The past doesn't just haunt Velvora — it bills its survivors. And when the ledger comes due, it doesn't ask for coin. It demands blood.
The hum hadn't left Asher's bones. Not even when he reached the upper steps of the Phantom Cathedral and emerged into Velvora's cold night.
The sky was glass-black, veined with flickers of aurora that weren't part of any natural phenomenon—energy runoff from the city's sealed engines or perhaps the glyphs reacting to what had been touched below.
Asher's coat was torn at the shoulder, singed at the sleeve. His breath hitched not from exhaustion, but recognition. Something had shifted—not just in the chamber beneath, but in him.
Rosa and Lucien followed a few paces behind, both carrying silence like weapons. Neither spoke. Neither had to. The atmosphere around Asher spoke louder than any words.
Rosa watched him from the corner of her eye. The way his shoulders moved. The way the wind curled around him unnaturally. The faint glow still leaking from his irises. She could feel it—the change.
Lucien lit a cigarette and didn't smoke it. He just held it to keep his hands busy.
Above them, the city pulsed.
But not with light.
With warning.
Alarms rolled through the air in rhythms only the attuned could sense. They weren't sirens. They were psychic pulses—low thudding reverberations in the chest, like a second heartbeat being forced into sync with the city's dread.
And every attuned in Velvora—every seer, every blood-touched, every haunted soul—felt it:
The inheritance vault had been breached.
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Derelict Ring – Beneath Velvora
Far from the cathedral, below the crumbling sewer-routes in a place older than the zoning maps, a pair of eyes snapped open.
The left one glowed blue.
The old woman coughed, breath thick with mold and memory. Crimson rags clung to her brittle frame like ceremonial skin. Around her, the bones of birds and beasts lay arranged in glyphic spirals. Some whispered. Some wept.
She ran a trembling hand along the rusted blade resting on the altar. Its hilt was marked with an inverted sigil — the royal glyph turned backward, the Varn crest long outlawed by every authority that survived the last war.
"The heir has awakened…" she rasped to the room.
No one replied.
Only the walls breathed.
She pressed the blade's point into the palm of her hand. Blood ran down like ink, soaking the altar stones. With the pain came the name — a name not spoken in centuries, burned into her lips like a curse she had waited too long to deliver.
"Selvaria Varn."
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Watcher's Tower – A Hidden Relay Room
The room was cloaked in static shadows. Painted glass filtered the moonlight into broken sigils across the floor. Rosa sat at a long iron table, waiting.
Her contact arrived, face hidden beneath the gold-banded mask of the Order's Shadowarm. They spoke no words—just handed her a folded document, burnt along the edges. The paper hummed in her hand, alive with residual glyph-heat.
She read it once.
Then again.
The first line twisted her expression into something dangerously unreadable.
"The Varn Line is not extinct."
Further down:
"The Bloodchildren beneath Velvora were never sealed — only bartered."
And finally:
"If he bears the mark, he will be hunted not only by the city, but by the other four Pillars."
She looked up slowly.
"So it begins," she said aloud.
Lucien leaned against the archway, arms folded, his voice barely audible.
"How do you even inherit a war that hasn't been fought in centuries?"
Rosa folded the letter, sliding it into her coat's inner lining. Her eyes darkened as she replied:
"By being born into the wrong story."
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Elsewhere – Mid-City Safehouse
Asher sat alone.
The glyph-mirror in front of him was the only light in the room. A fractured surface of silver that no longer reflected truth, but potential.
He didn't see himself in it.
He saw them.
Five shadows standing in a circle, projected from memory or prophecy—he couldn't tell which anymore.
One:A tall man with silver hair and voids for eyes, holding a gun made from fractured starlight. The edge of entropy at his fingertips.
Two:A woman whose skin flickered between molten steel and scarred flesh. Fire and metal, forged in grief. She wept magma, but smiled through it.
Three:A child cloaked in monk's robes, floating mid-air, surrounded by soul-chains that sang prayers and screams. Her eyes were closed… but she was awake.
Four:A noble in a porcelain mask, dancing with shadows shaped like teeth. A predator pretending to be royalty. Or perhaps the other way around.
And Five:
Himself.
Asher didn't know if they were real.
But the mirror did.
They were the Five Pillars.
Not a council. Not allies.
Rivals.
And by touching that glyph, he had stepped onto their ledger.
---------------------------------
Below the City – A Forbidden Chamber
Selvaria Varn knelt in front of a long mirror cracked at the corners, spiderwebbed by time and truth.
She had watched the glyphs reawaken. She had felt the pulse when the inheritance chamber opened. And now, the mirror finally responded after years of silence.
Asher's face flickered across it.
Selvaria didn't smile.
She simply stood, unsheathing her rusted blade. The blood from earlier was still warm. She turned her hand, revealing a rune etched into her palm—an old glyph, unspoken by modern tongues.
She pressed her blade against it.
It whispered back.
"Velvora made him the heir," she murmured.
"But the debt it owes…"
She stepped toward the exit, her rags dragging across blood-marked stone.
"…it owes to me."
[End Of Chapter 107]
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Next Chapter Preview: Chapter 108 – "Bloodchildren"
Asher learns the truth about the Varn bloodline — and the original deal struck beneath Velvora's founding. Meanwhile, Selvaria begins resurrecting her ancient faction: those born from blood, bound by glyph, and forgotten by time. But unearthing the Bloodchildren comes with a price… and not all of them stayed buried willingly.