The stairway bled downward, cut into the bones of Eryndor.
Azrael descended without a sound.
The air changed as he went—cooler, older; the smell of salt and steel giving way to stone, candle-fat, and old prayers.
Runes set into the walls pulsed with a faint, steady glow, like embers that refused to die.
The deeper he walked, the softer the world above became, until even the memory of voices was devoured by the earth.
He entered the catacombs of the Guild—the place where the greatest hunters humanity had ever known lay in curated silence.
Not coffins, but reliquaries: skulls crowned with iron laurels, arm-bones sheathed in runed brass, blades resting across ribcages like sleeping wolves.
Each alcove bore a name and a sigil.
Each name had once been a legend that frightened monsters.
Azrael always felt something strange while reading the names.
His heart felt a strange sensation of mixed pain and melancholy, like the men were his friends.
Hope clung to the stone in a way dust could not.
The hope that one day, through old lore and newer sorceries, some of these promised to rise again when the night called for them.
In the Undying Night, even the dead were only waiting.
Or, at least, the prophecy said so.
"When the moonlight will shine with the blood of sinners, the light will come to save the pure ones."
This was one of the most repeated things in the guild-
Azrael kept walking until he reached the last stair and found the chapel.
It was a small church hollowed into bedrock, an underground sanctum with an altar of black stone.
The ceiling rose into a dome of crude rock veined with mica and mirror.
Somehow, despite the weight of the earth, moonlight spilled into the room: a shaft of silver reflected through a lattice of enchanted stones and angled panes of glass buried in the cliffside, captured, bent, and brought here.
The light fell in a pale column upon the altar, and there it broke into a halo that touched the reliquaries like a benediction.
The Master waited within that ring of light, seated on a low stone bench.
He was old—older than the first stories about him. His hair was white and unbound. H
is face bore the map of three centuries: lines traced by storms, by grief, by iron choices.
But his eyes… his eyes were clear, bright as winter.
They lifted, found Azrael, and warmed.
"You are... alive," the Master said. His voice was thin as a reed and steady as a bell. "And yet you carry the scent of an unexpected battle."
Azrael stopped at the edge of the light.
He bowed, not a fraction too low, not a heartbeat too long.
Respect, not worship. "Master."
He recounted what had happened.
The ruined village.
The White Wolf's scavengers.
The appearance of two of Maria's generals, cut down not by luck but by inevitability.
And at last—quietly—the part that mattered: he had pulled two children from the jaws of a future that was already sharpening its teeth.
Elarwen Duskveil. Valtherion Kaelvorn. The last embers of warrior tribes that history had nearly smothered.
"Good," the Master breathed. "You saved more than lives." He rose with care, as though his bones remembered different gravities.
His fingers brushed the altar and the moonlight quivered, sharpening as if listening.
"Now look. There's something I need to show you."
Azrael looked up at his master , in silence.
The light fractured.
In the air above the stone, images bloomed—slices of a city torn from itself.
Towers torn open like ribcages.
Streets drowned in shadow.
Vampires moved through the squares as freely as water finds low ground, dragging bodies, feeding in doorways, burning churches to hear what prayers sounded like when they broke.
Mothers clutched children and vanished into red fog. Men ran and were unmade.
"This is a small town near Arkatzil," the Master said. "This is what is happening."
Azrael watched without blinking despite a wave of anger forming in his heart.
He learned with his eyes.
He had no need to ask why.
"Tell me what I need to do, Father." Azrael replied, with a devoted voice.
The old man's lips formed a small but fatherly smile.
He was proud of Azrael.
"A royal household," the Master continued, "a dynasty of magi who chose the corruption they once swore to fight. They let their blood bought by darkness beget more darkness. They breed within their own circle, a garden walled by sin."
The images turned—balconies heavy with velvet, a throne set on bones, a family of perfect faces with eyes too calm.
Silver goblets. A child laughing with fangs.
"They must be cut out," the Master said. "The Gods have spoken to me. One of those vampires knows the position of Maria..."
Azrael inclined his head, not asking further questions about the vampire.
Acceptance moved through him like breath. Duty never needed a flourish. "When?"
"Soon." The Master's gaze drifted to the reliquaries, as if asking the dead for patience. "The world tilts toward a reckoning, Azrael. The day of judgment draws near."
He stopped—something in him bridled, a knot he would not pull.
When he spoke again his voice had softened, but it had not weakened. "I am bound from saying more. There are laws above us, older than our wounds. Know only this: the ledgers are being opened."
Silence lived between them for a moment.
Azrael filled it with a nod. "Understood."
The Master drew in a careful breath. "There is another matter, my child." He turned his palm and the light dimmed, the visions dissolving into white dust.
"Someone will come for my head."
A muscle flickered along Azrael's jaw.
He did not step forward.
He did not make promises to gods he did not believe in.
He spoke the simplest vow a man can make.
"They will fail." He said, with a sharp voice.
Showing any kind of anger or bad emotions would've been seen as a bad thing by the master.
Azrael had learned how to control the deepest part of the things he felt.
The old man smiled, a tired, sudden thing, like a candle catching a wick on the last try. "I raised you too well."
Azrael's eyes did not move from his face. "You will not die, everyone here will protect you."
The Master let the words hang, felt their weight, then set them carefully down where they could not harm either of them.
He touched Azrael's shoulder with a hand so light it could have been dust. "Destiny is not a wall we break with a stronger blade, my Child."
Azrael's breath grew shallow.
My Child. The words always did that; they found places armor could not find.
The Master's hand fell.
He looked through the moonlight as though it were rain and he were remembering being young enough to run in it.
"Fate is inevitable," he said, and his voice did not waver. "There is need of every single pain for a greater good—but you will understand only by living."
The shaft of light trembled. The chapel seemed to lean closer.
Azrael's fingers found the hilt at his back, not to draw—only to remember that he could. "If the gods wrote this," he murmured, "they can read me defy them."
"Destiny," the Master said, with something like pride, "is why you are what you are, Azrael Noctis."
Azrael didn't reply.
The master turned once more to the altar. "One last seed to plant. I have felt a presence in the world again—the original hunter, creator of the sacred black blade: Quod Amo, Interficio."
"Erebahl?" Azrael said, without lifting a brow. "A good story."
"A true one," the Master replied. "You will not be convinced by words. When you return, you will understand."
When you return. The phrase fell like a feather, and sank like iron.
Azrael did not ask what I will be returning from.
He already knew that the only roads he took were the ones others did not return from at all.
He bowed again—one degree deeper than the first, a thing no one else would have noticed—and straightened.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
"For everything."
The old man laughed, a dry sound that filled the chapel the way the sea fills a shell.
"Now go, My Child. The Undying Night relies on you."
Azrael turned and left.
The moonlight washed his shoulders as he passed; the stairway accepted him again and rose to meet his boots.