Splinters shot upward in a ring around the Broodmother, and where they landed, they didn’t fall—they hung suspended before folding inward and dissolving into thin red threads that hissed against the burning air.
Blood. It simply existed, forming from nothing, from everything, from every drop she had spilled over years in this nest she called home, the way a soldier’s weapon calls him to duty.
"...Oh." Aseren’s grin split wider, wrong, too many teeth for how his face used to work. "There she is."
An Alignment was a magical attribute inherent to every being, a unique trait that determined their connection to certain forces of the world. The Broodmother possessed a Blood Alignment, allowing her to manipulate blood itself, turning every drop spilled around her into a weapon.
"MAGICCC~~!"
Aseren’s voice tore through the air, his eyes widening with a horrifying mix of wonder and madness. He stared at the blood twisting before him like a child seeing a miracle for the first time.
"IT’S REAL..."
A laugh escaped him, trembling with disbelief.
"I CAN DO MIRACLES TOO, MOTHER..."
Aseren’s smile stretched unnaturally.
"I CAN DO MAGIC TOO."
He tapped his chest.
"But mine is different. Mine always needs something. Everything has a price, doesn’t it? That’s the funny thing about miracles..."
His eyes gleamed.
"They aren’t miracles if they come for free."
He laughed quietly.
"I’ll show you a little one."
He reached into the pouch at his hip and pulled free a black vial, uncorking it with his teeth.
Bloodburst.
He drank it in one motion, and the world went white behind his eyes.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
SIGIL
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Name: Aseren Voric Azthal
Classification: Human → Horror
Status: Unawakened
Rank: Lesser Beast → Greater Beast
Evolution: Infant → Mature
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Since he was still Unawakened, he couldn’t use Ether. If his memory served him right, his Ether Furnace had to reach a capacity of roughly one thousand before he could awaken.
The window burned there behind his own eyelids, silver letters carved into the dark, and for one full second he simply stood inside the fire and read it like a man reading his own obituary and finding it funny.
"...Huh." A breathless laugh. "Would you look at that."
A Horror. Not a man. No longer.
Something in his chest that used to flinch at the word didn’t flinch anymore. It just sat there, warm, almost pleased, the way a man might feel finally trying on a coat that had been tailored to him since birth.
Bloodburst ignited.
Veins swelled beneath his skin as raw power coursed through his body.
Fire tore through his veins, entirely unrelated to the one eating the nest around them. His heart slammed once, twice, then dropped into a tempo too fast to be human. Muscle screamed as it strained beyond whatever boundary his body had carried into this world.
"YEE-HAW!"
The sound tore out of him raw and delighted, nothing like his own voice, both knives spinning once in his hands like something he’d seen in some half-remembered film from a life that belonged to somebody else now.
"Saddle up, Mother! It’s RODEO NIGHT!"
The Broodmother said nothing. She simply began her rampage.
The first whip of blood came so fast the air screamed before it did. Aseren twisted, felt it graze his shoulder anyway, a line of fire that had nothing to do with the flames around them. He staggered a step, laughed through the pain, and closed the distance before she could draw the whip back.
Mercy came down.
She caught it on an arm made of a hundred stitched pieces, and the blade sank an inch before grinding to a halt against something harder than bone.
"C’mon now, darlin’," he drawled, dragging the accent up from nowhere, from nothing, from some rotten corner of his mind that thought this was hilarious. "Yer swingin’ like a woman who ain’t never held a knife in her life. And you call yourself a HORROR."
"...What." Her voice came out confused. "What are you doing?"
"I’m ROLE-PLAYIN’, Ma!" He spun the second blade on his finger, caught it wrong, sliced his own palm open, and didn’t stop grinning. "Ain’t you ever played pretend with yer kids? Oh, wait—"
He tilted his head, mock-thoughtful, blood dripping steady off his chin from a cut he didn’t remember taking.
"—you don’t have kids. You have SPARE PARTS."
Something in her face cracked.
Misery had transformed into fury—pure, unfiltered, the kind that didn’t ask permission from sorrow first.
