Untitled Episode
893 Words
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Adeline did not sleep.
She lay beneath the furs, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the hum to return. Her hands rested on her stomach. Her fingers were no longer glowing. The violet in her veins had faded back to shadows beneath her skin.
Maybe it was nothing. Perhaps she imagined it. Maybe exhaustion was playing tricks on her.
She almost believed it.
Then the hum returned. Louder this time. Not a vibration in her chest — a shriek in her bones.
Adeline sat up. Her hand flew to her throat. Her heart pounded — not with fear, but with something else. Something that felt like recognition.
This has happened before.
When?
When I was a child. Before my mother died. Before the pack took me in.
I felt this once. A long time ago.
The memory was a fragment — a woman's hands on her face, a whisper in a language she didn't understand, a flash of violet light that made the walls tremble.
"You are not like the others, little one. You are the beginning and the end."
Adeline's breath caught.
My mother.
She knew.
The violet light exploded from her chest — not gently, not gradually. It ripped out of her, a shockwave of color and heat that sent the furs flying and mirrors cracking.
Adeline screamed! A painless release.... took over her body
The guards burst through the door.
Vesper was first, her ancient eyes wide, fangs extended. The younger guard followed, his glass spear raised.
"My lady—" Vesper started.
She stopped.
Adeline was floating. Not standing. Not sitting. Floating. Inches above the bed, her hair drifting in a phantom wind, her arms outstretched. Her skin was translucent — they could see her veins, her muscles, her bones.
Her bones were no longer white.
They were purple. Crystalline. Glowing.
"The seal," Vesper whispered. She stumbled backward, her hand covering her mouth. "The Priestess's seal. It's breaking."
"Get Cyprian," the younger guard said.
"He already knows."
Cyprian's voice came from the doorway. He was pale — paler than Vesper had ever seen him. His silver eyes fixed on Adeline's floating form.
"Leave us," he said.
The guards fled.
Cyprian walked to the bed. He reached up and took Adeline's hand. His skin was cold — but hers was burning.
"Adeline," he said. "Can you hear me?"
Her eyes — no longer brown, no longer violet, but white — turned to him.
"Cyprian," she said.
Her voice was layered. Hers, but not hers. Young, but ancient.
"The Priestess didn't just curse you," Adeline said. "She used me. She planted something inside my bloodline. Something that would wake when the time was right."
Cyprian's jaw tightened.
"Yes."
"What is it?"
Cyprian hesitated.
"The Key," he said. "The Cage. The thing that opens the door between the living and the dead."
Adeline's floating form trembled.
"And if the door opens?"
Cyprian's silver eyes held hers.
"Then the world ends," he said. "Or it begins again." He left her to herself to clear his head,, he wasn't gone for long before something else take over her
The violet light pulsed.
Mirrors in the room shattered — one by one, then all at once. Obsidian walls cracked. The silver fire in the hearth turned violet, then white, then nothing.
Adeline's body arched. Her mouth opened. A sound came out — not a scream, not a word, but a frequency. A note that made the mountain tremble.
"She's singing," Vesper whispered from the corridor.
The other vampires felt it too. They fell to their knees in the rotunda, hands over their ears, ancient bodies shaking.
The Key is here. The cage won't hold. The world will fall.
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In the Borderlands, Kael stopped running.
Ash was deep here — up to his thighs. Black skeletons of trees reached for a sky that had forgotten how to be blue. His chest heaved. His lungs burned.
Then he felt it.Her.
Through the remaining shattered bond
For one heartbeat — just one — the wall between them vanished. He saw what she saw: a room of obsidian and silver fire, a man with silver eyes holding her hand, a violet light eating her alive.
"Adeline," he whispered.
Her voice came back — not through the bond, but through something older. Something that didn't care about rejection or branding or laws.
"Kael."
Then the wall returned.
The silence was worse than the scream.
Kael fell to his knees in ash. His claws dug into bone, his chest heaving, his eyes — black pits of swirling frost — filling with tears.
"She's dying," the Grave-Wolf whispered.
Kael shook his head.
"She's changing."
He looked at the mountains.
And ran.
Adeline pulled her hand away from the mirror.
The hum faded. The violet in her eyes dimmed. Her veins stopped glowing.
She stood alone in the dark, her breath coming fast, her heart pounding.
Something is wrong with me.
Or something is right.
She didn't know which thought frightened her more.
Adeline climbed back into the bed. She pulled the furs up to her chin. She closed her eyes.
The hum was gone.
But the memory remained — a whisper in her bones, a promise in her blood.
You are stronger than you think.
And one day — very soon — they will beg the servant for mercy.
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- Writer
