The mortuary walls held the night in silence. Downstairs, candles bled low, casting trembling halos across black stone. But in the upstairs infirmary, time had narrowed to the sound of a shallow breath—and the echo of something wrong beneath the skin.
Thae lay unconscious, her arm slung over her abdomen, the bandages beneath her shoulder already stained again. What pulsed under the wrap wasn't blood alone—it was glyphwork, dark and alive. The mark had been carved into her during her capture—designed not to kill, but to linger.
Veylen sat beside her now, rolling his sleeves, his eyes narrowed to slits. The light from the oil lamp above him flickered in his irises like coals behind glass.
"She's burning up again," Zhada said from the wall, arms crossed but restless. "You said you sealed it."
"I did," he murmured. "Enough to bring her home. Not enough to quiet it."
Zhada stepped closer. "You should've bled it out of her the moment we returned."
He ignored her tone. He could hear it—the mark beneath the gauze wasn't just flaring—it was whispering. Old magic. Deeper than ink. And it recognized him.
Veylen peeled back the wrapping carefully. The skin beneath had split, but not from the wound alone. The sigil was nested there, branded into the muscle like it had grown inside her. The ink shimmered faintly as if it were trying to breathe.
He reached for the brass bowl beside him and drew a blade across his palm. His blood ran warm and slow, too dense to be human. It hit the sigil with a hiss—and the mark writhed.
Thae's body jerked on the table.
"She's seizing," Zhada warned, reaching instinctively for her, but Veylen lifted a hand to stop her.
"No. She's awakening."
The bloodwork had activated something—some hidden resonance. Not just in Thae's wound, but in Veylen himself. As the sigil drank from his cut, a sliver of memory cracked through the vault of his mind. Something forgotten. Buried. Unwanted.
A stone bridge. A flash of red ink beneath it. His grandfather's voice—tight with fear, not power:
"Even we don't draw these. These marks drink too deep. They know the blood of our line."
Thae gasped—her eyes fluttering.
Veylen took her hand. His blood now pooled across her shoulder, glowing faintly in the lines it traced.
"It's almost done," he said quietly.
The mark flared one final time, blackening, cracking, and then—disappearing beneath her skin like a scab falling away. Her breathing evened. Her brow smoothed.
Zhada exhaled behind him. "Is she—"
"She's alive." He stood. "And now she knows something none of us do."
He turned away, his hand still bleeding, his pulse quickened.
The mark was gone from her skin.
But not from his memory.
Thae stirred slowly, her fingers curling over the edge of the padded table as if trying to hold onto a dream she hadn't meant to wake from. Her lashes parted in slow motion, and her eyes—still clouded with pain—found Veylen standing over her, the crimson bowl in one hand and a bloodied cloth in the other.
"Where…" Her voice rasped.
"You're safe," Zhada answered gently, moving closer to her side.
Veylen didn't speak. He watched Thae's face as awareness returned in flickers. She blinked hard, once. Then again.
"I remember…" she whispered. "A tower. A sound like… screaming stone. And the sigil—it was talking to me."
Veylen set the bowl aside, wiping his hand. "You were marked by something ancient. Something not drawn for you."
Thae turned her head weakly. "But it knew your name."
That made Zhada look up.
Veylen's jaw ticked, just slightly.
"It reacted to your blood," Thae continued. "I felt it… pull. Like it recognized you."
Zhada's expression shifted. "So what was it?" she asked, voice low and steady. "Because the last time we saw a mark like that, you erased it without a word."
Silence sat between them like a shadow with weight.
Veylen finally moved, pouring water into a silver basin. "The sigil was not just a mark. It was a link. A trigger. One that required blood of a certain kind to silence."
"Your kind?" Zhada pressed.
"My blood remembers more than I do," he said, voice quiet but edged.
He wrung the cloth out, red drops dancing in the water like dying stars.
"You're not answering the question," Zhada said.
"I'm not ready to," Veylen replied.
He handed Zhada the cloth and moved to the tall shelf by the back wall, pulling down a narrow leather-bound tome. His tone shifted as he opened the book and turned to Thae.
"You were inside the tower. What did you see?"
Thae breathed shallowly. "Not much. Just… the staircases were wrong. Endless. But I saw markings on the walls, sigils I couldn't read. Except—" she furrowed her brow. "Except I feel like I've seen them before. I should know them."
"You were probably meant to forget them," Veylen said. "That's how this magic works."
He knelt beside her, the book open in his hands, showing a series of blood glyphs half-burned onto the parchment. Thae reached out slowly and hovered her hand over the page. One symbol glowed faintly beneath her palm.
"I saw that," she whispered. "On the inside of the tower's highest arch."
"That's one of mine," Veylen said.
Zhada stiffened. "Yours?"
"I erased it. Years ago. From a temple ruin east of the Vale. I didn't know anyone else had access to it, let alone how to use it."
Thae looked between them. "You think they're replicating your family's bloodwork?"
"I think," Veylen said slowly, "they've been watching my line far longer than I realized."
He stood abruptly and crossed to the cabinet of old scrolls.
