Archive of Our Own ^beta

Part I: Origins — The Archangel's Gateway

Vsevolod Elijah Vasilevich Volkov was born on April 14th, 1992, in the city of Arkhangelsk—Russian for "Archangel."

The name of his birthplace is the first word of his scripture. He enters the world through a gateway named for messengers from God, in a city that sits at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River where it meets the White Sea—a liminal space between land and water, between the frozen north and the trade routes that once connected Russia to the world. He is born in the year the Soviet Union officially dissolves, in the chaos between one world and another. Before he draws his first breath, he is already positioned at thresholds.

From the very beginning, his story is about being in-between: between eras, between identities, between earth and something else.

My relationship with Elijah as a character began where many others' did - with wariness and discomfort. His early appearances, particularly his stalking of Sydney, painted a picture that seemed simple to interpret. Here was a character designed to make us uncomfortable, to embody threat and moral failing. I understand this initial reaction because I shared it.

I changed my perspective primarily because of his playlist with the songs Taxidermist Taxidermist and You’re at The Party. Also because of the song Bottom of the River in Adam's playlist. His angel motif added to this. And also because of what Belov said about him representing Peter—the flawed, passionate disciple who denies and betrays in a moment of crisis, yet is still foundational. This reframed Elijah not as an inherent monster, but as a broken cornerstone, a failed apostle whose story is one of catastrophic denial and potential, heartbreaking redemption.

(Here's the link to what Belov said, I unfortunately don't know how to put in images here: https://discord.com/channels/786803248526000140/786803248954474527/849390000125509652)

The canon of Camp Here and There gives us glimpses of Elijah—the strange prophet on the roof, the keeper in the woods, the manipulator with his prayers and powders. But so much of him is a mystery. We see what he does, but we don't know why. This essay is my attempt to answer that "why." This is my personal interpretation, built from clues in the story and my own understanding. I want to move past the surface of the "prophet" or the "villain" and find the broken boy he was first: the boy named Vsevolod, and before that, the child forced to be called Eden.

My core argument is this: Elijah is not a natural-born monster. He is a tragedy that was built. He was shaped by three crushing forces that collided:

1. His Body: He was born intersex (what I interpret as Klinefelter syndrome). His body didn't fit the simple boxes society has, and his family saw it as a "mistake."
2. His Mind: He is autistic, specifically with a nervous system that is under-responsive (hyposensitive). The world often feels dull and distant to him, so his brain is constantly searching for intense feelings and complex patterns to feel alive and grounded.
3. His Trauma: He grew up in an abusive home with a cruel father and a withdrawn mother, and he suffered profound sexual abuse at the hands of his father—an act guided and facilitated by the entity Adam.

These three things—a body that felt wrong, a mind that felt numb, and a childhood that was a nightmare—crashed together to create the lonely, story-obsessed man we see. If one were to name his deadly sin, it would be Wrath—not a hot, impulsive anger, but a cold, sanctified, and utterly consuming fury born from this perfect storm of pain. The 'prophet' he becomes isn't his true self. It's a suit of armor he builds from scripture and story, a desperate way to survive his pain. But eventually, this armor becomes a weapon, and the survivor becomes a danger to others.

Part II: The Architecture of Names

His birth name was Vseslava Eden Vasilyevna Volkova. "Eden"—delight, paradise, the garden before the fall. A name his mother whispered over his intersex body with words that would calcify into prophecy: My perfect baby girl. It would have been better if you were never born. But God rarely listens to me.

He shed that name like a skin. In its place: Vsevolod Elijah.

"Vsevolod" is Old Russian, meaning "ruler of all." It is a name of medieval princes, of men who commanded armies and shaped nations. For a child whose body was treated as a mistake to be corrected, whose every choice was made for him, the name is a declaration of war. I will rule myself. I will rule everything.

"Elijah" connects him to the biblical prophet who called down fire from heaven, who was fed by ravens in the wilderness, who ascended to God in a chariot of flame without ever dying. The prophet Elijah challenged the priests of Baal, proved the power of the true God through spectacular violence, and spent his life as an outcast speaking uncomfortable truths to power. He is a template for what Vsevolod will become—or believes he must become.

And "Volkov"—from volk, the Russian word for wolf. Not even his family's real name, but an alias adopted generations ago to hide from the Nazis. The inheritance is layered lies, survival through concealment, the understanding that to be yourself is to be hunted.

The boy named for paradise chose to become the prophet who commands fire, descended from wolves. Every syllable is a strategy.

Part III: The Prison of Flesh

To understand Elijah, you have to start with his body. It was the first thing the world used to define him, and the first thing he had to rebel against.

Physically, I interpret Elijah as having Klinefelter syndrome—a genetic condition where someone is born with an extra X chromosome (XXY instead of XY). This isn't random speculation; it explains the specific way he's described in canon. His extreme height, his slender frame, his noticeably wider hips ("a moderately fat ass" in Blue's description)—these are consistent with Klinefelter presentation. His body, from a biological standpoint, literally exists between the typical blueprints for male and female.

When Sydney first describes glimpsing him at the hospital during his coma, the description is vivid: "very tall and thin, blonde, Slavic features. Pointy. Salamander-dismembering look." When Jedidiah remembers their childhood meeting, he recalls: "hay-blonde hair, a dark blue skirt caked in mud, a heavy sheepskin shawl despite the summer warmth. A raven on his shoulder." The confusion Jedidiah experiences—It's a girl, then No, the name is a boy's, then But the hands—crystallizes Elijah's liminal existence in the eyes of others.

This physical difference became a prison. When he was born, his parents looked at his intersex body and made a choice for him: they decided he was a girl. They gave him the name Vseslava Eden Vasilyevna Volkova  (I stole this from Blue, he mentions it here: https://www.tumblr.com/blue-wolfe/790356808536653824/pls-release-the-full-name-list-for-all-the?source=share). "Eden." A name that means "delight" or "paradise," but for him, it was a cage. It was a label for a person he wasn't, a pretty name for a life that felt like a mistake. His father, Vasily, would later call him "a blinding, gut-wrenching mistake." From day one, his own flesh was treated as a problem to be managed, a defect in the family's design.

Why does this matter? Because it gives him a body that the world—and especially his harsh, KGB-agent father—would see as fundamentally flawed. This physical "wrongness" is the direct link to his special interests in characters like Dumbo and the Elephant Man. He isn't just interested in them; he sees himself in them. They are "freaks," gentle souls whose suffering and difference are made into public spectacle. In their stories, he finds a reflection of his own.

His body makes him a permanent resident of the in-between. His first and most powerful act of rebellion was choosing a new name. It wasn't just preference—it was revolution. It was him taking the pen away from his parents and starting to write his own story.

The Whitest Teeth Jedidiah Has Ever Seen

There's a detail in Jedidiah's description of Elijah that seems almost incidental: his teeth. The whitest, most perfect teeth Jedidiah has ever seen.

They're dentures.

Elijah struggled with alcohol abuse—the kind of sustained, desperate drinking that destroys the body from the inside out. The kind that rots teeth to nothing. At some point, he lost them all. The perfect white smile is prosthetic, a mask over damage, another layer of performance hiding what's been destroyed underneath.

The horror deepens when you consider his medical knowledge. Elijah isn't ignorant. He studies medicine, anatomy, the architecture of the human body. He knows exactly what alcohol does—how it erodes the stomach lining, how it poisons the liver, how it rots teeth from the inside out. He understands the slow, grinding destruction in clinical detail. And he drinks anyway. This isn't ignorant self-harm; it's informed self-annihilation. Every bottle is a choice made with full knowledge of the consequences, a slow suicide conducted by someone who could diagram exactly how it's killing him.

This form of self-destruction would be particularly appealing to Adam. The psychological torment of knowing—of watching yourself die by inches while understanding precisely the mechanism of your death—generates suffering of a specific, exquisite quality. Adam feeds on negative emotion. A man who drinks himself to death in ignorance suffers less than a man who does it while cataloguing every stage of his own dissolution.

But there's another layer to the alcohol abuse—one that reveals Adam's teaching methods. The knowledge Adam imparted to Elijah about Sydney, about "the shape of the wound in reality," was itself corrosive. Understanding what Sydney truly is—what Jedidiah did to bring him back—requires holding concepts that the human mind isn't designed to hold. The deeper you go, the worse it gets.

For Jedidiah, this corrosive knowledge manifests as migraines, pressure behind his eyes. For Elijah, it settles in his heart—"like something squeezing. Like my heart is trying to reject what my mind is learning." The knowledge finds whatever's vulnerable, whatever's open. And for a boy whose heart had been broken so many times, who had loved so fiercely and been abandoned so completely, the heart was the obvious target.

The vodka wasn't just self-destruction. It was self-medication. The alcohol blurred the concepts enough that they "couldn't dig in." It dulled the squeezing in his chest, the physical pain of forbidden knowledge. This adds a tragic practicality to what might otherwise seem like pure self-annihilation—Elijah was trying to survive Adam's education. He was trying to learn what Adam needed him to know without the knowledge destroying him from the inside out.

