The Night Castle learned a new shape when it slept. Its spires leaned a fraction inward, as if conferring. The Red Gallery stopped whispering and began listening. Banners tightened their stitches; sigils crept into the margins like thieves who had been invited. Below, the Resonant Forge hummed in a key that made stone remember how to sharpen.
Lucas walked the inner courtyard while morning practiced failing again. The air carried ash, iron, and the low, clean scent of attention from far away—the Judicant's thread, faint but uncut. A line of children crossed the yard in silence, each small back straight under the weight of a bone bow longer than an arm. Cadets. Left wrists branded. Eyes wide like new stars.
Selena watched from the base of a spire, barefoot on warmed stone, hair a pale river catching whatever light the sky had forgotten to hide. "They don't tremble," she said, more pleased than surprised. "Did we feed them fear or hunger?"
"Both," Lucas answered. "Hunger aims better."
He watched the children mount the spiral stairs inside the Crimson Spire, quiet as dust. Above, the narrow slots blinked—the castle's eyes remembering they could open wider.
[Ding!]
[Unit Path—Blood Moon Archers (E): readiness 7/12.]
[Rare-class Ascension: Available (conditions nearly met).]
[Prerequisites: Sovereign Resonance ≥ 50%, Blood Moon cadence (1 cycle), Night Core ×1, Bone Dust ×1500 (fine), Vile Spark ×400, Abyssal Tithe optional.]
[Risk: mutation feedback; audit attraction.]
Selena angled her head, crimson eyes narrowing on the prompt. "Rare," she read, savoring the word. "At last, we stop being polite."
Lucas turned to the Forge. The Night Core he had kept in reserve lay in a cradle of iron, pulsing faintly—as if it were listening for the time to spend itself. He lifted it and felt the castle lean forward.
"Today," he said. "We ascend them."
He did not call a council. He did not need witnesses. He needed a room and a ritual and Selena's presence.
They chose the Red Gallery because the banners there had learned how to hold their breath. The children climbed down from the spires and filed into the hall, bows along their spines, hands flat to their sides. Ten cadets. Two more would be taken from the village line by evening—hands checked, eyes questioned, spines assessed by the way they refused to bend when Mirk pushed. For now, ten was an honest beginning.
Selena moved among them like a saint with better knives, adjusting a wrist, tipping a chin, turning a bowstring. "Pull with the back," she murmured. "Not the arm. Breathe low. The heart is a metronome you bully into agreeing with you."
The Forge rolled in its hum. Lucas set the Night Core on the black table, beside piles of fine Bone Dust that rose like pale smoke under lantern heat. A bowl of Vile Spark crackled on a stand—no light, only the sense of bright. The castle shivered along its runnels.
[Ding!]
[Ascension Rite—Sanguine Fletchery]
[Target: Blood Moon Archers (E) → Blood Moon Archers [Rare]]
[Inputs detected: Night Core √, Bone Dust √, Vile Spark √, Sovereign Resonance √ (Selena/Lucas).]
[Additional option: Abyssal Tithe (convert despair in radius to accelerate binding).]
[Outcome: unlocks abilities—Crescent Sight, Bloodthread String, Moonscour, Red Eclipse Banner.]
[Confirm? Y/N]
Selena glanced sideways at Lucas. The smile that touched her mouth was knife-small. "Say yes."
"Y."
The Night Core sank through the stone without melting it. The table drank with a sound like a held breath finally admitted. The Bone Dust lifted in slow spirals, caught in a current that had more opinions than air. The Vile Spark leapt—not light, but decision—into the dust. The banners above quivered, their threads drinking red that wasn't there.
A cadence woke in the hall. Not drum. Not heart. Something older the castle had inherited from a sky that remembered how to be a moon. The children heard it with the bones, not the ears. Their eyes widened like animals' right before the ground changes its mind.
Selena stepped to the center and offered her wrist without ceremony. "Drink," she told the hall.
She cut herself with a fang, clean as a vow. Blood ran, darker than secrets, and didn't fall—it traveled, lifted, divided, traced lines between the cadets and their bows, stitched sigils onto strings that hadn't existed yet. Lucas opened the old neat scar in his palm and let his iron mix, a thinner bright that the ritual craved for temper.
[Ding!]
[Sovereign Resonance: braided. Link stabilized.]
[Rare-class matrix forming.]
[Warning: mutation feedback—Cruelty Index will inflect aim.]
The children's bows flexed and sighed. No wood creaked; these were bone, spine-curved, strung with thread that wasn't thread—a thin red line that throbbed gently, the way an arterial cut learns to lie about being finite. Arrows in the racks shivered, their points brightening from dull to clot-slick.
Lucas stepped before the first cadet, a thin boy with smart fingers and a name he had been told to keep. "Lift."
