The Drop of Blood
The Festival of Echoes raged outside the Grand Archives, its drunken laughter and firework bursts muffled by thick stone walls. Inside the vaulted halls, the air hung heavy with the scent of aged parchment and candle wax.
Darien Veyne sat hunched over a crumbling manuscript, his fingers blackened with ink. The punishment detail had stretched into its twelfth hour - Archivist Haleon's favorite way to break rebellious scribes.
*"Translate this worthless tome,"* the old man had sneered earlier that day, *"Maybe rotting with dead men's words will teach you some respect."*
A sharp sting bit into his fingertip. A drop of blood welled up, dark against his skin. It fell onto the parchment.
The world exploded.
Golden fire erupted from the page, coiling up his arm like a serpent. Pain lanced through his veins - not the clean hurt of a blade, but something deeper, older. As if his blood had been oil and some long-dormant spark had finally found it.
When his vision cleared, the mark was already there.
Intricate patterns of gold and black swirled across his forearm, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The design shifted even as he watched, runes forming and dissolving like smoke.
Darien's breath came in ragged gasps. He'd seen Soulmarks before - every beggar and noble in Lyrion boasted of their past lives. But those were pale imitations, faded echoes.
This was something else.
This was gold.
---
**The Vision**
The air left his lungs.
Suddenly he wasn't in the Archives anymore.
He stood on a plain of cracked earth beneath a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Before him stretched an endless field of broken swords, their edges still gleaming sharp after centuries.
A man stood at the field's center.
No - not a man.
Himself.
Older, face lined with exhaustion, white robes stained crimson. The other Darien raised a trembling hand, lips moving soundlessly. Then -
A blade of black iron punched through his chest from behind.
Darien felt it. The cold metal. The gasp of stolen breath. The dizzying plunge into darkness as-
He slammed back into his body with enough force to knock over his writing desk. Ancient tomes crashed to the floor as he clutched at his unmarked chest, half-expecting to feel blood.
*"What in the Seven Hells..."*
The door burst open before he could finish the thought.
---
**The Inquisitors**
Black robes filled the doorway.
Silver masks gleamed in the candlelight, featureless except for the narrow eye slits. The lead Inquisitor carried a curved blade that hummed with a sound like a starving beast.
*"The Oracle's heir awakens,"* the figure intoned. The voice was wrong - hollow, like multiple people speaking through one throat. *"Purge the abomination before the vision takes root."*
Darien moved before he could think.
He threw the oil lamp at the nearest shelf. Flames erupted across ancient parchments as he dove behind a reading desk. A blade whistled through the air where his neck had been.
*"Oracle? Abomination?"* His thoughts raced even as his body acted on pure instinct. *"What the fuck did that mark do to me?"*
A hand like iron clamped around his wrist.
---
**The Killer in the Dark**
*"Make a sound and I'll kill you myself."*
The man who hauled him upright stood a full head taller, his face hidden beneath a tattered hood. The scent of blood and cheap whiskey clung to him like a second skin.
A jagged crimson mark coiled around his throat - another Soulmark, but where Darien's shone with unnatural light, this one looked like an old scar.
*"Kael Arvandor,"* the stranger growled. *"And you're the unluckiest bastard in Lyrion."*
Behind them, the Inquisitors fanned out through the burning archives. Their blades left afterimages in the air, like cuts in reality itself.
Kael's grin was all teeth. *"Run or die. Choose fast."*
He yanked Darien into the archives' maze of shelves just as an Inquisitor's blade split the desk they'd been standing behind like kindling.
---