The fog did not merely cloak London; it devoured it. In the year 1889, the city was a palimpsest of coal smoke and gaslight, where the upper crust walked upon cobblestones polished by the sweat of those they pretended not to see. And among them—perfectly erect, unbearably elegant—stood Xan Xenith.
He was seventeen, though his eyes held the calculating patience of a man who had already died once and found the experience tedious.
Xan adjusted his collar. Not the starched white collar of typical noble fashion, but a high, crimson velvet affair that rose to his jawline, fastened with a singular, obsidian button the size of a sovereign. His greatcoat—double-breasted, heavy wool the color of dried wine—weighed eleven pounds precisely, tailored with shoulder epaulettes that jutted outward at aggressive, architectural angles. When he walked, he did not stroll; he prowled with the rigid posture of a Victorian gentleman who had been taught that to slouch was to surrender to gravity, and gravity, in the Xenith household, was considered a suggestion rather than a law.
But the fashion was armor. Beneath the silk and wool, Xan Xenith was dying.
"Master Xan," the carriage driver called, voice muffled by the pea-soup fog rolling off the Thames. "The Academy of Surgical Arts, sir. As requested."
Xan did not answer immediately. He was staring at his glove—kidskin, dyed black—watching the tremor that had begun three months ago. It was subtle, a vibration like a plucked violin string, but it was growing worse. The physicians called it Hemophilic Neural Decay , a condition so rare that only twelve cases had been documented in the British Empire. Blood that refused to clot properly. Nerves that sang with phantom pain. The Xenith Curse, whispered the maids. The Crimson Rot.
They did not know the half of it.
Xan stepped down from the carriage, his boots—polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the gas lamps—clicking against the wet stone. He carried no cane. A gentleman of his station should carry a cane, preferably with a silver head. Instead, Xan carried an umbrella. But not just any umbrella: the handle was sharpened to a surgical point, the fabric reinforced with whalebone ribs that could, in a pinch, deflect a knife thrust. It hung from his left arm at precisely forty-five degrees, a position he held so rigidly that his shadow against the fog looked like a crucifix drawn by a geometry obsessive.
He paused at the steps of the Academy. It was a brutalist structure of gray granite, its windows staring like empty eyes upon the street. Here, the greatest anatomists of the age dissected the dead to serve the living. And here, Lord Malachar—the man who had sent Xan a letter scented with formaldehyde and inked in blood—waited.
Xan's hand moved to his neck. Beneath the crimson collar, his skin burned.
Three days ago, on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, the Mark had appeared. A geometric tattoo, neither drawn nor carved, but emerged —a tessellation of hexagons and impossible angles that wrapped from his jugular to his collarbone, pulsing with each heartbeat. It was the color of arterial spray frozen mid-air. The Xenith Inheritance. The documentation in his father's locked study had warned of it: "At the age of ascension, the Mask awakens. Blood becomes boundary. Boundary becomes blade. But remember, my son: every drop spent is a piece of your soul evaporating into the Crimson."
Xan had thought it metaphorical. Victorian fathers were prone to Gothic hyperbole.
He was wrong.
A scream—high, operatic, cut short—echoed from within the Academy.
Xan's eyes narrowed. He did not run. Running was for the prey. Instead, he ascended the steps with the measured pace of a chess player moving his queen, umbrella tapping a Morse code of annoyance against the stone. The doors were unlocked. Within, the gas lamps flickered, casting shadows that seemed to move against the light.
The foyer was a cathedral of marble and medical diagrams. And there, pinned to the great oak reception desk like a butterfly in a collector's case, was the porter. Dead, yes, but not by conventional means. The man was held aloft not by nails, but by crystallized blood—scarlet spears that had erupted from his own chest, freezing him in a tableau of agony, his mouth open in a silent aria of pain.
The blood gleamed. It had not dried. It had hardened , like rubies grown too fast, jagged and geometric.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
The voice came from the balcony above. Xan looked up, tilting his head back at an angle that would have broken a lesser man's posture.
Lord Malachar stood there, but "stood" was too simple a word. He loomed , draped in a surgical gown of bleached white that contrasted obscene with the crimson spatter across his chest. He was tall, cadaverously thin, with hair slicked back with macassar oil to reveal a forehead that bulged with intellectual arrogance. In his right hand, he held a scalpel. In his left, a heart—not a human heart, but something constructed , gears and tubes mixing with organic tissue, pumping a viscous black fluid.
