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Chapter 1 - Prologue: The Mark

The storm was no mere weather, but a living, ravenous entity—an ancient and vengeful beast, risen from the howling abyss of time. It hurled itself against the Highland manor with a fury that seemed personal, a siege laid upon stone and soul alike, as if the house's very existence was an affront to the wild. Its winds did not merely batter the walls; they shrieked and clawed, rattling loose centuries-old shutters and moaning through every gap in the old stonework. Rain struck in relentless sheets, each drop as sharp and cold as a thrown dagger, a thousand stinging whips flaying the leaded windows. Thunder rolled overhead, deep and guttural, the voice of something older than men or memory, while lightning limned the manor's towers in stark, spectral brilliance.Inside the birthing room, the hearth fire was a beleaguered sentinel, its flames shivering and shrinking with every new draft. The warmth it cast barely held back the encroaching cold, and its light—anxious, flickering—threw grotesque, frantic shadows that danced and sprawled across the rough-hewn stone walls, as if the room itself trembled at the storm's ferocity.​Elara Jenson's cries were not of pain, but of profound, gut-wrenching effort. A sound of creation wrestling against the void. Her knuckles were white where they gripped the sweat-soaked sheets; her husband, Alistair, was a rigid mask of strained encouragement beside her. Then, a new sound pierced the cacophony of wind and effort—a thin, wavering, indignant cry.​The midwife, her own face lined with exhaustion and relief, held up the squirming, blood-slicked infant. "A daughter," she announced, her voice trembling.​Alistair's stern features, so often carved from granite, softened and then broke into a rare, radiant smile. He looked from his wife's sweat-sheened, triumphant face to the mewling newborn. "Christina," he whispered, the name a vow, a blessing, a promise spoken into the chaotic night. For one single, suspended moment, the world contracted to this perfect, holy point: Alistair, Elara, their young son Clark sleeping soundly downstairs, and now Christina Isla. A family, whole.​The moment was shattered by the window.​It wasn't breaking; it was an annihilation. Glass exploded inward, a thousand glittering shards caught in the firelight as the storm screamed into the room. A figure clad in seamless black landed in a crouch in the center of the chaos, moving with an unnatural, liquid silence. The midwife's scream was a short, strangled thing, dying in her throat. The firelight glinted off the assassin's mask—a featureless, polished slate that seemed to drink the light—and the long, cruelly elegant stiletto in his hand.​His name was Sleven. His movements were devoid of wasted energy, a study in lethal economy. He ignored Alistair, who was already roaring and reaching for the heavy iron poker. He ignored the cowering midwife.​His eyes, cold and dark behind the mask's impenetrable gaze, locked onto the newborn.​He moved like a striking asp. Elara, fueled by a mother's primal, wordless instinct, did not think. She threw her weakened body over the crib, a human shield made of love and desperation. There was a soft, terrible sound—a sigh, almost—as Sleven's blade found its mark, not in the child, but in the mother's heart.​Alistair's world dissolved into a red haze of pure rage. He swung the poker with a force born of utter despair, catching Sleven off guard, driving him back. The assassin, his primary target now inaccessible, didn't falter. He simply melted back into the shadows and through the broken window, disappearing into the storm's maw as swiftly as he had come.​A sudden, deafening silence fell, broken only by the infant's cries and the howl of the wind through the shattered window. Alistair collapsed by the bed, pulling Elara's lifeless body into his arms. He rocked her, whispering her name, his tears falling onto her still-warm cheek, his sobs raw and ugly.​Then his eyes, blurred with a grief so profound it felt like madness, lifted.​They fell upon the source of the crying. The child. The daughter.​His expression did not simply harden; it was annihilated and rebuilt from ash and ice. The love that had been there moments before was scorched away, replaced by a bottomless, venomous hatred that seemed to poison the very air. The midwife, cowering in the corner, would never forget the words he snarled, each one a curse spat into the world.​"You," he seethed, his voice trembling with a loathing so absolute it was a physical force. "You took her from me. You are a curse. A blight. Death follows you."​Downstairs, six-year-old Clark stirred in his sleep, a faint frown on his brow, unaware that his world had just been cleaved in two, and that the shadow that had fallen over his new sister would darken all their lives forever.

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