The council ended beneath the weight of silence. When the last decree was spoken and the nobles withdrew, Carmila rose without a word and vanished through a side passage. She didn't look back—but she didn't need to.
I followed.
The hidden corridors of the palace were older than the kingdom itself—carved before the age of the nightborn, before even the first queens of Noctharyn. Cold air pressed close, humming faintly with restrained magic.
Carmila waited at the end beside a great iron door carved with runes that pulsed like veins beneath skin.
"You came," she said quietly.
"I said I would."
"This is forbidden to most," she warned. "But you need to see it. To understand why our bloodlines are cursed to remember."
She pressed her palm against the sigil. The runes flared crimson, and the door unlatched with a sigh, exhaling centuries of dust and secrecy.
Beyond, a stairway spiraled downward into darkness.
The deeper we went, the colder it became. The air thickened with the metallic scent of old blood and forgotten prayers. Walls were carved with stories—wars, oaths, and coronations etched in silver relief.
At last, the stairway opened into a vast circular chamber. At its center stood a monolith of crystal black as frozen night, thrumming with a faint red pulse.
"The Blood Archive," Carmila said softly. "Every memory of our kind is bound here. It holds the vitae of every ruler since the first dawn of shadow."
She approached the monolith. As she neared, the pulse brightened—slow, deliberate, alive.
I followed, though each step felt heavier. The closer I came, the louder the whisper in my veins grew.
It's awake.
The words weren't Carmila's—they came from within. The seal beneath my skin, long silent, stirred.
Not now. Not here.
I clenched my fists, but the whisper swelled—an ocean roaring behind my heartbeat. The monolith's glow turned fever-bright, its hum deepening until the air itself seemed to quake.
Carmila turned, startled. "Adrian—what's happening?"
I tried to speak, but my voice fractured under the pressure of something vast rising inside me.
Do you feel it, vessel?
The voice—no, the presence—wasn't sound. It was thought, color, memory, hunger.
My knees nearly buckled. "Carmila—step back."
"Adrian—"
"Now!"
She stumbled away just as the ground trembled. A deep rumble shook the chamber, cracks spidering through the marble like lightning frozen mid-strike.
Outside, distant and muffled, came the groan of the world itself. Towers shuddered. I felt it through the magic of the place—through the bloodlines tied to this Archive. The continent trembled.
The monolith blazed red. Shadows bled from its edges like liquid night, drawn toward me. The seal beneath my chest burned white-hot, veins of light searing across my skin.
Caged so long, the voice whispered, vast and ancient, every syllable vibrating through the bones of the world. You bring me to their cradle. You let me taste their blood again.
I fell to one knee. Images poured through me—worlds shattering, stars bleeding out into the void, oceans of ash devouring creation itself. Every heartbeat was another universe dying.
It was too much. Too vast. Too infinite.
Carmila's voice barely reached me. "Adrian! What is this?"
I forced my gaze up. She stood near the edge of the light, hair whipping in the wind that wasn't wind at all. The look in her eyes was half fear, half heartbreak.
She couldn't see it—the thing behind the light.
The seal pulsed again, and for one terrible instant I saw what it was holding back: a shape beyond shape, a presence older than matter. A wound in existence.
A being whose blood was the ruin of galaxies.
And it was awake.
I gritted my teeth, forcing the words through the pain. "Carmila—don't come closer. Whatever this is—it's not meant to be seen."
The monolith's glow dimmed suddenly, as if recoiling. The tremors subsided, leaving only silence and the metallic scent of power.
Then—darkness.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the cold marble floor. Carmila was kneeling beside me, pale, her hands trembling as she tried to steady me.
"What… happened?" she whispered.
I could still hear it—the echo, faint but eternal. A whisper threading through every drop of blood in my veins.
"Nothing," I lied. My voice was hoarse. "The Archive reacted to something inside me. It's over now."
But even as I said it, I could feel the seal's pulse—slow, deliberate, like something vast and patient waiting just beneath my heart.
It wasn't over.
Carmila searched my face. "That power… it wasn't human."
"No," I said quietly. "It wasn't."
I rose unsteadily, glancing once more at the monolith. The cracks that had formed across its surface were already closing—but faint streaks of white light still lingered where my blood had touched it.
Carmila looked at me, her voice barely a whisper. "Adrian… what did you feel?"
I met her gaze, the truth burning behind my eyes.
"Something that shouldn't exist," I said. "And it's inside me."
She didn't speak again. The silence between us was heavier than stone.
Far above, thunder rolled—not from the sky, but from the ground, as if the continent itself remembered the echo of that ancient presence.
And deep within me, the sealed being whispered once more—so faint it might have been imagined:
You can't hold me forever.