In the Empire of Valdris, there exist three absolute truths: the dead never return, magic cannot be stolen, and the Cursed Bloodlines were eradicated four centuries ago.*
*I have just discovered that all three are lies.*
This thought crossed Kain Vorthak's mind as pain dragged him from the depths of a nightmare that smelled of iron and ash. Above him, the three moons filtered their tricolored light through the Academy's enchanted stained glass—Luna Maior silver as angel's tears, Luna Minor copper as dried blood, and the mysterious Luna Mysticus whose violet glow showed itself only once a year.
Tonight, all three formed a cursed trinity in Valdris's sky.
*Black Convergence*, Mother Agatha would have whispered before making the sign three times. *The night when the dead speak to the living.*
His sheets clung to his skin like a shroud soaked in icy sweat—that particular perspiration that carried the scent of heated metal and oblivion. In his dreams, voices had called him again by that forbidden name, the one that made historians pale and priests tremble.
*Kaelen.*
The cracked mirror—a relic from the old dormitory, forged from the black glass of the Cursed Mountains before they were razed—reflected back a sixteen-year-old boy with hair black as prophecy's ink. His eyes were of such intense green that professors instinctively looked away, as if they glimpsed something there that shouldn't exist. His pale skin bore that sickly translucency of those who absorb light instead of reflecting it, a troubling detail noticed only by those who truly knew how to look.
*Three months and seventeen days*, he counted mechanically, this obsessive precision being one of the few comforts left to him. Three months since his arrival at the Imperial Academy of High Magic, jewel of crystal and pride, planted in the heart of Aethermoor the Golden. Three months watching his classmates draw from the Primordial Flux that irrigated the Empire through the twelve Resonance Towers, transform air into dancing braziers, summon familiars with wings woven from pure light, make magic sing between their fingers as if it were breathing.
He couldn't even light a candle without it immediately extinguishing, as if sucked into a void he carried within himself.
*"It's not normal,"* Sarah Blackwood whispered yesterday to her confidante, believing he couldn't hear. *"No one is so... empty. It's like he absorbs magic instead of creating it. Like he's... hungry."*
If only she knew she had just diagnosed the impossible: a Cursed Bloodline gift that hadn't existed since the Great Purge, when the Empire had drowned in blood and sacred flames everything that bore the curse of the Hungry Void.
Three quick knocks at his door, followed by two longer ones, then a one-second silence before a final isolated knock. Elena's code—but modified. Signal of imminent danger.
The door opened before he could respond.
"The three moons are in Convergence," said Elena Ravencrest as she slipped into his room, and her voice carried that prophetic gravity he didn't know she possessed. "That's why you bled in your dreams tonight."
*Bled?* Kain instinctively brought his hand to his nose, and his fingers came back stained with a dark liquid that wasn't quite blood—something denser, more... ancient.
Elena Ravencrest moved with that feline grace that made her one of the most admired students in their year, but this morning, her auburn hair seemed to capture and imprison moonlight instead of reflecting it. Her blue eyes—ordinarily clear as a summer sky—now held troubling depths, as if they had seen things no sixteen-year-old girl should know.
"How do you know about the moons?" asked Kain, his voice hoarser than he would have liked. "And how do you know that I..."
"You have that smell," she said, closing the door with a gesture that discreetly activated an entire network of runic locks—enchantments far too sophisticated for a first-year student. "Like copper heated in millennial blood. It happens every time *He* tries to pierce the veil between your souls."
The world seemed to stop turning. Kain stared at her, frozen to the bone.
"I never told you his name."
The silence that followed was more eloquent than a confession. Elena looked away—the first lie by omission he'd seen her commit since their meeting, and it struck him like a physical betrayal.
"The incidents are getting worse," she continued in a carefully controlled voice, like someone reciting a medical report. "Thomas, Marcus, Sarah, Leo... they didn't just faint, Kain. Their Essence Cores were completely drained, left drier than summer wells. In the forbidden archives of the Third Sub-Level, it's called a *Vampiric Drain of Dark Bloodline*."