But there's a darker possibility here. Adam resurrects. We know this—he brought Sydney back, he keeps his vessels functional. What if Elijah's perfect teeth aren't just dentures from dental work, but evidence of reconstruction? What if Elijah has died and been brought back before—not once, but multiple times?

Consider: a body ravaged by alcohol abuse, by winters in the Ohio woods, by the kind of self-destruction that comes from hyposensitivity and trauma. A body that should have failed. And yet Elijah keeps going, keeps functioning, keeps serving as Adam's vessel. The raven was with him "since before I could remember." Adam has been cultivating him since childhood.

How many times has Adam pulled his prophet back from the edge? How many deaths has Elijah already experienced, only to wake again with his body repaired but his soul still trapped? The perfect teeth might be the visible evidence of invisible resurrections—Adam's ongoing project of maintenance, keeping his vessel operational no matter how thoroughly Elijah tries to destroy it.

This reframes his entire existence. He's not just possessed; he's maintained. Like a machine that keeps breaking down and being rebuilt. The prophet's body isn't his own—it's Adam's property, repaired and restored as needed. Even suicide might not be an escape. Even death might just be a reset.

The whitest teeth Jedidiah has ever seen. A smile too perfect to be real. Evidence of how thoroughly Adam owns him.

Part IV: The Mind That Seeks Sensation

If Elijah's body was a prison, his mind was the restless inmate, constantly testing the bars. In my interpretation, Elijah is autistic, and his autism primarily manifests as hyposensitivity—an under-responsive nervous system.

Think of the nervous system like a volume knob for the senses. For most people, the world plays at a normal volume. For some autistic people, it's turned up too high—everything is painfully loud, bright, overwhelming. For Elijah, the knob is turned down too low. The world doesn't feel vivid or immediate; it feels muted, distant, frustratingly dull. His brain constantly craves more input, more intensity, just to feel connected, grounded, and real.

This isn't a small detail. It's the key that explains so many of his seemingly strange traits:

His Special Interests

His deep, all-consuming dives into religion and medicine aren't just hobbies. They are lifelines. The dense, complex systems of theology and the precise, intricate architecture of the human body provide the intense, structured mental stimulation his brain is starving for. He isn't just studying; he's trying to feel the concepts, to fill the quiet void in his mind with something monumental.

His High Pain Tolerance

He often has scratches and bruises he doesn't notice—"the ragged fingernails, the small, fresh scratches on the wrists." This isn't toughness; it's his hyposensitive system failing to register the signal properly. Pain, like everything else, feels muted.

His Risky Behaviors

The salamander incident, the winters in the Ohio woods, the physical extremity of his lifestyle—these are desperate attempts to break through the numbness. When the everyday world feels dull, you push your body to its absolute limit just to feel an undeniable, primal sensation. The screaming ache of cold, the electric jolt of survival instinct—these are ways of proving to himself he can still feel something.

His Relationship Style

When he uses Rowan's hair as a "stim toy," touching without asking because he likes how it feels, this is sensory-seeking behavior. His oscillation between genuine warmth and sudden cruelty maps onto the autistic experience of emotional dysregulation—of feeling everything too much or nothing at all, with little middle ground.

Why hyposensitivity specifically? We see canonical moments where Elijah is hurt and doesn't seem to register it—a clear sign of atypical pain response. His entire lifestyle demands radical tolerance for discomfort. Surviving winters, sleeping rough, enduring the elements isn't just a choice; it's a testament to a body and mind that don't process hardship in typical ways. The world is soft on him, so he seeks out hardness. Life feels faint, so he is drawn to the intense, even when it's dangerous.

Part V: The Minefield Called Family

The Volkov family history is not a foundation; it's a minefield. The legacy is built on secrets and survival at any cost.

The Hidden Jewish Identity

His parents came from Hasidic Jewish families who, to escape persecution, converted to Russian Orthodoxy and changed their name. "Volkov" isn't even their real name—it means "of the wolf," an alias adopted to hide from the Nazis. This is the inheritance: a life of layered lies, paranoia, and the understanding that to be yourself is to be hunted.

Why give Elijah hidden Jewish ancestry? Several layers of meaning converge:

The historical weight: A character born in Russia in 1992, descended from families that survived Nazi persecution by converting and hiding, carries the entire twentieth century in his bloodline. The Holocaust, the Soviet persecution of Jews, the constant negotiation between identity and survival—all of this becomes part of who Elijah is, even if (especially if) it's never spoken aloud in his family.

The theological irony: Elijah, the would-be sacrificer of his own "savior" (Sydney), is Jewish. This creates a cosmic, bitter joke that echoes the historical antisemitic charge of "Christ-killers"—but turned inward, with Adam as the Romans, with Elijah as both High Priest and Lamb. In his own passion play, he is forced to play every role: the one who condemns, the one who is sacrificed, the one who carries out the violence, and the one upon whom violence was first enacted.

The name "Elijah": The biblical prophet Elijah was Jewish—one of the greatest prophets in Jewish tradition, expected to return before the Messiah. By choosing this name, Elijah Volkov claims a specifically Jewish prophetic lineage even as his family has officially converted to Orthodoxy. The name is a secret assertion of identity, a refusal to let conversion erase heritage entirely.

The "in-between" theme: Just as Elijah's intersex body places him between male and female, and his autism places him between typical and atypical processing, his religious heritage places him between Judaism and Christianity, between hidden ancestry and performed conversion. He is liminal in every dimension—never fully one thing, always carrying secret selves beneath the visible surface.

The Cain identification: Elijah identifies powerfully with cursed, complex biblical figures like Cain—the rejected outcast, the vengeful brother, the one marked by God. In Jewish interpretive tradition, Cain is a more complex figure than in popular Christian readings; his mark is protection as much as curse. His exile, his anger, his sense of being permanently marked—all become part of a specifically Jewish drama of survival and divine wrestling.

The tragedy deepens: Elijah, descended from people who converted to survive, becomes possessed by a Catholic entity (Adam) and builds a Christian prophetic framework to contain his trauma. The hidden Jewish self is buried beneath layers of appropriated Christian symbolism, just as the hidden child "Eden" is buried beneath the prophet "Vsevolod Elijah." He has inherited his family's survival strategy—hide the true self, perform the acceptable self—and elevated it to cosmic scale.

Vasily (The Father)

A former KGB agent who saw the world in brutal, simple terms. His core philosophy, which he drilled into Elijah, was: "The strong devour the weak." To Vasily, Elijah's intersex body and sensitive mind were proof of weakness—a "blinding, gut-wrenching mistake" to be corrected. His disapproval was a constant pressure.

The Ghost in His Throat

Trauma doesn't just live in memory. It lives in the body—in muscle tension, in startle responses, in the way breath catches before certain words. For Elijah, it lives in his voice.

When anger rises in him—real anger, the kind that connects to the deepest wounds—his accent shifts. The careful American English he's cultivated, the educated diction of someone who has worked to erase their origins, begins to crack. Consonants harden. Vowels flatten. The ghost of Russian bleeds through, syllable by syllable, until he sounds like someone else entirely.

He sounds like his father.

"That happens sometimes. When I'm angry. I sound like him. My father. Trauma's a ventriloquist. Put enough fear into a child, and his ghost lives in their throat forever."

This is one of the most insidious forms of inherited damage. Elijah spent years constructing a new identity—new name, new country, new language, new self. He buried Vseslava Eden so deep she might never surface. But Vasily's voice survived the burial. It waited in his larynx, patient as Adam's raven, ready to emerge whenever emotion stripped away the careful performance of who Elijah chose to become.

The cruelty is precise: the moments when Elijah most needs to be himself—when he's fighting for Sydney, when he's confronting Jedidiah, when he's finally speaking his truth—are the moments when his father's voice takes over. His rage is valid, earned, righteous. But it comes out in a dead man's accent. Every time he tries to claim his anger as his own, he's reminded that even his emotions were colonized.

This is what it means to be raised by a monster. You don't just carry the scars. You carry the monster's voice. You open your mouth to scream and hear your abuser screaming through you.

His Mother

A ghost in her own home. She looked at baby Elijah and saw the truth—"It would have been better if you were never born"—but did nothing to protect him. She withdrew into melancholy, leaving him stranded in a house with only a cruel father for company. A child who is both criticized and ignored gets the worst of both worlds: constant disapproval with no comfort.

Part VI: The Nature of Adam and the Sexual Abuse

The deepest and most difficult layer of this interpretation is the headcanon that Elijah experienced sexual abuse at the hands of his father Vasily, facilitated and amplified by the entity Adam.

Why make this choice? Several reasons converge:

The creator's own framework: Blue has explicitly noted that Adam's relationship to Sydney carries "sexual assault metaphors." If Adam's predation on Sydney—the person Elijah was groomed to sacrifice—operates through violation imagery, it follows that Adam's predation on Elijah himself would use similar methods. Adam doesn't just corrupt; he possesses. He doesn't just manipulate; he inhabits. The most intimate violation mirrors the most intimate possession.

