The nights lengthened into weeks. Weeks folded into months. Kaeltharion's name unraveled across his domain, each syllable stripped from banners, each oath broken by blood, each house purged or bent until it no longer remembered loyalty.
Noctis moved through it without haste. The campaign did not burn in one fire. It spread like frost, steady, patient, killing root and branch alike.
Elders emerged from their holes, still drunk on old authority. Some came with escorts, lines of lesser kin armored in bone and iron, thinking numbers mattered. They learned otherwise.
One stood on a bridge, voice ringing with titles that had meant something once. He raised his marrow staff, sanctity wards burning white. Noctis stepped forward. The bridge split behind him. Orbitals cut the staff into splinters, the elder's chest into halves, his words into silence. The followers fell before they understood the oath they had chosen.
Another sealed himself inside a fortress of black glass and bone. The walls sang with blood-runes, meant to strip the marrow of any who dared touch them. Noctis did not touch. He pressed his palm to shadow, and the walls bent inward as if night itself had grown teeth. By dawn, the fortress was only rubble and dust blowing across the hills.
Some strongholds held longer. Courtyards filled with chained mortals screaming prayers, their blood poured into glyphs that burned like suns. Escorts fought in phalanxes, their marrow fused, limbs linked in one body with many faces. Noctis moved through them like a knife through cloth, cutting one face after another until the phalanx was only pieces, their screams echoing off stones that no longer protected them.
Not all were destroyed. Some were taken.
The campaign demanded more than blood—it demanded order. A few male vampires bent their heads before his shadow and did not rise again until the chain was sunk into their marrow. Not mercy. Utility. These were kept because the villages knew them, the roads feared them, the clans once bent to them. Folded into his dominion, they became tools with voices, masks that told the mortals what to obey. Their pride was swallowed whole, replaced by blood-bonds that burned hotter than loyalty ever had.
The nights became a record of submission. Villages silenced, towns stripped, fortresses broken, survivors pressed to their knees. Everywhere he passed, crimson marks traced gutters and wells. Everywhere he left, silence was heavier than before.
By the fourth month, the Northwestern marches no longer belonged to Kaeltharion's memory. They spoke Noctis's shadow without needing to be told. The air itself had learned his cadence, a rhythm that villages kept by instinct, towns by fear, strongholds by law pressed into marrow.
He stood on a hill above a plain once cut with clan banners. Only ash moved there now, drifting across fields where oaths had been plowed into soil. Behind him, Vaelora and her kin watched without words. They had fed and burned and bent across these months until their voices no longer trembled when they spoke his name. Around them stood the ones he had spared—males who now wore his chain inside their blood. Their eyes glowed the same crimson-gold, their silence matched his.
The campaign was not over, but its weight had shifted. Kaeltharion's domain had ceased to exist. The sovereign shadow walked in its place.
The bound kin trembled. Months of conquest had filled their marrow with discipline, but hunger cannot be taught to obey forever. The men clenched their jaws, hands shaking. The women's eyes burned too bright, veins drawn like maps across their skin. Frenzy swelled like a tide that would break and drown them all if it was not loosed.
Noctis felt it before they did. He led them into the dark, to a village still pinned under Kaeltharion's banner. Torches glowed weak above its square. Doors were locked, windows shuttered, prayers whispered into corners. Mortals smelled their own end and hoped to outlast the night.
He stood in the center of the lane. His voice cut through the air."Feed."
They erupted.
Shadows spilled over walls and down alleys, poured into houses like floods. Screams tore the quiet open. Bolts fired from rooftops, then bent in mid-flight and impaled the shooters. Doors splintered, shutters ripped free. Mortals clawed at each other to escape and were dragged down in silence.
The frenzy was savage. Men and women fed together, crouched over prey, their mouths red, their throats growling. Blood ran in streams down steps and pooled in gutters. Bodies were dragged half-living into the lanes, then stilled by teeth. Hunger stripped them of every rank and memory but one.
Noctis did not join. He watched. The square became a crucible of heat and crimson, the sound of veins breaking louder than the bells mortals had tried to ring.
When it ended, the village lay mute. Fires guttered. Every doorway bore crimson trails. The only breath left belonged to those who had taken it.
