Kaelen no longer walked; he crawled. Each step was a painful negotiation with his own muscles. The mud of Ostrava seemed to possess a will of its own—a black, voracious substance that swallowed his sandals and weighed on his legs like leaden shackles.
Hunger was a living beast in his stomach, gnawing at his ribs. Thirst, however, was worse. His throat was so dry that swallowing felt like dragging hot sand across his glands. He tried to lick rainwater gathered on withered oak leaves, but it tasted of soot and rot.
Ahead, always at the same distance, the black iron carriage advanced with an unnatural cadence. The horses that pulled it were war-beasts—massive creatures whose nostrils expelled a thick, yellowish vapor. They did not stop to graze. They did not stop to rest.
And Malphas… the Inquisitor was a monument of stillness atop the lead horse. Kaelen could see him even from afar: the ebony armor did not reflect light—it devoured it. Malphas showed none of the weary sway of an ordinary rider after two days in the saddle; he remained perfectly upright, an extension of the very curse that ran through his blood. He needed no water. No sleep. The demonic blood in his veins was eternal fuel, filtered through the Church's cruel dogma.
The Weight of Blood
How are they?
The thought lashed his mind like a whip.
Kaelen stared at the wooden frame of the carriage, sealed and dark. His mother, Baroness Valerius, who always smelled of lavender, whose hands were soft as silk. His sister, Elara, who still carried a child's laughter despite her sixteen years. They had never known the cold of a night without a hearth. Never passed a day without the certainty of a full meal.
Now they were crammed into a wooden cage, feeling every jolt of the iron wheels, treated like luxury cattle. The image of his mother being forced to eat scraps, or his sister trembling in terror at Malphas's shadow passing the door's slit, made Kaelen's blood boil—only for that heat to be quickly quenched by his failing body.
He glanced at the butcher's cleaver at his waist. His hand trembled.
If I attack now…
The Academy's logic—cold and merciless—struck him like a slap. He was exhausted, dehydrated, shaking. Malphas was a Nephilim trained by the Inquisition, a creature that could crush Kaelen's skull with a single gloved hand. To attack would be useless suicide. Worse—it would be the last hope of his family dying before their eyes.
— I cannot die — he murmured, his voice a dry rasp. — If I die, the name Valerius ends in a muddy ditch.
The Crossroads of Morality
The road narrowed as it entered the ravine leading to Ostrava's cliffs. The smell of salt and rotten fish began to replace the scent of earth. Kaelen saw the carriage slow for the first time, maneuvering around a fallen rock.
He dropped to his knees behind a thorny bush, his heart hammering against empty lungs. Only a few paces away, at the roadside, lay a small peasant cart overturned—likely recent victims of a "protection tax" or bandits.
There was a corpse.
A man lay there, his hands still clenched around a leather waterskin and a small canvas bag.
Kaelen crawled to the body. The waterskin was nearly full. He could smell cheap wine and water. Inside the bag, the corner of a hard, moldy loaf showed itself. Life, reduced to scraps. But as he touched the waterskin, he noticed something—the peasant wore the emblem of one of the families that had helped deliver his father.
Hatred and necessity collided. He wanted to spit on the corpse, but his body begged him to steal what remained.
Below, the port of Ostrava began to emerge through the mist—a city of black wood built on stilts, where the sails of slave ships swayed like ghosts. Kaelen's time was running out.
By nightfall, Malphas would deliver the women.
The moldy bread slid down Kaelen's throat like ground glass, but the cheap wine from the waterskin brought an artificial warmth that stilled the tremor in his hands. He felt no disgust. Disgust was a luxury for those with full stomachs.
With quick, feverish movements, he searched the peasant's corpse. He found a brass ring, a bone knife used for peeling fruit, and a few copper coins hidden in the boot's stitching. He took everything. To Kaelen, it was not theft; it was the advance collection of a debt those people owed his house.
He did not follow the main road. He ran along gravel slopes, slipping and cutting his hands, until his feet struck the rotting planks of Ostrava's docks.
The city was a tumor of wood and salt driven into the ocean. Ostrava did not sleep; it merely rotted beneath the glow of whale-fat torches. Kaelen entered the first pawnshop he found—a shack that stank of smoke and rust.