The boy lifted. The bow scaled to him without apology. The Bloodthread sang against his skin and did not cut. His pulse stabilized, then lowered. Crescent Sight crawled over his eyes like a new lens.
He flinched. "It… sees for me."
"It will see what you can't," Selena said. "You tell it where not to look, and it will be offended enough to help."
The cadence built. The Rare-class matrix latched. The runnels along the hall's floor lit in crescents, each one cupping a child's heel like a small, patient hand.
Lucas moved to the second cadet, a girl with nails cut blunt and a jaw that could open doors. "Draw," he said.
She drew. The bow refused to be heavy. Her back made the right shape. The Bloodthread trembled at full length and then settled. The arrowhead's sheen deepened—claret, then near-black, as if ashamed of its own brightness.
Selena's voice lowered, velvet ground on iron. "Feel the throat. There. Between bone and breath. Tell the arrow where the space is."
The girl aimed at the wall. Her eyes did not change—but the wall felt watched.
The last of the ten took their places. Mirk pressed himself into a corner, wide-eyed and reverent, fingers twitching to imitate. Var stood nearer the door, lacing and unlacing rope like a nervous habit he was telling himself was art.
"Now," Lucas said. He turned toward the far end of the hall.
A curtain of bone slid aside, revealing a row of man-shaped frames—targets built of jointed ribs and stitched with gristle. Each wore a scrap of different color: black, ash, ember—the three banners reduced to fabrics that didn't know they had died. Behind the frames, a slit of night promised a little slice of wind.
"Volley," he said.
The bows lifted. The children's chests did not heave; the cadence had set their breath in a measure that felt like someone else's good habit. Selena stood between two of them, shoulders back, mouth parted as if to kiss the air. The Command Link thrummed through Lucas's bones.
"Loose."
Ten strings sighed. Ten red lines became suggestions the world could not refuse. Lunar Volley fell inside a room, which is impolite to rooms. The man-shapes shuddered as if corrected; ten throats learned new holes. Where arrowheads hit bone, the bone admitted error and stepped aside.
[Ding!]
[Blood Moon Archers [Rare] — activated (10).]
[Abilities:
— Crescent Sight: perceive "gaps" (arterial, structural) at range.
— Bloodthread String: shots convert fear in flight into force.
— Moonscour: suppressive weave; arrows push men into kill paths.
— Red Eclipse Banner: project dread field from spire; lowers enemy coordination, blinds scouts to geometry.]
[Passive: Accuracy ↑ in presence of children's silence or weeping (mutation bias).]
[Cost: Sovereign Resonance drain (low, sustained).]
Selena clapped once, slow, delighted. "They will write poems quickly."
Lucas walked the line, correcting nothing. The bows had listened. The children had not shaken. This pleased him. Exactness pleases men like him more than cruelty does. Cruelty is a tool; exactness a crown.
"Again," he said.
The second volley did not aim. It chose—the Moonscour weaving across the frame-line, arrows staggering in an off-beat pattern that forced the targets' joints to imagine different futures. The ribbons on the frames twisted; shadow along the far slit stuttered; a draft found a new way through the room and complained about it.
On the third volley, he raised his hand mid-draw. "Hold."
The Bloodthread strings thrummed at full length. The hall sang—quiet, like a cat deciding whether it loves you. He waited several heartbeats and then said, "Release."
The arrows went faster than before without having become heavier. The floor's crescents lit in approval. Somewhere outside, a bell along the wall answered as if it had been listening.
Selena caught his eye across the volley's aftermath. Her mouth moved with a secret. "We can hang a banner now. Not cloth. A feeling."
"The Red Eclipse," he said. "Above the gate."
"Above their tents," she suggested, vague to be arrogant.
Lucas tasted the risk and approved it. "At dusk."
The children lowered their bows. Their small hearts had not sped; their skin glowed faintly where the Bloodthread had spoken to them. One boy blinked and wiped a nosebleed delicately on his sleeve, unimpressed.
Selena crouched before him and tipped his chin up with a knuckle. "What did the string say?"
He considered, then chose honesty because the hall liked it. "It said the air lies."
Her smile widened. "Very good. Believe that always."
The Resonant Forge sent up a new tray—filigree bracers no heavier than lies. Lucas buckled one onto the girl with the blunt nails. It tightened until it fit the way a habit fits. She shivered and not from cold.
[Ding!]
[Crimson Filigree—Archer Brace equipped.]
[Effect: Crescent Sight resolution +, recoil none, tremor compensation.]
[Side: dreams will track trajectories.]
Mirk inched forward until he remembered he wasn't allowed to be in the line. "Lord," he rasped. "Can ghouls… learn string?"
Selena laughed. "You would break your fingers and think it love."
Lucas ignored them both and looked up. The banners had changed color by a shade. It meant something the system would take seven sentences to say. He didn't ask it.
The Rare class wanted blood. Not to drink. To keep the string unbothered. He would give it.
