“He was forever smoking. Liqun. A harsh brand, yet he consumed them ravenously. Our safe houses swam in smoke. My clothes, my hair, even the ice I conjured, carried that scent.” She wrinkled her nose, the memory a vivid ghost.

She paused, her fingers curling lightly then relaxing on the table.

“He taught me control through brutality. He cast me into extremes—scorching dunes, crushing depths, pulsing market squares—and said: ‘Master it, or perish.’ As a child, I hated him with a frequency that chilled my own blood. Hated him enough to dream of an ice spike finding his throat.” Her tone was flat, yet it leached warmth from the air.

Santali listened, a vessel of pure attention, slowly swirling the last garnet drops in his glass.

“Yet each time I teetered on the edge, he would materialize. Wordless. Offering a cigarette—though I never took it—or tossing a canteen of water. Once, in Siberia, a fever of forty degrees burned me clean. My ability shattered its chains. The entire outpost became a tomb of ice. I believed I would die there, a frozen effigy of myself.” Her voice grew thinner, almost devoured by the snow’s whisper.

Nyxl’s fingers tightened, her knuckles standing pale and stark.

“I woke in a cave. Buried under every sleeping bag, a fire roaring defiance. He sat at the mouth, his back to me, the cigarette still a glowing coal between his fingers. The snow fell in a solid curtain, piling on his shoulders like a second coat, but he did not move, a statue hewn from resolve. I learned later he had sat thus for eight hours, his own power a dam against my tempest, waiting for my consciousness to return.” She halted.

“Half his face, one hand—frost had claimed them, leaving its silver scars. He never spoke of it.”

She lifted her eyes to Santali. Her violet gaze held the candle’s twin flames, and within them, the reflection of his face.

“He always… he would say: ‘You must become strong. So strong you need no one’s shield.’ But every time… every time the abyss truly yawned, he was there.” She spoke the final words slowly, with a terrible clarity, as if pronouncing a bitter creed.

A long, unburdening breath escaped her. Her shoulders slumped, a momentary surrender, then found their straightness once more.

His turn.

“My father,” he began, the tone of a newsreader, his eyes resting on a faint score in the table’s edge.

“Was a bio-geneticist. Officially, he pursued ‘directed evolution of human potential.’ In truth—he engineered the artificial induction of paranormal genetics.”

He took up his glass, did not drink, but idly turned the stem, watching the wine paint brief, descending tears.

“My mother and he shared an academic union. She worked in neuro-ethics. Opposed his work from inception, deemed it an abomination. Yet she conceived. Me.” His words fell with a terrible, measured calm.

“He adulterated her prenatal supplements with his genetic catalysts.”

Santali paused. Nyxl’s breath stilled without her notice.

“On the third day of my life, my mother’s mind began to unravel. The diagnosis was early, savage Alzheimer’s — my father knew better. His log entry read: ‘Subject M exhibits unexpected adverse reactions, but Subject S’s sequence shows stable paranormal integration. Experiment successful.’” He recited it perfectly, tonelessly, without a flicker of emotion.

“Successful,” Nyxl breathed, the word a bitter taste, a fist forming in her lap.

“She lingered for three years. In that time, his ‘training’ of me commenced. At five years, he sealed me in a specialized wind tunnel, calibrating the currents to flay □□ muscle. He said: ‘If the gift of air is is genuine, you will survive.’” Santali’s face remained a mask, but Nyxl saw the tension in his hand, the blanched knuckles gripping the stem of his glass.

“That night, my mother… surfaced. A final lucidity—mother-love, the oldest, most potent cliché. She input the termination code, pulled me from the screaming air. We fled by car. The rain was a solid wall.” His gaze sought the window, finding only the black and white of the snow-blind night.

“What then?” Nyxl leaned into the space between them.

“An abandoned petrol station was our end. He came himself, with a security detail. She hid me behind a pump, walked out to meet him. I heard his voice: ‘Relinquish the subject. I grant you a dignified exit.’ Her reply: ‘He is not a subject. He is my son.’”

Here, Santali’s voice wavered, a minute fracture, there and gone.

He lifted the glass, drank deeply. The alcohol was a fire he seemed to need, a burn to cauterize the words that followed.

“He gave the order to fire. Not to kill. To draw me out. The first shot took her leg. She fell to her knees… the next, her abdomen. Still, she cried out—” His voice dropped, roughened, the final word a shattered thing. “‘Don’t come out.’”

He fell silent, his focus on the wine's bloody residue. The air turned to glass. The sound of the storm outside grew acute, a keen against the window.

The silence congealed. The candle flame shuddered, casting their elongated, twisted shadows upon the ceiling.

