Noctis did not rush.
When the purge began, his wings could have carried him across the land in hours. Instead, he walked. Selandra and her kin followed at his side, their crimson eyes glowing in the night. They did not question his pace. They understood — this was not only a hunt, but a journey.
Each night he paused, not for rest, but indulgence.
The women came willingly, eager to serve. Their voices carried soft at first, then louder as the hours stretched.
The moon was witness.
Their silhouettes were cast long across the ground, pale light outlining their curves and movement. Noctis pressed Selandra against a tree trunk the first night, her moans muffled by his mouth as her leg curled around his waist. Her kin knelt nearby, their shadows swaying as they kissed and touched each other, waiting for their turn beneath his hands.
The second night, the firelight of their camp threw harsher silhouettes. Noctis leaned one of the sisters against a stone, his hands gripping her waist, her body arched in rhythm. Another knelt before him, lips and cries muffled, her shadow rising and falling in frantic motion. When he moved to the next, the shadows overlapped, three silhouettes rocking together until their forms blurred in the glow.
Shadows swayed. Curtains of canvas tents rippled with the rhythm of bodies striking against them. Their cries came like waves — muffled gasps, sudden moans, beds creaking, flesh slapping. The air grew heavy with heat and breath, each sound punctuated by the sharp intake of whispered pledges.
Noctis shifted them easily, pressing one against a wall of stone, another bent over a railing of carved wood, another lifted into his arms and carried as she wrapped herself tight around his neck. The rhythm changed with each, slow and deliberate, then harder, then slowing again. He made them cling, kiss, gasp, and tremble until they collapsed, only for another to take her place.
Selandra's moans were the loudest. She trembled whenever his lips pressed against her neck, her cries breaking whenever he lifted her higher or drove her rhythm against the wall. She kissed him fiercely, her hands pulling at his back, her cries muffled into his mouth as shadows of her body jolted in the moonlight.
By the third night, the air itself was filled with sound — a chorus of overlapping moans, muffled cries, the rhythmic creak of beds and tents rocking with each movement. The women clung to one another when their turns passed, kissing and touching even as they trembled, their shadows writhing in groups across the ground.
And through it all, Noctis never faltered. His rhythm was steady, his hands guiding, his lips pressing, his eyes cold and sharp even as his body moved through each of them.
By dawn, they lay collapsed in his arms, their breathing ragged, their bodies trembling. Shadows faded from the walls as the sun rose, their whispers silenced by exhaustion.
Noctis rose unbowed, wings folding at his back, his expression calm. He led them onward without a word.
On the third day, they reached their destination.
The gates of a covenant rose before them, carved from black stone and veined with old marrow wards. The sigil of the clan — once carved with pride — now glowed faintly in decay. Guards stood upon the walls, their eyes widening as they saw him approach.
Noctis did not draw his blades. He walked forward, Selandra and her kin flanking him, their steps measured, their silence heavier than war drums.
The gates loomed. The air thickened.
The first betrayer clan had been found.
And their sovereign had come to judge them.
The gate opened. Iron scraped stone. The blue crystal torches along the wall tilted from the draft and then steadied.
Noctis walked in first.
No horns. No halo. No wings. Base form. Coat closed. Boots on stone. He did not hurry. He did not look left or right. He walked straight for the inner hall.
Selandra and her kin moved with him, three-by-three, tight and quiet. No blades drawn. No talk.
Guards on the parapet leaned out and froze. One dropped his spear. It rattled down the steps and slid to a stop. No one moved to pick it up.
Whispers jumped tower to tower and down the stairs in a chain of breath.
"Who is that with elder Selandra?"
"Wait… that feeling, that face… is that the…"
"This feeling… the blood of the Progenitor… is that our missing Sovereign?"
Doors along the court opened. Lesser vampires stepped into the cold without cloaks, eyes wide. They pressed toward the walkway railings and the corridor edges, but parted when Selandra's kin lifted a palm. Fear snapped into reverence; reverence into instinct. A dozen fell to their knees. More followed. Palms hit stone. Foreheads lowered. No cheering. Just held breath.
