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"My perfect baby girl. It would have been better if you were never born. But God rarely listens to me." — Mischa Volkova
"A mistake. A blinding, gut-wrenching mistake." — Vasily Volkov
Introduction: The Architecture of a Monster's Making
Elijah Volkov was not born into cruelty by accident. His parents—Vasily and Mischa—were themselves products of historical trauma, religious rupture, and the particular paranoia that comes from being hunted across generations. To understand the prophet who would later try to burn Sydney alive, we must first understand the wolves who raised him.
The name "Volkov" means "of the wolf." It is not the family's original name. They changed it during the Second World War, shedding their Jewish identity like a skin that had become too dangerous to wear. This name change is the first lesson the family would teach its children: survival requires transformation. Identity is a costume. The true self must be hidden, protected, denied.
Elijah learned this lesson too well.
Part I: Mischa Volkova — The Wrong Daughter
Origins: The German Jews of Arkhangelsk
Mischa's family were German Jews who fled to Russia to escape rising antisemitism in their homeland. Arkhangelsk—a port city in the Russian Arctic, cold and remote—seemed far enough from the gathering storm. They were wrong, of course. The storm followed. It always does.
But before the war, before the name change, before the conversion that would sever them from their ancestors, Mischa was already marked as different.
She was the only blonde in her family.
In a household of dark hair and dark eyes, she emerged golden—a genetic echo of some distant ancestor, perhaps, or simply the random shuffle of heredity. Her parents swore she was theirs. They told her to focus on more important things. They dismissed her questions with the impatience of people who have already spent too much energy on survival to waste any on a child's identity crisis.
But Mischa knew. Not that she was adopted—she wasn't—but that something was wrong with her. Some fundamental error in her making that expressed itself in her coloring, in her temperament, in the hollow space where faith should have lived. She was related to her family by blood, but she never felt related to them by soul.
The Secret She Kept
Mischa never told Vasily that her family was German. In the Soviet Union, in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, German heritage was dangerous—even for Jews who had fled Germany to escape persecution. The irony was bitter: her family had run from German antisemitism only to find themselves suspect for being German at all.
So she buried it. Another layer of hidden identity, another truth that couldn't be spoken. She told Vasily her family had always been Russian, had always been from Arkhangelsk, had always been exactly what they appeared to be. The lie was small but corrosive. It established the foundation of their marriage: concealment, performance, the careful management of which truths were safe to share.
The Hollow Woman
Mischa grew up believing herself to be a mistake that God had made and refused to correct. This belief calcified into something like theology: she was evidence of divine indifference, proof that prayers go unanswered, that the universe makes errors and doesn't care enough to fix them.
When the Hasidic matchmakers paired her with Vasily Volkov—a young man from a local shepherding family—she accepted without protest. What did it matter who she married? She was already wrong. At least Vasily was strong, capable, certain of himself in ways she would never be. Perhaps his certainty could fill the space where her own should have been.
It didn't.
The Marriage: Two Damaged People, One Damaged Union
Mischa and Vasily were betrothed young, as was custom in their Hasidic community. The marriage was arranged, practical, designed to produce children and maintain community ties. Love was not the point. Survival was the point. Continuity was the point.
But even practical marriages require some foundation of mutual respect, and Mischa and Vasily's foundation was cracked from the start. She was too melancholy for him—too withdrawn, too prone to silences that stretched for hours. He was too hard for her—too convinced of his own rightness, too quick to interpret her sadness as weakness.
They coexisted more than they lived together. Two people sharing a house, sharing a bed, sharing nothing that mattered.
The Diagnosis
When Mischa became pregnant, she felt not joy but dread. Whatever was wrong with her—whatever error had made her the blonde daughter in a dark-haired family, the faithless woman in a faithful community—she was certain it would pass to her child. She prayed, for once, genuinely prayed, that God would spare this baby. That whatever curse she carried would end with her.
God, as always, did not listen.
Before Elijah was born, the doctors discovered the abnormality. The fetus was developing in ways that didn't fit neatly into either category—not clearly male, not clearly female, but something the medical terminology of the time called a "birth defect."