“I emerged.” Santali’s voice was the whisper of ash settling. “I cannot say how. Only a feeling… a rage that wished to unmake creation. And then, the wind. Not of the world, but from the very core of my being.”

His description was chilling in its vacuum-like calm. “It became a harvest of invisible blades. It opened the guards’ throats. It parted my father’s arm, his leg, his chest. It paused, a hair’s breadth from the artery in his neck.”

He raised his eyes to Nyxl. In them was an expression she had never witnessed—not grief, not fury, but a weariness so profound it seemed the foundation of his being had been spent in the telling.

“He smiled. A brilliant, horrifying smile. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘You are my masterpiece.’ And then, the wind completed its final cut.”

The heart of the tale, laid bare. Brutal. Succinct.

The story ceased. The attic hung in a silence so absolute it had weight and texture. Only the minute crackle of the wick and the eternal, sifting sound of snow.

After an age, Nyxl asked, her voice scraped raw, “And after…The Whites found you?”

“Yes. They managed the aftermath. Brought me into the fold. You were two, then, just learning to speak.” A smile, faint as a snowflake’s ghost, touched and left his lips. “Mastery of that power… that took years. Longer still to understand that my mother’s final act was not a demand for vengeance, but a plea for me to live—to live as a man, not a subject or a… masterpiece.”

Another pause, then the final, brutal truth, delivered with devastating calm.

“Years later, I penetrated The Genesis T’s core. My mother’s true file. She died three days after my birth. The woman at the petrol station… was a replicate, grown from her cells. His final ‘control experiment’ — would a copy exhibit the same mammalian drive to protect its young?” He held Nyxl’s gaze, ensuring she absorbed each terrible syllable.

Nyxl’s heart clenched, a spike of pure cold. Memory surfaced —

"At the Arctic base... a woman, East Asian, about thirty..."

“One of many,” Santali confirmed. “He cultivated a series. Placed them in varying environments, observed their parameters. Some trained, some used as lures, some… like her... gifted with the full、false memories of motherhood.” He narrated it as a dispassionate analysis of experimental design.

He set the glass aside, laced his fingers on the table. The gesture rendered him startlingly vulnerable, the armour of his control seemingly abandoned.

“Thus, I have long wondered,” Santali continued, his calm now terrifying, “had I known she was a construct, a replica… would I have still stepped from that hiding place? Would I have still killed for her? Would I have still unleashed… that which even I feared to name?” The question hung, no longer an icicle, but a void, swallowing all easy meaning.

Nyxl had no answer. Words were cinders in her throat，as if packed with snow.

Yet her body moved before her mind could protest. Rising, she stepped to his side. Without speaking, she reached, laid her palm upon the crown of his head. Her skin met the cool silk of his hair, the faint warmth of the scalp beneath.

Santali went rigid, a creature startled from a deep wariness.

Her fingers slipped into the dark waves. Soft, bearing the clean scent of soap and the lingering damp of melted snow. She began to comb, slowly, stroke by tentative stroke, a clumsy, gentle mimicry of a comfort she had perhaps never received, only imagined.

“When did you know?” he asked, his voice low, making no move to pull away. The tension slowly drained from him, and he leaned, almost imperceptibly, into her touch.

“Our first night here. In Venice. ” Nyxl replied, her fingers continuing their work.

“You were asleep. I touched your hair. Your breathing… changed its rhythm. Every time since, it has been the same.” She offered this intimate intelligence, this tiny, stolen vulnerability, as if it were a state secret.

Santali closed his eyes. The rhythm of her touch, slow and deliberate, was an ancient liturgy, a wordless benediction. It felt as if it smoothed fissures not in bone, but in the psyche. He felt the warmth of her fingertips seep through, driving back a cold that lived in the marrow of his bones. A sensation, long entombed, stirred with the motion of her hand.

“My mother… she would do this,” his voice came from a great depth, burdened with forgotten echoes. “When the sun still found her. She said my hair was like the wind—never to be tamed. But its colour was hers.”

A silence, vast as the snow outside, filled the space. “That was the only era… unrecorded in his data.”

“The only time that… felt like home.”

Nyxl’s hand stilled. Then resumed, lighter, slower. As if handling something sacred and infinitely fragile — cracked porcelain, or a heart that had forgotten how to beat without pain.

The attic settled into a deeper quiet. The snow persisted, a white, soundless tide against the window, blurring the world beyond into abstraction. The canal’s voice was gone. All was softness, a boundless, forgiving white that promised, for a moment, to absolve all weight, all wound.

At some unknown point in the silent ritual, Santali’s hand rose, encircled her wrist. His grip was warm, his pulse a steady drum against her skin, an anchor of undeniable reality.

Nyxl looked down. Santali had opened his eyes. In the candlelight, they were the colour of a deep twilight, churning with emotions unnameable—perhaps even to himself.