The kin staggered into the plaza. Their hunger was sated, but frenzy had not passed—it had transformed. Blood still fresh in their mouths turned their marrow molten. Desire rose like steam, visible in their eyes, trembling in their limbs. The men shook under it, aura trembling, bound but consumed by the same fever. The women burned brighter.
Vaelora moved first. Her silks were torn, her lips stained, her chest heaving as though the feeding had not been enough. She crossed the plaza with eyes fixed only on him. When she reached him, she did not bow. She lifted her mouth and pressed it to his, crimson passing from her lips to his. Her moan was soft, low, heavy with surrender.
The others followed.
One pressed her lips to his hand, then to his jaw. Another rose on her toes to kiss him, fingers clutching at his cloak. Two more leaned against him at once, mouths meeting his in desperate rhythm. The air thickened with heat, their breath heavy, shadows on the walls showing the press of bodies into his.
The males knelt at the edges, trembling, their bloodlust binding them in silence. They did not dare move. They did not need to. The plaza belonged to the women and to him.
Vaelora kissed him again, deeper, claiming nothing but giving everything. Around her, the others moaned in unison, lips brushing his, voices rising in the same broken cadence that had once belonged to feeding and now belonged to him.
Noctis did not push them back. He let them come, let their frenzy turn into fire at his lips. The night bent around them, lanterns swaying, shadows etched against the walls in shapes that would never be forgotten.
The sovereign began to indulge.
The square had learned hunger, then frenzy. Now it learned silence too heavy to hold. The women pressed close, lips still stained, eyes burning. The air trembled with the heat that blood had left behind.
Vaelora moved first. She stood before him, crimson gaze fixed, silks torn by feeding and by chains. Her breath was ragged, her body trembling not with weakness but with a fever that no blood had quenched. She lifted her hands to his chest, her mouth rising to his. Their kiss was not defiance. It was surrender, sealed in crimson against the weight of his shadow.
The moon hung over the square. Its light bent across the fountain and cast their silhouettes against the walls: her form pressed to his, his shadow folding over hers, the outline of sovereign and queen locked in rhythm. The women moaned when they saw it. Desire broke through them like marrow cracking. They pressed against him in turn—kissing his hand, his face, his mouth, their breath thick in his cloak, their voices joining Vaelora's.
There were too many. Their bodies circled, heat rising, hands trembling as they sought him. The square filled with the sound of moans and whispers, silk against stone, chains rattling in a rhythm that was no longer restraint but cadence.
The men stood aside, trembling in silence. Bound, blood-bonded, caught between frenzy and fear. Noctis's eyes turned toward them. They froze. Then he spoke one word.
"Join."
They obeyed.
The women broke into pairs and trios, scattering into the alleys and houses. The men followed, hunger twisting into heat. Soon the village itself became a chamber. Every lane, every doorway echoed with cries. The air carried a chorus of moans, layered and unending, each one folding into another until the whole night sang with surrender.
Noctis remained at the fountain, Vaelora still with him. She leaned against the stone, her silhouette bent under his, her voice breaking into moans that echoed against the water. The fountain reflected their shapes in trembling arcs of light, her head thrown back, his shadow pressing into her. The sound of her breath carried through the square, the others answering it in alleys and rooms beyond.
"Tell me," his voice low against her ear, "how do you feel?"
Her answer came as a gasp, words dragged through moans."Yours… always…"
Her body jolted in his arms, her cry spilling into the night as the chorus rose behind her.
Noctis lifted her, silks clinging, thighs locked against his frame. Her mouth clung to his, her moans spilling into him as her kin's voices filled the rest of the village.
The night did not break. It multiplied.
Everywhere—behind doors, under eaves, against walls—silhouettes moved, shadows bent, and voices echoed until the air itself seemed to throb with them. The village that had prayed to Kaeltharion gave its last sound to a new sovereign.
By the time the lanterns guttered, the chorus had no edges. Moans bled into sobs, sobs into silence, silence back into breath. Near dawn, when pale light threatened the horizon, they pulled themselves inside, into houses that had been emptied of mortals but filled with shadows. The frenzy did not end. It learned new rooms to inhabit.
The village kept their echoes. The walls remembered.
The throne hall had no throne left. Its pillars bowed, its banners blackened, but its floor bore the weight of those who remained. Two hundred vampires knelt in silence, their heads bowed, majority women, their eyes lowered not from fear but from a marrow-deep bond. At their front was Vaelora, her crimson gaze steady in submission.
