To be reborn was a strange enough phenomenon on its own. To wake up in a decaying space station with the blood of a Dark Fey pounding in your veins and the latent, burning soul of a Phoenix was something else entirely.
Aleksander grew up surrounded by the sterile, metallic bulkheads of Alpha Station. To the rest of the Ark, he was just a brilliant boy, part of the privileged elite who spent his days running the upper rings alongside his closest friends, Clarke Griffin and Wells Jaha. But beneath his standard-issue gray clothes, masked by a heavy layer of instinctual glamour, lay the tightly folded, dormant wings of a Dark Fey. Beneath his skin, an immortal, regenerative fire flickered, waiting to be let out.
The awakening didn't feel magical. It felt like a brutal biological mutation.
Aleksander was twelve, locked alone in his family's private bathroom. It started as a severe, grinding ache at the base of his skull, accompanied by a sharp itch between his shoulder blades. He gripped the edges of the metal sink, trying to use his advanced mind to compartmentalize the pain, but his body was violently overriding his brain.
A heavy pressure built at his hairline. It felt like his skull was fracturing. He squeezed his eyes shut, biting his lip to keep from screaming as the skin stretched to its absolute limit. With a sickening, dull crack, two dense ridges broke through his scalp.
He opened his eyes, panting, and stared into the mirror. Thick, dark horns curved up and back from his head. He reached up with a shaking hand. They were rough, heavy, and undeniably real.
Before he could process them, his spine arched violently backward.
The fabric of his shirt ripped straight down the middle. The skin over his shoulder blades split open. With a heavy, wet tearing sound, two massive appendages violently unfurled from his back. The sheer force of the movement knocked over a rack of metal shelves behind him, sending medical supplies clattering across the floor.
Aleksander stumbled, his center of gravity shifting so drastically he had to drop to one knee just to keep from falling face-first into the sink. He gasped for air, his chest heaving, and slowly looked over his shoulder.
The wings were pitch-black and massive. The span extended far past his shoulders, dwarfing his frame and crumpling awkwardly against the narrow, sterile walls of the Ark's bathroom.
They weren't some ethereal, smoky illusion. They were deeply physical, mimicking real avian anatomy. Through the mirror, he could clearly see the thick, muscular shoulder joints anchoring them to his back. Beneath those joints layered the structured primary feathers, stiff and perfect for catching air.
But they weren't entirely bird-like. Crowning the top joint of each wing apex was a sharp, curved bony talon. The predatory claw looked lethal, scraping lightly against the metal wall as he took a shaky breath.
The weight of them was incredible. His hyper-active brain immediately kicked in, calculating the biological necessity of hollow bone structures and the immense muscle density now attached to his back just to support them.
He flexed a muscle he didn't know he had, and the massive right wing twitched. The apex talon dug a deep scratch into the Ark's reinforced steel wall. Aleksander stared at his reflection—the dark horns, the massive, spanning wings, the heavy talons. It was a terrifying reality check. He had to figure out how to hide this, and fast.
The crash of the metal shelves had been too loud for the quiet sectors of Alpha Station. Less than ten seconds later, the bathroom door override hissed, and the panel slid open.
Joseph stood in the doorway, Ygraine right behind him.
They froze. The bathroom was barely big enough for two people, and now it was completely choked with pitch-black feathers. Aleksander was kneeling on the floor, his torn shirt soaked in blood. The massive wings were crammed against the walls, the sharp talons at the top joints scraping the ceiling tiles. He looked up at them, breathing hard, the dark horns jutting from his hairline.
For a second, nobody moved. The only sound was the harsh scrape of feathers against metal as Aleksander tried to shift his weight.
"Close the door," Ygraine whispered. Her voice wasn't filled with awe; it was filled with pure, unfiltered panic.
Joseph snapped out of his shock. He hit the control panel, sealing the door shut, and immediately locked the deadbolt. He spun around, running a hand over his face as he stared at the sheer size of the wings.
"What is this?" Joseph muttered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the air vents. "Aleksander, what happened?"
"I don't know," Aleksander grunted. His back felt like it was on fire. "They just... ripped out."
Ygraine didn't hesitate. She dropped to her knees right into the puddle of scattered medical supplies and blood, ignoring the sharp talon that rested inches from her shoulder. She grabbed Aleksander's face, checking his eyes, then looked nervously at the horns.
"Does anyone else know? Did anyone see you walk in here looking sick?" she asked, her hands shaking as she touched the base of his neck.
"No," he managed to say. "Just you."
