In the heart of the new city, they gathered—creatures of myth and history, mortals and monsters, now rulers of a broken Earth. The last great war had left cities as craters, rivers tainted, and borders erased. Ten years of fire, bone, and betrayal. And when humanity was brought to its knees, crawling toward extinction, they raised the flag of surrender—not from weakness, but because no other path remained. The Summit was meant to end it all. End the killing. End the fear. Instead, it marked the beginning of something far stranger.
Inside the black cathedral—a monument built from steel melted during the siege of Berlin—thrones were placed in a great circle. There were 40 in all. Not all were occupied. Some factions had burned themselves out before peace could reach them. Others had refused the terms and vanished into exile.
The Lykaen Clans arrived first, shifting between forms as they passed through the cathedral's massive gates. Their alphas moved like predators, cloaked in rough leathers and old scars. They stood, not sat—watching. Waiting.
The vampires came next, silence trailing behind them like a cloak. They wore no armor, carried no weapons. They did not need to. Their very presence unsettled the air, bending light as if the cathedral itself feared them. Nobles with glassy eyes and perfect skin stood behind veils, their hunger barely leashed. A few smiled. None of them meant it.
The Archanum shimmered into existence without walking through any door. They simply were. Thirteen of them, each a conduit of raw magical discipline—witches, warlocks, oracles. Their eyes glowed faintly, seeing too much. The cathedral dimmed when they arrived.
The Fae followed. Nature bled in with them—wildflowers blooming in the cracks of stone, ice forming in the corners of windows. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, all seated upon thrones that responded to their magic. Their beauty was a mask, a trick. Even the trees outside held their breath when they passed.
And then came the humans. They entered without magic, without shifting shadows or blooming thorns. No illusions, no elemental fanfare. Only silence, footsteps echoing like memory on stone. They wore no crowns—only the scars of survival. Their uniforms were faded, stitched with blood and defiance. Some still bore the insignia of fallen nations; others carried symbols crafted from nothing but hope. Their armor was reason. Their weapon, endurance. They had bled more than any other faction in the war. Lost cities, families, children, and history. And yet, they stood—spine-straight, eyes forward, every step a declaration: We are not finished.
Though they had no magic, their minds were sharp, their innovations unmatched. They had built machines that pierced the sky, resistance networks that survived even under arcane siege, and diplomacy fierce enough to bring gods to a table.
They were not the strongest. Not the fastest. But they had always been the most relentless. And so, when the other factions turned their heads to watch them enter, they did not see weakness. They saw the reason this summit existed at all.
The air in the cathedral tasted of ozone and ancient magic. A silence fell as the final scroll was unrolled. They called it The Orion System. Not just a treaty—but a system. A cage, some whispered. A final salvation, others said. In the ashes of war, trust could not be brokered by words or treaties alone. So they devised a bond stronger than paper, stronger even than magic: marriage. Not of love or logic, but of enforced unity.
The Binding Circle.
Two names. One destiny.
Each year, a ritual would be held—names drawn by chance from every faction. A vampire and a human. A fae and a werewolf. A witch and a soldier. Bound by fate. Enslaved by duty. No refusals. No appeals. To say no was to declare war. Soul-seals would be cast immediately—branding the chosen with invisible magic that linked their essence. Fleeing meant death. Resisting meant curse. Submission was survival.
The Archanum created the vessel: an ancient, magical urn of bone and crystal, pulsing with neutral magic. It could not be tampered with. It did not lie. The first names were drawn that night. Some wept, others raged. One human commander vomited on the steps of the cathedral as his name was announced beside a vampire noble known for feeding on soldiers. The Binding Circle had begun.
In the first year, many resisted, many wept. Some ran. Some died. One soldier tried to attack a vampire noble and was incinerated before his blade left the sheath. One noble threw himself from a cliff rather than wed a human seamstress from Warsaw. A Fae envoy cursed their chosen partner with eternal sleep. A vampire burned his own coven to ash. And so, new laws were carved in. Refusal would be treated as treason. Rejection meant death. Because if even the powerful could not refuse, then peace was not a negotiation—it was destiny.
The Orion Tribunal was established after that to judge treaty violations. Seven judges, one from each main faction, and a neutral adjudicator sworn to truth. Their sentences could not be overturned. Not even by kings.
