CLANG.
The first bell of midnight did not merely ring; it compressed the air, a sonic fist that punched through the fog-choked foyer of the Academy. The vibration traveled through the marble floor, up Xan's polished boots, and into his spine, where it resonated with the glowing Mark on his neck.
CLANG.
Lord Malachar hesitated. It was a fractional pause, barely a heartbeat, but in the geometry of combat—in the sacred mathematics that governed the Masks—it was an eternity.
"You think sound is your ally?" Malachar hissed, his surgical gown rustling like dead skin. "I have dissected opera singers whose lungs could shatter glass. Sound is merely pressure. And pressure..." He raised the Crimson Heart, the gears grinding as black fluid spurted from its brass valves, "...can be stopped. "
CLANG.
Xan did not answer. He couldn't. His entire concentration was focused on the web he had spun—not visible to the naked eye, but suspended in the fog like a spider's architecture made of frozen hemoglobin. Forty-three threads of blood, each thinner than a violin string, each hardened to the density of diamond. They filled the foyer, crisscrossing from the chandelier to the banister, from the reception desk to the anatomical charts on the walls.
And every single thread was connected to Xan's radial artery.
He could feel them. Not as external objects, but as extensions of his nervous system. The sensation was obscene, like having forty-three additional fingers reaching into the mist, and each one was cold , drinking his heat, his vitality, his very lifespan.
The Price, Xan thought, his vision tunneling. Father warned me. Every drop externalized is a piece of your timeline excised.
CLANG.
Malachar struck. Not with the scalpel—that was a feint—but with the Crimson Heart itself. He crushed it against his sternum, and the ancient muscle fibers within spasmed.
Silence.
Absolute, surgical silence.
The chime of Big Ben did not merely stop; it was negated . The vibration died in Xan's boots. The air became viscous, heavy with the absence of sound. Even the rush of blood in Xan's ears—the constant roar of his hemophilic condition—suddenly muted.
Xan gasped. Without sound, his blood-web was blind. The threads transmitted vibration; they were his eyes in the fog. Now they were just dead strings.
"The Silent Scalpel," Malachar mouthed—Xan couldn't hear him, but he could read the lips, those predatory teeth glinting. "My Heart stops not just life, but phenomena . No sound. No pulse. No escape."
Malachar glided forward, moving through the fog without disturbing it, his feet hovering an inch above the marble—a trick of perspective, or perhaps his rejection of physics altogether. He raised the scalpel, and this time, Xan saw the geometry of the attack: a straight line, perfect Euclidean precision, aimed at the Mark on Xan's neck. The source. The wellspring.
CLANG.
The fourth bell. But Xan couldn't hear it. He could only feel it in his teeth, a ghost vibration.
Think, Xan commanded himself. The Mask is geometry. Geometry is mathematics. Mathematics exists independent of sound.
He twisted. Not away—that was impossible—but into the attack, his body snapping into a new configuration: spine curved like a bow, head thrown back so far that his crimson collar brushed his hairline, arms spread wide in a posture that suggested crucifixion but felt like preparation . The Crimson Stance, Variation Two: The Open Vein.
Malachar's scalpel entered the space where Xan's jugular should have been.
Instead, it encountered thread.
Not the threads in the fog—those were dead, silent. But a new thread, fresh from Xan's own palm. He had clenched his fist, driving his fingernails—sharpened to surgical points, a habit of anxious aristocracy—into his lifeline. Blood welled, not spilled, but shaped .
One drop. Perfect sphere. Harder than steel.
It caught the scalpel's tip and held it.
Malachar's eyes widened. In the silence, Xan could see the man's pupils dilate with chemical horror. The Crimson Heart in Malachar's chest—the black fluid within—suddenly sputtered.
CLANG.
The fifth bell.
Xan smiled. Blood trickled from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes—The Price exacting its tribute. He was aging, not visibly, but internally. Cells dying, telomeres shortening. A day subtracted. Then two.
But he had time enough for this.
You stop sound, Xan thought, his mind racing through the axioms of his family's cursed geometry. But sound is just one waveform. What about light? What about temperature? What about the quantum shiver of a molecule in distress?