For Vasily, this was confirmation of everything he secretly feared about his wife: that her strangeness, her melancholy, her fundamental wrongness had contaminated their child. He had married damaged goods, and now he would pay for it with a damaged heir.
For Mischa, it was worse. It was prophecy fulfilled. The curse she had always known she carried had passed down, just as she'd feared. She had created another mistake, and this time the mistake was a person who would have to live with what she had done to them.
The tension that had always existed between them calcified into something colder. They stopped pretending to be partners. They became two people trapped in a house with a problem neither of them knew how to solve.
The Birth: "It Would Have Been Better"
When Elijah was born, Mischa looked at her baby and saw confirmation of everything she had always feared. The wrongness had passed down. The error had reproduced. She had created another mistake, another piece of evidence that the universe makes things it shouldn't and refuses to unmake them.
"My perfect baby girl. It would have been better if you were never born. But God rarely listens to me."
This is not the statement of a woman who hates her child. It is the statement of a woman who hates herself and sees her child as extension of that self-hatred. Mischa loved Elijah—in her hollow, distant way, she loved him. But she also saw him as proof of her own fundamental wrongness, and she could not separate the love from the horror.
She withdrew. She had always been prone to melancholy, but after Elijah's birth, she retreated into it completely. She became a ghost in her own home—present but not present, visible but not seen. She fed her child and clothed her child and never once made her child feel wanted.
This was Mischa's sin: not cruelty, but absence. She didn't hurt Elijah; she simply wasn't there to protect him from the one who would.
Mischa and Adam: The Deadly Sin of Sloth
In Adam's economy of sin, Mischa represents Sloth—but not the common understanding of laziness. Theological Sloth is acedia: spiritual apathy, the failure to care about what should matter, the withdrawal from moral engagement with the world.
Mischa saw what Vasily did to Elijah. She saw the fear in her son's eyes, the way he flinched at his father's moods, the way he made himself small and silent. She knew—how could she not know?—that her husband was breaking their child in ways that would never heal.
And she did nothing.
Not because she approved. Not because she was cruel. But because she had long ago decided that the universe was indifferent, that prayers go unanswered, that wrong things happen and no one fixes them. Her own wrongness had taught her to expect wrongness everywhere. When it arrived in her home, she recognized it and accepted it and retreated further into her hollow space.
Adam didn't need to possess Mischa. He just needed her to be exactly who she already was: a woman too broken to intervene, too absent to protect, too convinced of cosmic indifference to believe that her actions could matter.
Her Sloth made space for what would come. Her withdrawal created the vacuum into which horror rushed. She didn't devour her son; she simply stepped aside and let the devouring happen.
(Note: Rowan also carries the weight of Sloth in Adam's constellation—the acedia of someone who sees too much and feels powerless to act. The sin echoes across generations, finding different vessels: the mother who wouldn't protect her child, the prophet's student who couldn't save himself. Sloth is not one person; it is a pattern, repeating.)
The Fire: Mischa's Exit
Mischa Volkova died in a house fire.
That is the official story. That is what Elijah was told, what the records show. A tragic accident. A woman who perhaps fell asleep with a candle burning, or left the stove on, or simply had the terrible luck of being in the wrong place when old wiring sparked.
The truth is simpler and more terrible: Mischa set the fire herself.
By the time of her death, Vasily was already gone—his suicide had left her alone in the house that had been their prison. Elijah was away at medical school, pursuing the career that would eventually lead him to that hospital, to Sydney's comatose form, to everything that came after. For the first time in decades, Mischa was truly alone.
You might think Vasily's death would have freed her. Without the wolf in the house, perhaps she could have finally reached out to her son, finally broken her pattern of absence, finally become the mother she had never managed to be.
But Sloth doesn't work that way. Acedia isn't caused by external circumstances—it's a fundamental orientation toward existence. Vasily's presence had given Mischa someone to withdraw from. Without him, she had only herself, and herself was the hollow she had been fleeing her entire life.
