July 31st, 17—
The Archangel is no longer a vessel of exploration; she has become a sepulcher of oak and iron, held fast in the crystalline jaws of a sea that does not breathe. For three weeks, the ice has tightened its ligature around our hull, the timbers groaning like the bones of a giant being crushed in an invisible vice. My men, those hardy souls who once dreamt of the North-West Passage as a gateway to glory, now move across the deck with the hollow eyes of the damned, their breaths blooming in the frigid air like ghosts escaping their mouths.
I stood upon the quarterdeck this morning, the sun a pale, sickly disc that offered light without the charity of warmth. To the north, the horizon was a jagged spine of pressure ridges, a chaotic architecture of frozen brine that seemed to defy the very notion of a navigable world. It was there, amidst that desolate geometry, that we saw it.
"A spirit, Captain!" cried Murchison, his hand trembling as he pointed a fur-clad finger toward the distance. "A demon of the wastes!"
I raised my glass, my fingers stiff and unyielding within my gloves. At first, there was only the shimmer of the parhelion, a trick of the light upon the rime. But then, the shape coalesced. A sledge, drawn by dogs that seemed to gallop with a frantic, unnatural speed, crested a ridge of ice nearly half a mile distant. Upon the sledge sat a figure—not a man, for no man could possess such a colossal stature. Even through the distorting haze of the frost, the proportions were wrong; the shoulders were too broad, the limbs too long, a silhouette of impossible, rugged power that commanded the wasteland it traversed.
It vanished behind a mountain of ice as quickly as a fever dream dissipates upon waking.
"A trick of the eyes, surely," I muttered, though my heart hammered against my ribs with a cadence that betrayed my words. I turned to address the crew, to offer some hollow platitude about the refraction of light or the effects of the scurvy-fever upon the mind, when the air was suddenly pierced by a sound that belonged to no part of this wilderness.
It was a click. Rhythmic. Precise. Metallic.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
It was the sound of a clockwork heart, or perhaps the cocking of a hundred pistols in synchronized succession. It did not echo; it seemed to bite into the silence, a cold, mechanical intrusion upon the ancient stillness of the Arctic. My first mate, a man whose courage I had never known to falter, stepped back, his hand instinctively flying to the hilt of his cutlass.
"The ice is cracking, sir," he whispered, his face ashen.
"No," I replied, my gaze fixed upon a bank of fog that was rolling toward the starboard bow with a predatory grace. "The ice speaks with a different tongue. That is the sound of a craft."
Out of the white shroud, a second sledge appeared. But where the first had been a chaotic blur of fur and muscle, this one moved with a terrifying, linear stability. It was not drawn by dogs. Four low-slung, brass-plated constructs—things of jointed metal and hissing valves—churned the snow beneath them, their clockwork limbs striking the ice with the very rhythm we had heard.
And upon this carriage of brass and steam stood a man.
He was young—not the withered, sorrow-laden husk I might have expected to find in such a place—but a man in the full, albeit scarred, prime of his youth. He wore a coat of heavy, oiled leather, cinched tight with belts that carried a multitude of glass vials and silver instruments. His hair was a shock of raven black, dusted with frost, and across his cheek ran a jagged, silvered line of scar tissue that seemed to throb with a faint, internal luminescence.
He did not look like a victim of the elements. He looked like their architect.
In his hands, he wielded a rifle of such singular construction that it arrested the breath in my throat. The barrel was long, etched with fine, labyrinthine conduits that glowed with a dull, thinned-blood red. The stock was bound in polished brass, and as he drew closer, I saw that the weapon was connected by a series of copper wires to a small, humming box fixed to his chest.
The mechanical sledge ground to a halt fifty yards from the ship's side. The man did not call out. He did not beg for sanctuary. He merely stood, his gaze sweeping over the Archangel with a clinical, detached intensity that made me feel not like a savior, but like a specimen.
"Lower the plank," I commanded, my voice cracking.
"Captain, we know not what—"
"Lower the plank!"
The man ascended the side of the ship with a lithe, predatory ease. As his boots hit the deck, the clicking sound ceased, replaced by a low, vibrating hum that seemed to emanate from his very person. He ignored the muskets leveled at him by my terrified crew. He walked directly toward me, his eyes—a piercing, unnatural violet that seemed to hold the cold light of the aurora—locking onto mine.
"You are the master of this vessel?" he asked. His voice was a rich baritone, cultured and resonant, yet stripped of all human warmth. It was the voice of a man who had spent too long speaking to the dead.
"I am Robert Walton," I replied, extending a hand that he did not take. "And you are in peril, sir. We saw another—a giant—not an hour ago. You are pursued."
The stranger's lips curled into a smile that did not reach his eyes. It was a grim, mirthless expression. He adjusted the brass-bound rifle on his shoulder, his fingers dancing over the glowing conduits with a practiced, almost sensual familiarity.
"Pursued?" he repeated, the word tasting like iron in his mouth. "You misunderstand the nature of our dance, Captain Walton. I am not the prey. I am the shadow that the sun forgot to cast."
He stepped closer, the scent of him hitting me then—not the brine and salt of the sea, nor the musk of the furs, but the sharp, ozone sting of a lightning strike and the cloying, antiseptic odor of a surgeon's theatre.
"My name is Victor Frankenstein," he said, and as he spoke, he reached up to the collar of his coat, pulling it back to reveal a silver-rimmed aperture embedded in the flesh of his neck. Within the glass, a tiny, blue spark flickered in time with his pulse. "And I require your ship to be purged. There are eyes upon you that you cannot see, and they belong to men who have forgotten how to die."
Before I could demand an explanation, Frankenstein turned his back to me. With a sudden, violent motion, he raised his rifle toward the sky and fired.
There was no report of gunpowder. Instead, a bolt of cohesive, violet light tore through the fog, screaming with the sound of a thousand glass panes shattering at once. It struck the air above the crow's nest, and for a terrifying second, the outline of a man—transparent, shimmering like heat haze, and clad in a suit of interlocking silver plates—was revealed in the flash. The invisible intruder fell, a heavy, metallic thud echoing across the deck as he landed near the mainmast.
Victor Frankenstein did not look at the fallen thing. He looked at me, his rifle already humming as it recharged.
"The Synod is here, Walton," he whispered, his face a mask of beautiful, terrifying resolve. "And they have already boarded your soul."
He turned and began to walk toward the hatchway leading to the hold, the mechanical clicking of his hidden instruments beginning once more.