ist der Tod der Menschlichkeit. Und der Beginn von etwas Besserem."
"Watch. This is the death of humanity. And the beginning of something better."
Three days later.
He stopped screaming.
He stopped sleeping.
He started remembering everything.
The guards whispered now. They'd stopped poking him with batons. They wouldn't meet his eyes. Even the scientists grew quiet.
The wounds healed but wrong. Too fast. Too smooth. His body didn't scar; it rewrote.
The clean doctor stood outside the glass again, clipboard in hand.
"Was sieht er?"
"What does he see?"
"Uns. Er sieht durch uns. Wie ein Tier. Wie ein Gott."
"Us. He sees through us. Like an animal. Like a god."
Elias couldn't understand the words but he understood the tone.
He'd heard it in church before a funeral.
That night, the lights flickered.
The guards on watch fell asleep and never woke up.
In the cold silence of the lab, Elias Krieg rose from his restraints. The leather had snapped sometime during his last "test."
He stood, barefoot, pale and breathing slow.
He didn't feel cold anymore.
He didn't feel human.
The alarm blared five minutes later.
Too late.
By then, he was already moving.
They fired. Bullets met bone. But he didn't fall.
He tore through them silent. Efficient. A ghost in the blood-red light.
The clean doctor tried to run. He didn't get far.
Elias found him by the generator core, whispering prayers to science, to ambition, to madness.
When Elias grabbed him, he screamed.
> "Bitte! Ich—ich habe nur versucht, die Zukunft zu—"
"Please! I—I only tried to build the future—"
Elias stared at him, lipless jaw trembling.
"I don't speak German," he rasped.
Then he crushed the doctor's throat with one hand.
The facility burned. Explosions cracked the ice above. Roofs caved. Labs melted. Generators overloaded.
As the last survivors fled into the blizzard, Elias walked through fire and frost alike.
And then—
The floor beneath him groaned.
Cracked.
And collapsed.
He fell.
Down into a frozen crevasse.
Darkness swallowed him.
Silence. For sixty years.
Until the thaw.
Until the dig.
Until the ice gave him up like a secret no longer worth keeping.
And when he woke—he screamed not from pain, but memory.
And the world would never forget his name again.
HeartEater was born.
And he remembered everything.