The sky fractured that night. A silver wound split the heavens, and from its edges, shadows slipped into the mortal realm. The air smelled of ash and iron, as though the world itself had bled.
Rhiannon stood upon the steps of the ruined shrine, her fingers grazing the cold stones. The wind carried whispers in a tongue she did not yet know but understood with every pulse of her heart.
Then she saw him. Across the ruin, eyes like molten gold met hers, piercing through the darkness. He moved as though the shadows bent around him, silent, purposeful, and impossibly familiar.
For a heartbeat, the world paused. Not recognition. Not memory. But a stirring deep within — that they had met before, and would again.
"The moon weeps tonight," she murmured, unaware that her voice carried farther than she imagined.
They say a vampire is born the moment blood is taken. But I was born the moment I gave mine.
This story is not of monsters. It's of memory, mercy, and the ruinous miracle of love.
- ALEXANDER VALERIUS.
Chapter 1 — The First Veil.
The night came like a sigh from the world itself — slow, heavy, and pregnant with secrets. Above the jagged cliffs of the Ashure Temple, the sky cracked as though the heavens had been struck by an invisible hammer. A silver fissure tore through the dark, a wound in the air, and from its edges, blood spilled like ink over the land.
The wind carried the scent of iron, of ash, of rain yet to fall, and Rhiannon drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders.
She had been told that the Veil between realms thinned on nights like this — a fact whispered in the temple halls and murmured by priests who rarely left the stone corridors.
But no words, no prophecy, could prepare her for the sight itself.
The blood moved with intent, curling along the cliffs and winding through the ruins below, testing boundaries she could not see.
Her fingers brushed the cold stone of the steps, worn smooth by generations of pilgrims who had climbed this sacred hill seeking guidance, power, or absolution. She could feel the echoes of their footsteps beneath her palms, a faint tremor in the stones as though they remembered every prayer, every desperate plea. And in that resonance, she thought she heard her own name, whispered softly by voices long dead.
The wind shifted suddenly, carrying a sound that was almost... music. Not song, not lament, but the screams of something stirring, something alive in the blood flowing. Rhiannon's breath caught in her throat. She was not alone.
From the fractured light of the fissure, a figure emerged. He did not walk; he appeared, as though called forth by the realm itself. Golden eyes glowed beneath a hood, cutting through the darkness with a heat that made her pulse stutter. His presence drew the blood back, forcing a small clearing of light around him, yet the air between them hummed with tension, charged as if the realm itself waited for this meeting.
Rhiannon wanted to speak, but no sound would come. Her heartbeat was a drum in her ears, demanding she flee, yet something rooted her in place. Recognition? Destiny? She did not know. Only that the pull was irresistible, undeniable.
He took a step forward, and the blood recoiled, writhing like serpents. Rhiannon thought she glimpsed shapes in the blood — faces, figures, impossible creatures — all watching, waiting.
And in that instant, she understood what the priests had feared and whispered about in tones meant to terrify and awe in equal measure, the Veil was thinning, and what came through was not supposed to.
"You should not be here," he said, voice low, commanding and soft but still terrifying. The golden light of his eyes seemed to peer not at her body, but at something buried in the marrow of her soul.
"I... I had to come," she whispered, shivering as much from the chill of the night as from the heat of his gaze. "I had to see."
He tilted his head, studying her, weighing her worth against some invisible scale.
"Few have the courage to stand at the edge of the Veil and look into it without flinching," he said. "Fewer still survive it. And almost none ever see me." he chuckled at her frightened look, " you look delicious for a silver flame wielder."
Rhiannon swallowed hard. She did not yet understand what "delicious" truly meant.
But something in his eyes — fierce, patient, unyielding — told her that their meeting was inevitable, that the realm had remembered them long before she ever existed.
A tremor ran through the ground. Stones rattled. From the fissure, a shape emerged, darker than the night, moving with a purpose that made her blood run cold.
The blood coalesced into forms — low-born , they would call them later — creatures of half-light and half-void, born of the Veil and the blood of forgotten ages.
Before she could flee, before her mind could fully comprehend the danger, he moved.
" Valerius" — she did not know his name yet, but somehow she already felt it — stepped forward with a grace that was unnatural, impossible, and the low-born shrank from him. With a single sweep of his hand, the nearest low-born dissolved into nothing but mist and whispers.
Rhiannon's legs trembled. "Who... what are you?" she stammered.
"I am what waits," he said simply, a statement both terrifying and comforting.
"And I have been waiting for you."
The wind howled, carrying the scent of rain now, and the fissure above the cliffs pulsed with light as though reacting to their meeting.
A voice, old and cracked, whispered in the darkness: " Valerius, crimson duke, I have been waiting."
Rhiannon shivered. Somehow, she knew she would remember this moment forever — the first time the Silver Flame and the Crimson Duke met under the blooded moon, at the edge of the world, And somewhere in the shadows, something unseen watched, patient and silent, waiting for the first move.
The Veil was open.
And the story had begun.