She had watched her son be destroyed, piece by piece, by the man she had married. She had seen Elijah retreat into that peculiar stillness that children develop when they learn that no one is coming to save them. She had heard Vasily's philosophy—"the strong devour the weak"—repeated like scripture, and she had seen it enacted on her child's body.
And she had done nothing. For years, she had done nothing. Her Sloth was not ignorance; it was complicity through inaction. She knew exactly what she had failed to do.
With Vasily dead and Elijah gone, there was nothing left to structure her avoidance. No one to withdraw from. No child to fail to protect. Just the empty house and the accumulated weight of everything she hadn't done.
The fire was her answer to herself. Not an escape from guilt—Sloth doesn't feel guilt strongly enough to be motivated by it—but a final act of withdrawal. She had been absent from her son's life in every way that mattered; now she would be absent entirely. She had failed to protect him; now she would remove herself as a factor in the equation altogether.
There was no note. No explanation. No dramatic confession. She simply waited until a day when no one would come looking, locked the doors, and lit the match. The fire was thorough. The house burned to its foundations.
Elijah was at medical school when he got the news. He never knew it was suicide. He was told it was an accident, a tragedy, one of those terrible things that happen to families for no reason. He mourned his mother—or mourned the idea of her, since the real woman had been absent long before she died—without ever understanding that her death was a choice.
This is its own form of cruelty, though Mischa didn't intend it that way. By hiding the truth of her death, she left Elijah with the belief that the universe had simply taken his mother, randomly, meaninglessly, so soon after taking his father. It confirmed everything he would later come to believe about a cosmos that destroys without purpose. If he had known the truth—that Mischa chose to leave, that her death was an act of will rather than chance—it might have changed something. Given him something to rage against. Something to understand.
Instead, he got only absence. His mother's final gift was the same as all her others: a void where something should have been.
Part II: Vasily Volkov — The Wolf Who Was Once a Lamb
Origins: The Shepherds of Arkhangelsk
Vasily's family had lived in Arkhangelsk for generations—poor Jewish shepherds eking out survival in the Russian Arctic, tending their flocks against wolves and winter and the endless hostility of a world that had never wanted them.
They were Hasidic, devout, bound by traditions that stretched back centuries. The men wore their beards long and their faith longer. The women kept homes that were poor in material goods but rich in ritual. They observed Shabbat in their drafty houses, lit candles against the Arctic dark, and believed that God watched over them even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
The family name was not Volkov then. It was something else—something Jewish, something that marked them as targets. The name has been lost now, deliberately forgotten, scrubbed from memory as thoroughly as they could manage. What remains is only the wolf-name they adopted to survive.
The War and the Wolves
When the Nazis came—not to Arkhangelsk directly, but close enough that the terror spread—Vasily's family made a choice that would define everything that came after.
They converted to Russian Orthodoxy.
This was not a spiritual decision. No one in the family suddenly believed in the Trinity or the saints or the resurrection of Christ. It was survival mathematics: Jewish families were being rounded up, deported, killed. Orthodox families were not. The equation was simple, even if the cost was not.
They changed their name to Volkov—"of the wolf"—because wolves survive. Wolves are not prey. Wolves do the hunting, not the dying. The name was an aspiration, a prayer to a god they no longer officially believed in: make us predators, not victims. Make us the ones who devour, not the ones who are devoured.
The conversion hollowed something out of them. You cannot abandon the faith of your ancestors—the faith that sustained your family through centuries of persecution—without losing something essential. What grew in the hollow space was harder, colder, more cynical than what had been there before.
Vasily was born into this hollowed-out family. He never knew the old name, the old faith, the old way of being in the world. He knew only the wolf-name and the wolf-philosophy: survive at any cost. Trust no one. The strong devour the weak.
The Soviet Citizen
Vasily didn't mind the Soviet Union. This surprises people who expect all Russians of his generation to be either devoted communists or secret dissidents, but Vasily was neither. He was simply a man who understood power and felt comfortable in its presence.
The USSR was strong. It had defeated the Nazis. It had built an empire. It had nuclear weapons and space programs and the ability to project force across the globe. Vasily respected these things. He felt a genuine patriotism—not for communist ideology, which he found tedious, but for the empire itself. The center. The power.
