The first thing was pressure.
As if the world had imploded inside his bones and refused to relent. He ached all over, every joint out of kilter and too large for his skin, his chest pummeling from the inside by a heart trying to break free.
Then the fire broke out.
It began in his spine, crawled up into his skull and down into his legs, a slow grind that flayed him apart from the inside out. Muscle ruptured, healed, and ruptured again. His lungs constricted. His throat closed. For a moment, he was certain he no longer possessed a body, only nerve endings and agony.
He tried to scream.
There was nothing. No air. No voice. Only the burning sensation and the gnawing, horror-twisted sense of something growing. Expanding. Altering.
And then it just stopped.
Sound came back as if a switch had been flipped.
Voices. Whispery low. arguing
".still alive. You can see it in the readings."
"Alive and not dying are not the same thing," another voice cut in, sharp and male and well-controlled. "We threw binding, suppression, siphoning, and it laughed at half of that before it even finished coalescing. That thing is not staying as it is."
"The first thing" echoed in the skull of the outlaw.
He did not open his eyes. Yet. His instinct told him to remain frozen. Whatever had occurred to him, it wasn't in a hospital bed.
Cold bit into his back. Stone. His wrists and ankles throbbed with a binding, unrelenting pressure. Metal. He could feel ridges etched into it, humming with a faint electrical vibration against his skin.
Magic, his brain automatically supplied, which was something his brain shouldn't have been able to do.
He willed the breaths into deep, shallow ones. His chest rose and fell. His chains didn't clank. A figure stirred near him. Robes rustled.
'The circle's stable,' said a woman. Now this one was tired, but stable. 'For now. The sigils are holding the hybrid matrix together, even if nature hasn't decided what to do with it yet.'
Hybrid matrix.
He swallowed, the action minute. His throat was sore, as if he'd been screaming for hours. The contact of his tongue was uneven, striking something sharper than normal. Fangs. Not fully extended, but present nonetheless, a comforting presence in his gums, a reminder that he was a creature of the night, a predator.
Not human then.
Pictures flickered at the edges of his mind. Impressions, rather than memory. Running on all fours, feeling the ground shudder with each pounding step. Catching glimpses of his hands, his paws, huge dinner plates smashing through dirt and rock. A heartbeat, not human fast, but thick and doubled, pumping strength through his blood, which wasn't blood.
Too big to pass as a regular wolf.
"Twilight shifter big, his old world's reference system whispered, unhelpfully."
His old world.
This idea unlocked something. Another tidal wave of imagery burst through: late nights in front of a screen, the sign welcoming to Mystic Falls, the Mikaelson compound in New Orleans, the Salvatore School. Witches. Vampires. Wolves. A girl with blue eyes like stormlight and her father's temper.
Hope Mikaelson
Just the mention made his chest constrict. Scents were part of it. Sacrifices. Burials. Having that look on her face when she realized that suffering was easier as a lonely burden.
Na.
But he closed the memories out before they could pull him under. Later. Think later. Right now, he had to know where he was and who had decided they had possession of the b he lay in.
"I'm telling you, we could have destroyed it when we had the chance," said the male voice a bit closer now.
He could hear the hard-soled footsteps closing in.
"We don't know what natural balance is going to demand for a creature like this," said the male voice.
"A tribrid was a bad enough idea to begin with."
Hope. Tribrid. The word slipped into place a little too conveniently.
"You tried to destroy it," a second, more distant voice whispered. Younger. Sharper. "Three times. It healed. You can't even classify it correctly."
"Which, of course, is exactly my point
He could almost feel the glare.
"Enough," said the tired woman. "Discuss theories at a time and place of your choosing. At present, we address ourselves to that which is before us."
A soft thump. Paper. She had left something on a surface near the cage. He dared open them an infinitesimal fraction.
The world was a jumble of warm candlelight and cold stone. Lying on the floor of what appeared to be a basement—the arched ceiling, the brick walls, the circle of candles outlining another, painted design—sigils covered the floor and the bars in thick black lines that throbbed with a faint beat that was not his own.
He was inside those bars.
Metal. Thick. Every inch of it inscribed with runes that made his flesh crawl.
A figure clad in dark robes stood just outside the circle of guests, back turned to him, hair twisted into a messy knot. A figure lounged against a pillar with folded arms and a set of harshly lined features. At least three more bodies hovered around the edges of his awareness.
Witches. That much his new senses did not need the aid of sight to confirm. A heaviness hung about them, like the pause just before thunder, when the sky held its breath.
"Current status?" a woman asked.
"Heart rate… high, but steady," a voice responded, this time closer to his feet. "Regeneration at a standstill. No further mutation in the last ten minutes. Whatever nature was doing, it seems to have… paused."
Paused. Not complete.
Good. Bad. Difficult to say.
"And what about fail-safes?" asked the woman
"The cage is layered with binding, suppression, anti-teleportation, and a secondary immolation trigger if the circle is broken from the inside," the same voice responded. "If it tries to force its way out, it burns."
It. Again.
