The grave marker was simple stone, unmarked except for dates.
Ilen Korr knelt before it in the pre-dawn gray, his chitinous fingers tracing the carved numerals. Seventeen seasons. His daughter had lived seventeen seasons before the infection took her. The same infection that had killed thousands in the coastal settlements when the last World Cats were hunted to extinction.
She had wanted to be a healer. Had spent her days learning which plants could ease suffering, which compounds could slow infection. In the end, none of it mattered. The fever came from a World Cat bite. A creature already extinct in living memory, already fading into legend. But the bacteria in their saliva lived on, hibernating in soil and water. His daughter had stepped on contaminated ground during a supply run.
That was ninety-three seasons ago.
Ilen's hand moved from the dates to the center of the marker, where he'd carved a simple symbol: a circle with a gap. Something incomplete. A wound that never closed.
"I'm going to finish this," he whispered to the stone. "Today. After a hundred and thirty seasons of work, today it ends."
The stone didn't answer. It never did.
He left the cemetery as the sun began its climb, moving through the Authority district with practiced invisibility. Other researchers recognized him in passing. Ilen the obsessive. Ilen the desperate. None stopped him. They knew what he was doing. Most thought him mad.
They weren't wrong.
The Authority had forbidden World Cat resurrection research sixty seasons ago. The political reason was simple: World Cats were apex predators that had nearly destroyed civilization in their prime. Extinction had been the culmination of generations of warfare, sacrifice, and cost. Bringing them back was insanity.
But Ilen had spent ninety-three seasons gathering pieces. Genetic samples preserved in crystal stasis from the final hunts. Ritual components sourced from black markets and desperate believers. A location where the dimensional barriers were thin. He didn't know why or how he knew, but the knowledge lived in him like ancestral memory.
And finally, eighteen years ago, a seed.
The last World Cat seed.
He'd found it in a shrine buried beneath the Greyglass Mountains, preserved in stasis older than the current regime. The genetic template inside was perfect, untouched by time's erosion. But the consciousness that should have guided the body had degraded across the millennia. Three thousand years of sleep had reduced it to whisper-thin threads, barely enough to sustain basic function.
So he'd built the ritual to call something else.
The Authority discovered his research six months before the summoning. They'd let him live, which was mercy of a sort. They'd simply warned him: this will fail, and when it does, we'll have no choice but to terminate you. The logic was cold and clean. A World Cat loose in the world couldn't be allowed to exist.
Ilen had worked faster after that.
Seventeen attempts. Sixteen catastrophic failures. Minds that shattered on contact with the biological template. Consciousness that rejected the merge and left only vegetative husks. One attempt that had resulted in a creature experiencing time backward, aging in reverse until it died before it was born. One that simply screamed for three weeks straight before its body gave out.
But the mathematics said attempt seventeen was viable. The calculations said the next dimensional anchor resonance would align with the seed's remaining consciousness just enough to bridge the gap. The next compatible mind, the next crossing, the next chance.
If he was wrong, he'd die. If he was right, he'd create something the world wasn't ready for.
Either way, his daughter's grave would finally stop being empty.
Commander Sareth stood on a windblown plateau above the Ashmar Wastes, his coat snapping in thermal updrafts that rose from deep volcanic chambers below. Eight officers waited in formation on the rock shelf at the edge of the dunes, their suppression rods humming with barely-contained force. The weapons weren't meant for individuals. They were designed for territorial pacification, for collapsing cave systems, for erasing problems at scale.
If they had to use them, Ilen Korr would be erased along with whatever he'd summoned.
"Movement in sector seven. Subterranean disturbance." The scanner operator's voice was flat with routine, but Sareth heard the edge underneath. This operator had been with the Authority for thirty seasons. He recognized the difference between normal seismic activity and something wrong.
This was wrong.
Sareth had reviewed Ilen's file extensively before coming here. Brilliant researcher. Obsessive to the point of dysfunction. Lost a daughter to World Cat-strain infection ninety-three seasons ago. Had been consistently denied resurrection permits for the better part of a century.
And then, three months ago, the black market flags had lit up. Dimensional anchor plates disappearing from secure Authority storage. Ritual components being acquired in volumes that suggested a major working. Finally, just last week, confirmation of the theft of the last World Cat seed from the deepest archived vaults.
Ilen wasn't trying to hide anymore. He was desperate.
"Begin containment," Sareth ordered.
The four crystal pillars at the corners of a perfect square around the low stone mound began to hum. They'd been placed with precision, each one equidistant from the others, each calibrated to the exact frequency of World Cat genetic markers. If something World Cat-shaped tried to cross the boundary, the pillars would lock it down through force fields that even a fully mature predator couldn't break.
Theoretically.
The Authority's last encounter with a mature World Cat had been three thousand years ago. Theory was all they had.
The pillars sang in harmony. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. A rhythm that made teeth ache and made the air itself vibrate. Threads of force wove themselves into a dome around the mound, each strand locking into place with the precision of a master weaver. The air inside wavered like heat over sand.
"Hold the field. Maintain perimeter. No one enters," Sareth said. "If he tries to run, let the dome do its work."
Beneath the mound, past a rough-hewn stair that descended into absolute darkness, Ilen Korr watched a white seed hover over an obsidian basin.
It was no larger than a grain of rice, turning slowly in the air, held in place by forces that predated the Five Kingdoms by millennia. It turned and turned and never fell.
Ilen's hands shook. Not from fear. He'd moved beyond fear seasons ago. This was something else. Anticipation. Grief. The weight of a hundred and thirty seasons of work compressed into the next three minutes.
"Anchor stable," he whispered, checking the glowing runes cut into the bedrock. They pulsed green, a soothing emerald that lied about the violence of what was happening. "Foreign mind attached. No drift. Come on. Just three more minutes."
The seed was a World Cat seed. The old texts called them Apex Adapters. Consume, learn, reshape, survive. The ultimate survivor organism, engineered in an age when the word "extinction" was a challenge to overcome rather than a natural law. The Five Kingdoms had purged them three thousand years ago when they realized nothing could kill a mature World Cat. Not armies, not magic, not time itself. Couldn't kill them, and couldn't coexist with them.
This was the last seed.
Ilen had found it in crystal stasis, hidden in a fallen shrine beneath the Greyglass Mountains. The template inside was perfect, untouched by time. But the guiding spark had thinned across the centuries, degraded to near nothing. Not enough to guide development. Not enough to prevent the creature from being pure predator, pure hunger, pure violence.
But maybe enough to receive a different guide.
He'd done the forbidden. He'd stolen dimensional anchor plates from a secure Authority station. He'd fit one into a ritual circle and tuned it to call a compatible mind from another world. Another reality. A place where the Authority's reach meant nothing. A place where someone innocent could be pulled away from their life and rewritten into something new.
Seventeen tries. Sixteen failures. Minds that shattered on contact, or rejected the merge, or arrived as nothing but screaming static. Humans. He'd learned to identify them by their pheromone signature. Humans were compatible with World Cat physiology in ways most creatures weren't. Something about human flexibility, human adaptability, human desperate will to survive.