A muffled whimpering made Kit raise his head from the workbench he'd laid it on. The door to his cabin was open but the lights were all off and unresponsive to psychic commands. He rose to look down the hallway outside and could see a crouched figure curled up with their tail wrapped around themselves. Something made the auroran reach his paw out, the soft plaintive sobbing in the night making his heart clench from the sound of desperation. The moment Kit stepped into the hall, a wave of nausea swept over him. The corridor seemed to lengthen out, a few feet seeming like a few hundred. His steps became increasingly leaden and unsteady but he had to reach the crying child. Stabs of pain accompanied by distant whispers pulsed through each laborious stride towards the kid.

"Just look up when you're scared. I'll protect you."
"...but you left."
"Come... let me show you what we've been denied..."
"I trusted you! I waited for you! Sa-"
"The world shudders as the facade burns away but we know why you're really trembling..."
"...I was weak."

Kit gripped his chest as breath became difficult but he was close. So close. The auroran leaned as if in hurricane winds, his paw outstretched toward the figure sobbing in the night. Closer. His legs tensed with the effort of space seeming to contort to keep them apart. Closer. He gritted his teeth even as the slices of pain lanced through him again and again.

"It's just a bad dream, " he grunted through a clenched jaw. He had no idea when the realization had hit him or whether he was talking to himself or the boy mere steps away. He made it his mantra, as if it could console the kid and dispel the agony building. "Just... a bad... dream." Kit reached out as far as his arm allowed, inches from the boy's shoulder. As his pad was about to rest on the sandy fur, a clawed paw shot out of the shadows and grabbed Kit's wrist in an iron grip. Before he could yelp in pain, the entire world fell out from under him. There was no ship. No boy. No blood flecked claws binding him. Kit was falling. Past sky, past the surface, below the sea.

When his paws once again found purchase, he stood in a room lit only by the glow of thrumming machines and consoles. Ribbed cables draped every surface and the sound of pumps forcing thick fluids down their length filled the air. He struggled to raise his head as he became aware of another in the room looking at him. With a slow shiver, his gaze followed the cables to the base of a massive glass tube lit by an ethereal red glow. Something... someone was floating in the liquid within. Its body began at the waist, flesh split open revealing a metal spinal column. Layers of flesh were exposed going up the torso, as if the viscous matter swirling in the water was reassembling a madman's half remembered nightmare. One arm hung fully formed. A muscular appendage sporting the same wicked claws that had seized his wrist. Atop the creature's neck was a silver skull. Tubes plugged into the grim canid visage from every angle and lenses covered the yawning eye sockets that emitted pinpricks of crimson light. It couldn't be alive, not with how badly it seemed flayed. Kit leaned in closer, feeling pinpricks of psychic potential at the edge of his senses. A jet of bubbles rose from the bottom and the figure's single arm twitched. The sudden movement made Kit fall backwards and land on his rear. The skull tilted downwards, the empty sockets burning into Kit.

It growled, a feral psychic emission more than a sound and another image bored into the auroran's psyche. A muscular auroran with ebon fury, long wild hair, and sharp-edged prismaglass armor stood above him. His bioluminescence red, seeming more like bloody gashes than the familiar markings common to their kind. One paw clutched a violet fractal sword, vicious and brutal like a butcher's blade. The other raised to the skies in dark triumph. Behind him, a city that went from one end of the horizon to the other was aflame with bolts of incandescent death pouring down from the heavens. Kit's heart stopped and his mouth went dry. "...you?!"

That was all he could manage before the skull-helmed vivisection howled. Kit felt like a rubber band had snapped and he was being tugged back from the hellish depths and writing machine-beast. His eyes shot open with blurry vision. Blood gushed from his nose onto the workbench where he'd fallen asleep. Nicole's voice came over the comms informing him that the ship had arrived at the site. The last monstrous Revenant digestion engine had been downed below, a symbol of a war that had made the auroran's all but extinct. Kit rose to answer Nicole, making it one step before falling to the ground clutching his head as psychic pressure built. This wasn't just another appearance of his benighted shadow self. Not just another nightmare. This was the architect of nightmares at work.
---

Perfect for October, we have this sketch of Project Snowdog's main antagonist. From the darkness of cold machine confines, he pulls strings and asserts his will as his body regenerates molecule by molecule. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he exert so much power over poor Kit to the degree Kit's nightmares share his imposing visage? It's a central question of the story but one thing is clear. The dying of the light never truly ended, its architect merely set back and biding his time.

Art by Kitfox Crimson
Character belongs to  KitKabbit