A/N — As the author, I recommend that you take a look at the prologue in the auxiliary chapter.
The screaming had been going on for six hours.
Caelum stood outside his mother's chambers, his back pressed against the marble wall, and tried not to count the seconds between each cry. He was sixteen. Old enough to understand that childbirth was difficult. Old enough to know that his mother's third labor should not sound like this.
The physicians had stopped entering and exiting an hour ago. Now they simply stayed inside, and the muffled sounds of urgent conversation filtered through the heavy oak door between shrieks.
His father emerged once, briefly. King Aldric Archambeau's face held the same expression he wore during executions—detached, analytical, already moving past the present moment to calculate future consequences. He'd looked at Caelum, opened his mouth, closed it, and returned to the chamber without a word.
That was when Caelum knew his mother was going to die.
The realization sat in his chest like a stone. He wanted to run. He wanted to break down the door. He wanted to be anywhere but here, listening to his mother's agony echo through the halls of the estate while servants hurried past with armfuls of blood-soaked linens.
Instead, he stood. And waited. And counted.
Sixty-three seconds between the last scream and the next.
Forty-one.
Twenty-eight.
The screaming stopped.
The silence was worse.
Caelum's hand found the door handle before he realized he'd moved. He pushed it open, and the smell hit him first—copper and something else, something that made his sinuses burn and his eyes water. Not rot. Not decay. Something foreign.
The birthing chamber looked like a slaughterhouse.
Blood covered the floor in a spreading pool that reflected the lamplight in crimson mirrors. The physicians stood frozen, their hands raised as if they'd forgotten what they were holding. One of them—Head PhysicianCorvas, who'd delivered Caelum himself sixteen years ago—had vomit on his robes.
His mother lay on the bed, and Caelum's mind refused to process what he was seeing. His eyes slid away from the center of the carnage, focusing instead on details at the periphery. Her hand, pale and perfect, hanging off the edge of the mattress. The silver ring she always wore catching the light. Her hair, golden and immaculate even now, fanned across the pillow.
Anything but the middle. Anything but the cavity where her abdomen should have been.
"Caelum." His father's voice cut through the ringing in his ears. "You shouldn't be here."
"I—" His throat closed. He tried again. "Mother—"
"Is dead."
The words hung in the air like an execution verdict.
Caelum's gaze finally, inevitably, dropped to what lay between his mother's ruined body and the physicians' trembling hands.
It moved.
The thing was roughly the size of a newborn. That was where any resemblance to humanity ended.
Its form shifted. Not like movement—like reality couldn't decide what shape it should hold. One moment it appeared vaguely humanoid, with too-long limbs that bent at wrong angles. The next, it was something else entirely. Protrusions of bone erupted from its back, then retracted. Its skin—if it could be called skin—rippled with colors that hurt to look at directly, like oil on water but alive, aware.
Eyes opened across its surface. Not two. Not in any configuration that made sense. They blinked independently, pupils dilating and contracting, some focusing on the physicians, others on the ceiling, others on things that perhaps only it could see.
The thing made no sound. No infant's cry. No whimper or wail.
It simply was.
"What..." Caelum heard his own voice from very far away. "What is that?"
"We don't know, Your Highness." Physician Corvas's hands shook so badly he'd dropped his instruments. "It came from the Queen, but it's not—it can't be—"
"Silence." Aldric moved through the carnage with steady steps, his boots squelching in blood. He stared down at the creature with the same analytical detachment he'd shown Caelum in the hallway. "Is it alive?"
"Yes, Your Majesty. Its... it has vital signs. Multiple heartbeats, actually. We count at least eight distinct—"
"Can it be killed?"
The question landed like a physical blow. Caelum watched his father's profile, searching for some crack in the mask. Some sign of grief for the woman who'd shared his bed for twenty years. Some acknowledgment that his wife lay dead, mutilated beyond recognition, and that this thing was somehow his child.
Nothing.
"We... we haven't attempted—"
"Then attempt."
Aldric stepped back, gesturing to the royal guards stationed by the door. Three men entered, their faces pale but disciplined. They'd been trained since childhood to face monsters—Rui-corrupted beasts, rogue cultivators, enemy combatants empowered by Epic abilities that defied natural law.
None of that training had prepared them for this.
