Before the world blinked and the light forgot to return—180 days remained.
The fog-drenched streets of London curled and slithered like a living thing, veiling every brick and windowpane in ghost-grey uncertainty. The air was damp with secrets. Alleys yawned open like the mouths of starved beasts, and the iron gaslamps cast halos through the mist, revealing nothing and everything all at once.
A lone figure sprinted through the labyrinth. His breath came in ragged bursts, each inhalation scraping against lungs that had long since forgotten strength. His coat—too large for his gaunt frame—flapped like tattered wings behind him. Beneath it, skin the color of wax clung too tightly to bone, and dark veins coiled like ink beneath the surface.
His legs threatened to collapse beneath him. Each step was agony, every footfall a silent scream echoing through his spine. And still he ran.
The Church's Executioners were close. Their boots struck cobblestone with the rhythm of inevitability, the sound sharp and cruel in the empty streets. They did not shout. They did not taunt. They only pursued, as relentless as time and twice as cold.
The fugitive clutched something beneath his coat—an object, a charm, or maybe just hope in a fragile shell.
But hope was a luxury he could not afford.
Not here. Not tonight.
And certainly not with death whispering at his heels.
He turned sharply, nearly losing his footing on slick cobblestones. A narrow passage stretched ahead—choked in shadow. He lurched into it, heart hammering, only to collide with a figure half-formed from the dark itself. A woman. Hooded. Silent. Her eyes cut through him, sharp with judgment and decision. She saw everything in a glance—his desperation, his sickness, the sigils of pursuit etched into the air behind him.
The Executioners rounded the corner. The first raised a hand to cast—too slow. The woman moved like a blade through water. Her jacket fell open, revealing glyphs carved into her skin, still glowing faintly from older incantations. With a motion that broke the fog like a whipcrack, she flung a crescent of light that sliced through the Executioner's arm mid-sigil. The second tried to step back—she was already on him, a dagger to the throat, another to the heart.
A third Executioner raised his own chant—but she was faster. She whispered something low and guttural. The glyphs on her arms flared—deep amber, flickering like the last light before a cave-in. She slammed her hand into the ground. The stones cracked open with a muffled boom, and from the rupture burst chains of spectral metal—luminous and heavy, groaning like the bones of giants.
Gravemark Bloom.
The chains snapped outward and coiled around the Executioners' limbs, rooting them to the earth. The very gravity around them warped, dragging them down as if the weight of judgment itself had fallen.
Stuck, they tried to cast, to run, to scream. It didn't matter. The woman advanced with the solemnity of a hanging judge. Her twin daggers traced arcs of light and blood. One fell. Then another. The third thrashed against the chains—too late. Her blade found his spine.
Silence returned. The air trembled. The boy, still shivering in the corner, didn't dare speak.
The woman turned to him at last, her voice flat and cold:
"Next time, run smarter."
"Thank you," the boy rasped, his voice little more than a whisper dragged across broken glass. His lips were cracked, his breathing shallow. "Please... I need protection."
The woman stood with her weight balanced on the balls of her feet, still halfway in a stance meant for killing. Her eyes scanned him—not with empathy, but calculation. She noted the tremble in his limbs, the blood smeared along his collar, the way his fingers curled in on themselves like withered vines.
"I don't do charity," she said flatly. Her voice was cold iron hammered into shape, not soft but not cruel. A weapon forged for truth.
He didn't flinch—only looked at her with hollow desperation. And maybe that was worse. Something in her gaze flickered. She looked again. Beneath the blood and the grime, the sickness and the panic… there was no strength. Just survival.
"Fine," she muttered. "Follow me. You collapse, I leave you."
He nodded, too tired to offer anything else.
They moved through London's bones—cracks in the city where light dared not linger. Past alleys dripping with mold, where rusted trash bins groaned under the weight of rot. Where the homeless hissed like alley cats and bartered violence for warmth. Their footsteps echoed through the filth, muffled by steam and the smell of wet concrete.
She led him behind a crumbling tavern, down a narrow corridor choked with broken crates and shattered bottles. At the end of it stood a shack that looked half-slain, its walls patched with tarpaulin and scavenged wood. A threadbare cloth hung in place of a door.
