Chapter 1 Part 4
She said her name like it still meant something.
"Vireya. Of the Primeclade."
The words fell with the weight of a confession, a claim, a prophecy. Not a whisper—an invocation. Kael felt his skin react before his mind could catch up. That name shouldn't exist. Not outside restricted vaults and myth-tagged archives.
He stared at her—this strange, pale being covered in dust and ceremonial silk, eyes glowing with memory and something too old to be called hunger. Her bite still burned in his neck, but the deeper burn was spreading—threading its way down his spine in cold fire.
He reached up, fingers trembling, and touched the nape of his neck.
The glyph was still there. Branded into him.
His HUD tried to blink back to life—no luck. His wrist-mod twitched. Static flickered behind his eyes, not just digital but psychic. He didn't know how he knew that word fit. It just did. He'd touched something ancient, and now it was in him.
"You marked me," he rasped.
"No," she said quietly, studying him. "I fed."
"And that was supposed to be…what? Casual?"
She ignored the sarcasm. "The glyph responded to your blood. That's what activated the rite."
"Which rite?"
"The bond."
Kael's laugh came out choked. "I didn't agree to anything."
"That's not how old contracts work."
Her tone wasn't cruel. It was factual. Like telling someone fire burned or rain fell. She stepped back a half-pace, folding her arms behind her back, watching him with an unreadable expression. Now that the panic of her awakening had passed, she was regal again—graceful, poised, horrifying.
Kael pushed himself upright against the wall. His head throbbed. The glyph on his spine itched, but not like skin healing. Like it wanted something.
"What does this bond do?" he asked. "Tell me straight."
"It links us. Temporarily."
"Define 'temporary' in vampire years."
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "If it stabilizes, it will last until one of us is destroyed."
Kael froze.
He didn't joke this time.
"You mean—if you die, I die?"
"No," she said. "Not exactly. If I die, the mark may collapse into feedback. You'd survive. You wouldn't be the same."
He took a shaky breath. "And if I die?"
She hesitated.
"That would be… worse. For both of us."
That silence stretched. Kael's heart thudded against his ribs. The vault chamber was flashing red now—crimson pulses that made the shadows twitch. The alarms weren't just sound—they were psychic bursts, rippling through the architecture like sonar.
"They'll be here soon," she said, still calm.
"The Blood Inquisitors?" Kael asked.
Vireya nodded. "Or worse. If I'm alive, the Ember Clade will send someone personal."
Kael swore under his breath. "So what now? We run?"
"No. We vanish."
"That's poetic. Not helpful."
Vireya walked past him, brushing the vault's glyph-engraved wall with her fingertips. The contact made the wall respond—sections shifted slightly, rotating to reveal an ancient service corridor hidden behind folding stone.
"I buried a path beneath the crypt," she said. "Before they sealed me."
Kael followed her into the narrow corridor, too shocked to argue. The air changed again—wetter now, tinged with mildew and scorched ozone. Their footsteps echoed strangely. The hall bent downward at impossible angles, like it had been bored into the world by something with no concern for physics.
"What were you?" he asked finally.
"Once?" she said. "I was a queen."
"Noctis-V doesn't have queens."
"It did. Before the Protocol. Before the Clades built their towers and made rules from corpses."
"And now?"
She didn't answer.
They emerged into an old under-platform—metal scaffolding beneath a decommissioned rail tunnel. The walls were covered in vein-root—vampire-forged biomass that once served as both communication line and memory network. It pulsed faintly, still alive, still connected to something.
Kael leaned against a rusted pillar, trying to steady his breathing.
His reflection in the shard-glass window nearby startled him. His eyes were darker. Not color—depth. Something behind them shimmered. His skin had taken on a pallor beneath the sweat and grime. The glyph down his back flared like a brand.
"What is it doing to me?" he asked. "Tell me the truth."
"The bond is incompatible," Vireya said. "You're not genetically prepared for Primeclade resonance. You don't have the sigil-laced marrow. The glyph is rewriting your nervous system to compensate."
"Compensate for what?"
"For being too human."
He stared at her, jaw tightening. "You saying I'm turning into one of you?"
"No. You'll never be one of us." Her voice was too gentle. "You'll be something else. If it completes."
"And if it doesn't?"
"You'll die."
Kael didn't speak for a long moment.
He sat down hard on a crate and buried his face in his hands. "I had a simple job," he muttered. "Crack a vault, pull a file, sell the data. Now I'm... infected with legacy magic, bonded to a forgotten royal, hunted by Protocol enforcers, and mutating into a cryptid."
Vireya sat across from him, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap like a statue.
"You could still run," she said. "Abandon me."
Kael looked up. "Would it break the bond?"
"No."
"Then there's no point."
She tilted her head. "There is always a point."
He didn't answer.
Instead, he pulled out a shard of old mirror and studied his own eyes again.
The reflection wasn't shifting anymore.
It was watching.