Joseph paced the narrow sliver of available floor space. "If the Council sees this... if medical scans pick this up..." He stopped and looked at his wife, his face pale. "They'll take him to the science wing, Ygraine. Jaha will authorize a vivisection by midnight. They'll cut him open to see how he grew extra limbs."
"I know," Ygraine snapped. She looked back at her son. "Aleksander, you have that... the energy. Can you put them back? Can you make them go away?"
Aleksander closed his eyes. His analytical mind focused on the new anatomy, treating it like a mechanical problem. He tapped into that warm, white energy humming in his chest and pulled.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The massive wings snapped sharply inward. The joints folded tightly against his back, and then, with a strange, rushing sound—like air being sucked out of a vacuum—they seamlessly sank directly into his shoulder blades. The heavy dark horns receded back into his skull, leaving behind nothing but unbroken skin.
It wasn't an illusion. They were physically gone, tucked away into some internal, magical space.
He reached over his shoulder. The heavy weight was gone. There was no invisible mass, no awkward appendages to maneuver around. His back was completely normal again.
Joseph let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding, staring at the bare, blood-smeared skin of his son's back.
"They're gone," Joseph said, his chest heaving. "Just... gone."
"They're still a part of me," Aleksander said, rolling his shoulders. He could feel them waiting just beneath the surface, ready to snap out the second he willed them to.
Ygraine pulled him to his feet. She grabbed a towel and started aggressively wiping the blood off his skin. "You have to keep them buried. Do you understand me? You can never pull them out again. Not here. Not on this station."
Joseph grabbed the torn, bloody shirt and shoved it into the waste incinerator chute in the wall. "I'll clean the blood. Ygraine, get him to his room. If anyone asks, he slipped and hit his head on the sink."
Aleksander nodded. He knew exactly what was at stake. If anyone on the Ark saw those wings pop out, he was dead.
His past life was a fractured mess of memories. He knew, abstractly, that The 100 was a television show, but his recall was frustratingly spotty. A couple of watched episodes from the first season here, a half-remembered plot summary there. He knew they would eventually go to Earth. He knew the radiation was survivable. Most importantly, he knew the Ark was dying.
What he lacked in prophetic foresight, however, he made up for in raw processing power. His mind was a marvel. He could crunch complex astrophysics, run hyper-realistic structural simulations in his head, and spit out technological workarounds that left the Ark's senior engineers scratching their heads.
But his parents knew the truth wasn't just big brains. They had walked in on him levitating his datapad across the room, his irises bleeding into a luminescent, toxic green. Terrified that the Council would drag him to lockup, they had grabbed him by the shoulders, tears in their eyes, and begged him to hide it.
So, he did. He built walls. He played the part of the quiet, eccentric prodigy. He grew up alongside Clarke and Wells, keeping the heavy, unnatural heat of his blood locked down deep inside his chest.
Three years later, the observation deck was quiet, the only sound the low, ever-present hum of the Ark's life support systems. Earth loomed massive in the reinforced glass window, a swirling marble of blue, white, and a bruised, sickly green.
Aleksander leaned against the cold bulkhead, his glowing green eyes—currently glamoured to a dull, ordinary brown—fixed on the planet below. History class on the Ark taught a heavily sanitized version of the apocalypse. The teachers simply called it 'The End,' blaming it on a nuclear holocaust that wiped out all life on the ground ninety-seven years ago. The lucky ones had been up here in space. When resources grew thin, twelve orbiting stations docked together to form the Ark.
Three generations had lived and died since then under the brutal thumb of the Exodus Charter. Strict population control. Capital punishment for anyone over eighteen who committed even a minor infraction. All to buy time until the radiation levels on the ground dropped enough to support human life again.
The Ark Council firmly believed they had another century before Earth was safe.
Aleksander didn't know the deep lore of this universe. He had no idea who or what had actually fired the bombs, or what exactly was waiting for them down in the trees. But he knew enough to see the writing on the wall. He knew they didn't have a century. They didn't even have a year before this metal tin can ran out of oxygen. He knew that soon, the Council would load a hundred juvenile prisoners into a drop ship and fire them at the ground to see if they melted.
It was their fifteenth birthday today. Well, close enough—birthdays on the Ark were often grouped together for ration-sharing purposes, and the three of them had sneaked away from the minor celebrations in the mess hall to just breathe for a minute.
Clarke was leaning against the glass a few feet away, rolling a piece of synthetic cake between her fingers. "I made it official this morning," she said, breaking the comfortable silence.