The first guard drew his blade—good steel, enhanced with Rui-infused forging techniques that could cut through Adept-level defenses. He approached the thing slowly, weapon raised.
The thing didn't react. Its multiple eyes continued their independent movements, tracking things invisible to everyone else. A mouth opened somewhere on its surface—not where a mouth should be, but near what might have been a shoulder. It closed again. No sound emerged.
The guard glanced at Aldric. The King nodded.
The blade came down.
The steel shattered.
Not bent. Not deflected. Shattered—into dozens of fragments that scattered across the blood-soaked floor with musical tinkling sounds that seemed grotesquely cheerful in the charnel house atmosphere.
The guard stumbled backward, staring at his broken sword.
The thing remained unchanged. Not a mark on its shifting surface.
"Again," Aldric said. "Use fire."
A second guard stepped forward, hands already glowing with channeled Rui. He was a Novice-level cultivator—barely past normality, but capable of manifesting basic elemental manipulation. Flames erupted from his palms, purple-white fire that could reduce bone to ash in seconds.
He didn't hesitate. The fire washed over the thing in a torrent of heat that made everyone in the room step back.
When the flames cleared, the thing lay exactly as before. Its surface hadn't even darkened. The blood around it had boiled away, but its flesh—if that's what it was—remained untouched.
"Holy fuck," one of the physicians whispered.
Caelum found himself stepping forward without meaning to. The thing's eyes swiveled toward him—six of them at once, focusing with an intensity that made his skin crawl. For a moment, impossibly, he thought he saw recognition in those alien pupils.
Then one of the eyes changed. The color shifted from black to a brown that matched Caelum's own. The shape refined, becoming more human. A perfect mirror of his iris stared back at him from the thing's shoulder.
"It's mimicking me," Caelum breathed.
"Back away from it." His father's hand clamped on his shoulder, pulling him back with surprising strength. Aldric was a Master-level cultivator—his physical capabilities enhanced by centuries of Rui integration. Even that casual grip felt like iron.
"Your Majesty." The third guard's voice cracked slightly. "Perhaps we should try dismemberment? If we can't kill it outright, we could—"
"Do it."
What followed would haunt Caelum for the rest of his life.
The guards worked with grim efficiency. They tried beheading first, using a Rui-enhanced cleaver that could split stone. The blade passed through the thing's neck—or what approximated a neck in its constantly shifting anatomy.
The severed head—if it could be called that—rolled across the floor, eyes still blinking. The body didn't die. Instead, new tissue erupted from the stump, bubbling and reforming with hideous speed. In seconds, a new head emerged, slightly different from the first but fully functional.
The original severed head dissolved into gray ash.
They tried dismembering the limbs. Each severed piece regenerated within heartbeats. They tried crushing it beneath the guards' boots. The flesh compressed, then sprang back, undamaged. They tried drowning it in a basin of water—it didn't breathe. They tried suffocation—it didn't need air.
Through it all, the thing made no sound of pain. No indication of distress. It simply endured, its multiple eyes tracking each new attempt with what might have been curiosity.
After half an hour, the guards stood exhausted, covered in strange fluids that weren't quite blood. The thing lay in the center of the birthing chamber, intact, its eight hearts beating in a rhythm that Caelum could somehow feel in his chest—a syncopated pulse that matched no natural creature.
"Enough." Aldric's voice cut through the heavy breathing. "It can't be killed by conventional means. Perhaps not at all."
"Then what do we do with it?" Physician Corvas asked. He'd given up trying to appear professional. His eyes held the flat thousand-yard stare of someone whose worldview had just shattered.
Aldric looked at the thing. Then at his dead wife. Then at Caelum.
"We seal it away," he said. "The deepest cell in the dungeon. No windows. No contact. No one speaks of this. To anyone."
"Father—" Caelum started.
"The Queen died in childbirth." Aldric's voice held a tone that brooked no argument. "The child was stillborn. That is the story. Anyone who speaks otherwise will join it in the dark."
He turned to the guards. "Take it. Now. Use the servant passages. If anyone sees you, kill them."
The guards exchanged glances. One of them swallowed hard, then reached down to pick up the thing.
