The silence in the Blood-Altar Sanctum was a living thing, a coiled predator made of incense smoke and generations of brutal expectation. The air itself tasted of copper and conquest.
At its heart, standing alone, was Alexandros of the Bloodborne.
He was, to the casual glance, the pinnacle of his lineage. At fourteen, he possessed a divine beauty that seemed less an inheritance and more a quiet, personal rebellion against the house's grim aesthetic. His hair was not the deep burgundy of his siblings, but the shocking, vivid scarlet of freshly spilled arterial blood, falling in a perfectly straight cascade to his shoulders. His eyes, wide-set and intelligent, held the same piercing crimson hue, but where his father's gaze promised slaughter, Alex's held a disconcerting, placid depth—like twin pools of still blood under a moonless sky. His features were sculpted with an artist's impossible precision: a sharp jawline, high cheekbones, and lips that naturally settled into a faint, contemplative curve. It was a face that drew stares and bred envy in equal measure. In a house that worshipped ferocious power, his calm, ethereal beauty was seen by many as an unearned distraction, a fluke of nature that mocked their martial purpose.
His siblings, arrayed in the galleries like jewels of gore and onyx, watched him with varying degrees of disdain. Rykard, the First Son, a mountain of simmering violence, looked upon Alex as one would a flawed but shiny weapon—potentially useful, likely to break. Caius, the Seventh Son, sneered openly, his own handsome features coarsened by resentment. The others wore masks of bored superiority.
All but one.
Seraphina, the Third Daughter and eldest sister, stood statue-still beside Rykard. Her beauty was of a different order—sharp, severe, a blade honed to a monofilament edge. Her expression was carved from ice, a perfect mirror of ducal indifference. But her crimson eyes, identical in shade to Alex's, were fixed on him with an intensity that betrayed her. To anyone else, it was scrutiny. To Alex, who had known the subtle language of her rare, almost imperceptible smiles and the gentle pressure of her hand on his shoulder during midnight studies, it was a fortress of silent solidarity. She was the only warmth in the frozen architecture of his family, a hidden hearth in a palace of sharp edges. He did not look at her, but he felt her gaze like a steadying anchor in the gathering storm.
Upon his throne of fused war-helmets, Duke Valerius observed. His own legendary handsomeness had long ago been subsumed by an aura of apocalyptic might. He saw his tenth son's beauty not as a trait, but as a resource unbacked by currency—a gilded sheath with no blade inside. Today would reveal the blade.
The High Blood-Speaker, a living relic whose skin clung to his bones like ancient parchment, raised the Ruby Chalice. "Let the blood of the war-god stir! Let the legacy of conquest answer the call of its scion!" His voice was the rustle of dry leaves in a tomb.
He drank, and power flooded the chamber. Runic arrays ignited, painting the air and stone in pulsing, scarlet light. The vibration resonated in the marrow, a primal drumbeat calling the Bloodborne essence to wakefulness. Alex closed his eyes, reaching inward as he'd been taught a thousand times, searching for the dormant torrent of power that was his birthright.
He found the quiet.
A deep, profound, and unyielding quiet.
It was not emptiness, but a sovereign null-space. The roaring energy of the Sanctum, the psychic scream of his ancestors, the divine spark meant to ignite his blood—as it rushed into him, it did not spark. It dissolved. It was not rejected; it was peacefully, utterly negated, erased upon contact with the core of his being, as if meeting a fundamental law that stated 'Here, this does not exist.'
The brilliant runes encircling him stuttered. The light flickered, dimmed, and died with a series of soft, conclusive pops. The resonant hum cut off, leaving a void of sound so absolute it pressed on the eardrums.
Alex opened his eyes. His vivid red hair seemed brighter against the sudden gloom, his beautiful face eerily placid. He felt nothing but a heightened, surgical clarity, as if a fog of latent violence had just lifted from his mind.
The High Blood-Speaker dropped the chalice. It clattered on the onyx, a sound of shocking vulgarity. The old man stared at his own trembling hands, then at Alex, with naked horror. "The Altar is silent… The blood turns away. It… it does not see him. A Soul of Null. A void in the lineage!"
Null.
The word hung, heavier than any weapon. In House Bloodborne, to be weak was a failing. To be nothing was a blasphemy.
A sharp, ugly laugh escaped Caius. It was quickly bitten off, but the stain of it remained in the air.
Duke Valerius rose. The movement had the finality of a continent breaking apart. The temperature plunged. He did not need to shout. His voice was a glacier grinding stone.
"Fourteen years," he said, each syllable dropping like an executioner's block. "Of history. Of resource. Of the Bloodborne name." He descended, his presence crushing the space around Alex. He loomed over his son, a monument of disappointed might. Alex gazed up, his divine features composed, his red eyes reflecting his father's image with unsettling neutrality. That calm—that beautiful, infuriating calm—was the final insult. It was not defiance. It was something worse: irrelevance.
"You are not a failed weapon," the Duke pronounced, his voice ringing in the dead Sanctum. "You are the absence of the forge. A hollow sculpture wearing my blood in its hair and eyes, but not in its spirit." He turned his devastating gaze to the scribe trembling in the corner. "Record it. Alexandros, tenth scion, is a Scion of Null. He is stripped of sigil, privilege, and place. His name is ash. His line ends with him."
He turned his back, a dismissal more absolute than any blow. "Confine him to the Western Keep. Let the silence there mirror the silence within him. On the Bleeding Moon, he is to be cast into the Scarlet Wastes. What the wastes claim, we disown."
The blood-iron guards moved, their grips vise-like on Alex's arms. As he was turned and marched away, his scarlet hair a bright banner of disgrace, he allowed himself one fleeting glance toward the gallery.
Seraphina's ice-carved face had not changed. But her eyes, those crimson mirrors of his own, held a fracture. A minute, almost invisible shattering deep within. It was not a tear—tears were for weaker houses. It was the silent scream of a bond being severed by decree. Her fingers, resting on the gallery rail, were white-knuckled. It was the only goodbye he would get, and the only love he would take with him.
He was led past triumphs he would never share, under the gaze of ancestors who now looked through his beautiful, hollow form. The Western Keep was a forgotten finger of stone, its rooms cold and dusty, its sole window a slit overlooking the brutal, blood-hued expanse of the Scarlet Wastes.
The door sealed behind him with a runic thud that vibrated in his bones.
Alone, Alex walked to the window. The wind howled a dirge through the stone. The last light of the sun set the distant wastes ablaze in crimson and shadow.
He raised a hand, studying the elegant fingers, the flawless skin. The face reflected in the darkening glass was one of devastating, useless beauty. The signature red hair and eyes of the Bloodborne, now a cruel joke.
Inside, the quiet persisted. The null-space. But as he stared into the vast, consuming emptiness of the Wastes, a thought, cold and sharp as a diamond, formed in the sterile stillness of his mind.
If I am Null… a vacuum where your power should be… then what force will now rush in to fill me?
Outside, the first stars pierced the twilight, distant and indifferent. The quiet within him deepened, and for the first time, it did not feel like absence. It felt like… potential. A pristine slate, waiting for a different kind of mark.