The next morning, Lina climbed the tree again.
Johan and Jennifer were already there waiting — Jennifer cross-legged on her usual branch, Johan lying flat on his with one arm behind his head, pretending he hadn't been watching the garden path for the last ten minutes.
"Okay, Mama." Jennifer sat up straight. "Let's continue."
Lina settled onto her branch and looked at her daughter with raised eyebrows. "Mm. Interested in my life story now, are we?" She tilted her head. "Who was it that said yesterday she hates horror stories?"
Jennifer waved a hand. "That was yesterday. Let's start."
Lina laughed — soft and short.
Before she could open her mouth, the window of the neighbouring mansion swung open.
A man leaned out. He looked like someone who had been awake longer than he wanted to be and had decided other people were responsible for it.
"Lina." His voice was flat. "Could you keep it down. We can hear everything from over here. Thirty times louder than you probably think."
Lina blinked. "Oh. Sorry about that. Are Elara and Eloise alright?"
"Yes, yes. They're fine." He pulled the window shut.
FUMP!
Jennifer stared at the closed window. "How rude."
"Don't say that," Lina said.
"How did you two even become friends?" Jennifer looked back at her mother. "He just closed a window in your face."
"I want to know that too," Johan said, not moving from his position.
Lina was quiet for a moment. She looked at the neighbouring mansion — at the closed window, at the ivy growing up the stone wall, at the lights still on inside despite the morning.
"That," she said, "is the story of another small life. Same curse. Same shadows." She looked back at her children. "Same darkness following it."
She paused.
She opened the diary in her lap.
In the Flora Town graveyard, three workers in red caps knelt over fresh gravestones, chisels steady, hammers rising and falling in the quiet morning.
Clink! Clink! Clink!
The sound carried through the still air between the headstones.
A boy of age twelve came through the gate.
He wore a heavy coat of royal blue and teal that reached nearly to his knees, high-collared, with gold filigree traced along the lapels and cuffs. It was the kind of coat that belonged to someone important, or someone who would be. He carried a bouquet of pink flowers at his side and walked through the graveyard like he had been here before — not hesitant, not rushing, just moving with the quiet purpose of someone who knew where they were going and had been dreading arriving.
He stopped at Joseph's grave.
One of the workers noticed him and set down his hammer.
"Knight Vlad. Did you know Master Joseph?"
Vlad looked at the stone. "You could call him my friend," he said. His voice was flat and even, the tone of someone keeping careful control of something underneath it. "My student. My mentor. A person I truly admired."
The worker nodded and went back to his chisel.
Clink! Clink! Clink!
"Fifteen days," the worker said, not looking up. "Eleven of the Aves race gone in fifteen days."
Vlad said nothing.
"Four today." The worker moved to the next stone. "Joseph Bennet. Hanna Richter. Tobias Weaver. Inga Weaver."
He paused. Took a breath.
"Joseph Bennet's demonification was expected. His age. But the others—" He shook his head. "The symptoms appeared without warning. They transformed before anyone could prepare. The other three hadn't even reached thirty."
He finished carving the third stone and sat back on his heels.
Inga Weaver.
"The saddest were Inga and Tobias," the worker said. His voice had changed — quieter, slower, the voice of someone recounting something they were still not finished understanding. "Siblings. Inga was fourteen. Tobias was nineteen." He set the chisel down on the grass. "Last night they were all at the dinner table together. Their father, both of them. A normal evening." He stopped. "Then Tobias transformed. The Order came and killed him. Their father tried to save Inga, but she had already been bitten. She transformed before morning."
The worker's shoulders dropped.
Tears ran down his face, and he didn't wipe them.
The worker beside him placed a hand on his shoulder and said nothing.
"They went to their mother," the first worker said. "She went three years ago. Same curse." He looked at the stone he had just carved, at his daughter's name in fresh cuts. "They left me here alone. But I will meet them again. In the next life."
Vlad stood very still.
He understood now. The man kneeling in the red cap with the chisel in his hand and his daughter's name on the stone in front of him — that was their father. A man who had lost his wife to the curse, and last night had lost both his children at the dinner table.
Vlad said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
He placed the bouquet of pink flowers at the base of Joseph's grave. He looked at the stone for a moment. Then he turned and walked toward the gate.
She came through it at a run.
A girl — around his age, breathing hard, her forest green tunic torn at the hem and stained with mud and bark, a leather satchel bouncing against her hip with the strap pulled tight across her chest like she was afraid of losing what was inside it. Her eyes found him immediately.
