The smell of burning myrrh tried to hide the city's rot, but Kio Valaryn tasted both on the back of her tongue as the guards marched her up the scaffold. Every step rang hollow on weather-eaten planks; every heartbeat answered with distant thunder from the Rift-Storm boiling overhead. Violet lightning cracked open the low clouds, staining the ruined skyline of Veyl a bruised amethyst.
Crowds once filled this execution square shoulder to shoulder, shouting or praying. Tonight barely two hundred spectators huddled behind broken barricades, clutching ration masks and hope in equal measure. No one had spare energy for outrage; they came because public deaths were cheaper than theater and twice as distracting from starvation.
Kio lifted her chin, refusing to let the iron collar dig grooves into her throat. Spy. Traitor. Rift-witch. The herald had recited the titles with relish, but he hadn't known the half of it. She'd been Veyl's shadow, a blade in velvet silence… until she'd refused her final order and exposed Lord Regent Caelis's child-torture interrogations. Two days later, Caelis's propaganda machines painted her as the butcher. Now the empire needed a scapegoat, and Kio—a twenty-five-year-old woman with a half-healed knife scar above her heart—fit the role perfectly.
A priest stood beside the platform's rusty guillotine, robes gray with ash. He raised a warped bronze censer; the ember puff scented smoke that drifted past Kio's face. Rite of Cleansing, she realized. The same ritual they had burned over her torture victims. The symmetry would have been poetic if it hadn't been so grotesque.
A burly headsman waited, hands wrapped around the guillotine's rope. He wore a burlap sack hood, eyes bored, as though decapitating spies were the night shift's least troublesome chore. Kio forced herself to memorize the pattern of nicks along his axe handle—useless knowledge, but old spy habits died harder than she apparently would.
Thunder rolled again. The lightning flash outlined the tops of shattered towers farther east. Those towers had crumbled the night the first Rift-Storm tore Veyl's stratosphere apart. A year later, fragments of that cataclysm still rained down in violet embers that melted stone and warped iron. Even the air felt thin, as if the sky had grown teeth and was chewing on reality.
A guard shoved Kio to her knees beside the guillotine.
"Confess," the priest rasped, leaning close enough she could count the burst blood vessels across his sclera. "Declare your crimes so your soul may pass unsullied."
Kio smiled—a tiny, almost gentle thing. "If I start listing sins, Father, you might be the one begging absolution by dawn."
The priest recoiled. A ripple of uneasy laughter moved through the watching crowd. The Regent's banner guards stiffened.
"On your stomach," a sergeant barked. "Neck in the cradle."
Kio did not move. She focused on the thunder. She had studied weather patterns for assassinations; tonight's sky was wrong. The lightning lacked natural rhythm—too regular, like heartbeats. Something massive and breathing rode those clouds.
Not yet, she told herself. If a miracle is coming, it isn't here.
The guards yanked her forward. Metal bit her nape; wooden stock closed. Splinters grazed her collarbones where jacket cloth had been torn away for spectacle. Blood beaded, warm against cold drizzle. The crowd hushed. Even the thunder seemed to hold breath.
The headsman glanced at the priest for approval; the priest nodded; the headsman took the rope.
Kio closed her eyes. She thought of the child she had smuggled out days before—seven years old, eyes too ancient, arms scarred by runic bands. Live, she had whispered. If that child lived, maybe the empire's ghosts would forgive Kio for failing them.
The rope hissed.
And the sky fell.
A black-fire comet slammed into the scaffold, shattering beams like kindling. The guillotine blade screeched sideways, severing nothing. Kio's world flipped; wood exploded; bodies pinwheeled through sparks.
She landed hard, the stock cracking open. Her lungs refused to find air, but adrenaline flooded fast. She rolled sideways, splinters shredding palms, and looked up into hell.
A shadow-wolf colossus crouched where the scaffold had been. Ten feet high at the shoulder, built of midnight and flickering violet flame, horns curling back like obsidian scythes. Each claw was a curved sword. Crimson eyes narrowed on Kio and burned hotter than forge iron.
Screams erupted; guards scrambled; crossbows loaded with a snap. But the creature—he, Kio's senses insisted—ignored them, staring only at her.
"Mine," the monster growled. The word rumbled through stone foundations, through Kio's ribcage. A territorial claim older than language.