He joined the KGB not out of ideological commitment but because the KGB was where power concentrated. It was where a smart, ruthless man could make himself useful and be rewarded for his usefulness. It was where wolves went to hunt.
The work suited him. He had a talent for reading people, for identifying weaknesses, for applying pressure at exactly the right points. He learned interrogation techniques, surveillance methods, the art of making people betray themselves. He learned that most humans were weak, that most resistance collapsed under sufficient pressure, that the strong really did devour the weak—it was just a matter of being strong enough.
These were not revelations to Vasily. They were confirmations. His family had already taught him the wolf-philosophy; the KGB just gave him tools to implement it.
The Fall and the Fortune
When the Soviet Union began to crumble, Vasily saw it coming. He had spent his career reading signs of weakness, and the signs were everywhere: the economic stagnation, the political paralysis, the growing restlessness in the satellite states. An empire built on fear requires constant maintenance, and the maintenance was failing.
Other men might have felt despair at watching their country collapse. Vasily felt opportunity.
He had access to resources, to networks, to information about where money was hidden and how it could be moved. When the USSR dissolved into chaos, Vasily was one of the men who knew how to profit from the dissolution. He made away with a fortune—not enormous by oligarch standards, but enough to transform a shepherd's grandson into a man of means.
The money felt like vindication. His family had spent generations as poor Jews, then as poor converts, always scraping, always surviving but never thriving. Now Vasily had wealth. He had proven the wolf-philosophy true: the strong devour the weak, and he was finally strong enough to do the devouring.
He decided to leave Russia. The country was chaotic, dangerous, full of other wolves who might try to take what he had accumulated. America was safer—a place where money could buy security, where a man with resources could build a life without constantly watching for rivals.
He took Mischa with him. She was his wife; she would come. He did not ask if she wanted to go. Her wants were not relevant to his calculations.
The American Isolation
In America, the Volkov family grew reclusive.
This was partly practical—Vasily had money he couldn't fully explain, connections he didn't want examined, a past that would not survive scrutiny. The less contact with neighbors, with authorities, with anyone who might ask questions, the better.
But it was also something darker. Vasily had always believed that other people were threats or tools, and in America, without the structure of the KGB to channel that belief into productive work, it curdled into pure paranoia. Everyone was potentially dangerous. Everyone wanted something. The only safe people were the people he controlled absolutely.
His family.
Mischa was already withdrawn, already absent, already retreating into her hollow space. She required no effort to control; she had surrendered before he asked her to. But Elijah—Elijah was a different matter.
"A Blinding, Gut-Wrenching Mistake"
Vasily looked at his intersex child and saw everything he had spent his life fleeing.
Weakness. Abnormality. Difference. The kind of deviation that gets noticed, that draws attention, that makes people ask questions. His entire survival strategy—the name change, the conversion, the move to America, the careful construction of an unremarkable life—was predicated on not standing out. And now he had a child who would always stand out.
"A mistake. A blinding, gut-wrenching mistake."
But there was something else beneath the disgust, something Vasily would never have admitted: fear.
Elijah reminded Vasily of the old stories. The Jewish mysticism his family had supposedly left behind, the tales of beings that didn't fit neatly into categories, the religious texts that spoke of things that were both-and-neither. Elijah's body felt like an accusation—proof that the old faith still had power, that the conversion hadn't really taken, that the God they had abandoned was marking their children with signs of His continued claim.
Vasily didn't believe in God. Not really. Not anymore. But he feared the possibility that God might believe in him.
So he set out to correct the mistake. To force Elijah into a shape that would be unremarkable, controllable, safe. The constant disapproval, the contempt, the wolf-philosophy repeated until it became doctrine—these created an atmosphere of fear that didn't require fists to be devastating.
Vasily was trying to save his son from the world's cruelty by being harder than the world could ever be. He was trying to toughen Elijah, to prepare him for a cosmos where the strong devour the weak. He was failing utterly, but he was failing with conviction.