Inside, a steward ran. He took the council corridor at a slide, slammed into the doorframe, and burst into the elders' room with the word already spilling out.
"Elders—Noctis is at the gate."
Six elders rose at once. Robes swung. Masks of calm fixed on faces.
"At once," said the head elder. "Receive him with honor."
They moved down the stair in a line. Halfway down, a smaller elder leaned toward the next in a low breath.
"Selandra is with him."
"That's wrong."
"I heard it."
They reached the main hall and set their faces back to stone.
The hall was large. Pillars of black stone held the ribbed ceiling. Blue crystal fire in braziers threw flat light across floor and pillar. The dais stood at the back, five steps, with a single obsidian chair centered on top.
Noctis crossed the floor, climbed the steps, and sat. Straight back. Hands on the chair arms. No nod. No smile.
Selandra climbed three steps and stood to his right. Head lowered. Hands clasped. Her kin took the floor below in two ranks, two forward, two flanking, two watching the upper gallery.
The elders fanned into a shallow arc.
The head elder bowed, measured. "Sovereign! Welcome! We rejoice at your return! We will serve you as before you went missing."
A second elder added, "While you went missing, we have been bullied by the other Progenitor clans. But we have held on."
The crowd behind them waited for a sign.
Noctis gave none. He spoke once, flat. "I am no longer your Progenitor Inheritor. I no longer want this position. I only came here for one thing. To get my revenge."
The room shifted. Not physically—breathing, balance, weight. Elders' shoulders tightened. A few lesser vampires looked down at the floor because it was safer than looking at faces.
Noctis continued, same tone. "They betrayed me. I was stabbed, and then sold over to the Church. I was tortured and experimented on ever since. And those that betrayed me are here in front of me, talking as if nothing has happened. As if they never betrayed me, selling me to the Church."
The sound that followed was a hall trying to process a fact it had never been allowed to say out loud. It was not shouting. It was breath, and then questions that could not find a target.
Selandra stepped one pace forward, eyes down. "It is true. I was there and was once a betrayer. I… was the one who stabbed him."
The word stabbed landed hard. Heads turned from elders to Selandra and back. The elders moved fast to fill the air.
"Lies," one said, too sharp."
She cannot be trusted," another snapped. A third pushed forward a step. "We acted to protect the covenant. The other clans pressed us. The Church had gathered. We were trapped."
A fourth pointed at Selandra. "She admits she struck him. Why is she standing at his side? Why bring him here now? What is she planning?"
Noise rose—confusion, anger, old fear. Hands lifted. People wanted answers and didn't know which way to face.
Noctis raised one hand.
Silence.
He reached, took Selandra's wrist, and pulled her onto his lap. One motion. Controlled. She did not resist. Her breath hitched once as her body settled. His left arm locked at her waist. His right hand slid along her side and rested. The action was open. There was nothing hidden to guess at.
"She is mine," he said. "My woman."
Selandra wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. Quick. Firm. It carried one meaning to the room: where she stood.
That was the moment an elder chose his last words.
"You let a betrayer live because she spreads her legs!"
A red arc cut the air.
A Bloodfang Reaper—already formed, already in motion—scythed across the front rank. Scythe form, edge bright, no pause. It took the elder at the ribs and finished at the opposite shoulder. Half the body slid and dropped. The other half twisted and fell. Blood sprayed forward and spattered two elders beside him and the stone at their feet. The scythe reversed, spun once overhead, and settled behind Noctis in a slow orbit, point down.
Noctis didn't look at it. He didn't look at the body. He set Selandra gently to her feet at the arm of the chair and stood.
He did not speak.
He stepped forward to the edge of the top stair and stopped. He stood still for one long beat.
The floor trembled.
Pressure rolled through the hall like a weight dropped on a table. The blue crystal fire flared and guttered, then burned higher, bending toward him. Stone dust shook out of the ceiling ribs in a fine sheet. Banners along the back wall snapped once without wind and then hung straight, clean.
The elders' knees hit stone—first one, then another, then the rest. Not a choice. Their bodies folded under pressure they could not name or resist. Lesser vampires dropped flat, foreheads on floor, hands pressed open at their sides in instinctive submission to higher blood.