*Vorthak Bloodline. Phase Two Awakening. Transduction through emotional trauma. The Awakening of the Devourer.*
The words resonated in his head with the clinical precision of a medical diagnosis, spoken by a voice that wasn't his own—deeper, more ancient, heavy with centuries of repressed anger.
"You think it's me?" His voice seemed distant, foreign.
Elena finally looked at him, and what he saw in her eyes struck him like a blade of pure ice. Not fear, but pity. And worse still... resignation.
"I think you're becoming something this world has forgotten how to destroy. And I think *He* is starting to regain control of your common Bloodline."
The brutal frankness of her response hit him like a blade of pure ice.
"Stay in your room today," Elena continued, pulling from her robe a tarnished silver pendant engraved with symbols that seemed to writhe under his gaze, making his eyes and stomach ache. "Don't go near Professor Thorne under any circumstances. He's part of the Inner Circle, and if he ever discovers that your Awakening has begun..."
"What circle? What are you talking about?"
"Later." She handed him the jewelry with an urgency that made him shiver. "Wear this against your skin. It's a Fourth Generation Suppressor—it should delay the *Soul Fracture* by a few days at most."
Before he could ask what a Soul Fracture was and why she was speaking in days rather than years, she was already gone, leaving him alone with the jewelry that vibrated against his palm and the terrifying certainty that Elena Ravencrest knew far too much about things that officially no longer existed.
---
Of course, he didn't follow her advice.
He had never been good at obedience, and sixteen years of frustration couldn't be dispelled by a simple warning, even coming from her.
At noon, gnawed by a hunger that wasn't merely physical and a curiosity that bordered on self-destruction, Kain went down to the Great Refectory. The place buzzed with life and magic—animated conversations punctuated by ritual demonstrations of power: cutlery levitating by drawing directly from the Primordial Flux, food transmuted into exotic dishes by pure whim, spectacular light spells to impress new conquests.
A whole display of talents he could never equal.
He settled at his usual table near the enchanted windows that offered a real-time view of the Academy's geometric gardens, hoping that the familiarity of the place would calm this growing sensation of disconnection from the world around him.
He was wrong.
"Well, look what the sewers have spat out today."
*Shit.*
Darius Blackthorn approached with that born-predator gait he had inherited from his father, Grand Inquisitor of the Goldmane Bloodline. Tall, blond, arrogant—the perfect archetype of the young Sacred Bloodline noble who had confused divine privilege with personal merit since his first breath.
"I heard a *fascinating* rumor, Vorthak," said Darius, sitting down without invitation, his glacier-blue eyes shining with that calculated malevolence he cultivated like an art. "It seems your little classmates mysteriously collapse after looking at you a little too long. As if you were... contagious."
Around them, conversations fell silent in concentric waves. Nothing attracted attention like the smell of blood in water, and Darius Blackthorn was a born shark who knew exactly when to strike.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course not." Darius's smile revealed perfect teeth that bore the discreet mark of his Bloodline—two canines slightly more pointed than normal, a vestige of the era when Goldmanes physically hunted their prey. "How could you understand? You're so... *empty*. So deliciously *hollow*."
With a casual gesture that made his family ring engraved with a roaring lion sparkle, he transformed Kain's water glass into an ice sculpture representing a skull with gaping sockets that wept frozen tears of blood. The level of detail was obscene—one could see every crack in the bone, every crystallized drop of blood.
A few rounds of applause erupted from neighboring tables, accompanied by laughter that rang too loudly.
"Tell me, Vorthak," Darius continued, leaning toward him until Kain could smell the aura of pure power emanating from his Sacred Bloodline—a golden warmth that hurt to breathe, "what's it like being the only failure in the entire Academy? The only one incapable of the most pathetic spell? The only... *defective* one?"
Something moved in Kain's chest. A dark hunger, almost alive, that awakened purring with pleasure as it recognized the golden food source pulsing before it like an exposed heart.
*So delicious*, whispered Kaelen with the greed of a man dying of thirst before a crystal spring. *A pure Sacred Bloodline, never corrupted... It's been four centuries since I've savored one. Take it, my heir. Take what is rightfully ours.*
For the first time in his life, Kain *saw*—truly saw—the golden aura that surrounded Darius like a second skin. It pulsed with the rhythm of his arrogance and inherited power, dense with centuries of privileges and sacred blood.
