The subterranean command bunker of the High Council, buried three hundred meters beneath the crushing granite of the Swiss Alps, was a fortress designed to survive a nuclear apocalypse. Its reinforced obsidian walls were embedded with centuries of ancestral stasis runes, and its air filtration systems were independent of the earth’s surface. For generations, the three Grand Elders had looked at this mountain sanctuary as their absolute, final insurance policy—a place where the laws of the mortal and supernatural worlds could never reach them. They had spent five centuries sitting in this deep, cold dark, pulling the invisible strings of the packhouses, launching genocides like The Ancient Cleansing, and forcing the world to bend to the brutal doctrine of Alpha supremacy.
But tonight, the