Noctis's coat shredded from the collar to the hem into a ribbon of wet crimson and then reformed as armor that fit like it had been poured. Horns tore up from his skull and locked into place. The air cracked around his shoulders. Six wings burst out—two crimson feathered, two draconic scaled, two black flame—unfolding until the shadow of them filled the riser wall to wall. The stone under his boots groaned.
The Bloodfang Reapers multiplied—three, then five, then a full crown of orbitals. Blades spun into different shapes without leaving the circle: scythes, long swords, guan dao, short hooked sickles. Their arcs drew red lines in the air and left afterimages that hung and faded.
Ambient mana turned harsh and unstable. You could see it in the way the blue flames shook, in the static crackle from pillar to pillar, in the way loose grit rolled toward him across the floor. Sound warped—small noises went thin, big noises hit hard and then died.
Noctis said nothing.
He took another step.
The pressure climbed. The head elder tried to lift his chin and couldn't. Two elders were already bracing on their hands to keep from lying flat. The last stiffened and shook in place, jaw clenched, trying to prove something to himself and failing.
Selandra stood on the top step at his right, now behind his wings' inner arc. She did not speak. She did not move. She watched, breathing steady, eyes wet and clear. Her kin below had gone to one knee with heads bowed.
A scythe drifted out of the orbit and hovered at shoulder height in front of Noctis. He did not reach for it. He didn't need to. The blade's edge hummed. A thin line of red light ran its curve. It waited for a nod that did not come.
The hall itself carried the statement: judgment was next.
The torches along the walls blew sideways as if the room were taking a hard breath in. The stone at the base of the dais cracked in a shallow vein and sent a small spray of grit down the top step. The curved ribs of the ceiling popped and settled with a noise like old wood flexing—except there was no wood, only stone reacting to too much weight in one place.
Noctis's wings shifted once. Black flame curled off the outer pair and licked up the pillar faces without leaving char. The crimson pair feathered tight, then opened again. The scaled pair locked and held, rigid, like armor plates.
The elders tried to speak and failed. The head elder managed one word: "Sovereign—" It cracked. He swallowed it and choked. Two of the others coughed blood without wounds and spat on their own robes because they couldn't get their chins far enough down to miss.
He did not acknowledge them.
He took the last step off the dais. The ground shuddered a fraction. The reapers adjusted their orbits to the new centerline, every blade tracking like it knew the plan.
Noctis stopped within reach of the first kneeling elder.
He did not raise his arm. He did not lift his chin. He did not give a verdict in words.
The hall had it already: the insult answered in blood, the confession heard, the lie exposed, the elders on their knees, the weapon ring full, the air unstable, the fire bent, the stone ready to receive.
Outside, wind hit the outer banners and the sound came in late through the doors like a reminder that the world still existed past these walls.
Inside, everything waited on his next motion.
The scythe's edge brightened a shade. The long sword's spine flared once and went dark. The guan dao dipped its blade a finger's width and rose. Each orbiting weapon made a small sound at the end of its arc, metal over air, and those clicks stacked until they sounded like a slow clock.
Noctis's eyes moved from elder to elder. He took their faces in and filed them. He didn't need the names. He had the shapes, and a sovereign never forgot shapes.
He drew one breath.
The blue flames leaned toward him and held. The floor vibrated steady under boots and knees. The air hit the back of the throat like cold iron.
He exhaled.
The hall was silent but for breathing and the hiss of blue crystal fire.
Noctis stood at the foot of the dais in apex form. Six wings spread—two crimson feathered, two draconic, two black flame—casting long, shifting shadows. The Bloodfang Reapers orbited him in a slow ring: scythes, swords, a guan dao, hooked sickles. Edges bright. Paths exact.
The elders knelt under the weight of his aura. Not by choice. Their bodies had given up that right.
Noctis did not speak. He looked from face to face. That was enough.
A scythe dropped out of the ring and cut the first elder's neck in a clean half-circle. The head hit stone and rolled; the body folded. Blood sheeted forward. The scythe snapped back into orbit.
