The red shadow still hung over the Blood Gate like a low moon that refused to leave. It turned ash into wine and fear into weather. The Night Castle breathed in long, even drafts, each exhale a colder wind sliding across the ribbed plain. Morning tried to happen and found itself edited.
They came in knots and ropes.
Carts rattled. Bare feet slapped grit. A procession of living things who had belonged to the three banners—cooks, smiths, washerwomen, water carriers, boys whose faces had not learned how to stop being round—shuffled beneath the Crimson Spires. A Darkblood Sentinel walked at their flank like a moving pillar; Bone Dogs drifted between bodies with the patient nosiness of creatures who had already decided where every ankle would break.
Selena stood on the inner yard's stair, barefoot on warm stone, hair a pale flood, smile small and courteous. Her eyes—those two decisive reds—moved over the crowd like a tailor measuring cloth she intended to cut. Lucas stood opposite, one palm resting on the wall. The castle hummed under his hand. It liked being touched.
"Inventory," he said.
Mirk and Var answered with ropes and practicality, their voices broken and eager. They split the column with the ease of men who no longer bothered to pretend they were not wolves. Work, wombs, feeder. The words were not spoken aloud. The ropes suggested them. People obeyed suggestion faster than orders when the ground itself nodded along.
The feeder line was shortest at first because men lie to their own terror. A woman with ash in her hair looked at it and then at the sky as if there might be a different sun she had forgotten to request. A boy tried to stand somewhere that wasn't a line and found a Bone Dog's jaw placed gently around his ankle, as persuasive as grammar.
The system slid into Lucas's vision without asking permission.
[Ding!]
[Module Unlocked — Feeder Pool.]
[Purpose: Sustain Sovereign (Selena Draculea) through structured offering.]
[Economies: +Sovereign Resonance, +Vile Spark, Cruelty Index scaling, Dread Dividend multiplier near public rites.]
[Risk: mutation acceleration; barracks instability; rumor velocity ↑.]
Selena glanced across the yard and smiled wider, as if the text had complimented her dress. "At last," she said softly. "We stop pretending bread is enough."
Lucas raised his hand. The yard quieted because air prefers obedience.
"Listen," he said, and his voice laid a blade-flat path through noise. "You are not citizens. You are uses. Work, carry, count, breed, or feed. Choose correctly and breathe longer."
A murmur—the kind the throat makes when hope remembers it has no spine—ran through the column and died against the Dread the gate wore like a perfume. The priest they had captured three days ago stood with wrists bound and tried to find a prayer small enough to fit between his teeth. He failed nicely.
"Mark them," Lucas added. "We won't argue names."
Ghouls brought bowls of altar-paint—thick, red, warm though no fire sat beneath it. Mirk dipped a finger and drew a crescent on the collarbones of any chosen for the feeder line. The paint pulsed once under skin, as if pleased to be official. Var held a slate and scraped tallies—work, womb, feed—lines that meant rations and hours and which door would open in the morning.
Selena stepped down from the stair and passed through the new feeders like a rumor with better posture. Her fingers trailed briefly along shoulders, jaws, brows. One man flinched hard enough to trip his own breath.
She stopped and tipped his chin with a nail. "You'll be fine," she said with the gentle mockery of a good liar. "Or you won't. Both outcomes are useful."
Her fang made a neat signature at the corner of his throat. He gasped. The Command Link purred.
[Ding!]
[Feeder sampling: Sovereign Resonance +5%.]
[Vile Spark harvested: +9.]
[Compliance ripple: adjacent feeders panic → obedience (+).]
"Efficient," Selena murmured, tongue clearing a red line from her lip. "Bring the first two at dusk."
"Two at dawn," Lucas said, "two at dusk. Cycle stable bodies. If one fails the rope, the rope eats time, not blood."
The feeders were moved to a long, low barracks near the Slave Grave—stone, clean, full of air that smelled faintly of old iron and instruction. They did not speak much as the door shut. The door did not slam. It closed the way a lid closes when it has understood its job.
Dusk wore the Red Gallery like a crown.
Banners leaned. Lanterns made the stone hungry. The long table swallowed reflections. Selena sat upon it, one leg drawn up, her heel pressed lightly into polished black. She looked like something the room had drawn to explain itself.
Mirk dragged in a girl with shorn hair and a seam of livid sunburn along her nose. Var brought an older man still wearing the shadow of importance in his shoulders. They were made to kneel.