Wells looked over, raising an eyebrow. "Official?"
"Apprenticing under my mom," Clarke clarified, a small, proud smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Medical track. I start shadowing her in the clinic next week."
"Shocking," Aleksander deadpanned from where he had migrated to lay sprawled across a metal bench, staring up at the ceiling grates. "Next you'll tell me you like drawing trees."
Clarke threw a crumb of cake at him, which he didn't bother dodging. It bounced off his nose. "Shut up, Alek. What about you, Wells?"
Wells straightened his jacket, looking a little too serious for a fifteen-year-old. "Pre-law and administration. My dad wants me sitting in on the junior council meetings by next year. Says it's important to understand how the laws keep us alive before I try to enforce them."
"Right. Chancellor in training," Clarke teased gently. She turned her attention to the bench. "And the resident genius? Engineering? Hydroponics? Astrophysics?"
Aleksander didn't move. He just kept staring at the gray ceiling, feeling the phantom itch of feathers against his shoulder blades, and the quiet, persistent warmth of the Phoenix flame settling in his lungs. What was the point in picking a career on a space station that was about to become a floating tomb? Earth was down there. The ground. Space enough to actually stretch wings that had been bound by magic for fifteen years.
"Not sure," he muttered.
Wells let out a short laugh, shaking his head. "How does the smartest guy on the station not know what he wants to do?"
Aleksander finally sat up, his dark eyes catching the dim light of the corridor. He offered a lazy shrug. "No idea."
Clarke rolled her eyes, throwing another crumb of synthetic cake at him. "You're going to end up assigned to the sanitation decks if you don't pick a track."
Wells chuckled, leaning against the glass. "I can see it now. Chief of Waste Management. A brilliant mind, dedicated to recycling."
Aleksander smirked, brushing the crumb off his shirt. "Hey, someone's got to clean up the mess after your future council meetings, Wells."
The joke landed, drawing a genuine laugh from both of them. They spent another hour tossing around insults and half-baked ideas, acting exactly like the carefree teenagers they were supposed to be. But while Clarke and Wells stressed over securing their place on the Ark, Aleksander's mind was already miles below them. He was planning for the drop. He was planning for his return to the ground. To him, the Ark was just a waiting room. Earth—wild, overgrown, and bathed in radiation—was home.
Later that night cycle, in the cramped, dimly lit confines of his family's quarters, the quiet genius act dropped.
Aleksander sat cross-legged on his narrow cot, a sharpened scrap of tungsten gripped firmly in his hand. Laid out across his blanket were ten heavy, solid metal rings. He had spent months quietly salvaging the dense, conductive iron-alloy from discarded atmospheric scrubbers in the engineering lower levels. They were rough around the edges, but they were nearly indestructible.
He was recreating a weapon from his fractured memories—something he had seen in a movie from his past life. The Ten Rings. If he was going down to a savage, unpredictable Earth, he needed good weapons. He needed a way to channel his raw, volatile magic into blunt kinetic force and absolute defense without instantly giving away what he was.
His eyes bled from dull brown into a piercing, luminescent green. He pressed the tungsten tip into the metal, his hand guided by the ancient instincts of his bloodline. He carved intricate, jagged runes into the inner band of the first ring, whispering incantations that tasted like ash and ozone. As he finished the final stroke, a spark of immortal Phoenix fire flared from his fingertips, searing the magic permanently into the alloy.
As the months bled into years, Aleksander's quiet preparations only deepened. The Ark's standard curriculum became nothing but background noise to his real education.
Hidden beneath a loose floor panel under his bed was his Grimoire—a thick, ragged journal bound in scrapped leather. He had compiled it himself, filling the pages with every spell, hex, and runic array he could drag up from the depths of his soul. It was a chaotic mix of Dark Fey nature magic and the destructive, purifying heat of the Phoenix.
Night after night, while the rest of the station slept under the hum of the life support vents, he practiced. He mastered telekinetic strikes, hardened his mental shields, and perfected the thermal manipulation of his own internal fire.
And he never took the rings off.
Five on his right forearm, five on his left. They were heavy, interlocking perfectly against his skin, a constant, grounding pressure over his pulse points. But to anyone else—to the Ark guards, to his parents, to Clarke and Wells—his arms looked completely bare.
His glamour, an instinctual, second-nature veil of magic, hid the dark metal perfectly. Let the Ark Council think he was just an eccentric, unmotivated kid. Aleksander was armed, waiting in the dark, and entirely ready for the day the sky fell.