Inside, it was scarcely more than four walls and a cot. But there was warmth. A rusted stove hissed in the corner. A small lantern glowed like a dying star.
He stepped in. Hesitated.
"You gonna say your name?" she asked without looking at him.
He blinked. "No one's asked me that in a while."
She turned slowly, raising a brow. "That's not an answer."
"...Call me Emil," he lied, though his voice caught on it.
The woman studied him, nodding just once. "Talia."
He nodded. "You saved me, Talia. Why?"
Talia scoffed. "Didn't do it for you."
She turned her back again. The jacket slipped off completely—and that's when he saw it.
Her arms were bare. No—not bare. Etched.
Dozens of glyphs ran down her shoulders, coiling like inked serpents across her back and ribs. They weren't tattoos. They were deeper. Carved. Old. Fresh. Some shimmered faintly, humming with latent force.
His breath caught.
"You—those markings—what are they?"
She turned her head slowly. Her expression was thunderclouds and cracked glass.
"You been staring?"
"No—I just—" he stammered.
She was already reaching for the curtain.
"Pervert," she hissed. "Get out."
The word hit him harder than any spell. He backed through the cloth, stumbling into the alley. The cold clawed at him immediately, digging under his skin like frostbitten regret. He sat on the opposite side, back to the stone, shivering. The fog pressed in again, dampening everything but his guilt.
Minutes passed. An hour. He didn't know. He hugged his knees and said nothing.
Then, the cloth pulled aside.
She stood in the opening, silhouetted against the lantern's glow. Her face unreadable. Her voice softer, but still laced with steel.
"Come back in."
He blinked at her.
"Forget what you saw."
He nodded, quietly stepping past her. He sat opposite her, beside the unlit cot.
She sat cross-legged on a faded mat, sharpening a small blade with rhythmic swipes. Silence bloomed between them, vast and aching.
He opened his mouth to speak—but stopped when she looked up.
That look—flat and heavy, like a ward drawn against intrusion—froze the words in his throat.
"...Thank you," he said instead.
She returned to her blade.
And in that quiet shack, surrounded by darkness and the crackling sigh of the stove, two strangers shared the silence of survivors. Neither trusted the other.
But neither turned away.
That night, sleep came to him not as a balm, but as a tormentor.
The pallet beneath him—though warmer than the cold streets—felt like a pyre. The cracked ceiling above might've been a mausoleum dome for all the peace it offered. His fevered body twitched, and his breath shallowed.
And then the dream seized him.
A field of wind-stripped ash. The remnants of a house—no, a manor—splintered and blackened, its once-regal banners now smoldering threads on the wind. Smoke hung in the air like the spirits of the dead.
A younger boy stood in the center, wild-eyed, trembling. His arms were outstretched, fingers clawed with desperation. Glyphs spiraled across the ground, half-finished, a mangled ritual circle still steaming from the backlash.
And at the circle's edge—
"No—No, please—" the boy whimpered, stumbling forward.
A woman lay in a heap. Her robes were scorched, her hair matted with blood. A second figure—a man—knelt beside her, clutching her hand with a kind of shattered reverence. Behind them, a little girl whimpered, clinging to a fallen bookshelf.
The boy—Emiliano, though he'd never spoken the name aloud since—cried out in agony. The spell had been a binding ward. A containment array meant to keep spirits at bay, nothing more. But something had gone wrong. He had reached too far, drawn too deep. Something old had answered—and it had broken the circle from the inside.
"They're not moving," he had whispered.
And then—
"Emiliano," the man's voice cracked. "Run."
"But Father—"
"Go. Now!"
The memory exploded in fire. A second surge. A tear in the circle. Reality buckled, the glyphs screaming, white-hot lines tearing across the floor. He saw a burst of red, and then darkness.
He awoke with a strangled gasp, the sound torn from his throat as if pulled by unseen hands. His fingers clutched his chest, nails digging into the thin fabric of his shirt, half-expecting to find blood or fire beneath. But there was nothing—only the fading phantom of heat and the dull ache of memory pressing behind his ribs like a second heartbeat.
Emil exhaled slowly, his breath shaky, and turned his head.
