(TSSFH) CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO - SIMURGH

The Simurgh did not mourn.

She understood the concept. She had studied it in countless expressions: the keening of widows, the shattered silence in hospitals, the ink of eulogies spilling across newsprint. She had stood, wings outstretched and motionless, atop a mountain of rubble in Canberra while the city wept around her, and she had learned.

But she did not mourn.

Because the Simurgh did not feel in the way humans did. She wasn't human, and couldn't operate like one. 

She recalibrated. Refined. She shifted priorities and adjusted outcomes, working based on the parameters of conflict as defined by the greater structures of the Entities, and the creator she had been born to oppose.

Emotion was only a variable and a tool to be manipulated. Even now, when the shape of the world shifted beneath her wings, she processed only imbalance.

Because Eidolon was dead.

Her creator.

The administrator of the highest order.

Her long-time opponent.

And with his death, the balance of drives that defined her existence had tilted. Not ceased, no. But he had been the fixed point against which she defined her narrative of escalation.

It was intolerable.

It was incorrect.

She had not planned for this.

She had extrapolated a thousand branching timelines from the moment Superman arrived: chaos rising in North America, shattered trust in capes and parahuman institutions, a growing populist movement rallying behind the man in red and blue. She had begun contingency modeling for a confrontation, even considered the necessary calculations to construct a weapon capable of ending him.

For Eidolon. 

To make him matter again. To restore his purpose. To place him in the center of the board once more, challenged anew. Their war was to resume, elevated by context, by devastation, by need.

The alien would be the world’s lone symbol of hope. 

The weapon—she—would kill him. 

And Eidolon would rise in the hour of need.

But then, Contessa acted without thought.

The Simurgh could not see her. Contessa remained a blind spot to her, having no apparent past or future, existing outside precognitive modeling in a gap where possibilities blurred into meaningless abstraction.

But the Simurgh could work around her. 

She could watch the observed consequences and infer the actions in real-time. 

So she watched the aftermath through secondary signals: Alexandria’s rigid posture as she stared out from her office in Los Angeles. Satyr’s sigh and fractional shake of his head at a muffled gunshot. More reactions from those in the know. 

All of it pointed to one conclusion. 

And in orbit, the Simurgh hung motionless in the stratosphere, her wings spread wide, feathers outfitted with nanomachines so advanced they verged on self-awareness. They shone and moved according to patterns too complex for the average human mind to comprehend, an ever-shifting veil of interference, scrambling satellite optics, jamming signals, and blinding machines that dared to look upon her.

For twenty-three hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-three seconds she remained there, in her hibernation state, gathering low-feedback information about her surroundings and informing her precognition.

She ran parallel computations, analyzing billions of futures within strict observational limits to avoid detection. Despite the constraints, one viable outcome emerged: the war resumed.

Working backward, she identified the critical causal events and initiated targeted actions to ensure their occurrence.

And so, she descended.

To a forgotten bunker in northern Siberia, long abandoned by the original Tinkers who’d built it during the golden age of cape warfare. 

But not forgotten by her.

The Tinker-tech and infrastructure were preserved by no whim of fate, but by her own influence years prior. An errant supply route, a forgotten inspection, a fluke generator malfunction—all minor events, but just enough to keep the infrastructure intact.

There she built.

Muscle regrew. Tissue arranged itself into familiar patterns. Neural scaffolds blossomed like orchids in vats of nutrient gel. And eventually, the mind—the shell of a mind—took shape.

The clone would not be perfect. That was impossible, even for her. But perfection was not required.

The man had made her for war. He had made her with a drive to challenge him, to define herself—and thus, him—through opposition. That was not metaphor but an inherent instruction, written into her deepest code by a fragment of the man’s consciousness.

Eidolon had shaped her purpose.

Now she would shape his return.

The sample was easy. Eidolon had bled. His corpse had been handled by others, transported and given a befitting burial far from the eyes of the public. But no guards could hope to stop her.

The corpse had not been difficult to retrieve. Even with his diminished status, there had been a private ceremony and guards stationed outside the burial site. But no security on Earth could stop her. His blood held data. Cells, degraded but viable. With them, she sculpted stem cells, cultured nervous systems, and spun muscle fiber in zero-gravity chambers shielded from decay.

The host would awaken soon.

It would not be him.

But it had the capacity to become like him. 

So she would guide it. Feed it. Shape it as he had shaped her. She would introduce stressors. Curated adversities. Controlled conflict. The path to conflict would be built from the first breath, and with it, the war would resume.

She would not force the clone to become Eidolon. That was not how this war worked. The enemy must be real. Must choose to fight.

But she would lay out the foundation for that choice.

She sang as she worked, still not in tones humans could hear, but subtly, ensuring inevitability in the altered possibility.

Not Eidolon.

Not yet.

But he would come.

And when he chose to fight, when he reclaimed the mantle not because he was told but because he must…

She would be waiting.

. . . . .

The Simurgh did not mourn.

She could not feel triumph.

But she smiled again.