The floor was cold. Hard. Jagged. It was comprised of stone that had once made up towering historical monuments- but those sorts of things hadn’t mattered in years. The unforgiving stones were also wet, wet with blood from a face that was crushed almost as badly as his spirit. He had fought back- and in this place you simply do not fight back. Through swollen, tear filled eyes he looked to his forearms- where he had kept a tally of the time he’d been in this hell. As he looked to count the dirt and charcoal inscribed tick marks he found something he couldn’t believe. And what he found made him get up and fight back once more. 

Months before this moment Ethen was a paper pusher. No one. In a world of tattoo covered humans, hoping to be the next person carrying the Z7 gene, Ethen believed in himself so little he had not even once attempted to adorn his body in hopes of elevating his station. In this world, there were three very important people. These people had become so important because they found, by accident, that they carried a physiological mutation, what would come to be known as the Z7 gene. This abnormality allowed the carrier’s body to convert ink into physical form. To transform it in such a way that anything tattooed onto their body, so long as it was less than or equal to their body mass, that person could then pull that image from their skin into reality. Much like a sword from a sheath. They could then reintroduce it in the very same way. This ability offered the bearer a previously undreamt of tactical advantage. There were three such of these people. They maintained an unsteady understanding with one another, agreeing on very little. The one thing they did agree upon is that they did not want a fourth. And they did not want a fourth to the tune of rounding up hundreds of thousands of people who may, or may not, carry the gene and imprisoning them without hopes of release. 

They came to power through their powers. They called themselves The New Beginning. And Ethen, a human who never imagined himself to be anything special, a human who did not posses a single tattoo in a society covered in them; a society where tattoo artists had risen to become the highest paid celebrities because everyone had to try at least once. But millions tried consistently and maintained the belief that “the next tattoo will work.” Ethen was imprisoned for the very fact that he had none. For the fact that he was different in his thinking. And who, under only these particular circumstances, had come to keep track of his imprisonment by marking upon his skin. What he had seen when looking through his tear and blood filled eyes was that some of those tick marks were gone. Not smudged, gone. And he had found them laying on the ground. So by their own fear, the three had indeed found a fourth. Someone who would never have known otherwise. And in so doing, they had created their own doom. In that moment, realizing he possessed their same power, Ethen knew that if they considered themselves the “The Beginning” then he was most certainly “The End.”