The crypt beneath San Miniato al Monte was silent, save for the low hiss of flame and the slow drip of wax onto cracked marble. Candles burned in perfect lines, their light greenish and wrong, casting flickering shadows across the stone faces of ancient saints.
He stood at the center, cloaked in crimson and black, mask removed.
Valtheran.
His skin was pale, stretched tight over high cheekbones, and his eyes—once human—were now the color of dying embers. Hair black, streaked with white like ash in coal. Around his throat hung a ring of thorns, carved from bone, each one engraved with a name long since lost to history.
He had forgotten his own name centuries ago.
But he remembered what mattered.
Blood. Truth. Silence.
He moved slowly to the altar, where a cracked book waited open. Its parchment pages bore no ink. Only blood. His blood. Pressed and whispered into the vellum across decades. A journal. A prophecy. A ledger of everything the world had chosen to forget.
And tonight, he would begin writing the final page.
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"They called us heretics."
His voice echoed through the crypt, soft but sharp.
Around him, kneeling in rows, were ten masked figures—his Flamebearers, the innermost circle of the Crimson Faith. None spoke. None moved.
"They buried the truth beneath marble and gold. They wove a Veil over the wound and told the world it was healed."
He stepped down from the altar.
"They built their palaces atop sacred bones and named their forgetfulness civilization. But we remember. We are what they could not kill."
He stopped before the flame.
"And now, the last lock breaks."
He turned to the figure at the edge of the crypt—a tall, slender man with a carved censer in one hand.
"She has awakened."
"Yes, Father," the man replied. "The girl. Veilborn."
"Catalyst," Valtheran corrected. "She was not meant to live."
"She is protected."
Valtheran smiled.
"Then we take away her protection."
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That night, he walked alone through the tunnels beneath Florence.
These halls were older than any living soul. Older than the Council. Older than the Church.
Here, the Veil thinned. Here, his voice could call things that had no names.
He paused before a wall carved with hundreds of symbols—some bleeding, some shifting even in stillness.
He reached forward and touched the center.
The stone rippled like water.
And then it opened.
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The chamber was circular, filled with bones arranged in spirals—skulls stacked into towers, femurs laid into sigils, ribs curled into crowns. At the center sat a sarcophagus of black obsidian, sealed in molten gold.
Inside it slept a heart.
Not flesh.
Not beating.
But alive.
The Heart Below.
He approached, knelt, and pressed his brow to the seal.
"Soon," he whispered. "The blood will flow again."
He remembered the first time he had seen it.
He had been a priest then. A believer. A protector of the Old Flame.
He had walked the line between worlds not as a warrior—but as a servant. Until the Council exiled them. Until the pact was sealed. Until the Veil was cast like a curtain—and the gods were made myths.
He had tried to forget.
Tried to live among the ruins.
But the Heart never stopped calling.
Now, centuries later, he stood at the edge of war.
And he smiled.
"Let the girl burn bright," he murmured. "It will only make her ash more sacred."
He turned to one of the Flamebearers.
"Send the shadows to the Palazzo. Not to kill her—yet. To take something she cannot replace."
The masked servant bowed. "What shall we take?"
Valtheran's smile widened.
"Her faith."
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The scent of jasmine clung to the northern air.
It sickened him.
Valtheran watched the lights of Florence flicker from a spire high above the Arno, his cloak blending into the rooftops. He had no need to breathe, but he inhaled anyway, letting the city's lies fill his chest. The scent of candle wax, sweetened bread, and wine layered over a foundation of rot. The rot of stagnation. Of peace.
The world above had grown dull. The world below had been silenced. But no more.
Now the lines would blur again.
Now the world would remember.
"Take her faith," he whispered, voice laced with venom and music. "Take what steadies her hand. Then watch her unravel."
His Flamebearers had already fanned out across the sleeping city, cloaked in shadows that only the old blood could conjure. They would not touch Esmé—not yet. Not while she was still cocooned in her awakening. But he knew who kept her tethered to the light.
The glassmaker.
Her father.
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Matteo Loredan's house sat at the edge of the artisan quarter, nestled between a tanner's alley and an olive press. Modest, warm. The scent of hot metal always hung around it, clinging to wood and hair and memory.
Valtheran stepped into the forge without a sound.
No guards. No wards. No Veil protection. Only mortal barriers.
His fingers brushed over a cooling rod of glass, admiring its fragility.
He hated it.
He crushed it between his palms.
"Who's there?" called a voice from the workshop door.
The man entered with a cloth tucked in his belt, his eyes squinting in the firelight.
"Hello?" Matteo stepped forward, brow creased.
Valtheran said nothing. He let the silence answer.
The man paused. "You shouldn't be here—this is private—"
"Everything sacred," Valtheran said softly, "must be shattered before it can be reborn."
And then he moved.
Faster than thought.
His hand caught Matteo by the collar and slammed him against the wall. Glass shattered on the shelves, sparks dancing like frightened spirits.
But he didn't kill him.
He wanted pain.
Fear.
The kind that left scars deeper than wounds.
He reached into the man's chest—not physically, but spiritually—pressing his own dark blood against the fragile soul within.
"I leave you alive," he whispered. "So your daughter can watch you fall."
Then he dropped him.
Matteo collapsed to the floor, breath shallow, body shaking—but alive.
Broken, though.
Burned inside.
Behind Valtheran, a small mirror cracked.
He turned toward it.
A charm hung above it.
He tore it down.
He was gone before the moon moved.
No blood.
No signs.
Only a pulse of dread lingering in the glass.
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Back in the crypt, Valtheran knelt before the Heart once more.
"She will rise like fire," he said, "but fire must consume. And when the world turns to her for hope, she will already be ashes."
He smiled.
It was not cruel.
It was faithful.
Devotion in its purest form.
He dreamed again that night—if it could be called dreaming.
Visions whispered to him through blood rites and broken seals.
He saw Esmé standing over Luca's body, blade in hand, eyes hollowed by loss.
He saw the Heart Below awakening.
He saw the sky crack like glass, and the Veil tear down the middle with a scream.
Let her come, the voice of the old god said.
Let her bleed. Then she will understand.
He woke without breath, but full of certainty.
Tomorrow, he would take the next piece.
Tomorrow, he would begin the ritual.
But tonight, he had left a message.
Not written in words.
But carved in the silence of a father's eyes.