Keal
I stopped keeping track of the days. Down here, in the bowels of the Hollow, time doesn't pass—it decays.
They call it a cell, but it's not. It's a tomb. Built for monsters the world no longer wants to speak of. They didn't just lock me in stone and shadow. They wrapped me in ancient runes and silence, as if pretending I didn't exist would make me less dangerous.
The chains bite into my wrists and ankles, made not only of steel but laced with vervain—old, potent, and soaked deep into the metal. It scorches my skin with every twitch, sending burning pulses through my veins. A constant reminder that I'm not free. That I'm theirs.
Even worse than the chains is the blood.
They don't want me desiccating. I've seen it happen before—vampires shriveling like leaves in the fall, kept alive but dry, frozen in time and pain. The Council's afraid of that. Afraid I'll die too quietly before they can use me. So they inject me every few days with someone's blood. Clean, drugged, sterile. It doesn't heal me. It just keeps me awake. Breathing. A shell on fire.
I hate it.
They think it's a mercy.
It's not.
It's a curse.
Sometimes I wonder if they keep me here out of fear, or because they want to study what I'll become.
My father warned them. He told them the bloodline would not obey. That fusing vampire and witch would only birth chaos. They didn't listen. Now they treat me like I'm some cursed relic, a prophecy they failed to prevent.
And still… they watch.
I feel their eyes through the carved obsidian walls. Their spells hum constantly, a low vibration under my skin. Like bees crawling through bone.
But today is different.
Today, I smell her before I hear her.
Erythea.
The High Elder.
Cold, ageless, and always dressed in black so deep it absorbs the torchlight.
She enters without preamble, robes sweeping the floor like shadows with a mind of their own. Her presence cuts through the air sharper than any blade they've used on me.
I don't move.
She stops a few paces from the circle of chains and raises an eyebrow.
"You reek of rebellion," she says.
I smile with cracked lips. "Better than reeking of rot."
"You should be grateful," she says, circling me like a judge before the execution. "Most would have withered into nothing by now. We've kept you alive. Fed you. Contained your… disorder."
I glance at the vein-thin scar on my forearm, where they always inject the blood. "You keep me breathing so you can drain me later. That's not mercy, Erythea. That's farming."
She stops walking.
I feel the silence grow heavier, pressing down on my lungs.
"Your father spoke like that too," she says finally. "Until we burned his tongue from his mouth."
I lurch forward, chains tightening. Vervain slices into my skin, hissing against flesh. I grit my teeth, the pain flooding my nerves with fire.
"Don't. Say. His. Name," I growl.
"You inherited more than his defiance," she replies. "You carry the same flaw. He believed love could fix the ancient bloodlines. He thought your mother's power would balance his curse."
"She wasn't a curse," I snarl. "She was the only thing pure in his life. In mine."
"She was a threat," Erythea says coolly. "Like you."
She raises her hand, and the cell's torches flare brighter, casting harsh shadows across my broken body.
"You're going to give us everything," she whispers. "Your blood. Your secrets. Your silence."
"I'd rather rot."
"You won't rot, Keal," she says, leaning close enough that I smell the ash and myrrh on her breath. "You'll burn."
She leaves on that promise, sweeping away into the corridor with her words echoing behind her like a spell cast in venom.
As soon as she's gone, I sag forward, the runes on the floor glowing faintly beneath me.
I close my eyes.
Try to remember a time before this place.
Before the Council.
Before I became a weapon they feared too much to kill and too much to release.
But the Hollow does not allow memories to stay pure.
Instead, the voices come.
Faint, like threads unraveling in the dark. Whispers in the tongue of witches. The tongue I was never meant to learn. But I did. I heard it in my sleep as a child. I tasted it on my mother's lips the night she died protecting me.
The runes etched in the cell begin to hum, faintly out of sync.
My blood reacts, just slightly.
Something's coming.
No… someone.
I hear the shift before I see the change—the vibration in the air, the scent of something not Council flooding in through the cracks in the sealed stone.
Boots strike the hallway floor.
Voices—startled, alarmed.
A sudden clash of energy, like a ward shattering under willpower not meant to exist.
Light blooms through the tunnel, brilliant and wild, rupturing the oppressive dark.
The runes flare in warning. The vervain scorches brighter.
But I don't care.
I lift my head.
A figure steps into the cell.
She's outlined in chaos, framed by smoke and the smell of wind.
And even before her face clears from the mist—
I know.
Kyra.
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