The pattern of "eternal return": Elijah's life is structured by repetition—the same traumas echoing forward, the same dynamics replaying in new contexts. Sexual abuse by a father figure, facilitated by a demonic entity, creates the template for every subsequent violation: Adam possessing his body, Elijah attempting to "sacrifice" Sydney (another form of consuming someone you claim to love), the prophet role itself as a kind of self-violation where Elijah hollows himself out to become a vessel for narrative.

The intensity of his body horror: Elijah's relationship to his own body goes beyond gender dysphoria or intersex discomfort. There's a quality of contamination to how he experiences himself—a sense that his body is not his own, that it has been used, that it carries something foreign. This is consistent with the psychological aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, where the body becomes a site of betrayal rather than home.

The "strong devour the weak" doctrine: Vasily's philosophy—drilled into Elijah as core truth—takes on a more horrifying dimension if it was taught not just through words but through demonstration. The father who preaches that strength means consumption, that weakness invites devouring, becomes the father who enacts that doctrine on his child's body. The lesson becomes literal. The ideology becomes flesh.

Adam's methodology: In my reading, Adam is a jealous god who covets Elijah's authentic, complex soul. His method is to bind Elijah to him through shared, unspeakable trauma. By facilitating abuse through Vasily—by using the father's body to violate the son—Adam creates a horrific intimacy that prefigures his later full possession. The abuse is the first invasion; the prophecy is the final one. Elijah's body was never his own, from childhood to the pyre.

This interpretation explains the extremity of Elijah's dissociation, his desperate need for narrative control, his oscillation between victim and predator, and his ultimate inability to distinguish love from consumption. He learned, in the most brutal possible way, that the people who should protect you are the ones who devour you. His entire prophetic framework is an attempt to rewrite that lesson—to become the devourer rather than the devoured, to transform violation into sacrifice, to make the unbearable into the sacred.

Part VII: Diagnosing the Damage

When we read Elijah, we aren't looking at a single wound. We are looking at a compound fracture—multiple breaks in the same limb, each one exacerbating the others:

• Autism: This gave him a brain that processes sensation and connection differently. It's not a pathology; it's a neurological difference. But it makes him an outsider, someone whose inner world is fundamentally unlike the people around him.
• Complex PTSD: The prolonged abuse from his family didn't create a single traumatic memory but a pervasive, chronic state of hypervigilance, dissociation, and emotional dysregulation. He is never truly safe because he was never safe.
• Borderline Personality Features: The instability, the intense and volatile relationships, the desperate fear of abandonment, and the shifting sense of self—these are consistent with someone whose early attachments were marked by chaos, unpredictability, and a lack of secure love.

This combination is not random. It is the predictable outcome of an autistic child raised by abusive caregivers. It is the inevitable mathematics of neglect and violence applied to a brain that already processed the world differently. His "madness" isn't inexplicable; it's the logical response to impossible conditions.

Part VIII: The Impossible Choice

His early trauma left him with what felt like a simple, brutal set of options. In his father's world, "the strong devour the weak." This wasn't just philosophy—it was lived reality. The lesson was:

Predator or Prey. Choose.

And so, the child who was prey chose to become a predator. His entire subsequent identity—the prophet, the scholar of the body, the manipulator—is an elaborate suit of armor welded from religion, intelligence, and charisma. He built this persona because the alternative was to remain the devoured thing. The armor is horrifying because it needs to be; it was designed to ensure he could never be eaten again.

Part IX: "Cataloguing the Musculature" — The Voice of the Seeker

When we first encounter Elijah through Jedidiah's eyes, he is a figure of studied contradiction—hay-blonde hair, a mud-caked skirt, a sheepskin shawl arranged like folded wings, a raven on his shoulder. Jedidiah's mind scrambles: It's a girl, then No, the name is a boy's, then But the hands. Elijah exists in the space where categories fail.

His first words establish everything:

"Cataloguing the musculature of Dynastes tityus. The Eastern Hercules Beetle. Its strength-to-weight ratio is phenomenal."

Note the clinical precision. Not "looking at" or "studying" but cataloguing—the language of systems, of organization, of making sense through classification. The beetle isn't interesting for its beauty or its strangeness; it's interesting for its ratio, its engineering. Elijah's mind reaches for pattern, for structure, for the underlying architecture that makes things work.

When Jedidiah compares it to his own interest in clocks and radios, Elijah's response is immediate:

"This is the same principle. You cannot improve a design without first understanding its fundamental architecture. Whether it's a clock... or a body."

The pause before "body" is the pause of someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about bodies—his own body that doesn't fit the expected design, the bodies he dissects to understand how life organizes itself, the body of knowledge that might explain why he feels so different from everyone around him. The word lands with weight because it carries weight for him.

And when young Jedidiah asks to learn:

"Hold these. Steadiness is more important than strength."

This single instruction reveals Elijah's entire philosophy. Not force but precision. Not power but control. The hands that will later tear legs from salamanders, that will later build pyres for sacrifice, begin by teaching that steadiness matters more than strength. The tragedy is that he believes this. The greater tragedy is that he's right—and that his steadiness will be turned toward such terrible purposes.

Part X: "Adequate" — The Language of Earned Approval

Jedidiah's first incision produces a flinch. Elijah's response is a single word:

"Adequate."

For Jedidiah, raised on conditional approval and constant criticism, this word is revolutionary. It isn't praise—it's assessment. It isn't warmth—it's recognition. Elijah offers something his father never could: acknowledgment based on competence rather than conformity.

This is how Elijah relates to the world. He doesn't flatter; he evaluates. He doesn't comfort; he recognizes. When he later tells Jedidiah "You are a very quiet place," it carries the same quality—not sentiment but observation, not compliment but diagnosis. Elijah experiences other people the way he experiences beetles: as systems to be understood, architectures to be mapped.

This isn't coldness, exactly. It's the language of someone whose hyposensitive nervous system processes emotion differently, who finds connection through shared analysis rather than shared feeling. When he says Jedidiah is "adequate," he means it as the highest form of welcome: you can do this. You belong here. Your hands work.

The problem is that adequacy isn't love. And Elijah, who has never received love that didn't come wrapped in violence or neglect, doesn't know the difference.

Part XI: "All Machinery Was Alive Once"

When Jedidiah observes that the beetle dissection is "like engineering... but alive. Or it was," Elijah's response opens a window into his metaphysics:

"All machinery was alive once. The ore in the ground, the trees that became the paper for your blueprints. This one's life is just more recent."

This is not casual observation. It's a worldview. Elijah sees no fundamental distinction between the living and the mechanical—everything is architecture, everything was once something else, everything can be understood through analysis. The beetle's life isn't sacred because it's alive; it's interesting because it demonstrates principles that apply to all systems.

This framework will later enable his most terrible acts. If Sydney is a machine—a miraculous machine, a divine machine, but still a mechanism—then studying him, worshipping him, even sacrificing him becomes a matter of engineering rather than ethics. The "Muse" isn't a person with desires and boundaries; he's "the most real thing there is," a principle to be understood and utilized.

The seeds of the prophet are planted in the language of the child. Elijah doesn't learn to dehumanize; he never quite learns to humanize in the first place. His autism gives him deep pattern recognition and systematic thinking; his trauma teaches him that people are dangerous and unpredictable; his hyposensitivity makes emotional connection feel muted and distant. The result is a mind that genuinely, sincerely believes it is honoring something by taking it apart to understand how it works.

Part XII: "Pain. Fear. It's the Most Real Thing There Is."

The salamander incident is the hinge of Elijah's childhood—the moment when his private coping mechanisms become visible, and visibility becomes catastrophe.

"The legs are so fragile. Like little twigs. You can hear the pop."

The voice is "conversational, as if noting the weather." The smile is "vacant, placid... the smile of someone looking at a mathematical equation, not a living creature in its death throes." This is dissociation made manifest—Elijah has left his body, left the moral weight of the moment, and is operating purely in the realm of sensation and observation.

For a hyposensitive nervous system, the world often feels muted, distant, wrapped in cotton. Elijah isn't torturing the salamander for pleasure; he's desperately trying to feel something. The pop of cartilage, the twitch of the dying creature, the visceral reality of life becoming death—these are the sensations intense enough to break through the numbness. He isn't cruel; he's starving.

But Jedidiah doesn't see starvation. He sees violation. And his response is worse than anger:

"I didn't know you were so... crude, Elijah."

The word is delivered "with a condescension that could flay skin from bone." Not "cruel" or "wrong" or "scary"—crude. Vulgar. Unrefined. Beneath the standards of their shared intellectual project. Jedidiah doesn't condemn the act; he condemns the aesthetics of it. The killing isn't the problem; the messiness is.

Elijah's response reveals everything about how his mind processes rejection:

"You stand there in your clean clothes, on your clean rock, and you call me crude? You love to look at the dead things, don't you, Jedediah? The pinned beetles. The picked-clean bones. It's safe. It's clean. It's already over. But the second it's messy? The second it's real? You can't handle it."

He sees immediately what Jedidiah cannot admit: that their shared fascination with anatomy and mechanism is only acceptable when it's sanitized, when the death is historical rather than present, when no one has to watch the dying. Jedidiah wants understanding without cost. Elijah knows that understanding is cost—that to truly know how something works, you have to be willing to break it.