Talia lay a few feet away, cocooned in the patchwork shadows of the shack. Even in sleep, her form remained taut, coiled like a spring that had forgotten how to loosen. The dim light filtering through a cracked wooden board caught her features—soft, yes, still touched with youth—but chiseled by the cruel fingers of experience. Faint scars traced the edges of her jaw and temple like forgotten constellations. She looked like someone who had been drafted into a war she never agreed to, and never left.
Her hands clutched her twin daggers with an intimacy that was both unnerving and heartbreaking. Not like weapons. Like talismans. Like toys she couldn't put down even in dreams. Dolls carved from steel and trauma.
Emil's throat tightened. He released a sigh, careful—reverent, almost—not to stir the thin veil of rest she had managed to find. The floor creaked beneath him as he rose, slow and silent, his limbs aching with exhaustion and something deeper: dread dressed as fatigue.
He slipped out of the shack, leaving behind the warmth of breath and the brittle peace of sleep.
The alley beyond was draped in mist—thick, clinging, alive with murmurs that weren't voices but felt close enough. The fog coiled low along the cobblestones like a spirit unsure of its shape. Yet even in that chill, in that stillness, Emil couldn't shake the heat behind his eyes.
The echo of flame clung to him—not the burn of fire, but its memory. A vision scorched into the walls of his skull. Smoke without source. Ashes that hadn't yet fallen.
He stood there, in the alley of ghosts, and tried to remember how to breathe without flinching.
His feet found the cobblestones like a penitent finding absolution. He wandered, vision blurred, the name he'd buried for so long choking him once more.
When he finally stopped, the wind bit through his threadbare coat, but the pain of the past burned far hotter.
From the shadow-cloaked mouth of the alley, a figure emerged with glacial deliberation—hood drawn low, footsteps hushed as confession. Beneath the folds of his cloak, something shimmered—a whisper of polished silver unsheathed like moonlight made manifest, the blade's gleam catching in Emiliano's widening eyes as if the very air had been cut open to herald judgment.
Emiliano—pale, gaunt, trembling—raised a shaking hand toward the dark figure in the alley. No chant, no flourish. Only raw desperation. The spell etched into his memory ignited like a faulty match. Mana surged—then tore.
His chest convulsed.
A fountain of blood welled up from his mouth. He collapsed to his knees, the strength in his limbs disintegrating. His spell fizzled mid-air into ash.
The Executioner—tall, impassive, robed in wards stitched from red wire—advanced in silence. His blade glinted in the fog, black as judgment, humming with stored curses.
Emiliano couldn't rise.
He couldn't flee.
Only watch as the blade slowly rose.
And was intercepted by a blur of silver and violet flame.
Talia crashed into the alley like a specter loosed from a forgotten war. The Executioner's sword rang against the twin daggers in her hands—one curved, the other straight—each humming with a different elemental resonance. Sparks erupted. The impact staggered the Executioner for half a breath.
Talia did not speak.
She struck again.
Her movements were jagged, vicious, and unpredictable—each slash from her left dagger trailed violet flame, each stab from her right etched runes into the air itself. She ducked and twisted, blades flashing in and out like fangs in a brawl, not a duel.
The Executioner countered with heavy precision. His sword cut the air in brutal arcs, warding off her aggression. But she was faster—less a warrior, more a wild thing carved into a human frame, all sinew and wrath.
Their blades danced, clanged, bit into stone and shimmered through steam.
Then Talia leapt back, boots skidding against cobblestone.
Her tattoos blazed to life.
She bit her lip until blood ran down her chin. A single drop fell to the dagger in her left hand.
"Gravemark Bloom."
The sigils on her spine lit up.
The ground groaned.
Then ruptured.
Chains, spectral and silver, surged from the earth—each one crowned in glyphs. They hissed and screamed like spirits made flesh. The Executioner's wards flared red as the chains struck, binding his limbs with a sound like steel grinding bone.
He grunted, lifting his blade with effort. It shimmered with counterspells.
Too late.
Three chains looped around his right arm.
Two around his legs.
Another over his throat.
Talia lunged, daggers poised to end it—when her glyphs flared violently out of rhythm.
A misfire.
A line of ink across her abdomen burst in smoke and steam. She screamed as mana lashed out through the carving, wild and unbound. Her body buckled mid-air.
She hit the ground hard.