The guan dao dipped and drove through the second elder's chest, low to high, then tore free. He collapsed around the hole. A line of bloodlight lifted off the corpse and bent toward Noctis.
A long sword punched through the third elder's sternum and out his back, held there a heartbeat, then withdrew. The body sagged. Bloodlight peeled from the wound and streamed into Noctis.
Two hooked sickles crossed over the fourth elder's heart and opened him in an X. He shook once and went still. Essence lifted clean and joined the others.
A scythe took the fifth elder's legs above the knees. He toppled, reached for nothing, and a short sword finished his throat. Bloodlight rose before the limbs stopped twitching.
The head elder stared forward and tried to raise his chin. It didn't come up far.
"Why—" he began.
A shard-blade slashed shoulder to hip. He fell without finishing the word. His essence left him in a rush and was gone.
The ring slowed. Bloodlight streamed in thin ropes toward Noctis and sank into him. Floor tremors settled. The blue flames steadied.
Noctis raised one hand and opened the Sovereign Crucible.
A red-black lattice swept out from his palm and filled the hall—lines of force threading stone, air, and marrow. It pulsed once.
Vampires tied to the betrayal jerked as if struck from within: the guard who had unbarred a side door, the steward who had carried sealed orders, the priest who had blessed chains. Their bodies collapsed into ash and bloodlight. The streams rose and curved and plunged into Noctis.
Those who had not taken part—who had argued in kitchens, who had hid, who had done nothing and hated themselves for it—fell flat and stayed there. The Crucible ignored them. It drank only the guilty.
When the last stain burned out, the lattice withdrew into his hand.
Silence held. The spared did not look up.
Noctis closed his eyes and let blood memory rise.
It came in fragments: shuttered room; table with straps; sanctified brine; a priest forcing a block between his teeth; a sigil over the door; a vote—six hands raised in order; hot wax; a signet pressed; a runner carrying a sealed letter; green eyes and a slow smile in a doorway—Maltherion; the smell of abyss; and from far off along the bloodline, a colder weight—Kaeltharion, not present, but watching, waiting for the Church to finish the work.
He opened his eyes.
"Maltherion and Kaeltharion set it up," he said. "Maltherion is dead. Kaeltharion is in his domain."
He looked once across the bodies—few in number; enough to break a life.
"Up," he said to the spared. "Out."
They rose on shaky legs and left in a controlled line. No one ran. Hands stayed visible. Heads stayed down. Doors opened and shut. The hall emptied.
Selandra stepped onto the dais and came to his side. She put both arms around him and held, then lifted her face and kissed him. Direct. He answered. When he drew back, his breath was steady.
"Clear the hall," he said, louder, to the last on duty. "Everyone out. Selandra's kin stay."
Boots moved. Hinges thudded. Then silence again.
Only Selandra and her six kin remained—Kyssara, Valenne, Miraelle, Deyra, Athis, Sylrae. They stood in a line, then moved closer without waiting for permission. Eyes bright. Breathing hard. No words wasted.
Noctis sat on the obsidian chair.
"Selandra," he said.
She climbed onto him, knees braced on the throne's arms, hands on his shoulders. She lowered herself slowly, found his rhythm, and rode it. Her breath turned to gasps, then to sharp cries. The chair creaked under them. He held her hips, set pace, lifted and pressed until her body locked tight and trembled. She came with a raw sound, collapsed against his chest, and shook. He held her until the shaking eased, then set her gently aside onto the step.
"Kyssara," he said.
Kyssara stepped in and turned to face the hall, palms flat on the chair's arm. He took her from behind—slow at first, then harder. Her breath caught and broke into loud, open-mouthed moans. He reached up, took her shoulders, changed angle, and drove her through. When her legs began to give, he pinned her hips and finished her. She cried out and went slack. He lowered her to the floor, chest heaving, hair loose.
"Valenne."