Noctis stood before them, cloak torn from conquest, shadow burning steady. His voice cut the silence."Kaeltharion hides in the Demonic Academy. Then we turn to Maltherion's continent. His domain will be next."
The kneeling host pressed their foreheads to the stone. When they rose, they rose as one, bound in blood, their voices silent but their bodies ready to march.
The nights blurred into fire and ash. Kaeltharion's last clan gathered in mountain halls, clinging to names already erased. Noctis struck without pause. Orbitals carved through their defenses, marrow rends split their lines, shadows swallowed their walls. No plea slowed him. No beauty spared them. Not one lived. Their screams vanished into the cracks of the peaks and never returned.
When the last corpse cooled, the campaign was done. The continent belonged not to Kaeltharion, not to memory, but to the sovereign shadow that now ruled its marrow.
Noctis turned to Vaelora and the others who had survived the crucible of conquest. Their silks were ragged, their bodies marked by battle and frenzy. He spoke plain."Change. These rags do not honor what you are now. Clean yourselves. Wear what suits my banner."
They obeyed.
New silks were drawn from vaults and captured storehouses. Jewels were taken from coffers stripped of their masters. Armor was reforged, fitted to frames that once bent under others. They washed in rivers, in baths once sealed for lords now gone. The scars of war were rinsed, though never erased.
Noctis himself sought water. Though his body needed none, his will did. He entered a bathhouse lit by red lanterns, steam curling in slow ribbons. Inside, the women were already gathered, their silks undone, their eyes gleaming through the haze. Desire still clung to them like scent after blood.
He did not turn back. He stepped into the steam. The men lingered at the edge, their hunger trembling. His gaze fell on them. His voice gave a single command."Come."
They entered.
Steam thickened. Shadows warped across the walls. The silence broke into gasps, then into cries. The sound of chains long since dissolved seemed to rattle in rhythm again. The bathhouse shook with the weight of voices—loud moans, sharp cries, rising together until the night itself bent under them.
The city beyond slept, but its walls would remember what they heard.
The continent behind them was dead. Kaeltharion's banners were ash, his clans erased, his vaults stripped. The palace stood hollow, its stones blackened by fire. What remained of his name lay only in the mouths of the bound, and even that was fading.
Two hundred vampires knelt on the cliff above the sea. The wind dragged their silks into tatters, salt spray stung their faces, but none looked up. They stayed bowed with their foreheads pressed to rock, held in silence by the marrow-deep law that bound them.
Vaelora knelt at their front. Her hair was torn loose by the wind, her silks still marked with blood. She held her head bent, her hands flat against the stone. No words came from her mouth. She was silent because silence was what obedience demanded.
Noctis stood at the edge. His cloak pulled hard in the gusts, his eyes fixed on the horizon. He did not look back at the ruin behind him. His voice carried across the sea."Kaeltharion hides in the Demonic Academy. This land is ended. Maltherion is next."
The kneeling vampires bent lower until their faces struck the stone. Their bones ached under the weight of the words. The silence thickened, heavier than any oath.
He turned and walked forward. The bound rose together and followed without sound.
The shoreline was jagged rock and black sand. The sea roared against it, waves slamming and breaking into white foam. The tide smelled of iron and salt. For mortals it was a barrier. For them it was another command to be broken.
Noctis stepped into the surf. The water bent. Waves collapsed flat and pulled back as if pressed by a hand. Foam slid away in streams. A path of stone and sand revealed itself, stretching into the dark horizon.
He did not pause. His boots struck wet stone and kept moving. The water hissed at his ankles but did not touch him.
The two hundred followed. Their feet sank into slick sand. Salt wind stung their throats. The sea's roar pressed into their ears. Some faltered, bodies tensing against the instinct to recoil. None turned back. Chains that did not show still held their steps in line.
The whispers came with the tide. At first they were faint, thin threads in the roar. Then they thickened, rising with every wave. A woman's voice, layered, deep, and cold. The Abyssal Siren spoke through the sea.
He comes.
The words slid across the water. Every breaker carried them further. Sailors on distant ships shuddered awake. Sentries on the far shore felt their legs weaken though they saw nothing. Mortals turned in their beds, clutching their children without knowing why. The rumor carried faster than ships, faster than birds.