— What do you want, mongrel? — the dealer growled from behind an iron grate.
Kaelen threw the brass ring, the bone knife, and the mud-stained butcher's cleaver onto the counter.
— I want steel — Kaelen's voice came out hoarse, but steady. — Something that cuts boiled leather and doesn't shatter on first impact. Quickly.
The man assessed the items with contempt, but his eyes gleamed at the quality of the butcher's cleaver's steel—family steel, abused though it was. He tossed onto the counter a short-guard dagger with a darkened blade to avoid reflecting light, and a short infantry sword—plain, tip-heavy, built for gutting men in narrow corridors.
— That's what your trash buys. Now get out before the guards think you stole this off a corpse.
— I did — Kaelen hissed, tying the sword to his waist with a length of rope. — But the owner won't be coming to complain.
The Flesh Market
Meanwhile, in the stable yard of the Sea Raven Inn, the air seemed to freeze with Malphas's presence. The Nephilim dismounted with inhuman grace, the metal of his armor grinding just enough to announce death.
Two men waited for him in the shadows beneath a stone arch. One was the Cathedral Merchant, an obese man wrapped in clerical silks, whose duty was to turn sin into tithe. Beside him stood a pale-faced man with ring-covered fingers: Garrick, owner of the Black Rose Lupanar, the most expensive and cruel brothel on the coast.
Malphas tore open the carriage door with an iron jolt.
Inside, Baroness Valerius tried to shield her daughter with her own body. Torchlight revealed Elara's face, smeared with tears and dust, her eyes wide with terror as the ringed man smiled at her.
— Fallen nobility — Garrick remarked, stepping closer to the carriage. — The mother still has fire in her eyes. She'll suit clients who enjoy… resistance. But the girl… ah, the girl is a rough jewel. The Archbishop will pay a fortune for a virgin Valerius.
— The price was set by the Church — Malphas's voice echoed like it came from a grave. — Half the gold goes to the Crown as payment of the debt. The other half to the Inquisition's fund.
— Of course, of course — the Cathedral Merchant coughed, handing the Inquisitor a heavy sack of coins. — The sale contract is signed. They are now property of Garrick's establishment.
Garrick gestured to two brutes armed with chains.
— Take them out. Put the little one in isolation. Prepare the mother for tomorrow's auction. I want them to understand that the name Valerius is now nothing more than a label on a piece of meat.
Kaelen was two blocks away when he heard a muffled scream he would recognize in any hell—his sister's scream.
He froze in the middle of the muddy street. He saw Malphas walking toward the local church to cleanse his armor of the traitor's blood, while Garrick's thugs dragged the women into the alleys that led to the brothel.
He had ten minutes before the reinforced oak doors of the Lupanar closed and they vanished into the city's labyrinth of slavery.
Kaelen stared at his own hands. They were shaking now—not from hunger, but from the acidic adrenaline flooding his spine. He looked at the fortified church where Malphas entered for his purification, then at the carriage. The calculation was simple and suicidal: if he drew steel against the Nephilim, his head would be torn from his shoulders before the blade ever cleared its sheath.
But Malphas, for all his sanctified heresy, still relied on mounts to carry his power and his authority.
Kaelen moved through the shadows with the stealth of a sewer rat. He tore a resin-soaked torch from the wall of a nearby tannery. The flames danced, reflected in his brown eyes, now hardened like stone.
— May hell take you first — he whispered.
With a precise throw, the torch traced an arc of fire through Ostrava's gray sky, landing directly atop the mound of dry hay and straw piled in the inn's stables.
The effect was instant. Within seconds, the hungry fire licked up the beams of wood dried by salt and age. The screams of the warhorses—huge, nervous beasts—shattered the night. They were not ordinary animals; they were bred for battle, but panic before fire is a primal force no training can tame.
The horses began to kick and smash against their stalls, turning the stable into a chamber of noise and destruction. Flames surged higher, illuminating Garrick's brothel and the church where Malphas knelt.
— FIRE! FIRE AT THE CATHEDRAL STABLES! — a watchman screamed, and Ostrava's alarm bell began to toll in frantic peals.