Vasily's Guilt and Suicide
Vasily was many things—cruel, cold, convinced of his own philosophy—but he was not without conscience. The wolf-costume he wore was always that: a costume. Underneath, there was still the shepherd's grandson, the boy who had watched his family abandon their faith to survive, the man who had built his identity on hardness because softness had nearly gotten his people killed.
Whether Vasily ever struck Elijah is unclear. What is certain is that he made his child fear him. The constant disapproval, the contempt for Elijah's body and sensitivity, the wolf-philosophy repeated until it became the air the family breathed—these created an atmosphere of terror that didn't require fists to be devastating. Elijah learned to flinch at his father's moods, to read danger in his silences, to make himself small and quiet and invisible. A child can be broken without ever being hit.
But Vasily loved his son. In his broken, inadequate way, he loved him.
The guilt crept in slowly, then all at once. Vasily would catch Elijah watching him with those wide, wary eyes—the eyes of a prey animal calculating escape routes—and something would twist in his chest. He had justified everything: it was discipline, it was toughening, it was preparing Elijah for a world that would be crueler than any father could be. But the justifications were wearing thin.
He started drinking more. He stopped sleeping. He would stand in the doorway of Elijah's room at night, watching his son's troubled sleep, and feel something vast and terrible opening beneath him.
What have I done?
The question had no good answer. He had made his child afraid of him. He had looked at his son's body and called it a mistake. He had installed a philosophy of devouring into a child who would spend his life being devoured. And for what? Elijah wasn't stronger. Elijah was terrified.
The suicide was not a statement. It was a surrender. Vasily couldn't face his son, couldn't confess, couldn't do the slow and painful work of accountability. He took the coward's way out: a gun, a moment of resolve, and then nothing.
He died believing he was the worst thing that would ever happen to Elijah.
He was wrong.
Adam Fills the Void
When a soul leaves a body, it creates a vacuum. Most of the time, the vacuum collapses—the body becomes meat, begins to decay, returns to the earth. But sometimes, something else fills the space before it can close.
Adam had been watching the Volkov family for a long time. He had recognized in Elijah something rare and valuable: a soul capable of containing contradictions, of holding both victim and prophet, prey and predator. A soul that could be shaped into a vessel for Adam's purposes—but only if it was wounded in exactly the right ways.
Vasily's cruelty had started the work. The fear, the contempt, the wolf-philosophy—these had created fractures in Elijah's psyche, fault lines along which he could be broken and rebuilt. But it wasn't enough. Adam needed something more. Something that would shatter Elijah so completely that he would spend the rest of his life searching for a framework to contain the pieces.
When Vasily pulled the trigger, Adam was ready.
The soul departed. The vacuum opened. And Adam slipped in.
The Assault: Adam Wearing Vasily's Face
What happened next was not Vasily's crime. Vasily was dead, his soul gone wherever souls go, his guilt and love and cruelty all finished. What remained was meat and memory—a body that still looked like Elijah's father, still moved like him, still spoke in his voice.
But the thing inside was not Vasily.
Adam used the father's body to commit an act the father never would have committed. This is important: Vasily was cruel, but he was not that. He made his son fear him; he did not rape him. The emotional abuse was Vasily's sin. The sexual assault was Adam's—enacted through a corpse that still wore a familiar face.
For Elijah, this distinction was impossible to perceive. He saw his father's hands. He heard his father's voice. He felt his father's weight. How could he know that his father was already dead? How could he understand that the thing whispering "the strong devour the weak" was not the man who had taught him that phrase, but something ancient and hungry that had stolen his father's mouth to speak through?
He couldn't. He can't. He will likely never know.
The horror of it is precise: Elijah believes his father did this to him. He believes the man who raised him, who terrorized him, who he nonetheless loved in the complicated way abused children love their abusers—he believes that man also raped him. He carries that belief like a stone in his chest, and it has shaped everything he's become.
The truth—that his father's guilt drove him to suicide, that Adam violated Elijah using a corpse, that Vasily was already beyond the reach of blame by the time the worst thing happened—this truth might have changed something. Might have given Elijah someone other than his father to hate. Might have separated the emotional cruelty (Vasily's real crime) from the sexual assault (Adam's crime wearing Vasily's face).