Vaelora walked close behind him. The spray drenched her hair and clung to her silks. Her body shook, though not from the cold. Hunger still gnawed at her marrow. Shame pressed behind her ribs. She had once commanded, but now her voice was gone. She followed the man who had broken her, because the bond left her no other truth.
Behind her the women walked with heads lowered. Some stared at the sea as if it would swallow them whole. Others fixed their eyes on Noctis's back, trembling but steady. Their breath came shallow, but their steps did not break. The men walked at the rear. They had been spared only to serve. Their pride was gone. They kept their silence.
The night stretched long. The moon laid a silver path over the waves. Every step made the air colder, the salt heavier on their skin. The Siren's voice did not stop.
Kaeltharion has fallen.
Maltherion is next.
The words grew louder. Along Maltherion's coast, villagers woke in panic. Bells rang in harbors with no cause. Guards along watchtowers pressed their hands to their ears. The sea itself carried dread inland.
Still the path held. Stone rose where he set his feet, sand hardened under his stride. The sea obeyed, forced to carry him across against its own nature.
At last land rose ahead. Black cliffs cut into the sky. Strongholds crowned the ridges, their towers lit with watchfires. Banners marked with Maltherion's crest hung in the wind. Lanterns gleamed on the walls like open eyes.
The sentries did not yet see what approached. But they heard it. The Siren's whispers crawled into their marrow. A man dropped his spear. Another knelt without knowing why. Fear moved faster than sight.
Noctis stepped onto the shore. Water surged and closed behind him, washing away the path as though it had never existed.
Two hundred vampires followed, their feet sinking into Maltherion's soil. They lowered their heads again, their silence deepening under the weight of his presence.
He looked once at the towers ahead. His silence pressed heavier than any command. The land had already begun to yield.
The whispers did the rest.
He comes.
The first fortress rose out of the cliffs like a tooth. Basalt walls, mortar dark as old marrow, runes pressed into the stone until they held a dull, red glow. Torches crowned the parapets. Watchfires burned in iron bowls that bled smoke across the stars.
The sentries leaned forward when they saw the procession from the sea. Two hundred vampires walked out of the dark water without dripping and without sound, heads lowered, paced by a single figure whose shadow seemed to weigh the ground. The alarm rope jumped in a guard's hand, rang once, then stuttered into quiet as if the bell had remembered a different master. Wind carried a rumor along the battlements—words with no mouth behind them, a woman's tone braided into the hiss of the surf: he has crossed; he is here.
The gates opened not in welcome, but because fear prefers distance. Escorts poured through, armored in bonework and iron bands, shields interlocked. Behind them came elders wrapped in warded cloth, mouths moving, palms bright with the heat of old vows.
Noctis did not call for parley. He moved.
Blood lifted from his palm and hardened into weapons. Three blades formed cleanly—a sword, a guan dao, a scythe—each drawn from him, each circling his body in silent arcs. Torchlight bent across their edges until the air around him held red ribbons instead of flame. The ring tightened once as if taking a breath.
He stepped forward. The circling blades broke formation and went out.
In the first rank of escorts, shields jarred. The sword-form passed between two faces and kept going. The long blade cleaved a line through center mass and returned to his orbit as if listening for the next thought. The scythe cut low, never touching earth, and the front line folded as if pulled at the knees. The guan dao drove into the locked wall of shields, and the pattern of their defense broke as if a knot had been cut.
Elders shouted command words. The air brightened around their hands. Noctis raised his own and the ground answered. Chains of shadow coiled up from the cracks in the stone, links shaped from darkness that carried weight. They wrapped wrists and elbows and pulled. The light in the elders' palms stuttered, sputtered, dimmed. Chants fell out of rhythm.
He crossed the space between ranks in a single movement that did not disturb dust. One moment he stood outside the formation; the next, the world around him had pivoted, and he was among them. It looked like a step. It felt like the night had folded and then unfolded with him on the other side.
A wall torch snapped as if wind had struck it. The circling blades revised their course, meeting the rise of weapons rather than striking first. Steel rasped. Wood split. Runes etched on escort shields cracked down the center and ran cold. Noctis did not snarl or speak. His cloak pulled in the same direction as the cuts, as if dragged by the argument of force.