It didn't resist. Its form stabilized as the guard's hands closed around it—becoming almost infant-shaped, as if in mockery of what it should have been. One of its eyes met Caelum's again, and this time he was certain.
It saw him. Not as an animal sees, with instinct and base awareness.
As a person sees.
With consciousness.
"Move," Aldric snapped.
The guards carried it out, their footsteps echoing down the marble halls. Caelum watched them go, watched the thing's multiple eyes continue tracking everything until it disappeared around a corner.
The silence that followed felt like a tomb closing.
They cleaned the chamber in the pre-dawn hours. A team of servants sworn to secrecy—and backed by death threats—scrubbed away the blood, burned the linens, replaced the mattress. By the time the sun rose, the room looked pristine. Untouched by horror.
Caelum sat in his own chambers, staring at his hands. They wouldn't stop shaking.
His mother was dead.
Something that wore his brother's name had killed her.
Something unkillable. Unstoppable. Wrong.
He could still see those eyes—the ones that had changed to match his own. Could still feel that wrongness in his chest, like a second heartbeat overlaying his natural rhythm.
A knock at his door.
"Enter," he said automatically.
His father stepped inside, still wearing the same blood-stained clothes from the birthing chamber. In the morning light, Aldric looked older than his years—Master-level cultivation could extend life, but not erase grief.
Or perhaps what Caelum saw in his father's eyes wasn't grief at all.
"The thing is sealed," Aldric said. "Fifty feet beneath the estate, in a cell meant for captured gods. It will never see daylight. Never know freedom. As far as the world is concerned, it doesn't exist."
"It killed her." Caelum's voice came out flat. Dead. "The thing killed mother."
"Yes."
"And we're just... keeping it? Like a pet? Like something you collect?"
"What would you have me do?" Aldric moved to the window, looking out over the estate grounds. "I spent six hours attempting to destroy it before you arrived. Nothing worked. Not steel, not fire, not Rui-enhanced weapons. Not even my own Epic could touch it—Monarch's Domain shapes space, but the thing's flesh resists spatial manipulation entirely. It is, as far as I can determine, immortal."
"Then throw it in the ocean. Cast it into a volcano. Send it to the wasteland zones where even Master-level cultivators die."
"And if it survives? If it adapts? If it finds its way back?" Aldric turned, and Caelum finally saw something in his father's eyes that might have been fear. "We don't know what it is. We don't know what it can become. The only certainty is that we cannot kill it. So we contain it. We watch it. We ensure it remains buried where it can harm no one else."
"It's your son."
"It's an abomination."
The word hung between them like a curse.
Caelum stood, his chair scraping against the floor. "Mother would have—"
"Your mother is dead." Aldric's voice didn't rise, but it cut like a blade. "And that thing is the reason. Remember that, Caelum. When you feel sympathy, when you question this decision, remember what we pulled from her corpse. Remember what it cost our family."
He moved toward the door, then paused.
"The official announcement will be made at noon. You will attend. You will mourn appropriately. You will tell no one the truth. Do you understand?"
Caelum's jaw clenched. "Yes, Your Majesty."
"Good."
His father left. The door clicked shut with a finality that felt like a coffin closing.
Caelum returned to the window, watching the sun rise over the Archambeau estate—over the gardens his mother had loved, over the training yards where he'd learned to channel Rui, over the dungeons where something that should not exist lay in absolute darkness.
His brother.
His mother's murderer.
A thing with eight hearts and eyes that could mimic his own.
The shaking in his hands stopped. In its place came something colder. Harder.
Hatred.
Fifty feet beneath the estate, in a cell carved from stone that predated the Rui invasion, the thing lay in absolute darkness.
It didn't cry. Didn't whimper. Didn't rage against its confinement.
It simply existed.
Eight hearts beat in syncopated rhythm—a pulse that echoed against stone walls and registered to no one. Its form had stabilized into something vaguely humanoid, though in the dark, shape hardly mattered.
If it had thoughts, they were alien. Unformed. The consciousness that had looked at Caelum with such intensity now turned inward, processing existence in ways that had no precedent.
It didn't know it had a name. Didn't know what mothers or fathers or brothers were. Didn't understand death or life or the concept of family.
It only knew three things:
The darkness.
The sound of its own hearts.
And the growing, gnawing sensation that would eventually coalesce into a single question:
Why?