His eyes were squinted and fixed on the voices. He had to be careful now or they'd panic or do the wrong thing irreversibly.
"But we still have to make a decision regarding what we are going to do," said the man standing by the pillar. "Closing it is not the answer. As we saw once before, just because we choose to sweep something under the rug doesn't mean we've contained the problem," he said.
Malivore, his brain whispered.
Pit of suffering.
Bad storage solution.
"And we've also seen what happens when we swing first and ask questions later," said a snappy-voiced witch with a wild tangle of curls. "Oh, you'd forget? He dropped right into the middle of our spellwork, half-developed. Without us to hold the fort together, this place'd be falling apart. I don't think 'burn it' is a strategy; I think burn it is an instinct."
He. That was a novelty.
He risked a fraction of a movement. The fingers jerked, tensed slightly against the floor. The chain that held him prisoner chafed against the stone by a millimeter, the sound obscured by their shouting argument. The manacle hurt his skin, releasing a warmth that seeped into the surface like ink in water.
He could feel three different tides running under the weight. A fiery, wild one, like the snarl of a wolf's mouth. A chill, hungry one, like a razor's edge. And a bright, sparkling one, like electricity crawled over his bones.
Tribrid. Witch, wolf, vampire. Even fiercer than Klaus's combination, it feels like. There was more inherent power in him than any one body should contain before it bursts.
It's no surprise they'd panicked.
"Even if we wanted to kill him," the younger witch said, "we can't. There are no ways to do it by the book. Cutting off his head healed. Burning him healed. Taking out his heart gave us what, exactly, thirty seconds?"
"Forty-six," corrected someone abs
"Forty-six seconds," she snapped. "We're not going to stand around trying random alternatives until one of them works. That's not strategy, that's torture."
"Hope's weakness: red oak." This thought drifted into his mind unbidden: red oak. "A kind of wood in all of existence that could destroy her." This was season three, season four. A tree that, so far, did not yet exist in this reality, if he was in the place he thought he was.
Nature hadn't balanced him either. Not yet. No matching bullet was in place. That meant that they were stuck with him until nature decided to get creative.
"Nature will even it out," the old man growled. "It always does," he said.
"Yes," said the leader of the witches quietly. "Which is what worries me."
He allowed his eyes to drift shut again, for a brief moment. His pulse was throbbing in his ears. Not quite human, not quite vampire-petrified. In between, amplified.
Legacies. TVD. The Originals. All of it, every single rule and loophole and tragedy, crowding his brain like a wiki had flooded it to overflowing with information. He knew where he was. He knew what was coming.
He knew there had to be a girl out there in the world who would bear the weight of all the terrible choices that the grown-ups had made.
Hope Mikaelson
He swallowed, his chains moving just a hair. One of the witches sucked in air.
"He's awake," she said.
There's no use pretending after that.
Ortega's fully opened his eyes.
The sudden light still was painful, but he refused to flinch. The robed woman, who had tired eyes, was standing directly in front of the bars, staring at him. Up close, he noticed the fine lines around the sides of her mouth and, just below, a smear of fatigue around her eyes. Not a teenager, then, but someone who'd been at this a long time.
Her magic caressed his skin like a chill of water. Testing, weighing.
For a heartbeat, there was silence in the room
"I didn't either."
Talking meant spilling information. Information meant risk. He was chained, caged, and had not a clue as to whose favor these witches would fall once they determined what he was worth.
"No," he simply stated, shaking his head, "he's
Her eyes darted from his gaze to the cuffs of his sleeves, and then to the minute crack where he hadn't realized he'd dug his fingers into the stone. Her face didn't change, but her demeanor seemed to realign itself. Caution, possibly wariness.
"Can you understand me?" she asked finally.
He met her gaze and nodded once.
A breath was exhaled in the background. It would be a younger witch, no doubt
"Great," muttered the old man. "It's not just a monster, it's listening."
Ortega did not look at him either. Instead, he kept his concentration on the person who seemed in charge. They could chat as they wanted. They could fill the silence with guesses and assumptions.
He needed time. Time to comprehend these bindings, time to sense the limits of his powers while under the control, time to determine where within the timestream he found himself.
Above all, the time to escape this prison of a cage and to the only person within this universe he had not vowed to watch suffer again.
Hope Mikaelson. The Tribrid
What he was, he knew one thing as surely as he knew his own name:
"He wasn't here to be another weapon locked in a basement."
He was there to see that she did not encounter her destiny alone.
For now, at any rate, he leaned back against the cold wall, the burning of the chains lightly against his flesh, and let them squabble about whether to bind him or not.
"Silence was the safer option than anything he could say."
---
Salvatore School – Headmaster's Office
Later that night, after the dragon fight
However, the campus was strangely quiet, given the events that the group had just been through.
Alaric was seated behind his desk, his jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up. Before him was an open box of dark wood with velvet interiors and content that was much less so.
The knife was inside, quiet and innocuous, in a way that made his stomach turn. Just a few hours before, that woman had turned into a dragon for it. Before her, Landon had taken it from her, had lied about it. And now Landon was gone, Rafael was gone, and he had nothing but that thing as souvenir of this entire fiasco.
