The rain smelled of blood.
Not the fresh kind,not the kind that sang with life,but old blood, soaked deep into the earth like a curse that refused to die.
Riven Kael stirred among the bones.
Lightning tore the clouds apart, revealing a battlefield drowned in silence. The corpses of vampires lay twisted in the mud, pale and eyeless, their wings torn. Wolves 'his kin by birth' were little more than shadows, their silver fur burned to ash. The wind dragged the stench of death through the shattered cathedral spires that once reached toward the moon.
Bloodfall — the city of eternal night — was now a grave.
He rose slowly, every muscle screaming as though the battle had ended inside him, not around him. His right arm was furred, dark and sinewed, claws dripping with the remnants of something he didn't remember killing. His left arm was human — pale, veined, trembling beneath the cold.
The war lived in him.
He stumbled toward the ruins of a fallen archway. Through the storm, he could hear voices — faint, lingering things that did not belong to the living. Run, Riven… they whispered. The Queen remembers.
He shut his eyes, but the voice only grew louder.
In flashes, the memories came: fire, the scent of his mother's blood, the blade of a vampire knight piercing her chest. Then darkness. Always darkness.
He looked up. The moon hung low — not white, but red, a wound in the heavens.
The Eclipse Moon.
And beneath its light, something moved.
Across the field of corpses, a figure glided between the dead — tall, cloaked in black, her skin pale as frost. She carried no torch, yet her presence set the air alight. Eyes like molten ruby met his.
The Queen of Bloodfall. Seraphine.
Riven's claws flexed. "You should have stayed dead."
Her smile was slow, cruel, ancient.
"Death," she said, voice dripping like honey through fangs, "is for those who can afford to rest. You, my little half-breed, are not among them."
He stepped back. The rain thickened, and thunder cracked.
"What do you want from me?"
Seraphine tilted her head. "The same thing your blood wants — an end. To pain. To hunger. To everything that makes you tremble when you wake."
She walked closer, each step quiet as snowfall. "Your father fought to destroy me. Your mother died to save you. And still you stand — broken, furious, lost. Tell me, Riven Kael…" She reached out, her pale hand brushing the air between them. "…how long before you realize the beast inside you is not a curse?"
Riven's eyes glowed amber.
"It's not a curse," he whispered.
"It's a promise."
And then he struck.
The storm screamed as wolf and queen collided — claws against fangs, fury against centuries of sin. The ruins trembled, stone crying out under the force of their battle. Blood met rain; lightning burned through shattered stained glass, scattering fragments of crimson light.
For a moment, the prophecy felt alive again — not as legend, but as blood and breath.
Because in that ruin, under that red moon, something impossible awakened.
Not man. Not wolf. Not vampire.
Something immortal.