Valenne went to the wall without being told. Palms set on black stone. He lifted her by the thighs until her feet left the floor. The wall took her weight and his. Each thrust bounced her shoulders off stone with a dull thud. She gasped in short bursts that turned to a long, breaking wail. When she came, she clawed at the wall and laughed once through it, then slid down when he let her legs go. He caught her, set her carefully, and moved on.
"Miraelle."
Miraelle knelt between the chair and the step. He pulled her up, turned her, set one hand between her shoulder blades, and took her on the cold stone—controlled and deep. Her forehead touched the step. Her voice shook into his name. At the end she clenched around him, sobbing out a breath and smiling into the floor. He smoothed her hair back and stepped away.
"Deyra."
Deyra bent over the chair's arm. Elbows down. Hands gripping wood. He pressed into her and set a hard, even rhythm. Each movement drove a clap out of the chair and a gasping cry out of her mouth. She pushed back to meet him, lost timing, found it again, and broke into a string of sharp, high sounds before she folded forward, shaking. He eased her down onto the step and lifted her hair away from her face.
"Athis."
Athis took the pillar. She set her hands on the curve, cheek to stone. He pressed her chest to the cold surface and lifted her hips. Slow. Then a pace that built without mercy. The pillar took the force and thrummed under his hand. Athis made a low, steady noise that climbed at the end and snapped into a harsh exhale. She slid a hand-breadth down the pillar and stopped, breathing hard, face flushed.
"Sylrae."
Sylrae stood in front of him and then turned without a word, bracing on the throne's arm. He drew her back onto him and set a deliberate, punishing tempo—measured, precise, increasing only when her body begged for it. She bit her lip, lost the bite, and moaned loud into the hall. When she came, she went quiet first—breath gone—then cried once, full and raw, and sagged. He held her until she found her feet.
He took Selandra again last—against the back wall. Hands on stone. Spine arched. He pulled her hips, then her shoulders, then a hand in her hair, slow to start, then a pace that made her voice climb and tear and tumble into his name. She came hard, shaking against him, forehead on the stone, hands spread.
The echoes ran out.
Bodies lay where gravity put them—slumped at the wall, curled on the floor, draped half over the armrest. Chests rose and fell. Legs trembled in small aftershocks. Sweat cooled. The room smelled of stone and skin and the iron edge of old blood already fading under the Crucible's clean pull.
Noctis stood. His breath was even. Aura steady. Reapers slowed their orbit and dimmed.
Selandra crawled back to the throne, climbed onto his lap sideways, and rested her head against his chest. A moment, then she looked up.
"We move to the next clan," she said. Voice rough, clear. "We don't stop."
"We move," he said.
Kyssara, still on the floor, turned her head. "Maltherion is dead."
"Kaeltharion is in his domain," Valenne said from the wall.
"I know," Noctis said.
He lifted a hand. The reapers slid back into their crimson sheaths and vanished. Wings folded in and were gone. Armor collapsed into a coat. Apex receded. Base form returned—no horns, no halo, no wings—his presence no less certain.
"Dress," he said. "We leave at first light."
They obeyed. They rose on shaky legs and gathered what they had dropped. Passing him, each pressed a quick kiss—jaw, throat, the back of his hand—and moved on without fuss.
Selandra lingered. She looked at the stains where elders had fallen. She touched the chair's arm with her fingertips. Then she faced him.
"We finish them," she said. "All of them."
"We will," he said.
She kissed him once more. "For the vote. For the chains. For the blade."
"Finished," he said.
She nodded and joined her kin.
The blue fire had dropped to normal height. Night air pushed through the open doors. Outside, a few spared vampires stood in lines without being told, heads bowed. They looked up when he appeared.
"At dawn," Noctis said. "We go."
They bowed deeper and stepped aside.
He crossed the yard with Selandra and her kin. The wind off the ridge smelled of snow. The sky was black and clear. He did not need its light.
Behind him, the covenant stood quiet. The elders were gone. The stain was burned. Names sat in his blood like points on a map—routes to doors, votes, signets, hands that had moved chains. One of those names led to Kaeltharion's border.
He did not say it out loud. He didn't need to.
He walked into the night. The hall behind him learned how to breathe again. The next hall would learn the same at dawn.