Crimson Heir: Rise Of The First Blood

9

CHAPTER 9

MADNESS AND MEMORY

The gates groaned shut behind them, sealing Rylan and Mira in darkness.

The voice that had spoken had not revealed itself. Rylan's senses strained, but he could not tell where it came from. The darkness was thicker than the one in Silent Ash.

Mira pressed close to his side, her breathing shallow. "I don't like this, Rylan. This place feels wrong."

"It is wrong." He could feel the weight of the fortress pressing against his skull, foreign memories already trying to push through the cracks of his own. "That's why you're not coming any further."

She turned to him sharply with protest on her face. "What?"

Rylan faced her, his grey eyes steady despite the pressure building in his mind. "The Seal of Memory doesn't just guard itself, it consumes. The further I go, the more of his memories will try to replace mine. I can barely hold my own thoughts together. You won't survive it."

"I survived the undercity for a hundred years," Mira said, her voice hard. "I survived enforcers, starvation, and watching everyone I ever knew die. Don't tell me what I can't survive."

"This is different." Rylan reached for the shadows at his feet, feeling them stir at his command. Before she could protest, he raised his hand, and the shadows rose around her, curling at her feet, and wrapping around her body.

“Rylan. No!” .

Those were the last words she said before the shadows swallowed her whole.

Rylan turned toward the fortress depths and continued walking.

The corridor beyond the gates was vast, its ceiling lost in shadow. The walls were carved with scenes that seemed to move in the corner of his vision. Scenes of battles, coronations, lovers embracing and throats being torn. When he looked directly at them, they were still.

Remember. Remember. Remember.

He pushed forward, ignoring the whispers. The seal of flesh and shadows hummed within him, but even with both seals, the pressure was immense.

Rylan didn't know what time had passed, until the corridor opened into a chamber. That was when he stopped. The room was circular, its walls lined with dozens of mirrors, each reflecting a different version of him. But they were not reflections.

In one mirror, he was a child, silver-haired and small, watching his father's head roll across the marble floor. In another, he was a young vampire, being stripped of his blood-right while Cassian smiled. In another, he was a Crimson, starving in the gutters, too weak to fight back.

“You remember,” a voice whispered and it wasn't the walls this time. It was something else.

“You remember your pain… your shame… your weakness.”

Rylan walked through the mirrors, refusing to look. "I'm not here for the memories, I'm here for the Seal."

The Seal is memory in itself, there’s no difference.

A mirror shattered behind him, then another before the shards reformed into new images, memories he didn’t recognize. There was one with a woman in a blood-red dress, her face obscured by shadow. A war fought beneath a black sun. A child being turned, screaming as the fangs sank in.

The ancient's memories.

"Show yourself," Rylan called out.

The mirrors went still, and then slowly, the figure at the center of the chamber became visible.

He was sitting on a throne made of vampire bones, each one carved with a name. His skin was grey and translucent, stretched so thin that Rylan could see the memories moving beneath it like fish in a pond. His eyes were completely black, and they were unblinking.

"Vanir," the figure said. "That was my name, once. Before I became this."

Rylan stopped ten feet from the throne. "I've come for the Seal of Memory."

Vanir siked terribly. "Everyone who comes here wants the Seal because they think it will give them power over others and everything they regret."

He leaned forward, and the memories beneath his skin surged.

"But the Seal does not give power over memory. It gives possession. You do not control what you remember. It controls you."

Rylan held his ground. "I'm not everyone."

"No." Vanir's black eyes studied him. "You carry two Seals already, I can smell him stirring in you." He tilted his head. "Do you know what happens when you take the third?"

"I know what Kaelos told me. Every Seal brings him closer to waking."

"Kaelos." Vanir's smile faded. "The scholar. He tells you what he knows, but not what he fears. Do you want to know what he fears, boy?"

Withiut a response, Rylan stared at the ancient.

Vanir rose from his throne, and the memories in his skin moved more frantically. "He fears that the First Vampire does not want to be reborn. He fears that the First Vampire wants to return. Not through you… as you. The Seals are not pieces of his consciousness, they are pieces of his hunger. And hunger does not resurrect… it devours."

Rylan's hands tightened into fists. "Then give me the Seal, and let me face that hunger myself."

Vanir was silent for a long moment, then he laughed, a hollow, broken sound that echoed through the chamber of mirrors.

"You have the madness," he said. "The same madness that brought me here, three thousand years ago. I took the Seal of Memory, thinking I could use it to forget the war, deaths and the child I turned who I had to burn." His voice cracked. "Instead, I remembered everything. Every life I took, every face and every scream. For three thousand years, I have remembered."

He raised his hand, and from the throne of bones, light emerged. A ring, forged from silver and shadow, floated toward Rylan.

"The Seal of Memory," Vanir said. "Take it and become what I became. Or walk away, and live as the hollow man who was strong enough to refuse."

Rylan looked at the ring, pulsing with the same rhythm as the other seals, calling out to him and promising power beyond imagination.

Without a second thought, he reached for it and wore it.

And his eyes went completely black.