DaoistMApKyt

The dead should stay dead.

Kael Arvid repeated the words like a prayer as he adjusted the raven mask over his scarred face. The carved beak pressed cold against the bridge of his nose, the eyeholes narrowing his vision to slits of flickering torchlight. Beneath him, the ballroom of House Dain shimmered—a grotesque painting of gold and rot. Nobles laughed behind ivory masks, their gloved hands clutching goblets of wine dark as clotting blood. The air reeked of clove and something fouler beneath, like meat left too long in the sun.

He hadn't come for wine.

The dagger at his belt was hungry. It had waited seven years for this night. Seven years since House Dain's soldiers kicked in the door of his family's cottage. Seven years since he'd watched from the treeline as the flames turned his sister's screams to smoke. Seven years of imagining this moment—the moment he'd slide steel between Lord Dain's ribs and whisper his family's names as the light

The Hollow Masquerade

The world dissolved into screaming fire.

Jacob no, his name was Daniel then crouched in the nursery corner, his twelve year old fingers slippery around the ritual knife. Lord Blackwood's shadow loomed against the floral wallpaper, his breath reeking of clove and something darker, like meat left to rot in holy water.

"Remember," Blackwood murmured, pressing Daniel's palm to the squalling infant's chest. "The house doesn't want her life. It wants her name."

The baby's skin burned under Daniel's touch. Not with fever with the same unnatural heat now radiating from the carved symbols on the floorboards. The ritual circle pulsed like a second heartbeat, its edges smoking where the infant's tears struck the painted lines.

Daniel's knife hand trembled. "She's just"

"A Blackwood," the lord finished, tightening his grip on Daniel's wrist. "And we protect our own. Unless you'd rather it be your sister next?"

Beyond the nursery door, a floorboard creaked. Young Eleanor's whisper slithered through the crack: "Do it, Danny. You promised."

Daniel's blade nicked the baby's heel. Blood sizzling as it hit the symbols. The infant's wails cut off mid-breath as her eyes changed, pupils dilating into bottomless pits.

Blackwood smiled as he pressed a rusted key into Daniel's palm. "Now the final step. Carve the marks into your arms. That way, you'll always remember"

Fire erupts from the cradle not consuming, but warping the infant's form: tiny fingers elongate into talons, downy hair dissolves into smoke and reforms into feathers.

The nursery door burst open. A younger Eleanor staggered in, her nightgown streaked with soot. "Danny, run! She's"

The memory shattered again. Jacob gasped as he was yanked through a kaleidoscope of damnation:

Age seventeen, holding Eleanor down as she screamed, carving the same sigils into her forearms. "It's the only way to make you remember next time," he sobbed.

Age twenty-three, standing over a fresh grave as Blackwood patted his shoulder. "The house is pleased. Only seven more cycles until"

Last month, finding Eleanor in the asylum, her face wrapped in blood crusted bandages. "You came back," she'd whispered. "She always lets you remember too late."

The visions coalesced into a single, terrible truth:

Just the first child they'd taught to lie.

Jacob's scars ruptured, unleashing centuries of repressed guilt in a geyser of black smoke. The spectral fire around him roared higher, forming walls that reflected endless versions of the same moment every time he'd chosen the knife over the key, the lie over the truth.

The Crow's true voice, small and broken, cut through the inferno:

"You promised we'd go home."

Jacob collapsed to his knees. The rusted key materialized in his grip, its teeth now moving, rearranging into the shape of the first sigil he'd ever carved.

The moment his fingers closed around it, the fire died.

A single, stifled whimper from the unburnt cradle.

Chapter 14: The First Sin