"HOW DARE YOU—"
"OH SHE SPEAKS!" He threw both arms wide, blades and all, laughing so hard he nearly overbalanced into the fire himself. "I was startin’ to think you only knew how to cry, Serel—oops. Sorry. Mother. My bad. Let’s not use the real name yet, wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise."
A blood-blade shot toward his throat, faster than the last one, faster than anything she’d thrown yet.
He barely got Mercy up in time, and the impact sent him skidding back across burning wood, boots smoking.
"There it is!" He cackled, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist. "THAT’S the stuff! C’mon, get MAD! Get UGLY with it! Show me the thing under the thread, Mother, I KNOW she’s in there—"
"I WILL TEAR YOU INTO SOMETHING UNRECOGNIZABLE." Every word came out of her like a hammer strike, and this time the floor genuinely split beneath the weight of it. "I OPENED MY HOME TO YOU. I GAVE YOU A NAME."
"You FORCED me first, MOOOTHER~. Let’s keep the story straight—"
He ducked one whip, took the next across his forearm. His blood mixed with the threads of hers already painting the floor, running hot down to his wrist, and he looked at it like it was the funniest thing he’d seen all week.
"Oh nooooo," he sing-songed, wiggling the wounded arm at her. "Oh no, I’m hurt, whatever will I do, however will I survive—"
He surged forward mid-sentence, no warning, both blades screaming in, and this time it was her turn to fall back a step.
"—OH WAIT." His grin stretched impossibly wide. "I’m not human anymore, so who GIVES A SHIT!"
Something about the sheer, gleeful wrongness of him finally reached her. She was long past fear, but something colder settled in—the specific horror of a mother realizing that the thing wearing her child’s face had never, not for a single second since the adoption ceremony, been broken by anything she’d done to him.
He’d simply let her think so.
"Ahh... so you planned this, huh?" Her voice dropped, quiet now, quieter than the fire. "HAHAHA, HOW COULD I BE SO FOOLISH? SO MY BLOOD DIDN’T WORK ON YOU? EVERY SMILE WAS FAKE, WASN’T IT?"
"Every. Single. One." He said it almost tenderly, mockingly so, batting his eyelashes at her through a face streaked in soot and his own blood. "You really are dense for someone with a hundred eyes."
She screamed.
Not words this time—just sound, raw and enormous, and the blood around her convulsed into a dozen blades at once, filling the air like a dreadful red weather.
He met it laughing, both knives up, weaving through gaps that shouldn’t have existed, catching two blades on Mercy and letting a third open his side just to keep the rhythm going.
"THAT’S the spirit!" he howled, spit and blood flying from his grin. "Come on, Mama Bear! Show the audience what you’re MADE of—OH WAIT, I already KNOW, I’ve SEEN the STITCHES—"
Behind her, the fire now fully engulfed Thorn.
Her scream wasn’t human anymore. It split into something raw and layered, three registers of agony at once, vines and skin curling black together.
Aseren didn’t stop grinning even as the sound hit him.
"Oh, listen to that," he murmured, delighted and horrified at once, some last unbroken sliver of himself watching the rest of him from very far away. "That’s a NEW noise. Never heard THAT one before."
Why does that feel good.
Why does any of this feel good.
He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t sure he was looking for one anymore.
The Broodmother’s head turned, just barely, just enough—the fire, the screaming, the son standing in the middle of it all laughing like a man at a carnival—and for one flickering second the fury cracked wide enough to let something older through.
He didn’t let her have it.
"Eyes on ME," he snarled, all the mockery gone from his voice in an instant, replaced by something flat and starving. "You wanted a family. Here it is. Watch it burn."
"STOP THIS." Her voice cracked, rage bleeding finally into something closer to begging. "STOP, PLEASE, I’LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING—"
"Too late for the sales pitch, Mother." Mercy came around in a wide arc, forcing her back another step, closer to the flame she still hadn’t noticed was crawling toward the last child left breathing. "Should’ve made that offer before BRINGING ME HERE."
Another exchange. Another line of fire opening across his ribs. He was slowing—he could feel it, the Bloodburst starting to fray at the edges, his own borrowed strength beginning to buckle under a debt he’d bought with a bottle and a laugh.
Then Petal screamed.