And then the accusation that will echo through their entire relationship:

"You just want a pretty, broken thing to fix so you can feel good about yourself. You're a coward."

He's right. He's exactly right. And being right doesn't help him at all.

Part XIII: The Sanctuary Lost — Sydney

Sydney was Elijah's first real hope for salvation. Here was someone beautiful, genuine, and brimming with an unguarded sensitivity that Elijah's wounded heart recognized and coveted. With Sydney, Elijah found a potential "Muse," someone who could be the object of his devotion without demanding anything in return.

But this hope was cruelly severed by Jedidiah. The "campaign" Jedidiah wages against Elijah—reframing his intensity as instability, his intelligence as manipulation, his difference as danger—convinced Sydney to fear the strange boy with the raven. In Elijah's interpretation, Jedidiah didn't just want to protect Sydney; he wanted to own him, to be his sole source of stability and care. Elijah was competition.

The loss was catastrophic. In losing Sydney, Elijah lost the possibility of being loved for what he was, rather than being fixed or feared. The door to a different life—one where his hunger for intensity might have been met with patience and partnership—slammed shut. What remained was only the cold, predatory logic learned from his father and Adam.

Part XIV: The Fractured Mirror — Jedidiah

Jedidiah was supposed to be his kindred spirit, the "only other freak worth a damn." In their shared fascination with systems and structures, Elijah glimpsed the possibility of true connection. Their dynamic, however, was doomed.

Jedidiah needed to fix things. Elijah's messy, raw expressions of pain—like the salamander incident—were not something to be understood but problems to be corrected. When Elijah showed him the most honest part of himself, his hyposensitive search for sensation, Jedidiah recoiled with a word that cut to the bone: "crude."

This betrayal is the source of much of Elijah's subsequent wrath toward Jedidiah. To be called "crude" by the one person who understood him was to be declared fundamentally unacceptable—not for his ideas, but for his essence. Jedidiah abandoned him in the same way his father dismissed him, confirming Elijah's deepest fear: that his authentic self is unlovable.

Yet, their connection wasn't entirely toxic. There was a genuine bond between them, a recognition between two brilliant, damaged boys. Jedidiah's later reflection captures this complexity:

"For a while we were friends—really friends, I think. We both needed something the other had. You understood why things worked, and I could build them. You were the theory; I was the application."

Jedidiah needed someone as interested in the architecture of things as himself. And Elijah, starved for a companion who could keep up with his mind, allowed himself to trust. But the trust was shattered by a power imbalance: Jedidiah's "clinical" approach allowed him to maintain distance, to study Elijah the way Elijah studied beetles. The moment Elijah became a "data point" to be managed rather than a friend to be loved, the relationship became another form of predation.

Part XV: The Prophet as Performance

Enter the Elephant Man.

When Elijah becomes the "Prophet," he assumes an elaborate performance identity. The name itself is a nod to his special interests—the compassionate freaks who are made spectacles of. The Elephant Man was a gentle soul whose disfigurement made him an outcast, a "monster" that was actually beautiful. It's a mask for Elijah's own yearning for acceptance.

His proclamations are theatrical, his prayers are lyrical. He stages cosmic drama, casts himself as the visionary who interprets reality itself. But beneath the grandeur lies a terrified child who is desperate to feel connected to something bigger than his pain.

When Elijah reappears in this role, his language has transformed. The clinical precision remains, but it's been overlaid with liturgical grandeur:

"Here enters he who has been chosen to finish the work the Architect began—to witness, understand, and immortalize your beauty! Here enters... me. I love you."

The structure is religious: the chosen one, the sacred work, the witnessing, the immortalization. But notice what remains from the child who catalogued beetles: understand. Even in his most grandiose prophetic mode, Elijah frames love as a form of comprehension. He doesn't say "I want you" or "I need you" or even "I worship you"—he says he will understand Sydney's beauty. Love is still analysis. Devotion is still dissection.

Part XVI: "My Word" — The Prophet as Scripture

At the ceremony, when Jedidiah challenges him, Elijah delivers an exchange that captures his entire theological project:

"...and what constitutes the gospel?"

"My word."

He's not claiming to interpret the gospel—he's claiming to be it. His speech is scripture. His perception is revelation. The distance between prophet and text has collapsed entirely.

This is the logical endpoint of his childhood need to make everything meaningful. The boy who catalogued beetles grew into the man who catalogues reality itself, and the catalogue has become canon. When he calls Jedidiah "the Architect" and Sydney "the Muse," he's not using metaphors—he's assigning ontological roles. The names create the reality they describe.

His sermon demonstrates this world-building in action:

"You have witnessed, oh Muse, how the masses, so alike in stupidity, have scorned and dismissed you. Though blasphemous, their disregard is not irredeemable... they are not like the Architect, whose neglect is deliberate and borne of dispassion. The masses are simply foolish... trudging dumbly through their ugly lives... like cattle. They must be shepherded..."

He's not describing a situation; he's narrating one. The campers become "masses" and "cattle." Their ordinary obliviousness becomes "blasphemy." Jedidiah's emotional withdrawal becomes cosmic "neglect." Everything is elevated to mythic scale, and the elevation is the point—it transforms his personal wounds into universal truths.

The problem is that significance can justify anything. If Sydney's death would complete the sacred story, then Sydney's death becomes necessary. If Elijah's suffering proves his election, then more suffering proves more election. The narrative machine requires constant feeding, and it doesn't care what it consumes.

Part XVII: The Perfect Script — Christianity as Operating System

I see Elijah's elaborate theology as a kind of psychological operating system. It provides the structure through which he processes his experiences. For a mind that craves complex systems, what could be more perfect than the system of faith? It offers:

• A narrative for suffering (sin and redemption)
• A role for the outcast (the prophet in the wilderness)
• An explanation for being misunderstood (divine election)
• A justification for the pain he inflicts (sacrifice for the greater good)

His Christianity (as learned from his mother, then corrupted by Adam) becomes the software he uses to run his life. The tragedy is that it's a buggy, exploited program. The "script" he uses to understand the world comes with a built-in vulnerability: it can be hijacked. And Adam exploited this vulnerability mercilessly.

Part XVIII: The Engine of Cold Wrath

His deadly sin is Wrath—but not the kind that burns hot and fast.

His wrath is cold, sanctified, and utterly justified (in his own mind). It's a wrath that wears robes, speaks in scripture, and calls itself mercy. It's far more dangerous than rage because it is patient and can plan. It is the wrath of someone who believes they are enacting divine will.

"I was so angry, Sydney. At everyone. At the world that made me wrong from birth. At the family that saw me as a mistake to be corrected. And at you."

The specificity matters. Not angry "at the world" in some abstract sense, but at everyone—a comprehensive, undifferentiated fury that couldn't distinguish between the father who violated him and the friend who (he believed) abandoned him. The wrath was so vast it had to be distributed across the entire cosmos. Making it theological was the only way to contain it.

And then the confession that cuts deepest:

"I dressed my vengeance in logic and called it mercy."

This is Elijah seeing himself clearly, perhaps for the first time. The utilitarian calculus, the greater good, the necessary sacrifice—all of it was costume for something much simpler and much uglier. He wanted Sydney to suffer because he was suffering. He wanted to destroy the one good thing he'd ever had because losing it had destroyed him. The prophet's robes were just better-fitting versions of his father's hands.

Part XIX: Certainty as the Engine of Evil

At the heart of Elijah's capacity for harm is his unwavering certainty. He doesn't believe he might be right; he knows he is. His prophetic role isn't a guess; it's a revealed truth.

This certainty is what allows him to dismiss dissent, override the wills of others, and commit to atrocities in the name of a "greater good." The moment you know the plan is divine, any questioning becomes not just wrong but sinful. His followers don't need to understand; they need to obey.

This is the chilling core of many historical horrors, from inquisitions to revolutions. Elijah becomes a case study in how unhealed trauma, combined with a mind that craves pattern and certainty, can produce a person capable of immense destruction—all while believing they are saving the world.

Part XX: The Nine-Year-Old Predator

There is something deeply troubling that must be named directly: at nine years old, Elijah was already a predator.

When he found seven-year-old Rowan by the river—wearing a yellow dress that didn't fit, skipping stones alone—he didn't see a potential friend. He saw prey. His own confession is devastating in its precision:

"I saw someone lonely. Someone with no one. Someone who would be easy... I looked at you and I thought: this one will stay."

Each criterion was calculated: younger (so he'd always have power), isolated (so there'd be no one to compare him to), traumatized (so any attention would feel like salvation). This isn't the language of childhood friendship. It's target identification. At nine years old, Elijah had already learned to read vulnerability as opportunity.

"I Was a Nine-Year-Old Con Man"

His own words cut deepest:

"I put on an act. 'I'm so much more confident than you, let me help you become like me.' I was a con man, Rowan. A nine-year-old con man who'd learned that if you seem certain enough, people will follow you anywhere."

The phrase "nine-year-old con man" captures the tragedy perfectly. Children shouldn't know how to do this. That Elijah did—that he'd already learned to perform certainty as survival mechanism—tells us everything about what his home life had taught him. The con man was made, not born.

