Crimson Heir: Rise Of The First Blood

2

CHAPTER 2

THE SEAL OF FLESH

The walls were watching him.

Rylan felt their gaze like a thousand needles pressed against his skin. Eyes, dozens of them, yellow and ancient, blinked open from the pulsing flesh around him. They didn't belong to any single creature, they were the eyes of the Catacombs themselves, fused into the living architecture over centuries of grotesque alchemy.

Flesh-melders.

A wave of chill ran down his spine.

He had heard stories, whispered among Criminals in the dark. Vampires who had sought immortality so desperately that they abandoned their forms, merging with stone and soil until they became something else entirely. Something that no longer fed, spoke or died.

They simply just… existed.

Rylan forced himself to breathe even though the air was thick, wet and tasting of iron and rot. Each breath coated his tongue with the residue of ancient blood, his bare feet squelched against the floor. Then it registered to him that the floor was no longer stone.

He looked down and he couldn't even decipher what he was standing on. He turned and looked towards the exit as the enforcers words echoed in his skull.

“Nothing comes out of the Catacombs alive.”

But going back was now impossible. The staircase had already begun to close behind him, the fleshy walls knitting together like a wound healing in reverse. He was trapped.

Forward was the only way.

He kept on walking, the eyes still following him with every step he took.

The passage twisted and turned, narrowing until he had to crawl on his hands and knees. The flesh beneath him pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm of a heartbeat that wasn't his own.

A part of him was scared, but the other part has accepted his faith. What was he to lose? He had already lost his position as a noble and was battling a blood deficiency that made him an easy prey.

The whispers returned, no longer a single voice but a chorus, layered and dissonant.

Find us.

Claim us.

Become us.

Rylan's mind reeled. He pressed his palms against the walls to steady himself, and the flesh rippled under his touch. For a moment, he saw something, a bright, fragmented vision. A gauntlet, forged from crimson metal, floating in a chamber of bone, calling out to him..

Then the vision vanished, and he was crawling again.

He didn't know how long he moved through that living tunnel. Time and hunger had no meaning in the catacomb of flesh. Only the pulse, the whispers, and the growing certainty that something waited for him at the end.

Then the passage opened.

Rylan stumbled into a vast chamber, and his breath caught in his throat.

The room was a cathedral of bone and sinew. Ribs the size of ancient trees arched overhead, forming a vaulted ceiling. Veins pulsed along the walls, carrying liquid light; a soft, crimson glow that illuminated the space in shades of blood and shadow. And at the center of it all, resting on a pedestal of fused vertebrae, was the gauntlet from his vision.

The Seal of Flesh. A legend that was carried across centuries of vampires. Rylan could not believe his eyes.

It was beautiful in a terrible way. Forged from a metal that seemed to shift between solid and liquid, it pulsed with the same rhythm as the walls, red and black, intertwined like veins beneath skin. Rylan could feel it calling to him, not through sound but through his own blood.

His deficiency, the same curse that had made him weak, sang in response.

He took a step toward it.

“Stop.”

The voice was not a whisper. It was a thousand voices, speaking as one. From the walls, from the ceiling, from the very floor beneath his feet. The flesh-melders had found their voice.

Rylan froze.

All the eyes on the walls turned to him, and then the walls began to move. Figures emerged from the flesh, half-formed and dripping with viscera. They had faces, but the faces were incomplete. There were mouths without jaws, eyes without lids, hands with too many fingers, all reaching for him.

“You are not like the others,” they said. “You carry the emptiness and hunger that never fills.”

Rylan's throat tightened. "I don't know what you mean."

“The blood deficiency. You were born missing something, that is why you hear us… that is why the Seal calls to you. You are hollow, little vampire, and hollow things can be filled.”

One of the figures stepped closer, its misshapen hand hovering near Rylan's chest.

“The Seal will bond with you and fill the hollow place. But it will also take something in return. Are you willing to pay the price?”

Rylan thought of his father's head rolling across marble floors, his mother's heart ripped from her chest, and Cassian's cold smile. A century of hunger, hiding, resentment, and being less than nothing.

"Yes," he said.

The figures dissolved back into the walls as all the eyes closed one by one. And the Seal of Flesh rose from its pedestal, floating toward him like a lover reaching for an embrace.

Rylan extended his hand.

The moment his fingers touched the gauntlet, pain exploded through him.

It was not a simple burning, it was unmaking. He felt his bones crack and reform, his blood boiled and cooled, his skin peeled away and regrew. The deficiency that had cursed him since birth was being ripped out by the roots, replaced by something vast and hungry.

He screamed, and the walls screamed with him.

And then, silence.

Rylan collapsed to the floor, gasping. His body was whole, his wounds were gone. And coursing through his veins, was raw power.

He looked at his hands. They were no longer pale and thin, but were now strong. And on his right hand, fused to his skin, the Seal of Flesh gleamed before it sank into his body, becoming a part of him.

A smile curved on Rylan's lips as the whispers changed.

One down. Four to go.