The winds howled across the snow-covered highlands of the Veinscar Ridge, where sunlight dared not linger and gods turned their gaze away. Beneath the old cathedral, long abandoned and half-buried in ash, a child cried for the first time in a thousand years.
His name was Nclai Azrael.
Not born of sin. Not created through pact. Not bred like the hybrids now filling the world like weeds in tainted soil.
He was pure.
The elders who attended his birth trembled. Not from fear. From awe.
His blood ran thick and dark, not red, but the shade of moonless night. When the midwife touched it, her fingers blistered. When the high priest leaned close to mark him, his breath stopped for a full heartbeat. Even the runes carved into the birthing altar glowed with an ancient hum. One by one, they flickered back to life...markings that hadn't responded to any vampire in over eight centuries.
A true blood had returned.
The last time such a child was born, the world bled for thirty years.
"Bury his name," whispered one elder. "Or the world will hunt him before he draws his second breath."
"They will smell it," said another. "The wolves. The elves. The necrotic ones. Even the false kin who call themselves vampire now. They'll feel it in their marrow."
The midwife, eyes wide, said nothing. She had delivered children of every race. Some deformed. Some blessed. None like this. None who opened their eyes without crying, without gasping, without confusion.
Nclai didn't wail. He didn't reach. He watched.
Silent. Cold. Alive in a way the room hadn't seen in centuries.
Above the cathedral, storms churned unnaturally. Ice fractured stone. Crows circled once and vanished, never returning.
The priests swore their oaths in blood, sealing the boy's presence from the world. The ward-stones around the region doubled in strength overnight. And in the darkness of a sealed chamber carved into the mountain's heart, they laid him to rest- wrapped in silence, hidden even from the stars.
He would grow slowly. Isolated. Taught only by fragments of dead languages and books written in bone ink. They would not lie to him. But they would not tell him everything.
Because no one knew what would happen when he awakened.
Because no one alive remembered what came last time a Crimson Sovereign drew breath.
And beneath his skin, behind his pale crimson eyes, something old was already watching.
Not a system.
Not a voice.
A throne, long abandoned, now shifting in its sleep.