"Rest," he told Thae. "And write down everything you remember—no matter how broken or strange. Names. Sounds. Shapes. They're not dreams. They're the map."
Zhada moved to help Thae sit up. "And where will you be?"
Veylen looked over his shoulder. His eyes were darker than before.
"Following the scent of silence," he said. "And reopening a door I was possibly, never meant to walk through."
The old steps groaned under Veylen's boots as he descended into the lower crypts. Lantern light flickered in long veins across the stone, casting the blood-marked walls in shades of rust and fire. Down here, the silence breathed differently. It didn't wait to be filled—it listened.
He paused midway and placed his hand on the carved arch framing the narrow corridor. His blood had once sealed this path, per his grandfather's instructions. He had never dared to disobey—until now.
But the sigil he saw in Thae's wound, the glyphs she touched in that tower—they matched what he had once erased. And if the Red Choir was drawing on bloodwork thought lost to time, then the silence could no longer be his shield.
The seal recognized him instantly. A low, resonant hum stirred beneath his palm, the stone warming to his blood. It clicked softly. The ward parted with a sound like bones cracking in reverse.
He entered.
Dust kissed the air. Forgotten relics lined the chamber: bone-carved scroll tubes, faded grimoire fragments, and a glass urn sealed with a wax crest marked by his family's sigil—a sharp spiral surrounded by seven drops of blood.
In the center was the vault. Black iron. Runed. Wrapped in a dried vein-like lattice that pulsed faintly once he approached.
Veylen knelt, unsheathing the dagger from his belt, and drew it lightly across his palm. His blood welled slowly, darker than most. It dripped onto the vault's core lock.
Drip.
Drip.
Then it pulsed.
A wave of warmth surged through the chamber, stirring dust into curling spirals. The lattice withdrew like dying roots. The lock opened with a shudder.
Inside was a single scroll—parchment coiled so tightly it had never breathed air in over a century. Veylen's fingers trembled as he reached for it. Something in him knew: this was his bloodline's memory.
As he unrolled it, a drop of his blood smeared across the first glyph. It hissed and shimmered.
And then—he wasn't in the vault anymore.
He stood in a place made of nothing but ink and breath. A world etched in veins and memory.
The Sigil Tower rose before him—spiraling obsidian, glowing red lines running through its seams like molten arteries. The sky above it was a roiling eclipse, its center bleeding open like a wound. The ground was cracked earth, but beneath it—he sensed layers of bone, voices buried in the stone.
And standing just before the tower's threshold—his grandfather. Younger than he'd ever seen him, but eyes heavy with time.
"You weren't meant to find this yet," the older man said, voice half echo, half blood-song.
Veylen said nothing. The air itself pressed on his chest.
"This tower… is not of this world," his grandfather went on. "It was constructed by those who serve Her. Each sigil carved in it siphons from ancestral lines—yours most of all. If it is ever fully awakened, the Vessel will rise. And your blood… your blood will decide the end."
The memory trembled.
"Then why seal it from me?" Veylen finally asked.
His grandfather looked at him, grief flickering behind resolve.
"Because you were born into a war. And I hoped… that sealing your power would buy you peace. That the world might forget you, long enough for you to choose your path freely."
"Then you failed," Veylen said softly.
"No. I bought you time."
And just like that—the vision collapsed.
Veylen gasped awake in the crypt. Sweat coated his brow. The scroll still sat in his lap, now warm to the touch, but quiet.
He slowly rolled it shut and stood. His voice was almost a growl.
"Then let my blood decide nothing but their death."
In the forest just beyond the edge of the city swayed with a cold wind, branches moving not with breeze, but purpose—like they were watching. Two cloaked figures stood between the trees, neither shivering nor speaking at first, cloaked in woven shadows and silver-lined hoods that faintly shimmered in moonlight.
They were not human. Not entirely.
One knelt with a hand pressed to the soil, eyes closed. "It shifted."
The other stood taller, back to the city lights, gaze fixed on the mortuary's rear spires through the thicket. "Are you sure?"
"I felt it in the wards," the kneeling one whispered. "He opened the vault. The old blood stirred."
A pause.
"Then he's further along than we hoped."
The taller one lowered her hood. Her eyes were silvered, rimmed with faint runes of light that curved under her skin like sacred scars. Her voice held the weight of both oath and war.
"We'll have to move sooner."
The kneeling figure finally stood. His features were faintly Fae—long lines to his jaw, pointed ears barely visible beneath dark braids. His Nephilim half gave him a quiet density, a slow-burning strength.
"He's still unaligned."
"For now," she replied. "But blood remembers its purpose. Even when the mind doesn't."
A pulse throbbed in the air—distant, but undeniable. The mortuary's core hummed, nearly imperceptible, like a great beast yawning in its sleep.
"He broke the seal," the man murmured again.
The woman nodded slowly. "Then it's already begun."
They turned without another word and vanished into the trees—becoming part of the lightless night, bound by their cause, knowing the next time they faced Veylen Graveblood… it might be as true enemies.