Lida Ghetto Chapel - December 1941
Agony was the universe. Klaus Vogel no longer possessed a body, only pain. The infected shrapnel wound in his thigh had been a localized hell, a rotting fire eating into bone, but this was total annihilation. Every nerve ending shrieked as if dipped in acid. His bones were being splintered, dissolved, and reforged inside his own skin. He arched off the frozen chapel floor, spine bending like a bow about to snap, tendons standing in stark, ropey relief against skin that shimmered with unnatural heat. No scream emerged; his vocal cords were molten lead, his throat filled with a bitter, coppery flood that tasted of graves and lightning. Make it stop. God, make it stop. The prayer fragmented as his jawbone cracked audibly. He tasted enamel shards, blood, and the venom – thick, cloying, like liquid arsenic mixed with frozen poison ivy.
Through vision bleached white with suffering, he saw the ancient one watching. The gaunt figure knelt beside him, a statue carved from sorrow and time. Parchment skin stretched over bone, eyes like dried blood holding galaxies of loss. Tattered furs, smelling of deep earth and forgotten winters, hung loosely on his frame. Those ancient eyes held no pity, only a grim, weary satisfaction as Klaus's muscles tore and reknit like molten steel cables.
"Feel the price," the ancient one rasped, his voice stones grinding in a dry riverbed, the words archaic German layered with an accent lost to centuries. "Their perfect weapon... hammered on this anvil." The words meant nothing, only noise against the white-hot static filling Klaus's skull.
Klaus's femur snapped. A white-hot detonation bloomed in his hip, radiating down the leg that had already been dying. He choked, venom flooding his trachea, drowning him while paradoxically breathing air he no longer needed. Memories detonated in the crucible of pain, shrapnel from a life being incinerated:
Vater's fist: A calloused knuckle cracking across his twelve-year-old cheekbone. "Judenfreund!" Spat like phlegm. The taste of blood in his mouth, the sting of betrayal hotter than the blow. He'd shared Leah Feinberg's gifted bread.
Tempelhof's roar: A hundred thousand torches turning night into hellish orange. The stomp-stomp-stomp of boots vibrating in his adolescent ribs. A Party official's hand, heavy and possessive, on his shoulder. "Look! A Nordic oak! Strength and purity!" Pride, hot and sudden, flushing through him. Seen. Chosen.
Kristallnacht glass: Shards glittering like malevolent stars on wet Berlin cobblestones. Herr Feinberg's spectacles shattered, blood trickling from his temple. Leah, thin as a wraith in her nightdress, clinging to his arm. The SA man's backhand. The crack. Her crumpling. Her eyes finding his across the chaos – not pleading, but accusing. His own hand, clenched around a hammer, hanging useless at his side. Coward.
His skin began to harden. Not gradually, but in violent, lurching surges. Patches of flesh on his forearm turned instantly cold, unyielding, seamless alabaster, while the surrounding tissue still burned with feverish agony. The duality was exquisite torment – freezing and burning simultaneously, his newly amplified nervous system screaming at the contradiction. When the transformation reached his infected thigh, the gangrenous flesh sloughed off like rotten fruit, revealing smooth, cold, perfect stone beneath. The relief from the putrid agony was momentary. New, sharper pain erupted as his teeth reshaped – not visibly elongating, but compressing, the edges honing to diamond-hard sharpness against his tongue, against the roof of his mouth, a grinding pressure that made his rebuilt jaw ache. His gums throbbed.
Hours passed in a timeless hellscape defined solely by agony and the venom's cold fire. When the final, convulsive spasm released him, Klaus lay utterly spent on the frozen chapel dirt. Silence roared louder than artillery. True silence. No breath rasped in his own ears. No heartbeat thudded in the cavern of his chest. Only the overwhelming presence of absence. Snowflakes landed on his face, each intricate crystalline structure imprinting itself on his consciousness with microscopic, excruciating clarity. He felt the weight of each flake, the unique lattice of its frost, the subtle shift in air pressure as it fell. He was a statue carved by suffering, granted terrible, silent life. Cold radiated from him, a deep, internal winter that repelled the falling snow. It simply rested on him, cold on cold.