But Elijah will never know. And so he carries both sins as one, attributed to a man who was only guilty of one of them.
What Vasily Actually Was
Strip away the possession. What remains?
A man who was shaped by history—whose family's survival came at the cost of their identity, their faith, their sense of safety in the world. A man who learned that softness gets you killed and hardness keeps you alive. A man who loved his son and expressed that love through fear because fear was the only language he trusted.
A man who felt guilty. Who couldn't live with what he'd done. Who chose death over facing the child he'd failed.
Vasily was not a monster. He was a broken person who broke another person, and then broke himself. The monster came after—wearing his face, using his body, committing crimes he never would have committed.
In Adam's economy, Vasily was not a deadly sin. He was simply raw material. The fear and contempt that defined his parenting made him useful—made his body a weapon Adam could wield, made his face a mask that would maximize Elijah's trauma. But Vasily himself was just a man. A cruel man, a cowardly man, but a man nonetheless.
The sin that killed him was not Lust. It was Despair—the belief that his wrongs were unfixable, that death was easier than change, that his son would be better off without him.
He was wrong about that last part. But he'll never know.
Part III: The Inheritance
What Mischa Gave Elijah
From his mother, Elijah inherited:
The sense of fundamental wrongness. Mischa believed herself to be a cosmic error, and she transmitted this belief to her son through a thousand small absences. Every time she failed to protect him, every time she withdrew instead of comforting, every time she looked at him with that hollow recognition—you are like me, you are wrong like me—she taught him that some people are simply mistakes the universe made.
The hidden heritage. Elijah is Jewish through both parents, though neither of them practiced by the time he was born. He is also German through Mischa's family, though she never told anyone. These hidden identities—the faith that was abandoned, the nationality that was concealed—live in Elijah as absences, as the sense that there are true things about himself that he doesn't know and might never discover.
The capacity for spiritual emptiness. Mischa's Sloth was not laziness but acedia—the profound spiritual apathy that cannot care about what should matter. Elijah inherited this as a vulnerability. In his darkest moments, when the prophet-performance fails, he falls into something very like his mother's hollow: a place where nothing matters, where intervention is impossible, where the only response to suffering is withdrawal.
The blonde hair. A small thing, but significant. Elijah has his mother's coloring, the same genetic echo that made her feel like a stranger in her own family. When he looks in the mirror, he sees her looking back.
What Vasily Gave Elijah
From his father, Elijah inherited:
The wolf philosophy. "The strong devour the weak" was the first doctrine Elijah learned, and he has never been able to fully unlearn it. Even when he rejects it consciously, it shapes his expectations. He assumes relationships are competitions. He assumes vulnerability is weakness. He assumes that love, ultimately, is just a polite word for consumption.
The capacity for cold violence. Vasily's rage was never hot. It was calculated, controlled, applied with precision for specific effects. Elijah inherited this capacity—the ability to do terrible things without losing himself in emotion, to hurt systematically rather than impulsively. His wrath is cold because his father's cruelty was cold.
The paranoia. Vasily trusted no one, saw threats everywhere, built his life around the assumption that others were always calculating how to hurt him. Elijah absorbed this worldview. His elaborate theologies, his careful testing of loyalty, his assumption that everyone has hidden motives—these are Vasily's paranoia refined into something that looks like wisdom.
The voice. When Elijah gets angry, truly angry, his accent shifts. Russian consonants harden. Vasily's cadences emerge. The father's ghost lives in the son's throat, speaking through him in moments of extremity.
The Compound Inheritance
Together, Mischa and Vasily created conditions that made Elijah's transformation into the prophet almost inevitable:
- A child who felt fundamentally wrong (from Mischa) and fundamentally weak (from Vasily)
- A child who learned that God doesn't answer prayers (from Mischa) and that strength is the only salvation (from Vasily)
- A child who experienced total absence (from Mischa) and total violation (from Vasily)
- A child who inherited spiritual emptiness (from Mischa) and cold rage (from Vasily)
The prophet role was Elijah's answer to this impossible inheritance. He built a theology that transformed his wrongness into specialness, his weakness into chosen suffering, his parents' failures into necessary trials that prepared him for revelation. He couldn't change what had been done to him, so he changed its meaning.