"Vlad." She grabbed his arm to stop herself. Still huffing. "Your brother. The symptoms have shown in your brother."
The words landed.
Vlad's face did not change. Not immediately. He stood at the gate of the graveyard with the pink flowers no longer in his hand and the sound of the chisel still going somewhere behind him —
Clink! Clink! Clink!
— and something moved behind his eyes. Deep and fast. Like something falling from a great height that hadn't hit the bottom yet.
His jaw tightened.
He looked back once at Joseph's grave — at the fresh stone, at the flowers he had just placed there.
Then he looked at the girl.
"When?" His voice came out completely steady. It cost him something to make it that way.
"Last night. He hid it. Your mother found him this morning."
Vlad turned and walked. Fast. The coat moved behind him.
The girl ran to keep up.
The Pale Sanctuary— Vaelora City,
Vaelora was a city of towering marvels, a soaring monument to the Realm of Life. Unlike the chaotic hubs of the outer lands, Vaelora was a place of quiet gravity—less a crowded city and more a grand cathedral for the elite.
Every inch of the earth was paved in massive squares of polished white marble, so vast and pristine they seemed to glow with an inner light. These hallowed grounds were reserved for the influential: the high-ranking members of the Order of Life, and the legendary warriors and soldiers who served as the Realm's living shield.
The room was large and marble-floored, the walls pale with gold tree patterns pressed into the stone. Morning light fell through the high windows onto the bed where Alad lay.
He was eighteen. He looked older right now. His head was swollen, the skin pulled tight, the veins beneath gone black from his neck to his temples — ink spreading through wet paper. Each breath came slow and heavy, like pulling something up from deep water.
A crowd had gathered around the bed. Too many people, too close together, the air thick with fear.
"Please." A man near the door raised his hands. "We understand your concern. But keep your distance. The Order is coming. All of this noise — it will only frighten him more."
A woman near the window was crying with both hands over her mouth. "Where is Vlad? Does he know? Has anyone seen him?"
"Mrs Luen, I haven't seen him since this morning—"
The door opened.
Vlad walked in with the girl behind him.
He saw his brother on the bed, and his steps slowed — just slightly, just for one step — before he kept walking. His eyes moved across Alad's face. The swollen jaw. The black veins climbing his neck. The hands twisted against the sheets, fingers already wrong at the knuckles.
He had known this was possible. He had known it every day for years. But knowing and seeing were two different things, and for one brief moment something passed across his face — deep and fast, like a crack in stone — before it closed again.
Every face in the room had turned to him.
"Everyone out," he said.
Nobody moved.
"Now."
One word. Flat and final. The kind of voice that had learned not to need volume.
They moved.
The girl pushed past the others toward the woman by the window.
"MAMA!"
Mrs Luen caught her daughter and pulled her toward the door. One of the others turned back for a last look at the bed.
They all saw it at the same moment.
Alad's hands left the sheets.
His fingers had lengthened — the proportions all wrong, joints bending backwards, black veins raised against the skin like roots breaking the surface of the earth. His back arched hard off the mattress, the wood of the frame cracking under the force. Through the back of his shirt, something pushed — pressed — and then tore through. Wings forced themselves into existence without his consent, dark and veined and trembling, something the curse was building rather than something he had chosen.
His whole body shook.
His teeth grew and sharpened.
His eyes — familiar, brown, his brother's eyes — expanded and filled completely. No white. No iris. Just black, flat and total, reflecting the light like still water at the bottom of something with no bottom.
He opened his mouth, and the sound that came out did not belong to a person.
Everybody ran.
The girl grabbed the doorframe and screamed back into the room. "VLAD, COME NOW!"
Vlad stood at the foot of the bed. He had not moved. His face had not changed.
"I want to do one last thing for my Brother," he said. No emotion. No hesitation. Just a man stating a fact.
His fingers snapped.
"Glimmering Rapier."
The sword formed in his right hand — long and slim and luminous, a rapier of condensed mana glowing with cold, steady light from within. One of the great mana swords. The kind with a history older than the person holding it.
Alad looked at him with eyes that no longer knew him.
Vlad looked back.
Outside in the corridor, the people pressed against the walls and held each other and listened.
Alad moved first.
He crossed the room in one motion — not running, not lunging, something faster and less human than either — and hit Vlad with the full weight of a body that no longer understood restraint. They went through the wall together.
Stone exploded outward. Then the next wall. Then open air.
They were falling.
