The ancient chapel lay in ruin, half-consumed by ivy and time. Its stained-glass windows had long since shattered, their fragments crunching beneath Lucien Kael's boots as he staggered to the altar. All around him, the hollowed walls loomed like the ribs of some vast carcass, sheltering nothing but dust and despair.
There, upon the cracked stones, he laid her down.
Yuva's hair spilled over his arms like a silvered shroud. Her lips, once quick to smile, were now fixed in the stillness that came when all warmth had fled. Lucien pressed trembling fingers to her throat, searching again and again for a heartbeat he knew he would not find.
"No… no, not yet…"
His voice was ragged with pleading. He sank to his knees, clutching her lifeless hand to his lips.
"Great gods—Ancients Above—hear me," he gasped. "All my days I have given in faith. I have honored your rites, spoken your prayers. If ever you have known my name, know it now—"
His throat closed around a sob.
"Take me instead. Take everything. But please… let her live."
He waited, listening to the echo of his own desperation. Nothing stirred but the cold wind sighing through the broken rafters. No radiance descended. No godly whisper came to offer absolution or hope.
Only silence.
Lucien's shoulders collapsed. The breath shuddered from his lungs as the weight of the world pressed him into the stones. The ache in his chest became a void so vast he thought it might consume him entire.
Then—
A sound.
Slow, deliberate.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
He lifted his head.
Upon the tallest shard of a shattered window, a lone crow had alighted. Midnight plumage
gleamed in the dying light. But it was not the darkness of its feathers that rooted him in place—it
was the eyes.
Twin pinpricks of crimson, glowering as if they alone possessed the memory of ancient,
nameless hungers.
The crow fixed its gaze upon him. Lucien could not look away.
"Be gone," he rasped, though his voice quavered. "Leave this place—"
The bird tilted its head with unnatural stillness. In that moment, the chapel seemed to exhale,
the air growing heavy as the grave.
Then, without moving its wings, the crow began to bleed darkness.
A shadow uncoiled from its silhouette—an ink-black vapour that clung to the walls and spread
across the shattered glass. As it flowed into the nave, the temperature plummeted. The final
candle sputtered, its flame guttering into nothingness.
Lucien scrambled backward, shielding Yuva's body as though his mortal flesh could oppose this
creeping night. His breath came in ragged clouds.
Then the world… stopped.
Dust froze midair, suspended like tiny stars. The wind fell silent. Even the thudding terror in his
chest faltered, as if the beating of his heart were no longer permitted.
A voice rose, woven into the darkness itself. It did not echo, because it needed no air to travel.
"Mortal."
Lucien's teeth chattered, though time itself seemed bound.
"You beg your silent gods. But it is not they who listen."
The shadows pooled upon the altar, coalescing into a form more felt than seen—a robed figure
crowned with horned void. The crow's red eyes glowed within that darkness, watching him with
chilling curiosity.
"You would surrender all to spare her."
Lucien tried to speak. His lips moved, but no sound emerged.
"Your devotion is quaint. Your agony… exquisite. And so I offer you this boon."
A cold pressure wrapped around his skull, squeezing thought into pain.
"Four conditions I shall name. Each shall carve deeper into the life you cling to. Fail in any, and you shall beg for an end that will never come."
His voice trembled within the prison of frozen time. "I… I must know them—"
The figure inclined its horned head, as though amused.
"In time, you shall. For now, the question is simpler: Do you consent?"
Lucien's gaze fell to Yuva. Even in death, her features seemed peaceful—her lashes resting like soft ink upon her pallid cheeks.
Memory rose unbidden: her laughter as they danced beside the midsummer fires, her hand warm in his beneath the stars, the whispered promises of a life they would build.
He could not let her go.
"I… I consent."
The darkness erupted, surging toward him in a torrent of ice and agony. It forced itself into his lungs, beneath his skin, into the marrow of his bones. He screamed as the shadow's claws carved a mark over his heart—a sigil of impossible geometry that blazed crimson against his flesh.
Time shuddered.
Then it resumed.
The candles flared back to life. The dust settled. The crow was gone.
Lucien collapsed, gasping. The cold retreated, leaving only a throbbing ache deep in his chest. He tore open his shirt with shaking hands.
There, etched into his skin, the mark still glowed—a wound that would never heal.
Yuva stirred.
Her eyelids fluttered. A breath rattled from her lungs as colour bled back into her cheeks.
She opened her eyes—and for an instant, he thought he glimpsed a flicker of crimson in their depths. But then it was gone, replaced by confusion and fear.
"Lucien…?" she whispered.
He drew her into his arms, tears of relief mingling with dread. For though she breathed again, he knew the cost of her return had only begun to reveal itself.
In the hush that followed, a single certainty remained:
He was no longer merely a man.
He was the Cursed One—marked by Valek's will, bound to four unspoken conditions that would one day claim everything he loved.