He exhaled. His breath did not fog in the air.
Malachar had stopped heat too. The temperature was plunging, crystals of ice forming on the formaldehyde jars lining the walls.
Desperate, Xan reached not into his blood, but into his pocket . The handkerchief. The silk square he had used earlier. It was soaked with his blood, a textile biopsy of his own mortality.
He flicked it.
In the silence, the handkerchief didn't flutter; it fell like a stone. But as it descended, it touched one of the suspended threads in the fog.
Sympathetic Resonance.
Xan's mask was not merely hardening blood. It was conductivity. His blood remembered the vibration of Big Ben. It held the echo.
The thread sang. Not with sound—with memory of sound.
The handkerchief, soaked in Xenith blood, transmitted the stored vibration to the web. Forty-three threads, suddenly humming with the ghost frequency of the fourth chime.
CLANG.
The sound didn't return. Instead, the geometry returned. The web activated, not as sound, but as form.
The razor threads contracted.
Malachar screamed—Xan saw his throat work, the veins bulge, but no sound emerged—and the surgical gown shredded. Not cut. Cubed . The threads passed through fabric and flesh with equal indifference, dividing Malachar's left arm into one-centimeter segments before he could withdraw.
The Crimson Heart dropped.
The silence shattered. Sound rushed back in a roar: the bells, the screaming, the wet thud of meat hitting marble.
"You... you calculated the harmonic resonance of your own clotting factor?" Malachar gasped, clutching his stump, black fluid spurting from the severed arteries—not blood, but the ichor of his artificial heart.
Xan collapsed to one knee. The handkerchief lay on the floor, a crimson snowflake. He was seventeen, but he felt ninety. His hair—he could feel it—had developed a streak of white at the left temple. The Price. Three days of life? A week?
"Mathematics," Xan wheezed, adjusting his collar with a blood-slicked hand, his posture still absurdly perfect even in defeat. "Is the only aristocracy that matters."
He reached for the Crimson Heart, which lay pulsing on the marble like a dying insect.
Malachar laughed—a wet, bubbling sound. "Touch it, young Xenith. Touch it and see what eternity truly costs."
Xan's fingers stopped an inch from the brass gears. He saw it then—the trap. The Heart was not a creation. It was a vessel. And it was empty. Waiting.
Waiting for a Xenith to fill it.
CLANG.
The sixth bell.
A new sound interrupted. Not the bell. Footsteps. Heavy, military, perfectly synchronized.
The doors to the Academy burst open—not by force, but by key , turned with the casual authority of those who owned the streets.
A figure stepped through the fog. Not Malachar's ally. Someone worse.
He wore the crimson uniform of the Queen's Own Royal House Guard, but modified—straps and buckles crossing his chest like the harness of a puppeteer, a cape of black waxed canvas that shed the fog like water. His face was obscured by a gas mask, but not a standard military issue. This one had been customized with silver filigree, a hexagonal pattern that matched the Mark on Xan's neck.
In his hand, he held not a rifle, but a tuning fork. The size of a broadsword. It hummed with a frequency that made Xan's blood web vibrate in sympathy.
"Lord Malachar," the figure said, his voice filtered through the mask's resonators, deep and mechanical. "You are in violation of the Xanadu Compact. Section Seven: Unauthorized experimentation with Primordial Masks."
He raised the tuning fork.
"And Young Master Xenith," the figure continued, turning the hexagonal eye-pieces toward Xan's kneeling form. "Your father sends his regards. He requests you stop bleeding on the furniture. It is... unseemly."
Xan looked up, blood dripping from his chin, and smiled a smile that belonged to a much older, much more dangerous man.
"The cavalry arrives," Xan whispered, "wearing the wrong colors."
Lord Malachar, bleeding and broken, began to laugh. "Oh, child. You think I'm your enemy? You think this is about a heart?"
He gestured with his stump toward the figure in the gas mask.
"Welcome to the Geometry," Malachar hissed. "Phase One begins."
The tuning fork rang.
And the world turned crimson.