The tower dropped away above them, the city spreading out below in every direction — marble rooftops, gold-veined walls, streets full of people who looked up and stopped moving. Miles of open air beneath them. The wind hit Vlad's face, and the ground was very far down and getting closer.
His fingers snapped.
Wings tore open from his back — mana-formed, precise, catching the air immediately. He pulled out of the fall and shot upward, angling away from the tower.
Behind him, a roar split the sky.
VRAAA!
Alad had caught the tower wall on the way down — fingers driven into the stone like hooks — and climbed. He stood now on the broken edge of the hole they had made, three hundred feet above the street, and he was wrong in every proportion. Taller than he had been. Wider at the shoulders, the joints thickened and reshaped by the transformation. His wings had fully spread — dark and vast, the membranes threaded with black veins that pulsed with each heartbeat. His face had kept enough of Alad's features to be recognisable, and that made it worse. The jaw was too long. The teeth too many teeth. The black eyes caught the light from every direction at once.
He opened his mouth and roared again.
VRAAA-KHAAA!
The sound rolled across the city like a wave.
Then he jumped off the tower and came after Vlad.
Mrs Luen grabbed her daughter and pulled her back from the window.
Her daughter didn't move. She stood with both hands on the sill and watched the two shapes in the sky — one glowing faintly with rapier light, one vast and dark and wrong — and could not look away.
Vlad banked hard left as Alad closed the distance.
The claws came from below — Alad driving upward, reaching — and Vlad pulled his legs up, and the claws raked empty air six inches beneath him. He twisted, reversed direction, and used the speed of the reversal to drive his elbow into Alad's shoulder. Alad barely registered it. He grabbed for Vlad's wing, and Vlad dissolved it before the hand closed, dropped ten feet, reformed the wing and pulled away.
Alad followed.
He was faster in a straight line. Vlad was faster in direction changes, in small adjustments, in the half-second decisions that kept him just ahead of something that wanted to close its hands around him and stop moving.
They crossed the city at speed.
Alad drove Vlad into a residential street — too narrow, too low, the marble walls close on both sides. Vlad folded his wings and ran along the rooftops. Alad came through the walls. Stone and dust and roof tiles exploded into the street below, the people already running, the sound of the pursuit rolling ahead of them like thunder announcing itself.
A market square opened up. Vlad cut across it at full speed, low to the ground. Alad came through a building on the far side — through it, not around it, the wall simply ceasing to exist where he hit it — and landed in the square directly in Vlad's path.
Vlad went straight up.
Alad caught his ankle.
They hit the ground together and rolled through a fountain and into the wall of the building behind it. The wall cracked. They went through that too.
An abandoned house. Dark inside. The furniture long since removed, the floors dusty, the ceiling low. They hit the far wall, and the impact brought the roof down — beams and tiles and stone crashing around them, filling the space with dust and debris and the sound of a building deciding it had held long enough.
Silence.
Then movement in the rubble.
Vlad pushed a beam off his chest and stood. His coat was torn at the shoulder. Blood from somewhere above his eye. He found the rapier in the debris beside him and picked it up, the mana in it still cold and steady and alive.
Across the ruined room, the debris shifted.
Alad stood.
He shook the dust from his wings and turned and found Vlad with his black eyes, and there was nothing behind them. No recognition. No hesitation. Just the forward motion of something that had decided.
He jumped.
Claws first. Full weight. The speed of something that had stopped calculating the cost.
Vlad moved.
One step to the side. The rapier came up in a single motion — not a swing, not a slash, something more precise than either — and the light of it traced a line through the dark of the ruined room.
The sound came a moment after.
Clean. Final.
Alad's momentum carried him past Vlad and into the far wall. He hit it and slid down and did not move again.
The slash continued upward — out through the broken roof, up through the open sky above the city, a line of cold mana light cutting through the air for miles.
Every person in the city who looked up saw it.
The echo rolled across the rooftops and the marble walls and the golden streets long after the light had faded.
Vlad stood in the rubble of the room with the rapier at his side and looked at his brother.
The destruction was so massive that it could vanish hundreds of people at once. That is the reason he brought Alad to this abandoned structure.
He did not move for a long time.
The dust settled around him. The city outside had gone quiet in the way cities go quiet after something large and wrong has happened — not silence exactly, but the absence of ordinary sound, everyone still and waiting without knowing what they were waiting for.
Vlad lowered himself to his knees in the rubble.
He reached out and took his brother's head carefully in both hands. He lifted it. He leaned forward and pressed his own forehead against Alad's.
He closed his eyes.
The reality shifted.