Crimson rebirth: rise of the cursed eye

POV: Seraphine Duskmoor

The Grand Summit Hall of the Royal Capital had never felt this cold. Not even during the winter wars. Seraphine Duskmoor stood still as a statue beneath the chandeliers of skyglass and mana-threaded silver. The air was heavy with tension, magic pulsing faintly from the floating crystal in the center of the chamber.

It projected a boy.

Eight years old. Cloaked in rags. Dirty. Alone.

And powerful.

The nobles of the Five Great Houses sat or stood in stunned silence as the memory crystal replayed what the imperial investigators had captured deep in Wyrmveil Forest. The chimera's corpse still smoked with residual energy. The child approached it quietly, kneeling beside it. When he touched the beast, a pulse of unstable energy distorted the visual feed—and then the core vanished.

No sigil. No magic circle. No chant. Just disappearance.

The child vanished next.

"And you are certain," Seraphine said quietly, breaking the silence, "that this was the same signature recorded earlier in the village?"

"Confirmed," Valen Ravaryn answered. "The same pulse. Same sequence. What we recorded in Wyrmveil is identical to what the Red Core team sensed around the grave."

Another noble frowned. "You mean the girl's grave. Elenore."

Seraphine nodded. "And the boy was with her when she died. The villagers remembered them both."

"They also remembered nothing useful," Valen added. "Faces blurred. Names forgotten. One called the boy a ghost."

Seraphine folded her arms. Her heart was calm, but her thoughts raced. The timeline matched. The girl died. A pulse of forbidden energy shook the ley lines. Investigators followed it into the forest. They were attacked by an inhuman creature—Vel'Zareth, they called it. But it did not kill them.

It played with them.

They barely survived.

Hours later, the boy returned to claim the core. As if it belonged to him.

Seraphine didn't believe in coincidences.

She turned toward the projection. The boy's face was shadowed, partially obscured. His eyes seemed too old for his age. But more disturbing than that was the way the magic reacted around him. The scrying runes had warped. The investigators' recordings glitched. Mana, it seemed, resisted his presence.

Or he resisted its.

"Elenore," she said suddenly. "What do we know of her?"

Valen gestured, and a second crystal hovered forward. "Born inside the Ardyn estate. Listed as a maid. No public record of her parentage. Disappeared three years ago, along with a young boy. No known bloodline until recent tests revealed something... inconvenient."

Seraphine's eyes narrowed. "What kind of inconvenient?"

"She had Ardyn blood," Valen said.

The room chilled.

Seraphine's lips pressed thin. She had already suspected it, but hearing it confirmed in a council chamber made it real. The girl had noble blood—and the Ardyns had erased her existence.

The implications were vast. Political. Dangerous. But Seraphine was not here for House politics.

She was here for the truth.

---

The Ardyn Estate

It took less than a day to arrange her audience.

The gates of the Ardyn estate opened at her name, though the tension in the guards' stances made it clear she was not welcome. She entered the West Wing, where Thalor and Virelle Ardyn received her in a velvet-draped study lined with old books and battle relics.

Neither smiled.

"Lady Duskmoor," Thalor said, not rising. "We were not informed of your intentions."

"I assume you know why I'm here."

"We have heard rumors," Virelle said carefully.

Seraphine walked to the center of the room and placed a mana crystal on the table.

The boy appeared.

The projection looped: the child entering the clearing, kneeling, claiming the core, vanishing.

"This boy was with Elenore," Seraphine said. "The girl you listed as a servant. The girl who had your blood."

Virelle looked away. Thalor's jaw tightened.

"She was my niece," Thalor admitted. "Born to my brother and a commoner. She had no Core. No future. We took her in, gave her a roof, nothing more."

"She left three years ago," Seraphine said. "With that boy."

"He wasn't ours. Just a stray. She protected him for reasons we never understood."

"You never tried to find her?"

Virelle's voice hardened. "She left of her own will. That made her rogue."

"And now she's dead," Seraphine said. "And her death triggered the same energy that nearly killed imperial investigators."

She let the weight of her words settle.

"Tell me, Lord Thalor, what exactly was buried in your house that your family decided to forget?"

Thalor looked into the fire. ''Waste "

---

Seraphine's Reflection

She left the Ardyn estate in silence, riding beneath an overcast sky. The roads were quiet, the wind too soft to disturb the weight in her chest. The boy's image haunted her.

Not because of his power.

But because of how silent it was.

He didn't cry. Didn't scream. Didn't ask the world for anything.

He just returned, claimed the core, and vanished.

She knew what that the Ardyn family have created a monster

The pulse didn't come from ritual.

This wasn't curse. Or warlock power. Or demonic pact.

This was something new. Or something so old that it had been erased.

And now, it was waking up again—inside an eight-year-old child.

If Elenore had protected him...

What had she known?

What had she given up to keep him hidden?

And why, even now, did his name remain missing from every record, every memory, every attempt to trace him?

Seraphine didn't know.

But she knew the world would remember him soon.