On the winter solstice of 1342, fires of ash and pine blazed in the courtyard of Castle Maelwic.
It was the darkest hour of the year. The moon had not risen, and the stars looked farther away than usual. In the center of a circle drawn carefully in crushed bone, there knelt three boys. None of them wore shoes. Their cloaks had been stripped away, even their nightshirts. Their bare chests were smeared in ritual paint their mother had smeared across with her trembling hands.
Toph, ten, held his back straight, even as the cold bit into his skin. Dom, silent at eight, scanned the torches, trees, and old stone wall as if memorizing them. Aspen, still four, sat quietly between them, his tiny fingers twitching in the frost.
They were the sons of Lord Alric of Maelwic, ruler of the mountain passage between Claerwyn and the Black Coast. Their father's blade was known. His hospitality, very much respected. But it was their mother—Lady Evelaine—whom the villagers feared in whispers. Not because she was cruel, but because she was strange.
"Mother, you said we were going to the chapel," Toph had whispered before they were brought out.
Evelaine didn't answer. She had only kissed his forehead and said, "From tonight is when your names shall outlive kingdoms, my precious child."
The priest, if he was one at all, stepped forward. He wore no shoes either. His robes were layered in stitched symbols and crow feathers. He walked the edges of the circle, murmuring in a language possibly older than Latin. As he passed each torch, the flames bent toward him unnaturally, as if bowing.
Toph's stomach clenched. Not from fear, but from the feeling that something else had begun watching.
Dom grabbed Toph's hand.
Their mother stepped forward, barefoot in the frost, and placed a bowl in the center of the circle. And, as if she had done it many times before, she bled into that bowl from her own wrists. Aspen whimpered softly at the sight of it.
"Shh," Evelaine said, her voice soft. "The Father of Ash listens through silence."
The priest stopped at the center.
"Let the offering be made."
Evelaine set the bowl down with trembling grace. "I give you my sons. Flesh of my body. Names of my line. May they never hunger as I did. May they never break as I did."
She knelt and pressed her bleeding hand into the earth.
The circle pulsed at that moment, the sky went silent, and even the wind stopped.
From beneath the ground, something stirred and slithered upward. It brushed Toph's ankle.
Not long after, he saw a woman made of soot, cradling a serpent. The forest lit with hundreds of pale faces chanting in a language his bones somehow understood. A thousand hands were suddenly reaching up for him from beneath the soil.
And inside the children, the scream began.
They saw not with their eyes, but with something instinctive, a girl cloaked in white. She stood in a field of dying flowers. Her hands folded, her eyes sewn shut. She bled from her mouth as she smiled at the boys, but said nothing.
When they blinked, she was gone. There were only voices in the air.
"The mother offers what the father fears."
Dom jerked back. Aspen fell forward, eyes wide.
"Will they drink… or rot in silence?"
Toph tried to scream—to reject it, to spit it out—but his tongue wouldn't move. He could feel the root beneath his skin now, slinking through muscle, wrapping around something inside his chest that wasn't a heart anymore.
And then, the boys collapsed all at once. Whether they fainted or were forced under, none of them would remember the moment the seed took hold of their tiny, precious bodies.
They were locked in the east tower that night.
The servants had disappeared. Evelaine brought them food herself—bone broth and vials of bitter wine she said would "temper the fever." Dom said nothing. Aspen refused to sleep unless Toph sang to him.
Toph tried to ignore the black pulses beneath his skin, but couldn't.
***
Lord Alric returned at dawn on the fourth day. His boots were muddied, cloak torn. He burst into the tower with two guards and his blade unsheathed.
"Where are they?" he roared.
Evelaine stood calmly, back to the boys. "Safe. They're safe now."
He stepped forward, hand trembling. "What did you do to them?"
"What was necessary. They would not have survived the coming century without it."
"They were children," he spat.
"They are vessels."
Alric raised his sword. This time, she didn't move. He swung his sword at her. And blood spilled onto the cold stones as Evelaine fell.
Dom flinched. Aspen screamed. Toph stared.
Their father stood frozen, blade soaked in his wife's blood, chest heaving. But something in his eyes fractured when he looked at the boys. At their pulsing veins.
***
Later that week, Alric summoned his younger cousin, Lady Maera of Dunrolen. She was a quiet widow known for her education and reclusion.
He said nothing of the ritual. Only that the boys required shelter.
"They are not sick," he told her softly, "but they are… changed. Keep them safe. Away from war. Away from superstition. Let them grow."
Maera asked no questions. She left with the children immediately.
That evening, Alric sealed himself in the chapel beneath the castle. He did not leave a note. Only the sword.
But in the hours before his death, Alric did the unthinkable: He bent his knees in the bloodstained chapel, not to the Devil—but to God.
"Take me," he begged. "Let me rot. Let me bear it all. I have taken my life not to escape hell, but to walk into it on their behalf. Do not let them bloom."
A father's soul for three cursed sons? It was a trade God accepted.
Years later, the boys grew. But only to the age their bodies were designed to hold. So long as they never tasted virgin blood, the seed inside them stayed dormant, bound by a pact sealed in sacrifice.
And centuries later, they would find something as old as the vow pulling them back toward what was forbidden.