The blade wasn't meant to cut skin.
It was meant to write.
Astra lay on black marble that drank the torchlight and gave nothing back. Chains pinned her wrists, not for strength but for ceremony—polished links, engraved with the Dominion's holy phrases. Law made pretty. Violence made clean.
Above her, the crestwright's needle hovered like a priest's finger.
"Hold still," the man said, as if she had the luxury of obedience.
The room smelled of metal and myrrh. Church incense and fresh blood—an honest pairing, at least.
Astra turned her head until the chain at her throat bit. On the far side of the chamber, behind a screen of gauze, stood the man who owned the air.
Marquis Dorian Veyrn.
He didn't step into the torchlight. He didn't need to. His voice was enough—smooth as silk pulled over a blade.
"Your file says you don't pray," he said.
Astra's mouth tasted like copper. "My prayers were unanswered."
"Then you'll love our system," Dorian replied, polite amusement threaded through each syllable. "In the Dominion, requests receive responses."
The crestwright glanced nervously toward the gauze. Even craftsmen feared patrons who spoke like gods.
Astra forced her breath slow. Panic was a resource; spend it too fast and you had nothing when it mattered. She counted the chain links at her wrist. She counted the torch pops. She counted the seconds until the needle touched her.
A shadow moved near her head—tall, quiet, disciplined. A man in dark uniform leather, sigils stitched at his collar. An Imperial Hound.
He didn't look at her like prey. He looked at her like a door he'd been ordered to open.
Kael Raithe's gaze met hers for a single heartbeat—flat grey, unreadable, and too awake.
"Restraint check," he said to the crestwright. His voice held no softness, but it held control.
Astra swallowed. "Does your leash let you talk like a man, or only like a tool?"
Kael's jaw flexed once. The smallest fracture in his composure—quick enough to miss unless you were starving for cracks.
He bent closer, just enough that she felt his breath graze her ear, the heat of a living body in a room designed to make hers feel like property.
"Blink once if you understand what's about to happen," he murmured.
Astra blinked once.
"Blink twice if you want me to stop them," he added, so quietly the torches couldn't hear.
Her lungs locked. There was no space in the Dominion for that sentence. No space for choice.
Astra held his gaze and did not blink.
Kael straightened. His eyes did not soften, but something in him tightened like a cord pulled too far.
Dorian's voice floated from behind the gauze. "Hounds are not here to comfort. Begin."
The needle descended.
Pain bit sharp, bright, immediate—real enough to erase the room for a moment. Astra's body arched against the chains, instinct fighting ceremony. The crestwright's hand was steady. The needle carved a sigil at the base of her neck where skin was thin and betrayal was easy.
Astra tasted a scream and swallowed it.
And then—
The world stuttered.
Not her vision. The room itself. Like a page torn and re-glued a finger-width off.
For a blink-long instant, torchlight froze mid-flicker. The crestwright's needle hung in air. Kael's pupils stopped contracting. Even Dorian's voice paused between syllables.
Astra's pain did not pause.
But time did.
In that silent fracture, something impossible unfolded across her sight like a translucent veil.
Letters. Lines. Icons.
A clean, indifferent interface, as if the Dominion had been honest all along and the collar was only code.
STATUS hovered at the edge of her vision.
Beneath it, a pulse—steady, cruel.
TRACE: 0.1%
Astra's throat went cold. No one else reacted. No one else saw it.
The room snapped back into motion. The torch popped. The needle sank again.
Astra laughed once, sharp and ugly, because terror had found a new shape.
Dorian's voice warmed. "What's funny?"
Astra turned her head, chains scraping. Her gaze cut through the gauze as if cloth could be bullied.
"You said you give responses," she whispered. "I think your system just answered me."
Silence.
Then Dorian stepped forward—not into full light, never fully exposed, but close enough that she saw the edge of his smile.
"Interesting," he said, like a man inspecting a rare flaw in a gem. "We'll be very careful with you."
Kael's hand closed around the chain at her throat, not choking—anchoring. A warning and a promise in one grip.
"Don't," he said under his breath. To her, or to himself, she couldn't tell.
Astra met his eyes again, and this time she chose the danger on purpose.
"Tell me your name," she whispered.
Kael's gaze flicked, almost imperceptibly, toward the sigil being written into her skin—toward the place where ownership would live.
Then he answered.
"Kael."
The crestwright pressed the needle deeper. The sigil flared, and the interface in Astra's vision expanded as if waking up—
BOOT SEQUENCE: INITIALIZING.