The Shrine breathed around them, a slow inhale of stone and shadow. Aria's face hovered in the shifting dark, her eyes black with the witch's hunger, her mouth curling into that half-smile that meant she knew something no one else could survive knowing.
"You've seen the first layer," she said, voice like a thread pulled through Kael's ribs. "Now you'll see why you were never meant to walk free."
The walls flexed. The floor beneath Kael's boots slicked with something warm, like old blood rising to the surface. Dario shifted beside him, a sharp profile lit by the red glow seeping in from nowhere, his hand hovering near Kael's back—not touching, but close enough that Kael could feel the heat.
The air thickened. Kael's breath caught.
And then the world folded in.
~~~~~~_
It wasn't like falling. Falling was clean. This was drowning in a memory that didn't want to let him breathe.
The Shrine pushed it into him—not just images, but weight. The smell of burning cedar. The ring of steel boots over wet cobblestone. The deep, bone-vibration hum of a city holding its breath.
Mortano, but not the Mortano Kael knew. The streets were narrower, the lamps gas-fed, every window shuttered against the wind. The banners of the Four Families hung heavy with rain—Virelli red, Delorenzo black, Mikhailov silver, Malvone gold. Behind them, another banner older than them all: the sigil of the Witches' Circle, a white moth spread over a black sun.
And at the center of it all—Salvara.
She didn't look like the whispers described. She was worse.
Her skin had the texture of something pulled from a grave but kept breathing. Her hair clung to her neck in strands the color of wet ash. Eyes like burned fabric—holes rimmed in light—looked through people, not at them. She stood at the right hand of Kael's father, the true king of Mortano's streets, and the crowd bowed lower to her than they did to him.
The memory swelled, showing her not as one moment, but many.
In one, she poured black sand into the hands of Virelli men, and they returned months later with gold and new land stolen from across the sea.In another, she whispered over the Mikhailovs' guns until they burned hotter, louder, more deadly than anything their rivals could touch.She sat at Delorenzo tables and cut throats with smiles, feeding them enemies as easily as meat. And for the Malvones—Dario's bloodline—she carved pathways into the city's underbelly, smuggling power the way others smuggled wine.
Her price was always the same: freedom for her kind. The witches walked Mortano untouchable, every shadow theirs, every silence heavy with their listening.
The memory shifted. A colder voice cut through—the one Kael somehow knew belonged to Elizia.
"There will be one born who will unmake you."
Salvara's head tilted in the memory, those burned-hole eyes narrowing. "Then he will learn to kneel, or he will be ash."
Elizia's reply was a whisper but carried the weight of a curse: "He will be beyond you."
The world in the memory trembled. Kael felt his own skin prickle—the way it does when someone says your name in a room you haven't entered yet.
That was when the war came.
Flames tore through country after country, each battle stitched together by Salvara's power and the Families' greed. Cities fell like rotting fruit. The old map of the coastlines changed under their feet.
And then—one night—the war ended.
Because Kael was born.
____
The memory didn't shift so much as deepen. Colors bled out. Shadows thickened, and the sound of the Shrine's breathing became the wind of another night, another century.
Mortano was burning.
The sea raged against the piers, flinging salt and foam like teeth. Gunfire rattled through the alleys. Whole streets had been gutted by fire, the cobblestones blackened and split. Overhead, the banners of the Families hung in tatters, whipped by a storm that refused to break.
Men screamed in languages Kael didn't recognize. Women dragged their dead from doorways. Horses, slick with sweat and blood, bolted down the main road, riderless.
And at the city's highest balcony, Salvara stood beside Kael's father.
Her robes were blacker than the storm. The wind tore at her hair, but she didn't move—didn't blink. In her left hand, she held a bowl of something that smoked even in the rain. In her right, a dagger carved from bone.
"This will be the last night," she said.
Kael's father glanced at her, unreadable. "Because we'll win."
Salvara's mouth twisted into something that wasn't a smile. "Because he'll be here."
~
In the street below, Elizia moved like a shadow through the wreckage. Her robes were white but streaked with ash, the hem torn from running. In her hands she carried a child not yet born—cradled in the curve of her magic, hidden from every eye except the ones she wanted to see.