And it seemed... appetizing.
"You trying to scare me?" Darius raised his hand, beginning to channel a public humiliation spell that would cover Kain with putrid magical mud in front of the entire Academy. "*Pathe-*"
But the moment the Primordial Flux's energy began to concentrate in his palm, Kain reached toward it.
It wasn't conscious. It was like breathing, like heartbeating—a Bloodline reflex so natural that he wondered with troubling detachment why he had never thought of it before.
Darius's golden aura began to swirl, drawn toward Kain like iron filings to a hungry magnet. The young noble's eyes widened, his face draining of all color and arrogance as he felt his life force being sucked out of his body in an invisible but inexorable current.
"What are you... what are you *doing* to me?" His voice had lost all superiority, replaced by a primal terror that was pleasant to hear. "My reserves... you're draining my reserves! It's impossible! It's *forbidden*!"
Kain didn't respond. He couldn't. He was too busy *savoring* this sensation of fullness that was invading him for the first time in his miserable life, this impression of finally being complete after sixteen years of emptiness and constant lack.
*Yessss*, hissed Kaelen with orgasmic ecstasy. *Finally! Finally, you understand the pleasure of the hunt! Feel how it flows into you, this golden power... Drink to the last drop!*
Darius collapsed on the table like a puppet with cut strings, his breathing becoming ragged and painful. For a few terrifying seconds, his veins appeared in relief under his skin, forming complex and geometric patterns—the characteristic marks of a Vampiric Drain of Dark Bloodline, which no student should have recognized but which all instinctively identified.
The silence that fell over the Great Refectory was more than simple stupor. It was sacred terror, what one feels before something that shouldn't exist, that *cannot* exist according to all divine and human laws.
Four hundred pairs of eyes stared at Kain with a mixture of fascination and pure terror, for all recognized the signs of magic that had officially ceased to exist since the Great Purge.
And he... he was smiling with a smile that was no longer entirely his own, his green eyes now shining with a red glow that didn't come from the moons' light.
"Call a healer!" someone finally shouted, breaking the spell. "And warn the Purifiers! Warn the Inquisition!"
In the chaos that followed—overturned chairs, hysterical cries, emergency communication spells shooting toward the administrative towers—Kain rose with a predatory grace he didn't know he possessed. His legs carried him differently now, as if his body had found a balance that had always been missing. His senses perceived every terrified heartbeat around him, every panicked breath, every drop of icy sweat.
He had become what he was destined to be since birth.
A predator.
*Phase Three approaches faster than expected*, murmured Kaelen with paternal jubilation. *The public incident accelerates everything. Soon, we will be one, my young heir. Soon, you will understand why I waited four centuries to be reborn in you.*
---
He found her in her room, livid as the dead, surrounded by grimoires whose titles were written in the First Language—that of before the Empire, before the current gods, the one no first-year student should have been able to decipher without going mad.
"How long?" asked Elena without looking up from the *Codex Sanguinarius* open before her, its yellowed pages covered with illustrations that moved slightly in the trembling candlelight.
"How long for what?"
"Before the complete Soul Fracture." She finally turned her face toward him, and Kain had the impression of looking into an abyss. "Before Kaelen takes definitive control and Kain Vorthak ceases to exist."
Kain's blood froze in his veins. "What are you talking about?"
This time, she really looked at him, and what he saw in her blue eyes chilled him to the soul. Not fear—Elena Ravencrest feared nothing. Pity, yes. But above all... guilt. A guilt so deep it seemed to be eating her from the inside.
"My full name is Elena Cassandra Ravencrest," she said in a voice that trembled despite her efforts to control it. "Last awakened heir of the Divination Bloodline, keeper of the Gift of Prophecy that predicted the fall of three empires. And in all the visions I've had of your future since we met..."
She paused, as if the words were scraping her throat.
"There are only two where you remain yourself. Only two out of hundreds of possible futures."