Selena slid off the table, a slow, rehearsed uncoiling. She knelt in front of the girl and held the young face in both hands. "What did they promise you?" she asked softly. "Fire? Food? Names that lasted?" She smiled as the girl's mouth worked and found nothing. "I promise a dream," Selena said, and then gave her a pain that only minds with hope can name.
Her teeth sank. Blood answered. The girl's fingers fluttered against Selena's wrist, then opened like a flower deciding light was not an argument. The banners above shifted their threads. The system sang through Lucas's skull in tidy numbers.
[Ding!]
[Feeder yield: +12% Sovereign Level progression.]
[Vile Spark +18.]
[Mutation: Cruelty Index bias deepens—publicity increases dividend.]
Selena let the girl fall sideways, smoothed her hair with an absent hand, and turned to the older man. "You look like someone who spoke at people for a living."
He spat where her foot had been, narrowly missing grace. "You'll drain me dry or you won't," he rasped. "I keep my spine."
"Spines are valuable," Selena said. "Hold onto yours. You drip better that way."
Lucas lifted a finger. "Leave him."
The room glanced at him—Selena's eyes bright with interest; ghouls still as furniture. "Why?" she asked, not criticizing, sampling.
"He will be an example," Lucas said. "Tomorrow he hangs over the moat. The castle drinks his spine until it forgets how to stand."
The man's defiance cracked around the edges. The feeders in the passage heard, and their breathing became a metronome the castle appreciated.
[Ding!]
[Fear Propagation: Feeder barracks compliance ↑. Next cycle yield ×1.2.]
[Side effect: particularized despair → Abyssal Tithe chance (minor).]
Selena laughed, low and delighted. "You ration terror with polite accounting."
"I ration everything," Lucas said.
The yard learned the new hour.
"Feeding," a ghoul's voice announced at dawn, the syllables hard as hooks.
Two were taken. Their feet made small noises that pretended to be sand. Selena received them on the steps of the altar chamber this time, more ceremony, less comfort. She preferred variety the way predators prefer angles. One feeder cried; the other sang something that might have been a child's rhyme if it hadn't known the stone would listen.
[Ding!]
[Daily Feeder Pool status: 28/32 viable.
— Resonance +41% / 24h.
— Vile Spark +74 / 24h.
— Morale coupling: undead + while feeders vocalize (mutation bias).]
By noon, a third had asked to be chosen out of turn. Not courage—a kind of arithmetic. Pain becomes bargain when the future refuses to speak your language. Selena stroked the woman's cheek, kissed her brow with theatrical tenderness, and drank until the system hummed a pleasant interval.
At dusk, the man from the gallery hung over the moat, a rope through his bound elbows, ankles weighted with iron. His blood fell in lazy red chains into the black water. Bone Dogs lapped; the castle smelled improved.
Children with bone bows filed by on their way to the spires, their eyes careful and wide and not empty. One boy paused a heartbeat longer than the others and memorized the speed of drops. Crescent Sight would use that later.
The feeder barracks developed habits. Some prayed. Some tidied. Some tried to teach children to sleep while the wrong music filled their ears. One woman began humming in a low, steady pitch when the door opened at dawn; by the third day, others matched her note. The castle liked that. The note made numbers taste richer.
[Ding!]
[Feeder sub-trait acquired: Devout.]
[Effect: yield ↑ ×1.4; risk of barracks contagion (lunacy) ↑.]
[Flag: Public Rite threshold unlocked — spectacle modifier available at plazas, gates.]
Selena raised an eyebrow at the last line. "We can throw festivals now," she said, amused.
"Keep them small," Lucas replied. "Spectacle spends silence."
Her smile sharpened. "And we owe silence."
They both felt it: the clean-water thread drifting closer through the air—Judicant. The Silence Ritual still muffled the castle's new habits, but the world had ears in places even stone could not bribe.
Lucas turned the yard into a machine.
Work-lines were sent to the kennels and pits. Hammers began speaking in the Resonant Forge's idiom. Mothers and the merely fertile were cataloged and moved to the lower cells where routine would teach bodies mathematics. The feeders were taught to stand in pairs, to tilt their heads at the same angle, to breathe on a count. Ghouls corrected with knuckles and rope. Bone Dogs patrolled like punctuation that would not apologize.
The priest watched and learned to be empty. He was given a slate and ordered to record names. He did it perfectly. When Selena asked why he did not sabotage columns, he answered without drama: "Because you will do worse to the children." She kissed his forehead for accuracy and told him to continue.
