WHEN SHADOWS BREATHE
The Hollowroots Sanctuary was unlike any place Elara Duskveil had ever seen. Hidden beneath layers of stone and soulsoil, it thrummed with a quiet, eternal breath. The walls were not stone but root—twisting veins of the elderwood that pulsed faintly with life, as though remembering the deep magic that had once carved them. Here, moss glowed in pale lavender. Pools of mirrored stillness revealed not reflections, but glimpses of elsewhere—moments, memories, or perhaps dreams.
Riven lay still beside her, half-curled in a stone basin that wept warm healing waters drawn from the bones of the world. His transformation had not faded. The shape of the beast still lingered beneath his skin, muscle taut and senses sharp. But the rage had receded, like a tide pulled inward by some distant moon.
Elara pressed her palm to his cheek, feeling the subtle quiver of power under his skin. "You're stabilizing," she whispered. "But not cured."
His eyes opened—amber and shadow-rimmed. "I felt it, Elara. The moon didn't rise, but something in me did. Something old. Something... watching."
Before she could respond, the Sanctuary's guardian emerged from the root-wall—an old woman cloaked in bark and breath. Her eyes held no pupils, only the shimmer of flowing rootwater.
"The Hollowroots recognize you," she rasped. "You are marked by shadow, and he by the blood of the hunted. This place will hold your wounds while your fates turn."
Elara bowed slightly, though her thoughts churned. This place felt connected—not just to the world but to the very weave beneath it. And the dreams that plagued her since the Revenant's return had only grown worse.
---
That night, Elara dreamed again.
She stood in a forest where the trees bled light. Mist curled in the boughs like silk, and a voice—velvet and ancient—whispered her name.
"Elara Duskveil… child of the mirrored moon."
She turned. A woman stood there, tall and silver-haired, her skin like night painted in stars. Eyes deep as abyssal oceans regarded her without warmth or cruelty. Nyxis.
"You are unraveling," the goddess said. "But unraveling is not the end. It is... revelation."
Elara dropped to her knees. "What am I?"
Nyxis tilted her head. "More than vampire. More than daughter. Less than what you were meant to be. The Faeblood stirs. Your line drank deep from forbidden wells. You must awaken what was buried… or it will awaken without you."
Then the forest folded inward like paper on flame, and she woke—gasping.
---
Across the realm, in the high bones of the Ashmar Peaks, Aeron Vale stood in the twilight wind, blood drying on his jaw.
The revenants were gone—banished or broken by the twilight's end. He was whole again, but changed. The memory of the Twilight Between still sang behind his eyes, and the oath he'd made in that liminal world weighed heavy.
He sensed it before he saw it—a presence both luminous and cruel. A figure emerged from a bloom of petals that should not have grown on stone: a tall, androgynous being with skin the color of duskdust and eyes like polished silver.
"You walk reborn, Revenant," the figure said. "But the world is fraying faster than you can mend it."
Aeron raised his gaze. "You're Faeblood."
The figure smiled. "We are what remains when gods forget and blood remembers. The Faeblood do not stir lightly. But the Breathless King rises. And so... we breathe."
"What do you want from me?"
"To watch. To whisper. To remind you that not all ancient debts have been paid."
Then the figure faded into moths.
---
In the bastion-city of Halvenreach, the Pale Synod convened beneath shattered spires. Of the twelve Ember Paladins who had marched against Aeron Vale, only five had returned, and they had done so bloodied and silent.
High Palewarden Selric leaned over the edge of the council dais. "He returned through the breach in twilight... and survived. That should have been impossible."
Magister Kael hissed, "And what of the girl? The Duskveil?"
"Missing. Along with the wolf-child."
The air thickened. Even among cold sorcerers and sanctified warriors, fear had found its root.
And then, from the lower balconies, a courier draped in violet and moon-etched silk spoke.
"The Eclipsed Moon Order has issued no statement. But their veils darken. They are watching. And the Faeblood have begun to stir."
A tremor passed through the council.
"What do they want?" Selric asked, voice low.
The courier shrugged. "Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps they remember what we forgot."
---
Back in Hollowroots, Riven stared into a pool where his reflection shifted, a boy, a beast, a shadow crowned in flame.
Elara approached slowly. "You felt it, didn't you?"
He nodded. "There's a place inside me that... isn't mine. Something old. And it woke."
She sat beside him. "The Faeblood… Nyxis spoke of them in my dream. She said our lines were touched by them once. Before the world sealed their kind away."
Riven met her eyes. "What does that make us?"
Elara didn't answer. But above them, in the roots of the world, something stirred. A petal bloomed black and iridescent. The air whispered like breath.
---
They followed the whisper.
Beyond the hollow chamber, down a spiral of root-engraved stone, they found a vault sealed by no door but by memory. Elara placed her hand against the wood and it peeled away, opening into the Dreamwound Archive.
Scrolls of living script floated in the air like jellyfish. Lightless orbs hovered over stone pedestals etched with Faeblood runes,bcurved, poetic, and half-forgotten. And there, nested in thorns of crystal, lay the Codex Nocturna.
Elara reached for it. A thousand voices brushed her mind.
Blood weaves. Night remembers. Your name is older than you know.
The Codex revealed it all:
Her bloodline was sired not by a vampire, but by a Faeblood exile named Velorai, who had stolen the essence of Nyxis herself.
Riven's wolfblood traced back to the Broken Fang Pact, a ritual by which Faebloods sealed monstrous spirits into mortal flesh.
Both were part of a design centuries older than the war—a hidden lineage meant to awaken only when the Balance failed.
Riven clutched his head. "We're... constructs?"
Elara's eyes blazed. "No. We're keys."
---
Far away, Aeron Vale climbed the broken tower once known as Solus' Watch—a ruin where the first Revenants bound their vows.
Inside, he found a sigil carved in dried blood and rootwork: a spiral devouring a sun. He touched it—and memory surged.
Aamon Bloodbane stood in firelight, speaking to a cloaked Faeblood. "The pact is broken. You were meant to seal the Tear, not feed it."
"I offered you power," the Faeblood hissed. "You offered me a grave."
Then Aamon drank something from a thorned chalice.
When the vision faded, Aeron fell to his knees.
Aamon was not just royalty. He was a vessel. A host for something older than Hell itself.
---
At the edge of the known world, deep in a grove that never saw day, the Faeblood Conclave began.
Each Faeblood emissary arrived in silence: wreathed in light, bone, wind, or ash. Their leader—a figure known only as the Mothking, spoke without moving his mouth.
"We have awakened not for war, but for reckoning. The child of Nyxis walks. The wolf marked by Broken Fang howls. The revenant dreams again. And the Breathless King rises."
One emissary whispered, "Will we serve or consume?"
Another: "Will the factions bend?"
The Mothking replied, "They will break. And from their ruins, the dark will breathe."
That night, in Hollowroots, Elara and Riven stood at the archive's edge.
"We need to find Aeron," she said.
Riven nodded. "And stop Aamon. Before he finishes what the Faeblood started."
The shadows breathed deeper.