He closed the lid more tightly than he had intended.
In another corner of the room stood the Enchanted Globe. It
Alaric looked up. The globe normally shone with a soft, steady light, a muted constellation across the glass. This evening, one spot burned bright enough to eliminate all else.
He stood, the sound of the chair scraping back across the floor as he moved to it.
"Not now," he muttered.
The light was just above the recognizable shape of Virginia, centered on a spot of dark green land outside Mystic Falls. It flashed once, twice, like a heart beating.
He opened a small brass covering at the base. The magical pattern vibrated. Paper emerged, a thin strip, and upon itself, the ink inscribed itself.
Three symbols appeared as beginnings: wolf, vampire, witch. The paths intersected, blurred, and ultimately connected. The spell abandoned any attempt at distinction and placed a single word below it.
UNCLASS
Alaric looked at it, his jaw clenching
Its door swung open without ringing either.
"If this is another speech about my choice, I'm going to require a cup of coffee," Hope replied as she entered the room.
Her voice was dry, but her bearing was anything but casual. Her hair was tied back, her hood up, but her eyes were far from healed from what she'd seen and experienced in one day: betrayal from Landon, a note from him, Ric's rage, a monster burning from the inside out.
"Actually," Alaric said, "we have something else."
She looked at what he was looking at, at the globe. "Oh, I think I was just about to make the same joke," she said, stifling it before she could deliver it.
"That wasn't doing that when I left," she said.
"No," he said. "It started a minute ago."
"Hope crossed the room to stand beside him. 'The spot of light was so intense he could have swore someone had dropped a star on the glass.'
"
She reached out and ran her fingers over the surface.
The world responded to her touch, the spell sensing its true caster. A hum began to build from the underside, and she could sense it for an instant: the power, stifled and striving, pushed inward from something unseen.
She withdrew her hand, frowning.
"That is not some sloppy first-time levitation spell caster," she said.
"Read this," he said, handing it to her.
Her eyes roved over the signs, their intersection, the lone word at the bottom.
"Unclassified," she read quietly
"Triple-natured signature—the spell can't sort it out," he said. "Familiar
Hope held her gaze on the paper. "The last time you tested that thing on me, it almost SHORTED OUT," Hope said. "You told me it wasn't capable of testing… whatever I am."
"That is why I don't like seeing something of the same category," said Rafaele.
She would look back at the globe. The bright spot flashed again, a little clearer this time. It had not been there when they'd left to go after Landon. It had not been there when she'd found the note left on the windshield instead of Landon.
"Location?" she asked.
He turned the outer ring, matching up the markings until he got the right coordinates.
"North woods," he said. "Further out than where we found Landon's shack. Old property line, near the back side of the falls,"
She relived the day without realizing it: the shack, the purloined goods, the look on Landon's face when she confronted him about it, the woman entering the clearing and transforming into something from a storybook. Fire, wings, the knife in Ric's hand, Landon disappearing.
"And this just… appeared?" she asked.
"Just after I locked that knife away," he said.
Hope's jaw clenched. "Well, so either this day is already finished with trying to kill us," she said, "or someone has just woken up loudly."
"The key of the world is attuned to young supes. Once they trigger or their powers really come alive, that's when the ping comes, which has been how we've recruited over the past couple of years."
"And usually it doesn't do… that." She nodded at the burning spot.
"Usually," he agreed.
For a brief instant, none of them said a word. The only sound within the room was the soft ticking of the wall clock and the ever-so-slight hum of the globe's magic.
"It could be a kid," Hope finally said. "Just somebody who got very unlucky with timing."
"It could take the form of what we're seeing today in a form that doesn't have a name yet," Alaric said. "Leaving any form of it alone is simply out of the question."
She didn't disagree. If anything, she straightened up.
"You want to go now," she said.
"I'd like to go before they, or rather, themselves, manage to harm themselves and possibly others," he said. "However, we do this by the book. We use gear, suppression cuffs—you know, the usual," he said.
"Backup?" she asked.
Kaleb and MG on standby, close enough to get there if things go south, not close enough to spook someone who may already be scared to death."
Hope looked at the globe again. The glow began to flicker, and she was sensitive to the pressure she felt under her skin—like things pressing on walls, urging them outward.
"Whatever that is," she said, "it feels trapped."
"Chains, basements, too many bad decisions made by adults who didn't know what they had in their hands," Alaric thought. "Then let's make the attempt to be the first to arrive," he said. "I understand," she nodded.
At the door, she stopped. "Ric?" she asked He looked up. "If this is… like me," she said, looking at the globe again, "we treat them like a person first. Not just a problem." He looked at her. The fight they'd had in the car hovered in the air. "That's the plan," he said. "We find them. We figure out what they are. And if they need help, we bring them back here." Hope gave a small, closed nod and departed. He put the paper in his pocket, picked up his jacket, turned back for a final glance at the globe.
There was a light burning steady and bright over the north woods, while a tribrid chained deep beneath the earth counted his breaths and waited for a seam to form in his cell.