And what makes this particularly chilling is that his predatory behavior coexisted with genuine help. He did accept Rowan's gender when no one else would. He did teach Rowan to read the world. He did fill a void left by Rowan's dead father. The relationship was "cute" even as it had that dark undercurrent:

"You can read it without the undercurrent... the relationship is so cute, like it's also cute at the same time, despite the undercurrent of, you know... it's very complex."

This is the horror: the building and the destroying happened simultaneously. Elijah's love was real; his predation was also real. Both truths exist. The child who genuinely saw Rowan as male was also the child who thought "this one will stay" because traumatized children don't leave.

Both Predator and Prey

Unlike Rowan, who is "just prey," Elijah occupies a more complex position: he is "both predator and prey at the same time."

This distinction illuminates the difference between their responses to trauma. Rowan's abuse left him vulnerable but didn't transform into mechanisms for controlling others. Elijah's abuse—sexual violation by his father, facilitated by Adam, layered onto an intersex body already treated as "mistake"—calcified into something that could hunt.

The factors that enabled this transformation:

Privilege: Both Elijah and Jedidiah came from wealthy families. Both are white. This creates what can only be called entitlement—a sense of ownership over other people's vulnerabilities. Rowan and Sydney, coming from poverty and marginalized backgrounds, never developed this predatory capacity.

Access to frameworks: Elijah had books, stories, theological systems. His wealth gave him tools for building elaborate structures around his pain. These same tools could be weaponized. Rowan, denied education by his cult, had no such sophisticated mechanisms.

Normalization: The abuse taught Elijah that relationships were about power, that the strong devour the weak, that love and consumption were the same thing. He internalized his father's doctrine so thoroughly that he replicated it.

The Tragedy of Making

"It just shows the effects of his abuse."

This is the key. Elijah's predatory behavior at nine years old is evidence of what had already been done to him. Children don't spontaneously develop the capacity to identify and groom targets. That skill is taught—through experience, through example, through the brutal education of being prey first.

When we think about how children are "supposed to be" and see instead a child who has already learned to hunt, the horror isn't primarily at the child. It's at what created him. The earlier the violation, the more thoroughly the lesson is learned: the world is predators and prey, and if you're smart enough, you get to choose which one you'll be.

Elijah chose. At nine years old, looking at a seven-year-old in a yellow dress, he chose to be the hunter. And he was still young enough that we can see exactly how the choice was made for him, in the house with the wolf-father and the ghost-mother, before he ever arrived at that riverbank.

Part XXI: The Fractured Mirror — Rowan

In the lonely, volatile prophet that Elijah becomes, there remains a desperate need to see a reflection of himself that isn't monstrous. He finds this in Rowan.

"A Worthy Indulgence"

Their relationship begins with predatory calculation. When Rowan asks if Elijah will return, the response is chilling in its honesty:

"You are a worthy indulgence. A persistent data point. Yes. I will come back tomorrow. Before the sun is at its peak."

Note the language. Not "friend" or even "student"—indulgence. Something permitted, a treat, a deviation from discipline. And data point—Rowan is information to be collected, a reading on Elijah's instruments. The clinical framework that dissected beetles now dissects a child's need for connection.

Yet there's something else here too. Elijah doesn't lie. He doesn't say "because I care about you" or "because we're friends." He names exactly what Rowan is to him: something worth returning for. In Elijah's world of constant analysis, this is as close to affection as his language allows.

"Now You Look Like Mine"

The hair-cutting scene is the most revelatory moment in their early relationship. Rowan, trapped in the wrong body and the wrong clothes, asks Elijah to help him cut his braids. Elijah's response:

"Will you do it?"

Elijah's eyes gleamed. He shook his head. "No. You must. I will guide you."

This is the prophet's methodology distilled. He won't do the transformation—he'll guide it. The power remains with him while the action belongs to Rowan. It's the same structure as his theology: the prophet reveals the path, the follower walks it.

His instructions are surgical:

"Here. At the base. Don't saw. A clean, hard pull."

The same precision he brought to beetle dissection, now applied to identity. He's teaching Rowan to unmake himself with clinical efficiency. And when Rowan hesitates:

"See? The world didn't end."

This is genuine comfort wrapped in Elijah's characteristic detachment. He's offering Rowan the same revelation he gave himself when he shed "Eden"—the discovery that the forbidden act doesn't destroy the universe. It's real wisdom, earned from real pain.

But then comes the possessive turn:

"There," Elijah whispered, his voice laced with a quiet, terrifying triumph. "Now you look like mine."

Not "now you look like yourself" or "now you look like who you really are." Mine. The transformation Elijah facilitated has made Rowan his property. The liberation was also a claiming. This is the double-bind of Elijah's love: he genuinely helps, and the help genuinely binds.

"We Will Read the Rest of It. You and I."

When Rowan shares memories of his father—how he knew the stars, could tell which rocks were best for skipping, said the river was always singing—Elijah's response reframes everything:

"He was a reader of the world. Like us."

Like us. Two words that offer Rowan something he's never had: belonging. His dead father wasn't crazy or heretical (as the cult claimed); he was gifted in the same way Elijah is gifted, in the same way Rowan is learning to be gifted. The dead father becomes retroactively validated through Elijah's framework.

"They were wrong about him," Rowan whispered, the truth solid and real as the stone in his hand.

"Of course they were," Elijah said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "They are only reading one page. They think it's the whole book."

And then the promise that seals everything:

"We will read the rest of it. You and I."

This is the offer of a shared project, a joint destiny, a future written in plural. For a child who has lost everything, it's irresistible. But notice what Elijah is actually offering: not healing, not safety, but reading—analysis, pattern-recognition, the same intellectual project that structures his own dissociated relationship with reality. He's recruiting Rowan into his way of being.

"It's Just How You're Made. Your Shape."

In a rare moment of vulnerability, Elijah confesses his own experience of hyposensitivity:

"Sometimes the input is too little. It slips away. The light, the sound, the feeling of my own skin... it becomes faint, like a radio station fading out. And the only way to pull the world back into focus is to find a signal so strong it defines everything else."

He's describing the desperate search for sensation that will later manifest in salamander legs and sacrificial pyres. And Rowan, echoing Elijah's earlier validation of him, responds:

"It's not a flaw. It's just... how you're made. Your shape."

Elijah's reaction is the closest he comes to unguarded emotion:

The ghost of a smile, real and uncalculated, touched his lips. It was like the sun breaking through a leaden sky.

"Yes," he breathed. "Exactly."

For once, the performance stops. Someone has seen his fundamental difference and named it not as pathology but as architecture. This is what Jedidiah failed to do at the salamander incident—what calling him "crude" destroyed. Rowan offers what Elijah has always needed: acceptance of his actual shape, not just his performance.

Part XXII: The Confession — "Not the Version That Makes Me Sympathetic"

Years later, Elijah must finally face what he did. His confession to Rowan is the most brutal self-examination he ever performs—language stripped of all prophetic grandeur, all theological framework, all self-protective narrative.

"I need to tell you the truth. Not the version that makes me sympathetic. The real truth about what I was. What I did."

This opening is itself a revolution. The man who declared "My word" as gospel now explicitly distinguishes between versions of truth—acknowledging that he has, until now, been telling the sympathetic version. The prophet admits to propaganda.

"I found you by the river. You were seven years old. Wearing a yellow dress that didn't fit. Skipping stones alone. And I saw—" He stopped. Started again. "I saw someone lonely. Someone with no one. Someone who would be easy."

The word easy lands like a blow. Not "special" or "worthy" or even "interesting"—easy. A target. Prey. He's describing himself as a predator who identified vulnerability and moved toward it.

"I was nine years old, and I was already... I knew how to read people. How to find the ones who were desperate enough to follow anyone who seemed like they had answers. You were perfect. Younger than me, so I'd always have the power. Isolated, so you had no one to compare me to. Traumatized, so you'd be grateful for any attention at all. I looked at you and I thought: this one will stay."

The clinical precision here is devastating. He's not describing a friendship that went wrong; he's describing a calculated selection process. Each criterion—younger, isolated, traumatized—was a feature, not a bug. He chose Rowan because Rowan was breakable.

"I Used You as a Stim Toy"

The confession goes deeper, into territory that makes Elijah "sick even now":

"There's more. Things I've never said out loud. The way I thought about you sometimes. The... categories I put you in. My mother read the Bible a certain way, and I absorbed it without questioning, and when I looked at you I would think—" He couldn't finish.

The unfinished sentence gestures toward the internalized racism his notes reveal—the theological framework that positioned Rowan as eternally subordinate. He can't say it directly, but the shape of it is there.

"I used you as a stim toy. Touched your hair without asking because I liked how it felt, because I saw you as mine to touch. I oscillated between genuinely caring about you and wanting to hurt you just because I could. Because you would let me."

"Stim toy" is a phrase of horrible precision. He's naming his own autism here—the sensory-seeking behavior, the need for specific textures—but he's also naming how he weaponized it. Rowan's body became an object for Elijah's regulation. The touch wasn't affection; it was self-soothing that happened to use another person.

And "because you would let me"—this is the predator's logic laid bare. He hurt Rowan not despite Rowan's vulnerability but because of it. The permission was part of the appeal.