The sound cut through everything—the fire, the fury, the manic edge still curling at the corner of his mouth—and for one instant even Aseren’s grin faltered.
He didn’t let it show.
He surged forward instead, forcing her attention back onto him before she could finish turning toward her daughter, blades screaming for her throat.
"Ah-ah." He clicked his tongue, mock-scolding, insane cheer flooding back into his voice like it had never left. "No looking away from ME, Mother. Rude."
She blocked. Barely.
And somewhere in the middle of stopping his blade, she finally saw past him to the small burning shape reaching for her with one good arm.
Whatever strength Serel had left, she used it to make a choice. She stopped fighting and fled.
Aseren watched her go, breathing hard, blood running down both arms, and the laughter finally, quietly, died in his throat.
The fire took her instead of Petal.
It climbed her back, her arms, the countless stitched pieces of a hundred different people she’d worn like a coat for years, and she didn’t scream. She held on, wrapping herself around Petal’s small frame, absorbing everything the flame had to give until there was nothing left of the room’s heat that could reach the girl underneath her.
Then she threw.
Petal sailed clear of the collapsing beam, out through the shattered doorway, into the cool dark beyond.
The Broodmother did not follow.
She knelt there instead, burning.
Her many hands held onto Moss and Thorn as the fire took them, refusing to let go even as the heat ate through her own arms to reach them. Petal was the only one she’d managed to throw clear in time.
"Tomas... I’m sorry."
All her stitched eyelids suddenly tore open. What ran down her face wasn’t the dark sludge filling this house, but simple tears—human and ordinary. For a moment, she looked like nothing more than a weary woman who had lost everyone she loved, not once, but twice.
Then she looked at Aseren, and the grief hardened into something else.
"YOu dOn’t Get to wAlk aWAy fRom tHis!"
Her voice had shifted—no longer rage or pleading, but flat and certain, like the sound of a door closing for good.
"A mother’s curse doesn’t die with her."
She reached toward him with one hand that was still, somehow, entirely her own.
Aseren felt it before he understood what it was—a cold pressure locking around his right arm, followed almost immediately by heat, as if his own blood had turned against him. The skin split first, in thin dark lines that spread from his fingers up past his wrist.
It felt like his blood had turned to fire.
"What—"
He didn’t get to finish the word. The pain arrived all at once, climbing his forearm, his elbow, his shoulder, and he went down hard onto one knee with his arm clutched against his chest, like he could hold it together by force alone.
"AAGH—!"
"Take IT!" she said, her voice already thinning, already coming apart at the edges. "CARRY it. EVERY time you REACH for SOMEONE again, REMEMBER what it cost to REACH for ME!"
The mark stopped just past his bare, blackened shoulder, shaped like nothing he could name.
She didn’t say anything after that. Her eyes closed one after another, and the fire finished the rest.
Aseren stayed on the floor for a while, breathing through his teeth, watching his own ruined arm shake in the firelight. He didn’t have it in him to be angry about it yet. That would come later.
═══════════════
SIGIL
═══════════════
Existence: The Broodmother, Serel
Title: Fourth Regent
Classification: Horror
Rank: Lesser Beast
Evolution: Juvenile
Status: Deceased
Cause of Death: Fire Exsanguination
Confirmed Killer: You
Aseren stared at the now-familiar window hovering before him.
Right... she’s only a Lesser Beast.
If this was considered a Lesser Beast, then what in the world would a Greater Beast be like?
True, Aseren had briefly pushed himself to the level of a Mature Greater Beast, but his Soul Core remained unawakened. He couldn’t wield Ether, invoke his Alignment, or draw on the countless advantages that came with true awakening. At the end of the day, he was still unawakened.
He silently thanked whatever god was listening that she had only been a Lesser Beast. Had she been a Greater Beast instead, he would’ve been killed in a single blow.
Another notification surfaced.
[Living Pact: Hearts of the Four Regents]
Progress: 1/4
────────────────
Ether Absorbed
+325 Ether
Living Pact Fee
−100 Ether (Transportation)
Ether Furnace Capacity
200 / 1000 → 425 / 1000
────────────────
"Oh yeah. The pact."
Aseren glanced toward Serel’s corpse.