One chain snapped. Then another. The Executioner tore the rest away in a burst of suppressed spellwork.
Talia writhed. Her dagger fell from one hand. She clawed at her side, black smoke rising from the corrupted rune.
The Executioner moved toward her.
Blade raised.
"No—" she gasped.
Just before the Executioner's blade fell toward Talia's throat, a flicker of breathless defiance stirred the collapsed boy on the alley floor.
He forced himself up on trembling arms, blood trailing from his lips, his chest heaving with the weight of broken lungs. His eyes—dull and sunken—locked onto the Executioner's silhouette.
He whispered the words, hoarse and half-prayer.
"Time is not a thread but a coil... wound in guilt..."
The Executioner hesitated. A breath. A blink.
Emiliano's fingers clawed through the blood pooled at his side, dragging the sigil into the stone with a fevered hand.
"I call the axis of fracture... bend the hourglass... reflect the sin—"
His voice cracked. His spine arched.
"REVERSE DIVERGENCE!"
The symbol ignited.
A sharp tearing sound cleaved the air as if reality had been scored with a blade. The sigil shimmered, pulsing with a sickly white light that dragged heat from the alley. Time itself stuttered.
The Executioner's form blurred—one step forward, then back, then forward again—caught between moments. His footing slipped. His blade lowered.
And in that sacred second of imbalance, Talia rose like vengeance reborn.
Talia roared.
The sigil over her chest reignited. She kicked off the wall, scooped her daggers from the stone, and twisted through the air like a falling star.
"WITCHKNOT!"
A chain of flame lashed from her shoulder glyph and wrapped around her left dagger, swinging it in a perfect arc behind her mid-strike. She caught it and drove both blades into the Executioner's chest—one through the warded heart, the other beneath the collarbone.
A shockwave surged outward.
The Executioner went rigid.
Then crumbled—his entire form unraveling into ash, sucked into the spectral contracts that had once bound him.
Silence fell.
Talia collapsed beside Emiliano. Her daggers clattered onto the blood-slicked stone. Her breath came in broken sobs.
"Idiot…" she muttered, glancing at Emiliano—unmoving, face pale. "You weren't supposed to help…"
Then pain ripped through her arm.
She screamed.
Falling to her knees, she gripped her wrist as a burning sigil seared itself into her flesh. Three crimson lines, like brands, flared just beneath the skin.
She stared at it in disbelief, breath shaking.
Emiliano awoke to the scent of scorched mana and old iron, mingling with the familiar mildew of the shack. His eyelids peeled open slowly, vision swimming, heart pulsing in his ears like a war drum. The pain in his chest still echoed faintly—residual tremors from the spell he had forced through his shattered frame.
The light was dim, filtered through the grime-streaked window, but he could see her.
Talia sat hunched in the far corner, her breath coming in ragged, shallow bursts. Her shoulders trembled. One hand was clenched over the other, nails digging into her palm. The glow beneath her fingers flickered like something alive—angry, uncontainable.
He sat up, wincing.
"Talia?" he croaked, voice dry and unsteady.
She didn't respond.
He stood, legs weak but willing, and stepped forward.
"What's wrong?" he asked again, more firmly this time.
She looked up. Her face was pale, not with fear but disbelief, as if she couldn't comprehend what her body was telling her.
Her fingers pulled back, just enough.
The symbol on the back of her hand burned crimson.
Three prongs, jagged and ancient. A sigil that pulsed with command—not suggestion, not influence, but dominion.
He stopped cold. The air grew still.
"No..." he breathed. "That can't be—"
She met his eyes, defiant despite the pain. "What the hell... is this?"
His gaze fell to her hand again. The mark continued to glow, faint veins of mana dancing beneath her skin like cracks in a dam. The mark was glowing with a downward-pointing triangle at its center, housing a watchful eye. It's framed by two plant-like columns and encircled by mysterious symbols forming a ring.
"That's... a Command Spell," he whispered, as if saying it aloud might undo its existence.
"A what?"
"You've been chosen," he said slowly, backing up half a step. "Or bound. Either way... you're a Master now."
Talia's expression hardened. "I didn't agree to anything."
"Sometimes, the Grail doesn't ask."
She flinched as another wave of pain surged through her palm. The mark pulsed again, brighter this time—hung