Kael Ardyn woke to silence.
Not the peaceful kind — but the heavy, suffocating stillness that followed slaughter.
Ash drifted through the air like gray snow, settling over burned homes and broken bodies. The village square was unrecognizable, reduced to charred timber and blood-dark earth. The screams were gone. The attackers were gone.
Only death remained.
Kael pushed himself upright, his body moving instinctively despite the shock clawing at his mind. His chest felt wrong — heavier, denser — as if something vast had settled beneath his skin.
The sigil still burned across his upper body.
It no longer seared, but it pulsed slowly, alive, its lines glowing faintly beneath soot-streaked skin. When he inhaled, it responded. When his heart should have beaten, it did not — yet power flowed regardless.
He staggered to his feet.
"Mother…"
His voice sounded distant to his own ears.
He moved through the ruins, stepping around collapsed walls and smoldering embers. Every few paces, his foot brushed against a body. He recognized too many of them.
Then he saw her.
Elira Ardyn lay near the remains of their home, one arm stretched forward as if she had tried to reach him. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing.
Kael dropped to his knees beside her.
For a long moment, he did not breathe.
Then something inside him cracked.
"I told you to stay hidden," she had said.
"I only wanted you safe."
His hands trembled as he brushed ash from her face. She was cold. Far too cold.
Something deep within him roared — not in rage, but in judgment.
The sigil across his body flared.
The air thickened.
Shadows bent inward, not violently, but reverently, as if waiting for instruction. Kael felt them — not as darkness, but as absence, as the ability to remove things from the world.
He clenched his fist.
"No," he whispered hoarsely.
The power receded.
He understood, instinctively, that this was only the beginning. That if he let it loose now, there would be nothing left — not even memory.
Kael gently closed his mother's eyes.
"I'll remember," he said. "Even if the world doesn't."
He stood.
The night seemed to recoil as he did.
He did not bury the dead.
Not because he didn't care — but because he knew something else now.
This massacre had not been meant to be hidden.
It was a message.
And messages were meant to be seen.
Kael walked to the center of the village square, where the blood had pooled darkest. As he stepped into it, the crimson liquid stirred, responding to his presence.
He did not command it.
It obeyed anyway.
The blood rose, weaving itself into thin, glowing threads that formed a symbol in the air — not his sigil, but something simpler. A warning. A mark of ownership.
Kael did not know who would find it.
But he knew they would understand.
He left the village before dawn.
The forest welcomed him — not as prey, but as something older. His senses expanded with every step. He could hear the movement of insects beneath bark, the pulse of animals sleeping miles away, the distant echo of thunder far beyond the horizon.
And beneath it all, another sensation.
Hunger.
Not for food.
For blood — not to feed, but to stabilize the storm coiling inside him.
Kael stopped near a stream and looked down at his reflection.
The man staring back at him was no longer human.
His eyes were darker now, ringed with faint crimson light. The sigil was visible beneath his skin, its lines spreading across his shoulders and chest like a living crown.
"You made a mistake," Kael murmured, thinking of the ancient vampire who had bitten him. "But so did they."
A presence brushed against his awareness.
Kael turned.
A man stood at the edge of the trees — tall, pale, dressed in travel-worn black. His eyes were sharp, calculating, but fear flickered beneath the surface.
A vampire.
Not ancient. Not weak.
"Easy," the stranger said, raising his hands slightly. "I followed the scent. Didn't expect… this."
His gaze lingered on Kael's chest.
The vampire swallowed. "That crest… who turned you?"
Kael met his eyes.
"No one," he said.
The word carried weight.
The vampire took an involuntary step back.
"I felt something awaken tonight," the man said quietly. "Something that doesn't belong. The elders will hunt you."
"Let them," Kael replied.
The vampire hesitated, then did something unexpected.
He lowered his head.
"I am Reth Varyn," he said. "And I would rather kneel to something real than die defending liars."
Kael felt it then — the choice, the threshold.
He could kill the vampire.
Or—
He stepped forward.
Reth gasped as Kael's hand closed around his wrist.
"Swear it," Kael said calmly. "Not to me — to the blood."
The sigil on Kael's body ignited.
Reth screamed as a fragment of that power burned itself into his arm — a smaller crest, incomplete, but unmistakably bound.
When the pain faded, Reth fell to one knee, shaking.
Kael released him.
The first of his bloodbound had been born.
And somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled across a cloudless sky.