CHAPTER ONE
The Birth of a Legend
The night Alexander Holmes was born, a storm tore through the Yorkshire moors like a curse. Midwives whispered of unnatural lightning, of hounds howling in unison, and of time itself holding its breath. In the small village of Ravenshollow, buried beneath soot-stained clouds and fields blackened by early frost, the child came screaming into the world—red-faced, with eyes too ancient for a newborn.
His mother, Eleanor Holmes, died an hour after the birth. Her face twisted in both agony and awe, she clutched the babe to her breast with bloodied hands and murmured something in Latin that none present understood. The physician, a man named Josiah Trent, later claimed he saw her eyes roll white before she whispered: "The old blood awakens."
Eleanor's husband, Jonathan Holmes, a former naval officer and a man as cold as the sea, refused to speak of that night again.
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Alexander's childhood was marked by silence. He did not cry after that first night. He rarely spoke, and when he did, it was in odd, rhythmic tones—as though he remembered languages he'd never been taught. The village children avoided him, frightened by his calm gaze and uncanny knowledge of things he could not know: the name of a dead dog beneath the chapel floor, the real cause of Old Meredith's death (arsenic, not age), and that the storm which bore him would return on the day he turned twelve.
It did.
On the eve of his twelfth birthday, the sky once again turned to ink. Thunder rumbled from the bones of the earth, and a cloaked figure appeared at the edge of Ravenshollow: tall, skeletal, and crowned in bone. Jonathan Holmes, armed with the musket he had not used since war, fired three shots at the figure. All missed. Or perhaps, they passed through him.
Alexander stood barefoot in the rain and approached the visitor.
"I have waited long enough," the figure rasped.
And then they vanished—Alexander and the stranger, swallowed by the moors.
He returned three days later, unchanged in form but never the same in soul. From that day on, Alexander Holmes no longer aged.
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When questioned, he offered nothing. When struck, he did not bruise. When cut, his wounds closed before the blood could fully flow.
Jonathan, terrified, drank himself into madness and was found dead with his eyes carved out and a Latin phrase scrawled in his blood: "Nemo moritur nisi vocatus."
("No one dies unless summoned.")
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At sixteen, Alexander walked away from Ravenshollow without a word. He did not return for eighty years.
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To be continued…