Rumor moved across the waste like weather made of mouths. Villages knelt before the thought of a queen who drank men the way drought drinks hope. Others packed and fled and discovered that retreat costs twice.
[Ding!]
[Title Adjusted: Lord of the Night Crypt → Master of the Feeder Chain.]
[Civilian fear radius doubled. Conversion time −. Audit probability ↑.]
Selena squeezed Lucas's fingers without looking at him. "It's flattering when the world updates your name for you."
"It's a receipt," he said.
On the fourth evening, a feeder broke in a new way. Not tears. Not prayer. Laughter. Quiet, breathy, wrong. She giggled as Selena's mouth closed, giggled through the shudder, giggled when the fangs withdrew and the blood dried and her hands trembled from lack. The sound scraped the banners. The gallery's lanterns leaned.
The system did not scold.
[Ding!]
[Aberrant adaptation logged: Joy Response.]
[Effect: Vile Spark yield anomalous (+), Sovereign drain ↓ during session.
Side effect: adjacent feeders' dreams distort → Red Gallery resonance ↑.]
Selena wiped her lip and considered the girl like a rare fruit. "You are going to make the spires sing," she said, almost affectionate.
Lucas made a small adjustment to the barracks guard schedule. Mirk would sleep inside their door now. Var would hum the metronome note on the hour. He didn't explain the reasons to himself. He didn't need to. The castle liked being treated as a tool.
Feeding became the day's commas. Work and drag and build and string and drill—then two throats. Then again at dusk. The Blood Moon Archers [Rare] learned to draw without moving their shoulders, to let the Bloodthread teach their fingers to be quiet. The dogs grew even more patient. The Sentinels rose and slept like pride carved from funerals.
Selena bloomed.
Each session etched a new geometry into her: an edge honed invisible; a step that made stone rehearse being floor; a light in her eyes that turned red into doctrine. She fed like an artisan, like a mathematician, like a queen showing mercy to a law she had written herself.
Once, in the quiet between feeders, she looked at Lucas over the lip of the bowl where the Night Core had promised futures. "You should taste it," she whispered. "Not blood. Power. It's sweeter when stolen slowly."
"I prefer it distilled," Lucas said. "Numbers. Walls. Arrows that obey humbler physics."
She laughed, truly amused. "Then let me be your hunger."
He did not answer because the castle answered for him: the runnels pulsed, content.
Outside the walls, the ridge edged closer in small brave pieces. Scouts kept making the mistake of being made of knees. The Red Eclipse thinned and thickened according to need. Somewhere far off, the clean-water scent hiccupped and changed direction. The Judicant was thinking, which meant it would arrive with papers and knives and a temper.
[Ding!]
[External Vector—Judicant proximity ↑.
Silence: 8h.
Note: "Public rites degrade cover; adjust spectacle."]
Lucas closed his hand around the warning until it stopped being a warning and became a line on a map. "No plaza shows," he said. "All rites inside. We keep the scream's shape, not its echo."
Selena's mouth tilted. "As you wish, my King. Private cruelty is a more flattering mirror."
By the seventh dawn, the Feeder Pool stabilized at a number the castle and the ropes both liked. The barracks learned to breathe in unison. The ghouls learned which wrists bruise prettiest. The dogs learned which ankles made the best music against stone. Children in the spires learned to ignore everything.
The procession became a ritual. Two in. Two out. The girl who laughed found that her laughter made the hour arrive sooner. The others hated her for it and then envied her and then forgot how to do either. The priest kept his slate neat and did not tremble unless ordered.
[Ding!]
[Feeder Pool: stable (36).
— Daily output: +52% Resonance, +96 Vile Spark, undead morale coupling locked.
— Mutation progress: accelerated.
— Audit probability: 57%.]
Selena finished a feeding and wiped her lip on the back of her hand, eyes bright, voice soft enough that the banners pretended not to lean closer. "They are ours now," she said. "Not as citizens. As instruments."
Lucas looked past her, past the yard, through the wall that had agreed to be honest to him alone, into the country where rumor watered fields better than rain. He placed new corridors in his head and made sure each ended in a mouth.
"They were always instruments," he said. "We've tuned them."
He turned from the Red Gallery. The castle breathed, the spires watched, the feeders slept badly and woke on time. Somewhere in the distance, someone asked what the word mercy meant anymore and no one agreed. A clean thread of something that thought it was law slid nearer.
Selena followed him, laughter like velvet on a blade.
"Next," she asked lightly, "shall we teach them to sing?"