Novalis City, First Ring.
Set between mountain ridges and a darkened lake, the Vale estate sprawled across the land like a dominion carved from the night itself.
Lines of fire burned along its winding roads, their glow reflected in still waters that ringed the grounds like sheets of black glass.
Ancient stone halls and towering keeps rose from the earth, their surfaces worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. They carried more than history.
They carried judgment. Memory. Authority so dense it seemed to press against the chest.
Tomorrow, the Vale family's eldest son, Damien, would be wed.
The estate throbbed with preparation—precise, extravagant, and profoundly hollow.
Crimson and gold banners hung from balconies and archways, stirring in the cold air, their shadows twisting across the stone walls.
Servants moved ceaselessly through the illuminated corridors, faces drawn tight with exhaustion and something closer to fear, bearing trays of untouched food and ceremonial adornments meant to be admired rather than enjoyed.
Across the courtyards, celebratory charges detonated at regular intervals—controlled bursts of sound and light that echoed through the night.
They did not feel like joy.
They felt like signals.
Or the measured ticks of a clock counting down.
---
Deep within the estate, far beyond the reach of lantern light and polite deceit, behind three unmarked stone doors, there was only darkness.
The air was thick—almost viscous—saturated with the metallic stench of blood, old and new. It clung to the tongue, weighed on the lungs, a physical manifestation of despair. The silence here was not an absence, but a presence: something patient, predatory, feeding on hope itself.
Across the granite floor sprawled a vast occult array, etched in dark crimson sigils—not painted, but drawn with a substance that glimmered faintly in the black. Twisted serpents, inverted eyes, fractured chains—symbols that seemed to writhe when stared at too long, draining light toward a single black candle burning at the northern point.
At the precise center knelt a solitary figure clad in black robes so absolute they seemed to consume the very idea of illumination. Long, tangled hair the color of cold ash spilled over slumped shoulders. The figure was unnervingly still—less a person than a relic, another dreadful heirloom of the Vale family.
The door groaned open.
A thin blade of distant celebration spilled in, only to be strangled instantly by the gloom.
Damien Vale stepped inside, sealing the door behind him with a final, echoing thud.
Here, the infamous young master of the First Ring—known for his cruelty, his arrogance, his volatile temper—was changed. His shoulders hunched slightly. His hands, accustomed only to blades and dominance, clenched tight at his sides. He approached the ritual circle as one might approach a sleeping dragon: with awe, terror, and ravenous desire.
Lowering his head felt unnatural, a gesture learned through necessity rather than reverence.
"I pay my respects, Lord Kurobane."
The figure did not turn.
Then a voice emerged—dry, rasping, like stone grinding against stone, like parchment peeling from a corpse's hand. It carried no warmth, only the ancient chill of earth and malice long perfected.
"All preparations are complete," it said, each word sinking into the silence like a dropped weight.
"At high noon tomorrow—when the sun stands at its zenith and shadows are briefly erased—the vows will be sealed. At that precise instant, the sacrifice will be made."
Damien's breath caught.
"The ceremony's surge of solar force—public, radiant, violently alive—will be inverted. Its vitality will be stripped, its polarity reversed. You will shed your defective vessel, your Heaven-Crippled body, and be remade."
A pause.
"Power will flood every channel within you. Every barrier will collapse. You will ascend directly into the realm of a Great Grandmaster."
The title reverberated through the chamber—and through Damien's soul.
Heaven-Crippled.
The curse branded into him at birth.
While other heirs awakened to spiritual resonance, his own body remained silent—a locked treasury door in a house of riches. Whispers followed him through childhood: pity disguised as kindness, succession debates held just beyond earshot, glances that slid past him toward stronger cousins. A prince of glass in a world of steel.
To be whole.
No—to surpass them all.
He would give anything.
And so he knelt not merely before a man, but before the architect of his salvation: Renji Kurobane, last known inheritor of the forbidden Onmyōji lineage, a name surviving only in censored texts and dying curses.
But such rebirth demanded balance.
"This is not a matter of faith," Kurobane said calmly.
"It is a matter of balance, timing, and containment."
"Power cannot be created. It can only be redirected. What the world calls 'blessing' is merely excess energy released under favorable conditions. A wedding is one of the few human rituals that reliably generates such a surge—collective focus, emotional synchronization, symbolic permanence."
"Love is irrelevant," he added flatly.
"Witnesses are not."
"At the exact moment the vows are spoken, the gathered consciousness peaks. Expectation, joy, projection—these form a temporary resonance field. Solar in nature. Expansive. Wasteful."
His tone carried faint disdain.
"Most of it dissipates uselessly into the world."
"We intercept it."
"The bride is not chosen for sentiment, but for capacity. A soul formed entirely under receptive polarity absorbs without resistance. No backlash. No rejection."
A pause.
"Her death will not be violent. Merely... complete."
"The public radiance masks the conversion. No anomaly detectable. No karmic rebound. To the world, a marriage occurs. To reality, an exchange."
Seraphine.
The name drifted into Damien's mind—soft, unresisting.
Seraphine of the eastern branch. Politically harmless. Chosen for convenience. And unbeknownst to her family, born with a fate too perfect to survive. Seraphine, who had looked at him yesterday with cautious hope, believing this marriage a beginning.
She was the sacrifice.
The grand wedding—the gifts, the music, the ancestral rites—was nothing more than an ornate frame around a blood offering. The most sacred of human unions perverted into an altar.
Kurobane's head tilted slightly. A sliver of impossibly pale profile caught the candlelight.
"Do you hesitate, young Vale?"
Damien lifted his head. The last trace of humility burned away, replaced by cold, unwavering resolve.
"I do not," he said. "Let the celebration begin."
He turned and walked back toward lantern light and hollow laughter.
Above, crimson lanterns swayed gently in the night, bathing the Vale estate in joy—perfectly concealing the serpent coiled at its heart, poised to strike beneath tomorrow's merciless sun.
---
At this time, in a quiet wing of the estate, Seraphine sat alone by the window.
The lantern light outside painted her reflection in warm gold, softening the sharp lines she had grown used to seeing. She adjusted the wedding ribbon at her wrist for the third time, then stopped, embarrassed by her own nervousness.
It will be fine, she told herself.
Not joyful. Not romantic. Just... stable.
That would be enough.
When a servant passed and asked if she needed anything, Seraphine hesitated before answering.
"No," she said, then added after a moment, "Just—please make sure the ceremony starts on time."
Timing mattered to her. She did not know why.