On the parapet, an elder pressed his palm to carved stone and poured heat into the wall. The runes along the curtain flared brighter. A fan of pale fire pushed outward, fell over the field like a curtain meant to scour. Noctis lifted his left hand and closed his fingers slowly. The fire dimmed as if suffocated under a lid. Smoke slumped toward the ground. Torches bent sideways and then went out. For a breath, the fortress knew what it was to be without light or sound.
In that hush, the blades did their work.
The sword-form returned to his shoulder and spun once before leaping again. The long blade traced a strict line from left to right, cutting through spear-shafts and raised arms with the same indifferent pace. The scythe turned in a measured half-moon and anything that had been reaching for his throat stopped reaching. The guan dao did not rise high; it pressed forward, as if its weight were sufficient to make men choose the ground. Where it met a shield, the arm behind the shield slackened. Where it met a helm, the helm, and the posture inside it, both lowered as if reconsidering the point of standing.
The ground on either side of him learned new marks. Not gouges, not pits—just lines pressed into stone as though someone had unrolled invisible cords and set them taut, then lifted them away again. Wind found those lines and sang through them. The sound joined the rumor from the sea: he has crossed; he is here.
A second wave of escorts charged to close the breach. Their discipline was real; their fear had not yet won. They came with shoulders touching and shields married. Noctis did not change his pace. The circling blades drew close and then went out as a single shape—three forms converging, point and edge and hook—meeting the wall of shields in a muted concussion that pushed the formation back a full step. Boots skidded. The front line lost its angle. The second line tried to correct and overcommitted. The gap opened not in a dramatic tear but in a quiet misalignment that leaders dread and battles end on.
He slid into the space the mistake created and spoke nothing. The fortress spoke for him: wood splintering, metal glancing, breath catching, stone answering weight.
On the wall, another elder appeared. Wires ran under the skin of his forearms, silver given red threads by the glow within. He raised both hands and the air warped above Noctis, as if heat were gathering itself for a single blow. Noctis looked up, extended his right hand, and drew his fingers together slowly, as though collecting threads. The distortion collapsed into a point and became a tight knot of absence. Sound did not travel inside it. Light dimmed at the edges. The elder's mouth kept moving, but its effort could not reach this ground.
Noctis walked out of the knot. The three blades waited in their orbit until his feet touched deliberate earth again. Then they went out and touched nothing twice.
Silence held for the length of a breath. Then the gates made the sound of failure.
They did not break in a shout, but in a tired sigh, hinges twisting, crossbeams creaking as they gave up the idea of staying horizontal. Noctis did not step aside; the angle of the falling wood learned how to miss him. The escorts behind, who had chosen the gate for their next muster, found a different plan demanded by weight.
The bound vampires had not yet moved from where he had left them. Their heads stayed lowered. Vaelora watched from the line's front, not blinking. Her shoulders remained square, her hands steady, her mouth closed. She did not need to speak to be understood. She stood close enough to see the way torchlight failed near him and the way the air returned to its own nature only after he had passed.
The courtyard filled with the kind of quiet that is not peace. The fires along the wall burned, but without confidence. The red glow in the runes dimmed to sullen. The escorts who could still stand did not raise their weapons again. Some remembered how to sink down and place their palms on the ground so that the earth could hear them surrender. Others stood long enough to drop their eyes and follow their weapons to the stones.
Noctis did not announce victory. He turned his head slightly, and the circling blades folded back into him, each dissolving to liquid red, each running along his forearms and into his hands before vanishing. The torches that had bent began, one by one, to right themselves.
He looked up at the parapet. Where an elder had stood a moment ago, there was only the memory of a figure marked by heat. The wall no longer tried to sing. The fortress had learned which voice to obey.
Beyond the cliffs, the rumor carried faster. It moved from tower to tower and then inland, riding breath and stone and the restless water in wells. Villages woke with a shiver someone called wind and someone else called warning. A council fire in a distant town popped and threw a spark that no one noticed had shaped itself like a word. He has crossed. He is here.
Noctis stood in the center of the courtyard until the ground finished answering him. The two hundred lowered their heads again, and the fortress found its new weight. There was no banner to pull down. There was no proclamation to nail up. The stone itself understood.
He turned toward the next road.