"I told myself I was helping you. Teaching you. Waking you up. But the truth is I was lonely too, and scared, and I found someone who would worship me without me having to earn it."

Here's the core confession: the prophet needed worshippers more than the worshippers needed the prophet. All the elaborate theology, all the "reading the world" framework—it was a mechanism for generating devotion he couldn't obtain honestly. The teaching was real, but it served his need to be needed.

"You Knew"

Rowan's response devastates Elijah in a way accusation never could:

"I knew you were dangerous. I knew the way you looked at me sometimes was... wrong. Like I was a thing you owned instead of a person. But you also saw me as a boy when no one else did. You gave me a name. You taught me the world was readable instead of just random and terrifying. So I stayed. Because even manipulated attention was better than no attention at all."

This is worse than anger. Rowan isn't claiming innocence or ignorance—he's admitting complicity. He knew, and he stayed anyway, because the alternative was worse. The manipulation worked not because it was hidden but because it was still preferable to nothing.

"You want to know the worst part? When you left, when you called me Rowan instead of Caleb and told me to forget you—I wasn't angry. I was grateful. Because you'd finally done the thing I always knew you would do, and I didn't have to wait for it anymore."

Gratitude for abandonment. Rowan had been holding his breath for years, waiting for the inevitable betrayal, and when it came, the relief was greater than the grief. This is what Elijah's "love" created: a child so prepared for devastation that devastation felt like resolution.

"The Ring Isn't Forgiveness"

When Elijah asks why Rowan still wears the ring, the answer refuses every comfortable framework:

"The ring isn't forgiveness. I want you to understand that. I'm not wearing it because I've absolved you."

"Then why?"

"Because it's evidence. I spent years not knowing why I was broken. Why I couldn't trust anyone. Why every relationship felt like a trap I couldn't see. And now I know. You did that. You and Juniper and everyone who decided they knew what was best for me."

The ring as evidence rather than memento. Rowan isn't keeping it for sentimental reasons; he's keeping it as proof. The years of dysfunction, the inability to trust, the sense of invisible traps—these weren't his failures. They were the predictable results of what was done to him. The ring is documentation.

"You don't get to disappear into my forgiveness. You stay visible. You stay evidence."

This is Rowan's refusal of the redemption narrative Elijah might want to construct. Forgiveness would allow Elijah to move on, to frame the harm as something overcome, something that's now "in the past." By withholding forgiveness, Rowan keeps the harm present. Elijah doesn't get the relief of absolution.

"I can hold both truths. That you hurt me, and that you also gave me something real. But don't mistake that for absolution. I'm not healing at you. I'm just healing. You're just... there. In the wreckage."

"I'm not healing at you" is a remarkable phrase. Rowan is refusing to let his recovery be about Elijah at all. He's not healing to spite Elijah, not healing to forgive Elijah, not healing as a demonstration for Elijah. Elijah is simply present in the debris, a piece of the wreckage that Rowan is navigating around.

Elijah's response shows he understands:

"That's more honest than forgiveness would be. Isn't it."

Not a question—a recognition. Forgiveness would be a story, a narrative resolution that ties things up neatly. What Rowan is offering is messier and more true: coexistence with unresolved harm. The wound doesn't close; it just becomes part of the landscape.

The Transmission of Trauma

Yet the damage is done. In teaching Rowan to depend on him, to see the world through a prophetic narrative, to accept manipulation as a form of love, Elijah ensured the cycle would continue. He shaped Rowan to one day need a lamb to sacrifice, a disciple to guide, a story to dominate his own pain.

The wounded prophet, seeking salvation, ended up blueprinting his own pathology for the next generation. The cage he built for himself got new bars, prepared for another prisoner. That Rowan eventually breaks free—refuses the forgiveness narrative, refuses to be managed, demands to see clearly—is Rowan's triumph, not Elijah's. The fact that escape was possible doesn't mean the trap wasn't real.

Part XXIII: Privilege and the Prolongation of Pain

A paradox emerges when examining how different characters process trauma: privilege may actually delay healing by providing more elaborate ways to avoid direct confrontation with pain.

Elijah had access to education, to books, to theological and philosophical frameworks. His wealthy family, for all their abuse, gave him tools that a child in Rowan's position never had. These tools allowed him to build something: the prophetic identity, the theological system, the elaborate architecture of meaning that transformed his pain into cosmic narrative.

But building is not healing. The framework contained his trauma without processing it. The prophet role gave his wrath a "holy shape" without diminishing the wrath itself. He could spend decades refining his theology, elaborating his systems, recruiting followers—all without ever having to sit with the simple, unbearable fact that a child was hurt and no amount of meaning can unhurt him.

Compare this to Rowan's trajectory. Without access to elaborate frameworks, without the education that would let him build theological defenses, Rowan had to develop "strong instincts about people and situations," had to build "emotional intelligence through necessity rather than study." His meditation practices, his incense rituals—these emerged from direct engagement with his experience rather than from books about experience.

The result is counterintuitive: the privileged response to trauma (Elijah's theological architecture, Jedidiah's clinical frameworks) may be less effective than the necessity-driven response (Rowan's intuitive methods, Sydney's indigenous practices). Sophistication isn't the same as healing. Sometimes the elaborate defenses just give you more places to hide.

But we should be careful not to romanticize this. Lack of access to mental health resources, education, and support isn't actually better for healing—it's just different constraints producing different outcomes. The wisdom of indigenous practices isn't a consolation prize for lacking access to clinical care. It's a legitimate tradition that exists alongside, not in competition with, other forms of healing.

Elijah's redemption, when it finally comes, requires dismantling everything he built. The frameworks that protected him were also the frameworks that enabled his harm. The prophet has to die for the person to live. And that death is harder, takes longer, precisely because he had so many more tools for building walls between himself and the truth.

Part XXIV: Two Kinds of Warfare — Michael and the Prophet

In the expanded framework of the fanfiction, Elijah is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—the angel of war, the commander of heaven's armies, the one who cast Satan into the abyss. This positions him as the cosmic warrior to Jedidiah's administrative Mars.

But notice the difference. Jedidiah's warfare is horizontal: human managing human, system containing system. He builds prisons and calls them sanctuaries. He controls information and calls it protection. His violence is bureaucratic—clinical notes and calibration sessions and Harmonization Lenses.

Elijah's warfare is vertical. He fights the war of heaven against hell, the cosmic struggle between meaning and void. His violence is spectacular—pyres and proclamations and the literal consumption of souls. Where Jedidiah contains, Elijah transforms. Where Jedidiah manages, Elijah sacrifices.

The tragedy is that both forms of warfare end up destroying the same person: Sydney. Jedidiah's clinical containment and Elijah's prophetic sacrifice are both, in the end, ways of making Sydney into an object—whether a patient to be managed or a god to be immolated. The horizontal prison and the vertical pyre lead to the same place: a person reduced to a function in someone else's story.

Part XXV: A Note on Historical Allegory

The following section explores a level of historical and symbolic allegory I believe is embedded in the character's design. To argue that a character symbolically represents certain historical forces or figures is an act of textual analysis. It is fundamentally different from, and in tension with, the psychological empathy that drives the rest of this essay.

One can analyze the "Hitler-esque" archetype a character is built upon—the wounded veteran, the charismatic orator, the purifying ideologue—while still maintaining compassion for the fictional, traumatized child who is molded into that shape. My personal relation to Elijah resides entirely in that latter, psychological space: in his neurodivergence, his feeling of being a "mistake," and his desperate need for a narrative to survive. Engaging with the darker historical symbolism of his role does not negate that human empathy; it seeks to understand the full tragedy of how such personal pain can be weaponized into collective destruction.

A Caveat on Framework Rigidity

Before proceeding, I want to acknowledge what this framework illuminates and what it obscures.

The Elijah-as-fascism, Jedidiah-as-America, Sydney-as-occupied-territory reading is genuinely useful. It explains patterns in their relationships, illuminates power dynamics, and gives language to forms of harm that might otherwise resist articulation. Historical allegory can be a powerful tool for understanding fictional characters.

But characters are not allegories. They contain contradictions that don't map neatly onto historical parallels. Elijah has moments of genuine tenderness that fascism-as-ideology cannot account for. Jedidiah's American-imperial reading doesn't explain his authentic love for Sydney, only his deficient expression of it. Sydney's "occupied territory" framing flattens his agency and obscures his cosmic significance.

The framework is a lens, not a cage. Use it where it clarifies. Set it aside where it distorts. The characters are richer than any single interpretive schema, and treating the allegory as literal truth risks the same kind of reductive thinking the analysis critiques.

With that caveat in place:

Elijah as the Lost Hope of Communism

He was born in Arkhangelsk—a port whose name means "Archangel," a gateway—in 1992, just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He enters the world in a literal and historical threshold. I see him as embodying the lost hope of communism: the original, idealistic promise of collective salvation, of a society built on a grand, unifying narrative. This is reflected in his prophetic, world-saving ambitions and his initial, genuine desire to offer a "better story" to the lost and lonely.