But the meaning-making was always fragile. Underneath the prophet's certainty lived Mischa's hollow and Vasily's violence, waiting to emerge. The theology was a house built on a foundation of fire and wolves—and houses like that always burn.
Part IV: The Sins Across Generations
Adam's Economy
Adam doesn't create evil. He cultivates it. He finds the seeds that are already present—in individuals, in families, in communities—and provides the conditions for them to grow.
In the Volkov family, Adam found:
- Sloth (Mischa): the acedia that allows evil to flourish through inaction
- Despair (Vasily): the cowardice that chooses death over accountability, creating a vacancy Adam could fill
- Raw material: a family already hollowed out by history, already fractured by trauma, already primed for possession
Vasily was not a deadly sin. He was a delivery mechanism—a body Adam could use once the soul had fled. His cruelty created the conditions; his suicide created the opportunity. The wolf-philosophy he taught Elijah was damage, passed down like a genetic disease, making Elijah vulnerable to the entity that would later claim him.
These patterns were not implanted. They grew from the family's history: the trauma of persecution, the survival mechanisms that became pathologies, the religious rupture that left them hollow. Adam simply recognized what was already there and waited for his moment.
The Generational Pattern
The Volkov name means "of the wolf." It was chosen as a prayer for strength, a hope that the family could become predators rather than prey.
But the name was a lie. The Volkovs were never wolves. They were sheep who dressed in wolf skins, hoping the costume would protect them. Vasily's cruelty was not strength; it was terror wearing a mask of dominance. Mischa's withdrawal was not peace; it was surrender dressed as acceptance.
And Elijah—Elijah inherited the wolf-name and the sheep-nature, the costume and the fear inside it. His prophet role was another layer of disguise: the sheep who becomes a shepherd, who leads other lost creatures, who pretends to know the way through the wilderness.
Underneath all the performances, all the costumes, all the wolf-names and prophet-titles, there was only what there had always been: a child who was hurt by the people who should have protected him, who built elaborate structures to contain pain that could not be contained, who repeated his parents' sins in new forms because he had never learned any other way to be.
The wolves of Arkhangelsk were never wolves at all. They were just a family of wounded people, wounding each other, calling it survival, calling it strength, calling it love.
Conclusion: Fire and Ash
Vasily died first—shot himself, or was emptied of the force that had been keeping him alive. The wolf-philosophy consumed its prophet.
Then Mischa burned, alone in the house after Elijah had left for medical school, choosing fire as her final withdrawal.
The house in America is gone. The old house in Arkhangelsk exists only in fragmented memory. The sheep are scattered. The old faith is forgotten, the old name lost, the old ways abandoned.
What survives is Elijah: blonde like his mother, cold like his father, carrying both their sins in his bones. He doesn't know that Mischa's death was suicide. He doesn't fully understand what possessed Vasily in those final years. He knows only that he was born wrong, raised cruel, and left alone—orphaned by violence and fire before he'd finished medical school—with questions no one will ever answer.
The prophet role is his attempt to answer them anyway. To make meaning from meaninglessness. To transform the chaos of his origins into something that feels like purpose.
But the meaning is built on missing information. He doesn't know what his parents really were—not just to him, but to themselves. He doesn't know about the German heritage, the hidden Jewishness, the conversion that hollowed them out, the survival mechanisms that became pathologies. He has only fragments, and from fragments he has built a theology.
In the end, the Volkov family story is a story about what happens when survival becomes the only value. When you change your name and your faith and your entire way of being just to stay alive, you survive—but the thing that survives might not be worth saving. Vasily survived by becoming cruel. Mischa survived by becoming absent. Elijah survived by becoming a prophet.
All of them were trying not to be devoured.
All of them were devoured anyway.
The wolves of Arkhangelsk were eaten by something older and hungrier than themselves, and all that's left is ash, and a blonde man with his mother's eyes and his father's rage, standing in a hospital room watching a comatose patient breathe, trying to make sense of a story that was broken before he was born.