She opened the grimoire to a page marked with a blood-red bookmark. The illustration took his breath away—the man on the page could have been his twin, with that same cruel smile that transformed an angelic face into a demonic mask, those same green eyes that now shone with a blood-red glow.
"Kaelen Vorthak wasn't just a vampire mage, Kain." Her voice had become a whisper. "He was the Emperor of the Hungry Void, the one who drained three entire continents of their life essence before being stopped by the alliance of all Sacred Bloodlines. When they executed him four centuries ago..."
She turned the page, revealing a complex diagram that showed spiritual links between generations—lines of force connecting the dead to the living, like a cosmic spider web.
"They thought it was over. But Dark Bloodlines never truly die. They wait. They find a genetically and spiritually compatible descendant. And they are reborn, stronger than before."
*No*, thought Kain, but even he was no longer sure who was really thinking in his head. *Not they. He. He waited. He chose me. He shaped me.*
"I'm not him," he said aloud, but the words rang false even to his ears, like a lie he told himself to sleep.
Elena closed the grimoire with a sharp snap that resonated like a death knell.
"For now, no. But every time you use your powers, every time you feed on life energy, he becomes stronger and more present. His personality will gradually crush yours until..."
Heavy footsteps suddenly resonated in the corridor, accompanied by orders shouted in the formal language of the Inquisition and the characteristic clinking of blessed runic armor. The sound all students dreaded above all else.
"The Circle of Twelve," whispered Elena, becoming even paler, if that was possible. "Someone told them about your Awakening. Probably Thorne—he was at the refectory."
She headed toward the window and opened it wide with a swift gesture, revealing a three-story drop to the Academy gardens. The night wind rushed into the room, bringing scents of damp earth and ancient magic.
"You have to leave. Now. If they capture you before you learn to control your powers..."
"Come with me."
"No." Her voice was firm, final, and tinged with a sadness that seemed to carry the weight of unfulfilled prophecies. "My Bloodline binds me to this place through blood oaths. And besides... someone has to delay them long enough for you to escape."
Kain hesitated on the window ledge, the bag of ancient grimoires clutched against his chest. In the distance, he could see the three moons beginning their separation dance in the morning sky, their combined glow gradually weakening.
"Elena..." He searched for words, aware that anything he said would sound insufficient. "Why are you helping me? You know what I might become. You've seen the visions. You know the odds are against me."
She smiled at him then, and for the first time since he'd known her, this smile was tinged with fragile but authentic hope.
"Because in one of the two visions where you remain yourself, you don't just become a hero, Kain. You become something this world has never seen: an Emperor of the Void who chooses to save instead of destroy. A monster who refuses his nature to protect those he loves."
The knocks at the door interrupted her—methodical knocks of iron-shod boots that carried the divine authority of the Inquisition.
"And in the other vision?" he insisted, aware that this might be the last time he saw her.
Elena's smile was tinged with infinite melancholy, and when she spoke, her voice carried the echo of prophecies that broke the hearts of those who received them.
"In the other, you save me from a fate worse than death. You set me free from a prison I had forged myself. And that..." She briefly touched his cheek, a gesture so tender it took his breath away. "That's worth all the risks in the world."
He jumped.
The landing should have pulverized his bones and spread his brains on the garden pavements, but he landed and rolled with supernatural grace—the heritage of his Bloodline finally Awakening—and got up unharmed. As he moved away toward the Academy gates under the dying light of the Black Convergence, a single thought occupied his troubled mind.
Elena Ravencrest, last heir of a Divination Bloodline, had known exactly who he was from the very first day. She had seen his future in the smallest details, knew every possible branch of his destiny.
The question that haunted him now was terrifying and straightforward: which of the two possible futures was she orchestrating? The one where he became a savior... or the one where he saved her?
And in his head, Kaelen laughed softly, like a father infinitely proud to see his son take his first steps toward a destiny that would transform the Empire forever.
*Whether he chooses to save it or destroy it.*
It didn't matter, ultimately. The essential thing was that he was finally walking toward what he was destined to become.
A god or a demon.
But never again a failure.