Elizia stopped in the ruins of the old cathedral. The roof was gone, the walls broken, but the altar still stood—split down the middle like a wound. She set her hands on the stone and whispered words older than the Families, older than Mortano. The air shook.
From the corners of the ruined hall, other witches stepped forward—Elizia's "true ones," bound to no family, to no banner. Their faces were sharp with exhaustion, but their eyes burned steady. They began to chant.
The rain fell harder, hissing when it struck the altar.
_
Up on the balcony, Salvara's eyes snapped toward the cathedral ruins.
"She's binding him," Salvara hissed.
Kael's father didn't answer. His grip tightened on the rail, knuckles bone-white.
"You let her live too long," Salvara said. "She'll shield him from me."
"You'll have him when he's ready," Kael's father replied, his voice quiet but certain. "We'll all have him."
Salvara's gaze slid back to the smoking bowl in her hand. The liquid inside was black as the space between stars, and it moved as if something lived in it.
In the ruins, the chant reached a crescendo.
Elizia's hands hovered over her belly, and the air between them shimmered like heat. A thread of gold light wound itself into the shape of a sigil—a mark that hung in the air for a heartbeat before pressing itself to the child's skin.
The magic sealed with a sound like stone cracking.
The child kicked once.
And across the city, the war stopped.
Not slowly. Not in surrender.
It ended like a candle snuffed out—soldiers frozen mid-charge, flames collapsing into embers, the storm breaking into silence.
Salvara felt it. For the first time in centuries, she stepped back.
In that silence, Kael—newborn and bound—took his first breath.
– YEARS UNDER THE MARK
Kael's earliest years lived inside the boundaries of a spell.
It wasn't a cage of walls or iron — it was quieter, stranger. People didn't meet his eyes for long. Doors seemed to close a second too soon when he approached. Even the air around him felt thick, like it knew whose son he was.
The sigil Elizia pressed into him that night was invisible to most, but it wasn't invisible to those who mattered. The Families could feel it — a pressure, an edge, a hum in the bones — and they understood its meaning even if they hated it.
The boy was untouchable.
The city whispered about him in half-stories. Some called him the war's last son. Others said he was born in blood and carried it in his hands. There were those who swore they saw the storm pause the night he arrived, as if the sky itself bent to see him.
Kael learned early that power could arrive before a man did — that people often reacted to the name before they met the flesh. And the name Virelli carried more than blood; it carried generations of alliances, wars, and debts written in bone.
The protection spell Elizia had woven was strong, but not permanent. She never told him exactly when it would end — but he felt it ticking inside him, a slow erosion of the invisible wall between him and the rest of the world.
By the time he could walk the streets of Mortano without a hand to hold, the Families had already begun circling.
The Delorenzos sent gifts — not to him, but to whoever guarded him that week. Always things that could be traded: gold chains, rare wines, blades wrapped in velvet. Teach him young, their silence said. Let him know where his future lies.
The Mikhailovs tried a different tactic: training. They offered soldiers to spar with him, men who smiled without warmth and corrected his grip on a knife with the patience of farmers tending soil. They wanted to see what he'd be capable of when the sigil faded.
The Malvones — Dario's bloodline — were the most subtle. They didn't send things or men. They sent Dario.
Kael met him in the gardens behind the old Virelli estate, two boys the same age staring each other down like they'd been born knowing they were rivals. Dario's hair was already combed with precision, his suit too clean for a boy his age, his eyes sharp in a way that had nothing to do with innocence.
"You're the one with the mark," Dario said, not a question.
"And you're the one who thinks it matters," Kael replied.
It was the first truth they ever shared.
If Dario came on orders, he never said. But over the years, his visits became less about duty and more about the strange tether between them — something like friendship, something like the beginning of a war neither of them wanted to win too soon.
Aria entered later, not from a Family in power but from one in orbit — her bloodline close enough to touch the throne, far enough to resent it. She was fire where Dario was steel, always moving, always daring Kael to follow her into places his name couldn't protect him.
The three of them together were like a match, a fuse, and the powder between.
But all the while, the clock inside Kael kept ticking. Elizia's spell wasn't a gift — it was a delay. And when it broke, the thing outside the wall would be waiting.
Salvara had not forgotten.
She never forgot a debt.
