Dawn on the day of the Bleeding Moon arrived not with light, but with a suffocating, rust-colored haze that leeched the world of true color. The sun was a pale, smeared coin behind the dust. It was an ill omen, even for a banishment.
The door to the Western Keep opened for the final time. No Seraphina this time. Two of the Duke's personal Reavers stood there, men whose souls had been tempered in the blood-rites until their eyes held no more humanity than polished stones. They wore no ceremonial armor, only practical, scarred battle-leathers.
"Up," the larger one grunted. His voice was the sound of gravel crushing bone.
Alex stood. He had changed into the clothes from Seraphina's bundle: dark grey wool trousers, a tough linen shirt, and a worn but serviceable leather jerkin. The boots were a fraction too large, but he had already devised a method to pad them with strips torn from his discarded silken underclothes. He tied the waterskin to his belt. He carried nothing else. The Reavers didn't even let him keep the iron shortsword from his Awakening day. He was to be utterly dispossessed.
They flanked him, their grip not brutal but implacable, and marched him through the bowels of Castle Bloodborne. They took no hallways the household would use. These were the utility passages, the stone veins of the fortress, cold and smelling of damp and old iron. Servants and lesser kin averted their eyes as the trio passed, as if the Null's condition might be contagious.
They exited through a sally port at the base of the western wall. Outside, the air was dry and biting, carrying the faint, metallic tang of the distant wastes. A small, grim procession awaited.
A single, enclosed prison-wagon, its bars forged of dull black iron, was hitched to two surly, scaled Canyon Drakes—low cousins to true dragons, all muscle and bad temper. Their handler, a grizzled wastesman with one milky eye and skin like cured leather, spat a stream of black juice onto the dust. Two more Reavers sat astride dull-coated warhorses.
At the head of this party, mounted on a massive blood-bay stallion that steamed in the cool air, was Caius, the Seventh Son.
A cruel, satisfied smile played on his handsome lips. He was in his element, the dutiful son administering the family's dirty work. He wore a light crimson travel cloak over his armor, the picture of martial nobility.
"Little brother," Caius drawled, his voice dripping with false pity. "The Wastes await your unique… contributions. I've come to see you off. To ensure the order of things is maintained."
Alex looked up at him, his face a mask of serene indifference. His vivid red hair was the only spot of true color in the washed-out dawn. He said nothing. He was too busy observing.
Caius's mount: right rear shoe slightly loose. Audible click every third stride.
Wastesman handler: nervous tic in left hand, fingers drumming on thigh. Fear of the Reavers, not the Wastes.
Prison wagon: lock mechanism, simple twin-tumbler. Hinge on the rear door, rusted at the upper pin. A weakness.
Drakes: respiration slightly labored. Dehydrated. Handler is skimping on their water ration.
The data streamed in, populating the quiet space in his mind with actionable variables.
"Cat got your tongue, Null?" Caius sneered, dismounting with a flourish. He strode closer, his presence an attempt to dominate the space. "Nothing to say? No grand last words? No begging?"
Alex met his eyes. "Your saddle's forward cinch is over-tightened by two notches. It's causing a slight rotational stress on the horse's spine. In forty miles, it will develop a sore. You should adjust it."
Caius blinked, his smirk freezing. It was so utterly, bizarrely off-script that his mind stalled for a second. Rage, hot and familiar, swiftly flooded the confusion. This wasn't defiance. It was… instruction. From the Null. The insult was galactic.
His hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of Alex's scarlet hair, yanking his head back. "You think you're still in a position to lecture anyone, you empty pretty thing?" he hissed, spittle dotting Alex's cheek. "You're nothing. You're about to become less than nothing. You'll be Hemohound shit by week's end."
Alex didn't struggle. The pain was a datum. Caius's grip strength: upper quartile for his weight class. Leverage applied: suboptimal, wasting energy on display rather than control. He kept his crimson eyes locked on his brother's, unnervingly calm. "The inefficiency is in your technique, not my observation."
With a roar of fury, Caius shoved him away, sending Alex stumbling back into the grip of a Reaver. "Put him in the cage! Now! I want to watch the dust swallow this mistake!"
The Reavers hauled Alex to the wagon. The wastesman scrambled to open the creaking rear door. As Alex was shoved inside, his hands, seemingly braced against the doorframe, gave the upper hinge a precise, testing push. The rust gave a tiny, almost inaudible flake. Confirmed.