"The Crimson Heart," Malachar said, his voice carrying the clipped precision of aristocracy mixed with the fever of obsession. " Eternal. Unceasing. Do you feel it, young Xenith? The call ? Your blood and my creation... we are geometric proofs waiting to be solved."
Xan did not reach for a weapon. Instead, he reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a handkerchief—monogrammed with an ornate X—and dabbed at his nose. Blood. A single drop, crimson and bright, landed on the marble floor.
"Lord Malachar," Xan said, his voice dry, cultured, and utterly devoid of fear. "Your invitation indicated tea. I see you have prepared something stronger."
Malachar laughed, descending the stairs not by walking, but by gliding , his surgical gown billowing. "Tea is for those whose hearts beat on borrowed time. You, Xan Xenith... your blood is the catalyst . The Xenith line carries the Geometry of Infinity. With a single liter of your arterial plasma, I can complete the Crimson Heart. No more death. No more decay. The Eternal Stillness."
He raised his hand. The air thickened. Xan felt his own blood—traitorous, diseased, powerful —begin to vibrate in his veins.
And then he felt the Mark on his neck ignite.
It did not hurt. It unlocked .
Xan understood, in a rush of synesthetic clarity, that his blood was not a weakness. It was a medium . Like marble to a sculptor, like paint to a mad artist.
Malachar struck first. A gesture—a surgeon's flick of the wrist—and the crystallized blood spears from the dead porter's chest detached, hurtling through the air toward Xan with the speed of bullets.
Time did not slow. Xan simply saw the geometry of the attack. The vectors. The angles of penetration.
He moved. Not away, but into the kill zone, his body snapping into a stance so bizarre, so aggressively architectural, that a normal spine would have shattered: left leg extended at ninety degrees, right arm thrown back, head tilted to expose the pulsing Mark on his neck. The Crimson Stance.
"Manifest,**" Xan whispered.
The drop of blood he had let fall on the floor did not stay there. It rose , spinning, multiplying, drawing more blood from his own leaking nose—not gallons, but milliliters, precious droplets that cost him a day's worth of vitality each. The blood hardened mid-air, not into crude spears like Malachar's abomination, but into threads—fine as spider silk, sharp as razor wire.
Twenty threads of crystallized blood suspended in the fog-heavy air, forming a web between Xan and the incoming crystal spears.
CLANG.
The spears hit the blood-web. And stuck.
Malachar's eyes widened. "Impossible. You haven't been trained. The Mask shouldn't manifest fully until—"
"Until you cut it out of me?" Xan finished, his voice strained. He could feel the weakness already. Each thread was connected to him, drawing not just blood, but warmth , memory , time . The Price. "I read my father's journals, Lord Malachar. The Xenith curse is not a disease. It is a inheritance of inconvenience."
He flicked his wrist. The blood-threads vibrated, shattering Malachar's spears into red dust.
But Xan stumbled. Just one step. His vision swam. The blood-threads dissipated, evaporating back into crimson mist.
Malachar smiled, revealing teeth filed to points. "Ah. There it is. The Limit. You are a candle burning at both ends, young noble. And I... I am the hand that snuffs you out."
He raised the scalpel. The Crimson Heart in his other hand began to beat louder, a rhythmic thump-thump-thump that synchronized with Xan's own faltering pulse.
Xan straightened his posture. He adjusted his collar. The fog from the open door behind him rolled in, thick and concealing.
"Lord Malachar," Xan said, wiping another drop of blood from his nose and flicking it casually toward the fog. "Do you know why I chose to meet you here, at the Academy? It is not because of your... cardiac hobbies."
He raised his umbrella, not as a shield, but as a conductor's baton.
"It is because Big Ben chimes in exactly forty-five seconds. And sound, my lord, travels through fog at three hundred forty-three meters per second."
The drop of blood he had flicked vanished into the fog. But Xan's eyes—the color of dried blood—tracked it perfectly.
"And my blood," Xan whispered, his Mark flaring with light visible even through the crimson collar, "is already connected to everything."
Outside, the great clock began to strike.
Twelve chimes to midnight.
And in the fog, something crimson and geometric began to move.