The nearest guard thrust a spear. The wolf-king flicked one talon. Steel, arm, and man severed in the same motion. Panic detonated. Shade-claws hewed through the execution crew like wheat, but every slash avoided Kio by inches, as if she were the eye of a hurricane.
Move. Her spy instincts shrieked even while numb awe tried to keep her frozen. She wrenched herself to her feet just as the monster's claw speared the guillotine base, flinging it aside.
Then he leaned down, hot breath scented like storm ozone and forest loam.
Kio met those ember eyes. Something coiled inside her chest. Not fear—recognition. Before she could parse it, the world went white and a crystalline chime split her skull.
[SYSTEM AWAKENED]
Designation: Ero-Thread Nexus
Primary User: KIO VALARYN
Status: Dormant → Active
Core Condition: ESTABLISH CONSENSUAL THREAD with Rift Sovereign.
Reward: Shadow Pounce Lv 1 — partial transfer of sovereign aspect.
Words etched themselves across Kio's vision, glowing violet. Her pulse synced with each letter. She staggered back, barely noticing the debris around her. The Nexus tattooed itself along her collarbone—thin thorn-lines, the color of dawn bruises.
The monster cocked his head, inhaled like he was sampling her scent. Lightning wreathed his mane, licking toward her tattoos but never quite touching.
"Who… who are you?" Kio managed.
"Vaun," he rumbled. Voice deeper than tomb doors. "King below the first rift. I heard your heart calling."
She almost laughed—calling? Her heart had done nothing but hammer frantic survival beats.
Crossbow bolts clattered off Vaun's shadow hide. He ignored them. A squad of Emerald Lancers—elite mage-knights—advanced, chanting binding glyphs. Emerald light snaked chains around Vaun's forelimbs. He snarled—sound shaking dust from broken façades—and jerked once. Chains snapped like grass.
The Nexus text flickered: Sovereign endangered. Thread incomplete. Core overload in 87 sec.
Kio understood then: the system thought Vaun belonged to her—and if she refused that bond, it would fry every neuron to enforce compliance.
The priest screamed an invocation. Holy sigils hovered. Vaun roared, jaws splitting into abyss. Heat washed the square.
Kio stood between them and lifted her shackled hands. "Stop!"
Miracle: they did. Even Vaun froze.
"I consent," she said, throat trembling but firm. "Bond. Thread. Whatever the gods demand—just stop killing them."
Vaun's eyes widened—an animal surprise melting into something painfully human. He bent until his horned brow nearly brushed hers.
Lightning arced—not from the storm, but from the Nexus glyph blooming across her sternum, thorn-runed and luminous. Vaun's claw touched the symbol.
Heat—pleasure, terror, adrenaline—fused into a single pulse. The mark flared; invisible threads stitched her nerves to the monster's heartbeat. Somewhere a choir of glass bells sang triumph.
[THREAD ESTABLISHED]
Ero-Thread Rank: I
Attribute Transfer: Shadow Pounce Lv 1 acquired.
Core Stability restored. Next overload at three unbound sovereigns.
Kio exhaled—blood and euphoria tangling. She felt stronger. Muscles grew spring-tight; darkness whispered how to carry her weight across rooftops, unseen and silent. Shadow Pounce wasn't knowledge; it was instinct under her skin.
Guards stumbled back. Some dropped weapons. The priest fainted.
Vaun's claws withdrew. His rumble became softer. "Mine," he repeated, but the word no longer felt like a chain. It sounded embarrassingly like a plea.
Kio steadied herself and looked around. Rubble smoked; bodies lay broken; the crowd had fled into alleys. Above them, the Rift-Storm's lightning calmed, as though sated.
In that hush she realized dawn light crept over eastern spires. She was alive, bound to a nightmare king, and permanently branded by a mystical, erotic system she'd never studied.
Spy training demanded objectives: escape, hide, plan. But the air tasted of wild possibility. Vaun extended a claw—gentle now, the size of her forearm. She climbed onto it. He lifted her to his shadowed shoulder. From there she saw Veyl's ruins stretch beneath the wounded sky.
"Where to, little queen?" he asked.
Kio narrowed her eyes at the Regent's fortress, visible beyond cracked rooftops. "First?" She drew in a breath sharp with lightning. "We hunt the man who tried to kill me. Then we find the next sovereign before this bond kills us both."
Vaun's chuckle shook thunder into sunrise. Together they leapt—her first Shadow Pounce—and vanished into the bruised violet dawn.