"We test outside," he said.
They mounted the spires. The stair narrowness forced the children into a snake of quiet. The slots opened, wider now, the castle extracting eyelets to fit the mood. The wasteland spread: ribs, gullies, char-black places where earlier devotions had burned. Smoke twisted from yesterday's pillars like tired prayers.
"Targets," Selena murmured.
Lucas did not point. He pushed the map into their minds: rocks that had become cover for men who had not yet decided to be brave; the line of the ridge where the alliance's second-tier scouts had learned to hide; a cart inching along the dry riverbed under canvas too clean.
"Cadets," he said. "Two per spire. You will not shoot to kill unless a unit commander breathes the killing into you. Today, you teach the world geometry."
Selena lifted her arms above her head. For a second, she looked less like a queen and more like what gods would inspire if they hadn't gone to sleep. "Red Eclipse," she said softly.
The air over the Blood Gate thickened—the kind of thick that words don't describe because words need air. It spread, slow, translucent red shading the gray, a false moon's shadow draped low enough that crows would avoid it. Men on the far ridge straightened without knowing why their spines wanted to.
[Ding!]
[Red Eclipse Banner active.]
[Zone: gate, forward killing field, ridge line fringe.]
[Enemy effects: coordination −, courage −, lines drift, scouts misjudge distance, orders delay +.]
[Friendly effects: Crescent Sight clarity +, Moonscour density +.]
"Write," Lucas said.
Arrows began to arrive in the world where people had planned to be.
A scout crouched behind a rib and decided he had time to scratch his shin. An arrow landed three inches in front of his knee—not a miss, a threat—and the second arrived where his knee had gone because knees are predictable. He screamed and the sound took a wrong route in the red shadow and arrived at his captain mangled, a begging where a warning had been.
Two men under the canvas cart argued about whose job breathing was. An arrow punched the canvas and pinned the argument to wood. A second arrow followed in the same hole. The third hit between their foreheads, gently, without tragedy.
On the ridge, a trio started down to map the bone pits' new lids. Moonscour wrote a skewed lattice across their way, not killing them, just writing walk here now in a script their ankles could read. They followed it without consent and arrived at a kill alley as if they'd meant to find it.
Selena laughed softly. "So polite."
Deyra stood in the yard below, circlet dark along her brow, voice carrying smooth. She directed survivors to new lines—spoke the word kneel and men who might have run made kneeling a plan. From this high, she looked like composure wearing a woman. The Command Link threaded through her like a fine metal—no tension, slick.
The cadence in the hall extended itself to the spires. The children's breath stayed even. One girl's eyes filmed red at the edges; Crescent Sight was painting her corneas with a map she would dream. She did not complain.
Selena tilted her head, listening for something beyond arrows. "The Judge is coming closer," she said, almost cheerfully.
Lucas felt the same thread tug—the clean-water scent behind the wind.
[Ding!]
[External Vector: Judicant proximity ↑.]
[Silence Ritual: 6h.]
[Note: Spectacle abstracted.]
"Let him watch math," Lucas said.
He put his palm to the spire's cold inside and spoke a line to the castle. "Give me two more."
The tower's throat echoed—the sound of rooms building themselves to fit instructions they had wanted to hear. Two slots opened farther along the wall. Bone began learning archers' names two floors down. The castle loved children who obeyed.
Selena's hand found his for a fraction; cool fingers, blood under nails, consent without surrender. "A kingdom," she said lightly, eyes on the red shadow over the killing ground, "with a moon it carries indoors."
"An epoch," he corrected. He lifted his other hand, two fingers. "Volley."
Arrows stitched the ridge. The Red Eclipse pulsed—a fake lunar tide. Men lost the idea of a straight line. Dogs below smiled without lips and started a patient trot to where fear pooled most neatly.
[Ding!]
[Blood Moon Archers [Rare]: performance optimal.
— Crescent Sight resolution stable.
— Moonscour writ large across ridge.
— Sovereign drain acceptable.]
[Mutation: Cruelty Index biases target selection toward leaders' throats.]
"Good," Lucas said.
He let the volley taper. He let the smoke thin. He let the ridge breathe so it would keep telling him truths. The Judicant's thread quickened, then steadied—patience dressed as law.
Selena turned to the cadets, voice warm as the inside of a knife sheath. "Eat," she told them. "Drink. Stretch fingers. Do not speak. Your silence keeps your arrows honest."
They obeyed. Children learn faster under gravity.
Lucas looked beyond the Red Eclipse, past the field where three banners had burned into two pillars and one voice, into the country that was starting to say Night as if it were a compass point. He traced corridors over it that ended in mouths. Inside the castle, the Forge sighed and rolled new filigree into trays. The Vault yawned delicately. The kennels ticked. The spires listened.
Above the gate, the red shadow held.
The castle had acquired its moon.