The Political Metaphor

• Vasily & the USSR = The brutal, failing Old World that creates the conditions for trauma.
• Elijah = The wounded idealist/revolutionary who emerges from those ruins with a blueprint for a purifying new order.
• Adam = The spirit of predatory Capitalism that sees this revolutionary energy, covets its power, corrupts its blueprint, and ultimately possesses it—turning a quest for salvation into an engine of consumption and control.
• Jedidiah (America) = The rival, clinical system that seeks to manage and contain this explosive, corrupted force through isolation and pathologization.
• Sydney (France) = The "sleeping god" whose violation is the central, heartbreaking crime of the story—the occupied sanctuary.

The Metaphor in Action

This political war plays out in Elijah's very flesh and fate:

• His intersex body, seen as a "defect" by his Soviet-era father, is the site of the old regime's failure to accommodate difference.
• His autistic hyposensitivity—the numbness that seeks intense sensation—mirrors the generational numbness after the collapse of a grand narrative, making him vulnerable to Adam's intense, predatory corruption.
• His attempted sacrifice of Sydney is the twisted, corrupted endgame of the communist ideal: the individual sacrificed for the perceived good of the collective, now horrifically orchestrated by the capitalist demon within him.
• His conflict with Jedidiah is a culture war: the systematic prophet of a new collective faith versus the clinical doctor of individual pathology.

The tragedy is that Elijah, fighting the ghost of his Soviet father (Vasily), believes he is building a new heaven. He never realizes he has become a tenant in a hell built and owned by Adam. He is the leader who, in trying to conquer the world, successfully surrenders his soul to a far more insidious and enduring power.

This political metaphor may extend into a more pointed historical allegory. I interpret Elijah as designed, in part, to represent a specific catastrophic archetype: the fascist visionary, with direct echoes of Adolf Hitler. This reading is supported by textual and symbolic choices. Elijah is a messianic, wrathful orator who crafts a scapegoating ideology (the sacrifice of the "Sleeping God") to purify a world he sees in decay. He operates from a place of deep, nationalistic humiliation (the fallen Soviet state) and promises transcendent renewal through violent, purifying sacrifice.

This interpretation is strengthened by the deliberate framing of his central conflict. His primary narrative ally is Natsume, a character with direct ties to Japan—a nation historically in the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany. Furthermore, my headcanon of Elijah being part-German completes this symbolic mirror. It creates a chilling microcosm of 20th-century trauma: a German-coded prophet of wrath versus a Japanese-coded budding magician, replaying a core conflict of the World War II era on a personal, supernatural stage. In this light, Jedidiah ("America," the clinical, isolating power) is not just a rival, but the intervening force that ultimately contains the fascist explosion Elijah represents.

If Elijah symbolically represents the fascist revolutionary—the wounded, messianic leader (Hitler) who promises national purification through a scapegoating ideology—then Adam’s role as corrupting capitalism becomes his demonic patron and the ultimate source of his corruption.

Here’s how the metaphor connects:

1. Capitalism Feeds on the Ruins of Failed Systems. Adam, the entity, doesn't create Elijah's ideology from nothing. He arrives in the void left by a collapsed empire (the fallen Soviet Union, represented by Vasily). He finds a brilliant, traumatized idealist (Elijah, the "lost hope of Communism") brimming with wrath and a desire for a new, pure world. Capitalism, in this metaphor, doesn't create fascism; it exploits its pre-existing conditions: national humiliation, economic despair, and a longing for a lost golden age.
2. The Corrupter and the Vehicle. Elijah's fascist-like ideology—his prophecy—is the vehicle. It's the populist, totalizing system that demands sacrifice. But Adam is the engine and the navigator. He is the corrupting spirit of capital that weaponizes idealism. He takes Elijah's authentic pain and genuine intellectual depth, commodities it, and twists it into a marketable, fanatical product. Adam provides the "divine" certainty, turning personal wrath into a saleable narrative of holy war.
3. A Parasitic Symbiosis. Their relationship mirrors how fascist movements and capitalist corruption historically interact. The fascist (Elijah) dreams of a transcendent, anti-materialist revolution. But to achieve power, he often forms a pact with—and is ultimately hollowed out by—amoral, predatory forces (Adam). Adam doesn't care about the purity of the new world; he cares about consumption, possession, and the energy the system generates. He facilitates Elijah's rise because a fanatical, unified system is efficient for harvesting fear, devotion, and suffering.
4. From Revolutionary to Hollow Brand. In the end, the fascist revolutionary becomes a brand for the capitalist corrupter. Elijah, the would-be saintly leader (Saint Michael), becomes the hollow vessel for Adam. His "revolution" becomes a ritualized spectacle of sacrifice (the attempt on Sydney) that feeds Adam's hunger. This mirrors the way radical, even utopian, movements can be stripped of their original soul, turned into empty shells of imagery and rage, used to consolidate power and profit for the parasitic forces that latched onto them.

In summary, within this layered allegory:

• Vasily & the USSR = The brutal, failing Old World that creates the conditions for trauma.
• Elijah = The wounded idealist/revolutionary (the "Hitler" figure) who emerges from those ruins with a blueprint for a purifying new order.
• Adam = The spirit of predatory Capitalism that sees this revolutionary energy, covets its power, corrupts its blueprint, and ultimately possesses it—turning a quest for salvation into an engine of consumption and control.
• Jedidiah (America) = The rival, clinical system that seeks to manage and contain this explosive, corrupted force through isolation and pathologization.

The tragedy is that Elijah, fighting the ghost of his Soviet father (Vasily), believes he is building a new heaven. He never realizes he has become a tenant in a hell built and owned by Adam. He is the fascist leader who, in trying to conquer the world, successfully surrenders his soul to a far more insidious and enduring power.

To fully understand the scale of the tragedy, we must see the characters not only as people, but as nations. We have seen Elijah as the lost hope of Communism, corrupted into a fascist revolutionary. We have seen Adam as the spirit of Capitalism that hollows and weaponizes that revolution. We have seen Jedidiah as America, the clinical power offering a salvation of isolated control. This allegory finds its heartbreaking completion in Sydney, who represents France.

This is not a casual comparison, but a precise narrative mirror. Sydney’s role in Elijah’s life and in the canon’s symbolism maps exactly onto the role of France in the psychic and military drama of the Second World War.

1. The Sanctuary Invaded. For Elijah, Sydney was his first and only true sanctuary—a place of mercy and safety utterly separate from the brutal, predatory world of his father. Historically, France served a similar symbolic role for pre-war Germany, particularly for its artists, intellectuals, and dissidents. It was seen as the sanctuary of civilization, reason, and culture. The Nazi invasion of France in 1940 was therefore not merely a strategic conquest; it was a profound, symbolic violation of a sanctuary. Elijah’s later ideological and literal assault on Sydney replicates this violation: he destroys the very place that once offered him salvation.
2. The Sleeping God and the Sleeping Giant. Canonically, Sydney is the Sleeping God—a passive, sacred figure of immense latent power, trapped in catatonia. This directly mirrors the Allied perception of France at the war’s outset: the "Sleeping Giant." France was a nation with a glorious history, immense resources, and the formidable, static fortifications of the Maginot Line (its own kind of entrenched, outdated altar). Its shockingly rapid fall and subsequent occupation left it in a state of stunned, vulnerable passivity—a "sleeping" power. Sydney’s canonical condition is a perfect personal analogue to this national trauma.
3. The Prize in a War of "Salvations." Sydney’s body and soul become the central battleground between the two competing systemic evils, each offering a horrific form of "salvation."

• Elijah’s (Fascist) Salvation is Occupation and Ritual. He seeks to "save" Sydney by making him the eternal, sanctified martyr of his new world order. He will preserve Sydney’s sacredness only by destroying his autonomy, consuming him in a ritual sacrifice for the prophet’s grand design. This mirrors fascist expansionism, which claimed to "save" and purify neighboring nations by absorbing them into its empire, honoring them only as a concept, not as a sovereign people.
• Jedidiah’s (American) Salvation is Clinical Management. He seeks to "save" Sydney by pathologizing the trauma of occupation, isolating him from the wider conflict, and placing him under controlled, clinical care. This salvation creates a safe, sterile, and utterly dependent prison. It reflects a postwar American style of hegemony: "liberating" nations through structures that demand alignment and create lasting dependency.

4. The Living Battleground. Ultimately, Sydney’s personal tragedy embodies the fate of a nation used as a theater of war by larger ideological forces. The trauma inflicted upon him—the spiritual occupation by Elijah’s ideology, followed by the medical oversight of Jedidiah—maps precisely onto the physical and psychological devastation of a country ravaged by invasion and then managed by a distant, pragmatic liberator.

The Completed Allegorical Core:

• Elijah: The Fascist Revolutionary (Hitler/Germany). The wounded child of a fallen empire, now a wrathful prophet of purification.
• Adam: Corrupting Capitalism. The demonic entity that exploits revolutionary energy, turning idealism into a consumable, hollow fanaticism.
• Sydney: The Occupied Sanctuary (France). The "Sleeping God" whose violation is the central, heartbreaking crime of the story.
• Jedidiah: Clinical Liberalism (America). The intervening power that offers a salvation of isolation and control.
• Natsume: The Axis Ally (Japan). The technologically-advanced partner, completing the symbolic WWII framework.