“Enough,” he said, the word husky, a sigh more than refusal.

“It is not finished,” she replied, her wrist turning slightly, not to free itself, but to feel the pressure of his hold.

“Then let it remain unfinished.”

He drew her down, the motion slow, granting her every chance for flight or refusal. Nyxl did not move. She allowed the descent until her knees met the sofa’s edge, her body canting forward, her hands coming to rest on either side of him—a cage that was also a yielding.

Their faces were so near. Breath mingled, rich with the ghosts of wine, wood, and snow. Her red hair fell, a curtain of cool, damp silk against his cheek, carrying her scent of frost and distance. His hand left her wrist, found the nape of her neck, his touch firm yet tender, his thumb tracing the delicate arch of bone.

“Nyxl.” He spoke her true name. Not the cipher ‘X’, but the one that existed only in the space between them. His voice was the night wind moving through snow-heavy eaves.

She did not answer with words. She bent her head and found his mouth. The kiss began as a question, a confirmation light as a snowflake’s landing. Fragile, melting, then deepening into a conflagration of shared need. His hand tightened at her neck, his other arm encircled her waist, pulling her into the circle of his being. Her response shifted, from acceptance to a fierce, claiming hunger. She caught his lower lip gently between her teeth, a silent, possessive stamp.

The candle flame leapt, casting their entwined shadows in a wild, momentary dance.

The rustle of fabric, the cadence of breath, the frantic percussion of two hearts—these sounds swelled within the small room, only to be gentled, swallowed whole by the endless, shushing mercy of the snow outside.

When his mouth found the old, silvered scar upon her neck, Nyxl laughed. The sound was breathless, fragmented, and utterly, devastatingly real.

“What amuses you?” Santali lifted his head, his lips damp, his eyes clouded with a wonder that stripped him bare.

“Nothing.” Her fingers tangled once more in his hair, drawing him close until their foreheads met，a bridge of shared warmth against the world’s chill. “Only this thought… that we are a perfectly matched pair of mad things.”

Her breath, warm and alive, fanned his skin.

Santali laughed then too. A true laugh, scarce and precious, devoid of calculation, simply an ember of pure feeling glowing in the exhaustion. Then he kissed her again, deeper, driven by a desperate urgency, as if this fusion of breath and warmth was the only incantation potent enough to hold the world’s vast cold and emptiness at bay.

Beyond the glass, the snow continued its silent, relentless alchemy. Canals, bridges, the very breath of the ancient city—all were being rewritten into a soft, forgiving monochrome. On this night of anomalous frost, two souls, each a map of old scars, shed their carapaces. In the shared furnace of skin and breath, they fashioned a fleeting, luminous illusion—a thing they dared, for this moment, to call ‘home’.

Somewhere, a bell tolled the profound hour, its voice muffled, absorbed into the infinite, sound-softening snow.

And on the red-and-white checked cloth, the newly-bought ebony comb lay in quiet witness. A single, dark thread of hair was caught in its teeth. Candlelight lovingly traced the warm patterns of its grain, the wave-like carvings seeming to stir in the luminous halo—a gentle testament to this snowy night, to the temporary suturing of wounds, to the silent, profound salvation discovered in the shared giving of warmth.

注：

密码：“1669-3-15-ForCh-αβθ”

解释：

日期密钥：1669年3月15日，禁图座处于特定方位角

星座密钥：Fornax Chimicae缩写（ForCh）

星等密钥：α（红巨星）、β（主序星）、θ（行星宿主星）三型恒星在密码学中分别代表“危险”、“路径”、“目标”

终极映射：该日期星图若叠加《奥斯特里亚的晚餐》原画（1599年威尼斯版本）的透视灭点，会指向维也纳霍夫堡宫地下第13号档案室——传说中迪伊手稿和老彼得·勃鲁盖尔《雪中猎人》的真正藏匿处

Note：( The cipher had been solved earlier. This detail reinforces Nyxl’s observational focus shifting from task to person.)*

Cipher: "1669-3-15-ForCh-αβθ"

Explanation:

Date Key: March 15, 1669, corresponds to the specific azimuthal positioning of the Fornax constellation.

Constellation Key: Abbreviation for Fornax Chimicae (ForCh).

Magnitude Key: The stellar classes α (red giant), β (main-sequence star), and θ (planet-hosting star) represent the cryptographic values "Danger," "Path," and "Objective," respectively.

Ultimate Mapping: Superimposing the celestial chart for this date onto the original painting of The Supper at Ostaria(1599 Venetian version), using its perspective vanishing point as a referent, yields a vector pointing to Vault 13 beneath the Hofburg Palace in Vienna—the alleged true repository of the Dee Manuscripts and Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Hunters in the Snow.