A soft chime echoed through the air. Crimson light bloomed within her chest, precisely where her heart had once been. It emerged slowly, wrapped in ribbons of red radiance, as though being cleansed of every stain it had carried in life.
Without warning, the heart vanished. It slipped into a space beyond his perception, swallowed by what could only be described as a pocket dimension.
"That’s fortunate," Aseren muttered. "Well. At least I don’t have to dig it out myself."
"Huh... WAIT?"
"TRANSPORTATION FEE?!"
Aseren’s eye twitched.
"You’re telling me I have to pay shipping on a dead person’s heart?"
He pointed accusingly at the empty air.
"IS THERE TAX IN THIS WORLD TOO?!"
"FUCK YOU, MERCHANT!"
Aseren’s voice boomed through the smoldering forest, the echo slowly fading.
He lowered his hand.
"Goodbye, Serel."
For once, there was no madness in his voice.
Only exhaustion.
He forced himself up anyway. His legs didn’t want to hold him, but he made them.
Petal was still there, just past the shattered doorway, frozen in the dark like she’d been carved out of it.
"...Big Brother?"
Her voice cracked on the second word.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he moved toward her, Mercy hanging dark and heavy in his good hand, his other arm useless at his side.
"Big Brother, please, I" She scrambled back a step, small hands coming up in front of her like they could stop anything. "I didn’t do it, I swear I didn’t do anything, please don’t—"
He kept walking.
"I can be good!" The words came out fast now, tumbling over each other, half-swallowed by tears. "I promise, I’ll be so good, I won’t tell anyone anything, I won’t—please, Big Brother, please, I don’t wanna"
He stopped in front of her.
Raised the blade.
Finish it—
His arm wouldn’t move.
"P-please..." Her voice had dropped to almost nothing now, just breath and terror. "You said... you said we’d play. You said we could play whenever you wanted."
She looked up at him then, and whatever crossed his face made every other word die in her throat.
Whatever stirred within him had no place among ordinary emotions.
What remained was emptiness, and it eclipsed everything else.
His pupils were bottomless pools, devoid of warmth, reflecting nothing but ruin. Coupled with the wounds carved across his body and the burn scar creeping up his neck, he looked less like a man and more like something that had crawled out of a nightmare. Dark hair hung in tangled, blood-soaked strands, streaked with the Broodmother’s black sludge. The scent of death clung to him like a second skin.
She began to tremble, unable to tell whether the figure before her was still her brother... or someone else entirely.
She was supposed to be his sun.
So why...
Why was he looking at her like that?
What had she done wrong?
That was the only thought echoing through her mind.
He had only come home a few days ago.
Even so, she trusted him.
After all, he was the only one who always played with her, listened to her endless chatter, and helped her whenever she needed him.
To her, he had always been someone she could rely on.
Her mind urged her to trust him, but her body instinctively recoiled, driven by an age-old instinct—the same primal feeling prey feels near a predator.
She was already running, crashing through the underbrush with no plan beyond getting away, and he let her go without a word.
He stood alone in the settling ash for a long moment, the burn along his arm throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and pulled the worn parchment from his pouch with a hand that wouldn’t quite hold steady.
[Second Regent. The Shepherd. Saint Aldren Monastery.]
He folded it, stowed the cleaver and knife in the pouch, and stepped into the dark, holding an arm that would forever remind him of tonight’s price.
Nothing comes without a price.
The voice existed without making a sound. It wasn’t noise, and it wasn’t quite thought either. It simply was—the way a bruise is there before you remember bumping into anything.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[The World has witnessed your descent.
You have consumed pain.
You have endured corruption.
You have embraced the thing you were meant to fear.
Humanity has become a memory.
You have become: Horror.]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The letters sat behind his eyelids, silver and patient.
Aseren stared at them for a long moment.
Then he laughed—short, hollow, more reflex than humor. He didn’t know what else a person was supposed to do with a sentence like that.
"Huh."
The fire around him stopped mid-collapse. A burning beam hung frozen in the air. Even the Broodmother’s blood forgot, for a moment, that it was supposed to fall.
The world hadn’t ended. It had just stepped aside.
"That’s it?" A voice answered him. His own voice, wearing someone else’s excitement.