With this layer, the personal story snaps into focus as a stark historical parable. Sydney is the sanctuary (France) invaded by the fascist revolutionary (Elijah/Germany), who is himself a puppet of the capitalist demon (Adam), only to be "liberated" into the controlled care of a clinical superpower (Jedidiah/America). His catatonia is not just a medical condition; it is the stunned silence of a paradise used as a battleground.

This final piece underscores the ultimate tragedy: in the war of systems and stories, the greatest casualty is always the specific, the beautiful, and the vulnerable. Sydney, the boy who offered a simple act of mercy, becomes France—a symbol of what is destroyed when the wounded hearts of history dress their rage in the robes of destiny and declare war on innocence itself.

Part XXVI: The Audience of One

The most devastating insight into Elijah's psychology is this: his entire prophetic performance was addressed to a single listener.

"Elijah's ultimate audience was his younger self, Eden. The entire performance—the prophecies, the control, the grand destiny—was a desperate play enacted for a terrified child locked in the past. Every scripture he quoted, every follower he gained, every step of his 'divine' plan was a frantic whisper to that boy: See? Our suffering meant something. It wasn't for nothing. I am powerful now, so you were never weak."

This is the closed loop of trauma. The prophet needs the boy's pain to justify his existence; the boy's pain is only reaffirmed by the prophet's monstrous methods. Eden sits in an empty pew, listening to Vsevolod's sermons, forever unconvinced. Because the sermons keep requiring more sacrifice, more proof, more elaborate architecture to contain the simple, unbearable fact: a child was hurt, and no amount of meaning can unhurt him.

The cathedral of theology was built to house a ghost. The ghost never believed any of it. And the builder couldn't stop building, because stopping would mean admitting that the cathedral was always empty.

Part XXVII: What Elijah Represents — The Monument to Survival

Elijah Volkov is not a monster born in the dark. He is a boy genius shattered on the rocks of a world that had no place for him. His story is not one of evil unfolding, but of a desperate, brilliant mind trying to glue itself back together with the wrong materials.

He gathered scripture, medical texts, and fairy tales, and tried to reassemble the fragments of "Vseslava Eden" into the shape of a storybook prophet—a figure of purpose, power, and control. But trauma is a poor adhesive. The cracks always seep chaos. Every time he thought he had built a stable, holy narrative, the old pain—the numbness, the betrayal, the violation—would bleed through, warping his good intentions into horrific outcomes.

His prophecy was a fortress built on a fault line.

The Walking Contradiction

This is why he exists as a walking contradiction, a series of painful paradoxes:

• He is a healer who harms, his medical knowledge used to diagnose and sedate rather than to cure.
• He is a savior who sacrifices, believing one must be destroyed for the many to be saved.
• He is a visionary blinded by his own wounds, able to see cosmic patterns but not the simple humanity of the person in front of him.

He collects the bones of dead things to understand the clean, logical architecture of life, yet he completely fails to grasp the fragile, bloody, beautiful, and horrifying humanity of his own beating heart. He masters the map but is forever lost in the territory of himself.

The Tragic Answer

So what answer does his life give to that terrible question: "What else can a person become when your only choices are to dominate or be devoured?"

Elijah's life is the tragic answer: you can become both.

He became the wolf in shepherd's robes. He internalized his father's predatory law so completely that he could only express love as a form of possession, and salvation as a form of consumption. His entire performance—the gentle voice, the lyrical prayers, the grand destiny—was a salvation narrative preached to an audience of one: his terrified younger self, Eden.

Every sermon was a plea to that ghost: See, our suffering meant something. I am powerful now, so you were never weak.

But it is a closed loop. The prophet needs the boy's pain to justify his existence, and the boy's pain is only reaffirmed by the prophet's monstrous methods. It is a cycle with no exit, a ouroboros of trauma and failure, forever eating its own tail.

The most vulnerable part of this entire analysis was engaging with this historical allegory. It is incredibly difficult to reconcile the fact that I relate to this character with the fact that he is designed to represent one of the worst archetypes in history. Putting those two ideas in the same essay is an act of vulnerability. I do it because I believe the harder path—examining how someone who embodies historical evil could potentially find redemption—is the more necessary one. I kind of understand why Blue doesn't want to deal with his character anymore, but I also feel it's a form of narrative cowardice. I am not a coward, so I will deal with this character. I will give him a redemption arc.

What would redemption look like? It would look like apologizing to Sydney, without any guarantee of forgiveness, and then doing the work to fix the issues that made him susceptible to Adam. In my vision, this healing happens not through therapy, but through love—specifically, through a transformative relationship with Jedidiah. After the events of the S1 canon, Jedidiah gives his project concerning the Limn and Sydney to Elijah. Over the course of working together, they build a relationship. It is a slow descent from the height of their antagonism to love, forged because they have both seen the worst in each other and choose to love anyway. This is more authentic than their previous, necessity-bound relationships.

Their dynamic models a shift in power: learning to be vulnerable without becoming predator or prey. It moves from hierarchical control to mutual support. This is mirrored in their work: where Jedidiah’s mechanical, precise "clock" solution fails, Elijah’s "messy" intuition provides the answer: an hourglass. The hourglass—a symbol of natural flow over mechanical control—becomes the new emblem, a synthesis of their minds. It may allow for a true reversal of the Limn's damage, rather than a trapped cycle.

Through this relationship, Elijah must confront being loved for his messy reality, not his prophetic performance. Jedidiah must confront loving someone whose "crudeness" he once rejected. Together, they evolve. Elijah becomes anarchism instead of communism—releasing his need for top-down certainty. Their union suggests a new system, born from the synthesis of their broken ideologies, moving toward something fluid, interdependent, and genuinely healing.

Conclusion: Why This Matters

Writing this analysis has been more than an exercise in character study. For me, it is three things:

An act of defiance. It is a push back against simplistic, morally sterile readings that label characters like Elijah as simply "evil" and dismiss them. It is a claim that these shadows deserve our scrutiny, because what we call evil is often just pain with nowhere else to go.

An act of creation. It is the deep, nuanced engagement with a character that I always wanted to find in the fandom and rarely did. If it didn't exist, I had to build it myself—not as a final word, but as an invitation to look deeper.

An extension of hope for connection. It is this document, sent out like a signal. It is the hope that someone else might see these same painful, complex patterns and understand. That they might recognize that analyzing a character like this isn't about making excuses, but about engaging with the fundamental necessity of complexity.

My relation to Elijah's utilitarian logic and his revolutionary despair is, in part, why this feels so vital. It's an examination of how noble frameworks—the greatest good, the liberation of a new world—can become the engines of horror when fueled by unhealed trauma and absolute certainty. To understand Elijah is to grapple with a terrifying question: how do we prevent the quest for salvation from becoming a blueprint for damnation?

I write this to hold that question, and him, in the complexity they demand.

To dismiss Elijah as simply "evil" is to commit the same act of dehumanization that his family, that Jedidiah, and that Adam inflicted upon him. It is to look at a monument to survival—however cracked and dangerous that monument has become—and see only the warning sign, missing the tragic story of the person who built it, stone by painful stone, trying to make a sanctuary from the ruins of themselves.

Elijah Volkov is a testament to the stories we tell to survive. And his tragedy is a warning of what happens when the story becomes more real than the person telling it.

He began as a child who needed to feel—a hyposensitive system starving for sensation, a wounded psyche desperate for pattern and meaning. He found that meaning in religion, in medicine, in the grand architectures of theology and anatomy that promised the world could be understood. He took the chaos of his abuse and assembled it into narrative, took the randomness of his suffering and made it a chapter in a larger story.

For a while, the story worked. It gave him purpose, identity, a role that wasn't "mistake" or "victim." He became the Prophet, the shepherd of men, the vessel and mouthpiece of cosmic truth. He built followers and rituals and an entire liturgy of salvation.

But stories require fuel. His story required suffering—his own and others'. The prophet couldn't exist without the wound. The mission couldn't continue without new sacrifices. What began as survival mechanism became consuming fire, and the survivor became the danger he once fled.

In the end, Elijah's redemption—if it comes—requires him to do what he's never done: stop writing. Stop casting people as characters in his cosmic drama. Stop needing his suffering to mean something grand. Accept that a child was hurt, that the hurt shaped him, that the shape became dangerous, and that none of it has to be a story at all.

It can just be a life. Messy, crude, real.

The boy who needed everything to be architecture might finally learn to live in a house without blueprints.

"You cannot improve a design without first understanding its fundamental architecture. Whether it's a clock... or a body."

"Pain. Fear. It's the most real thing there is."

"I dressed my vengeance in logic and called it mercy."

"I'm tired of blame. I've spent my whole life looking for someone to hold responsible for what I became. My father. Adam. You. Sydney. And the truth is, we all played our parts. We all made choices. We all became who we are through a tangle of pain and damage that no one person caused."

— Elijah Volkov, the boy from the city of the Archangel, who chose to become prophet and wolf

Maybe that's not the end of the story.

Maybe it's where the real one finally begins.