The iron-barred door clanged shut. The key turned. The world became a grid of shadows and dust-light.
Caius remounted, his face still flushed with anger. He wheeled his horse and gestured forward. "Move out! I want to reach the observation bluff by midday."
The wagon lurched into motion with a groan of wood and a jangle of harness. The drakes hissed, pulling them onto the rough trade road that wound down from the castle plateau toward the vast, bleeding expanse.
Alex sat on the bare plank floor, his back against the bars. He didn't watch the receding spires of his ancestral home. He watched the road. He noted the rhythm of the wheels over different types of stone and gravel. He timed the drakes' footfalls. He mapped the rising heat of the day as the weak sun climbed, tracing the shift of the temperature gradient within his cage.
He was a sensor array, collecting information. The quiet in his soul hummed with purpose.
After several hours, the wagon slowed. They had reached a high, windswept bluff overlooking a titanic, jagged rift in the earth—the Shattered Teeth Pass, the official, symbolic border between the Crimson Marches and the lawless Scarlet Wastes. Beyond, the land was a nightmare painting in reds, ochres, and deep purple shadows.
The party halted. Caius dismounted and strode to the wagon. The wastesman unlocked the door.
"End of the line, brother," Caius said, his smile back, edged with triumph. "The road ends here. Your life, for all intents and purposes, ends here. Walk into your new kingdom." He gestured grandly toward the desolation.
Alex climbed out slowly, his body stiff from the journey. He looked past Caius, down into the immense, sheer-walled pass. A narrow, treacherous switchback path was carved into its side, disappearing into the gloom far below.
"The path is maintained by whom?" Alex asked, his voice conversational.
Caius snorted. "Maintained? Nothing is maintained in the Wastes. It's carved by fools and worn by the dead. Now walk."
Alex turned his gaze from the pass to Caius. He took a single, slow step forward, not toward the edge, but toward his brother. The Reavers tensed. Caius held up a hand, amused.
Alex stopped very close. He spoke, his voice so low only Caius could hear, each word a perfect, cold crystal.
"You derive your worth from our father's approval. A variable you do not control. Your power is borrowed, your status contingent. You are a subsystem with no independent function." Alex's beautiful, placid face showed a flicker of something that wasn't contempt, but something colder: diagnostic pity. "When the source code changes, you will error and crash. I, however, am building my own operating system from the ground up."
He didn't wait for a response. He turned on his heel and, without a backward glance, started down the steep, crumbling path into the throat of the Shattered Teeth.
Caius stood rooted, the color draining from his face, then flooding back in a hot, humiliated crimson. The words hadn't been an insult. They'd been a diagnosis. And they had found a vulnerability no physical blow ever could. He watched the slender figure with its banner of red hair descend into the shadows, a profound and unfamiliar chill settling in his gut.
High above, on the castle's highest western tower, a figure in a grey cloak stood perfectly still, watching through a far-seeing crystal until the tiny figure was swallowed by the depths of the pass. Seraphina lowered the crystal, her hand steady, her heart a frozen, silent chaos of its own.
Down in the gathering darkness of the pass, Alex walked. The air grew cooler. The sounds of the world above faded, replaced by the moan of wind through stone teeth and the distant, echoing shriek of some unseen creature.
He was alone. He was weaponless. He was Null.
And in the perfect, profound silence of the descent, the first coherent idea since his Awakening finally crystallized in the workshop of his mind. It was not a memory. It was a schematic.
Primary Objective: Secure Water.
Secondary Objective: Construct Tool.
Tertiary Objective: Ascend to Geothermal Vent Signature (Grid Reference 78-B, observed from keep window).
Available Resources: One leather waterskin, one set of clothes, one body, one mind.
He reached the base of the pass as true twilight claimed the world. The towering walls blocked the last of the sun. Before him stretched the first rolling, barren foothills of the Scarlet Wastes, shrouded in deep violet.
Alex knelt. He picked up a stone. It was rough, of a brittle flint-like composition. He examined it in the gloom, his fingers reading its shape, its fracture lines.
Improvised Cutting Implement: Possible.
He looked up at the impossible vastness, at the first hard stars piercing the velvet sky above the canyon rim. The absolute indifference of the universe yawned before him.
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. It was the smile of a mathematician who has just been presented with the most complex, beautiful equation of his life.
He began to work on the stone.