>>>>>>
THE NIGHT THE FAMILIES FELL
The Shrine didn't let Kael ease into the memory — it drove him into it like a blade between ribs.
He was small again, no taller than the rail of the balcony outside his rooms, staring down at the courtyard of the Virelli estate. Torches burned low. Horses snorted in the dark. Somewhere far beyond the gates, bells rang a warning that came too late.
The deaths didn't happen in one place. They happened all at once, as if some unseen hand had plucked the heads of Mortano's four ruling Families and crushed them in the same heartbeat.
Virelli — Kael's father — was cut down in his own war room, maps still spread before him, a pen in his hand. No assassin was ever named, but those who found him said the candle beside his body hadn't even burned lower.
The Delorenzo patriarch was found in his bath, the water so still it might have been glass. No sign of struggle, no sound from the guards until it was over.
The Mikhailov heir — already acting head of the family — died on the steps of their chapel, eyes wide as if he'd seen something no man could bear before the blade touched him.
And the Malvone elder — Dario's grandfather — vanished entirely. No body. No blood. Just an empty chair at the head of their table and a goblet still half-full.
The city woke to a new order by morning: no king, no council, just four bloodlines suddenly leaderless.
People said it was fate, others called it war dressed as coincidence. But in the dark corners of Mortano, the whispers all carried the same name.
Salvara.
Kael didn't see her that night. But he remembered the shift in the air, the way the torches along the wall guttered for no reason, the way his nursemaid locked every latch on the balcony doors.
The next morning, Elizia came. She didn't speak to him at first — she walked the rooms, tracing the walls with her fingers, murmuring under her breath like she was listening for something only she could hear. When she finally looked at him, her eyes were tight with something he'd later understand as urgency.
"She'll come for you sooner now," she said.
Years passed, and the spell still held. But the city outside changed. Without the heads, the Families splintered into smaller, hungrier pieces. Every name became a faction, every alley a border.
Dario stopped visiting as a boy and returned as someone sharper, dressed in black, his voice measured in a way that made Kael feel like every word had been decided before it left his mouth. Aria drifted between them both, restless, fierce, daring the streets to claim her.
And Kael — protected but restless — felt the edge of the spell like a thread fraying under his skin.
It broke on the night he turned sixteen.
The breaking didn't look like lightning or flame. It was quieter, crueler.
One moment, the air around him hummed with the invisible wall Elizia had woven. The next, it was gone, and the silence left behind was the kind that made a man feel seen.
Somewhere in Mortano, Salvara knew.
And she smiled.
The night the sigil broke, the city didn't roar. It listened.
Kael felt it in the bones of the street — a subtle shift, like a current pulling him into deeper water. The protection that had wrapped him since birth was gone, leaving him bare to the wind, to the eyes, to her.
Dario came to him that night, not with a warning, but with a drink. The Malvone crest winked from the ring on his finger, catching the candlelight as he slid the glass across the table.
"Sixteen," Dario said, his voice steady but low. "You've outlived the leash."
Kael smirked, but it didn't reach his eyes. "It was never a leash. More like… a shield."
"And now it's gone." Dario leaned back, studying him. There was something unspoken in that look, something Kael had learned to turn away from — not because he didn't feel it, but because feeling it meant letting Dario closer than the streets would allow.
From the corner of the room, Aria laughed — bright, sharp, and unbothered. She perched on the arm of Kael's chair like she belonged there, her hand brushing his shoulder. Her eyes flicked to Dario, and the air between them cooled.
It was always like that — a triangle drawn in invisible ink. Dario's eyes on Kael. Kael's attention tilting toward Aria. Aria's fire aimed at both, but her anger sharper when it landed on Dario.
Across the city, in a room with no doors, Salvara watched.
Her form shimmered in the candlelight — not entirely there, not entirely gone. She didn't need to be close to feel the moment the sigil unraveled; she'd been waiting for it since the night of his birth.
"He's open now," she murmured to the dark.
From the corner, something answered — not in words, but in a low, amused hum.
Salvara's smile was thin. "Let them keep playing their little games. Soon, they'll see what a game really costs."
Her eyes, black and burned through, closed — and when they opened again, they were looking straight at Kael through miles of stone and shadow.
For the first time in his life, Kael felt truly seen.
*END OF CHAPTER 6*