The Orion Guard was also created next—a military force formed from every race, trained to kill their own if duty demanded it. They patrolled the neutral zones, raided rogue dens, and executed those who broke the peace. They did not answer to any court but the system.
The Lost Realm Accords—sealed, hidden, dangerous—were buried deep in the treaty's core. Only a handful knew its contents. A clause written in invisible ink, accessible only by blood and intent. It whispered of what had really come through the Tear. Of what still pulsed beyond it.
Supernatural Territories rose like kingdoms from ruin. Human Coalition zones shrank, fortified, policed. Neutral Zones were carved as buffers, battlegrounds of diplomacy and trade. Cross-border skirmishes became common, but the Tribunal's punishment made open war unthinkable.
The treaty banned unauthorized feeding. Unchecked shifting. Soul binding without approval. Even trade—of blood, of enchanted metals, of captured spells—required Council sanction.On paper, it was a masterpiece of peace. In truth, it was the beginning of something far worse.
Rebels gathered in silence, In alleys, in wastelands, in forgotten tunnels. Secret messages were passed between bond-mates—coded, desperate. Some unions became assassinations in disguise. Others led to children bred not from love, but strategy.
They called it unity.
Many called it enslavement.
The rebels were not simple anarchists or troublemakers. They were something far more dangerous. The Unbound had grown from the shadows of history, from those who knew the Binding Circle for what it truly was—a cage, gilded and adorned, but a cage nonetheless. They didn't seek to destroy the fragile peace that the Binding offered; they wanted to unmake the very foundation of it. The war had ended, and the laws of fate and the soul had been established, but the Unbound believed this peace was built on chains that tethered humanity to a false order.
They were not after bloodshed for bloodshed's sake. They were after the essence of control—the magic that powered the soul-markings, the ancient rituals that bound the supernatural to the mortal realm, weaving together destinies with ironclad certainty. The Unbound believed that if the Circle could be torn apart, if the Binding could be shattered, it would set every soul free. The supernatural races, the nobles, the Bound families—none of them would be able to claim dominion over the others. It would be chaos, yes. But it would be the kind of chaos that birthed freedom, an untamed world where power was not preordained, where no one could wear a crown of fate without earning it.
They called themselves The Unbound not as a banner of rebellion, but as a vow. A vow to break the chains that even the strongest couldn't see. But what they failed to understand—or perhaps what they understood all too well—was that something older watched, something ancient, something beyond the Tear. The Tear that had once cracked open the world and let the supernatural forces of fire, ice, shadow, and light spill into human affairs, binding the two realms together forever. This force, this old thing, had slept for centuries, sealed away in forgotten places, lurking in the crevices of time itself.
And as the Unbound worked from the shadows, planning their revolt, the older force stirred, alive in ways not seen for generations. It watched with cold, unblinking eyes as the first soul-seal was burned into flesh. It pulsed with quiet anticipation when the urns sang out their first Binding chant, marking yet another destined pair of lives bound together in fate.
It shifted—like a restless sleeper stretching in the dark—when the second Binding sounded, the soulmark flickering to life on the skin of a fresh chosen one, as if the very air itself had changed in the wake of their union. Each new soul-seal, each new Binding, sent a ripple through the unseen currents of power that flowed through the world. And this ancient thing, sealed beyond the Tear, remembered.
It remembered the war that had been fought so long ago. The war that had shaped the laws of the Binding Circle, that had drawn lines between humans and supernaturals, between nobles and their lesser counterparts. It remembered the bloodshed, the betrayals, and the price paid to create the fragile peace that now governed the world.
But most of all, it remembered that the price had not been enough. It had been too little to contain what had been unleashed all those years ago. And now, something else had begun.
The older force did not care for the petty politics of the nobles, or the petty ambitions of the rebels who thought they could rewrite the laws of fate. It was beyond that. It was beyond Binding, beyond any circle. It was the origin of power, the raw pulse that flowed through the universe itself. It had no need for the games of mortals, only the quiet hunger for a new age. An age where the Binding Circle was not the anchor of power—but the first thread in the unraveling of it.
And it watched. It watched as the mortal world turned, as the Unbound plotted their moves, as the supernatural races made their claims. And soon, it would make its presence known. It would break through the Tear once more. Because this war, the war to end all Binds, was nothing compared to the one that had just begun.