"That’s what you’re thinking about right now?"
He turned.
It had his face. His build. His voice, mostly—except it kept catching on the wrong syllables, like someone reciting a language they’d only half-learned. Antlers curled back from its skull, too many points, uneven, and both its palms were split through with black nail-shaped scars that didn’t match anything Aseren remembered doing to himself.
It grinned at him like they were sharing a joke nobody else had heard yet.
"There you are," it said, delighted. "Finally caught up, hm? Slow. You were always slow."
"...You." Aseren’s jaw tightened. "You again."
"Me again." It spread its arms, turning in a slow circle, taking in the frozen fire like a man admiring a room he’d redecorated. "Don’t sound so thrilled."
"What are you."
The figure stopped turning, cocking its head too far to one side, the way something without a spine might.
"Wrong query." It tapped its temple, the motion jerky, almost gleeful. "Always the incorrect question with you. Doesn’t matter what I am. Matters that you keep forgetting I’m here, and then you act so surprised when I show up again."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"Nada." His voice sank into a dangerous murmur. "You don’t. That’s the thing, isn’t it? You’re very good at not knowing things."
It stepped closer, its footsteps making no sound at all.
"You do understand what you’ve become, right?" it said, quieter now, almost fond. "You’re standing beside a dead woman who cursed your arm off, wondering what’s wrong with you." A small, private laugh escaped it. "Nothing’s wrong with you." It smiled. "You’re a Horror now. Act like one."
Each word he spoke was tinged with a sense of mockery and amusement.
Aseren felt something twist behind his ribs. "So what? That’s it? That’s your big revelation? That I wanted this? That I was just pretending to be horrified while secretly enjoying every second of it?"
His voice cracked, the anger collapsing into something far uglier.
"I DIDN’T CHOOSE ANY OF THIS!"
"I didn’t choose to be in this hell! I didn’t choose to become this! I don’t deserve any of this!"
His fists tightened until his nails dug into his palms.
"Maybe I’ve done bad things. Maybe I’ve made mistakes. But that doesn’t mean I deserve this! It doesn’t mean I deserve to lose everything!"
The words grew weaker with every sentence, until they were no longer an argument. They were a plea.
The being stared at him silently.
"I’m just saying you spent all this time looking for something else to blame because looking inward was easier."
The pressure behind his eyes built, sharp and sudden, the same ache he’d been swallowing for weeks and calling something else every time.
The figure leaned in, and for a second its grin faltered into something almost sad, almost human, before snapping back into that too-wide amusement.
"You don’t have to like it," it murmured. "I never asked you to like it. I just want you to stop looking so shocked every time I show up in the mirror."
"Get out of my head."
Aseren’s expression twisted, not with fear, but with the fury of someone discovering an unwanted passenger had been living inside his own skin. His hand tightened into a fist, nails digging into his palm as if pain could prove he was still the one in control.
"Get out."
His breathing grew uneven. The command wasn’t directed at a person, but at an existence, an infection, a thought that had somehow learned how to answer back.
"Get out of my head."
He stared into the empty space before him, refusing to acknowledge that the thing standing there felt less like an intruder and more like a part of himself he had buried too deep.
"This is my skull. My rot. My little cage."
His voice sharpened, almost offended by the idea that something else could claim ownership over the only place he had left.
"You don’t get a room here."
"You don’t get a chair. You don’t get a name. You don’t get to exist unless I allow you to."
The laughter that followed was quiet but unsteady, the sort of laughter that came from someone desperate.
"I’m the only occupant in this fucking corpse."
It smiled—genuinely, this time, and that was the most unsettling version of the expression yet.
"Always, always... forgetting."It sighed.
His silhouette began to dissolve into the darkness. "That’s fine. I’ll remind you."
The world cracked back into motion. Fire roared. Blood fell. The weight of everything slammed into him at once, and by the time his lungs remembered how to work, the figure was already gone.
Only its voice remained, trailing off like smoke.
"Until we meet beneath another sky. Let my presence endure."
"I am inevitable."
Aseren stood alone in the flames, breathing hard, the SIGIL notification long since faded from his vision.
His heartbeat came back. His breath came back.
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