### Chapter 13: The Tower Remembers Blood
(Third-person limited – alternating between Cillian, Lysander, Kael, and Riven)
Observation Deck, Stormwatch Tower
Hour 3 of 8
The wind had teeth now.
It screamed across the open deck in circles, dragging shards of old glass and centuries of dust into spirals that cut skin. The wards that normally kept the tower's interior calm flickered like dying candles. Every flash of lightning revealed cracks spider-webbing across the black-glass floor.
Cillian knelt in the western arc, sweeping the same patch of floor for the third time. The repetitive motion was the only thing keeping the storm inside him leashed.
Lysander stood behind him, silver braid whipping like a battle standard, eyes glowing frost-white as he traced containment runes in the air that dissolved almost as fast as he drew them.
Across the deck, Kael and Riven worked in mirrored silence. Their movements were eerily synchronized—sweep, shift, reach, retreat—like dancers who had rehearsed for years instead of weeks. Every so often their tether scars flared, black and crimson threads briefly visible beneath the skin, and the wind around them stilled for a heartbeat, as if the storm itself was listening.
Cillian hated how beautiful it looked.
He hated more that he understood it.
He remembered the first night he and Lysander had let the bond run unchecked. They had been nineteen and drunk on stolen starwine, hiding in the ruins of an old watchtower on the Nox-Thorne border. The storm had come without warning—his storm—tearing the stone roof clean off. Lightning had struck the ground so many times the sand turned to glass. Lysander had laughed into the heart of it, silver hair plastered to his face, blood running from a cut on his cheek, and said, "Let it burn, wolf. I was born in winter. I'm not afraid of thunder."
They had kissed while the world tried to end around them.
The memory tasted like copper and longing.
Lysander's cool fingers brushed the back of Cillian's neck now, pulling him back to the present.
"Focus, love," the vampire murmured. "The tower is waking."
Cillian felt it too.
A low, resonant thrum rising through the glass floor—like a heartbeat older than the moons. Dust shivered into patterns: runes, claws, eyes. The cracks in the floor began to glow faint violet.
Kael stopped sweeping. "Do you guys feel that?"
Riven was already moving, placing himself between Kael and the centre of the deck. "Old binding. Something's chained down here."
Lysander's voice was soft, almost reverent. "The Stormwatch Beast. They said it was a myth."
"It's not," Cillian said grimly. "My grandmother told me stories. Before the university claimed this tower, the clans used it to imprison things that shouldn't exist. The Beast was the last."
The thrum became a growl.
The glass beneath their feet cracked in a perfect circle, twenty feet across. Violet light bled upward, thick as smoke.
Hawke's voice crackled through a failing comm-crystal on the wall: "Wards collapsing. Evacuate immediat—"
The crystal exploded.
The lights died.
For one breathless second there was only the eclipse moon and the violet glow rising from the cracks.
Then the Beast spoke.
Not with words.
With memory.
The deck vanished.
They were standing on a storm-lashed cliff a thousand years ago.
Cillian saw his own ancestor—a woman with his eyes and his storm—driving a spear of lightning-forged iron into the chest of a creature made of night and thunder. The Beast roared, wings of living storm unfurling, and the woman's pack fell around her, torn apart by wind and claw.
Across the vision, another scene: a silver-haired vampire—Lysander's great-aunt—pouring her blood into the binding circle, weaving ice and night into chains.
The two bloodlines had worked together once.
To imprison the thing that now wanted out.
The vision shattered.
They were back on the deck, but the cracks had become a chasm. Violet storm-light poured out, coalescing into a shape: massive, serpentine, made of lightning and shadow and raw, screaming hunger.
Its voice rolled through their bones.
**YOU CARRY THEIR BLOOD.
YOU WILL OPEN THE CAGE.**
The Beast lunged.
Cillian moved without thinking—shifting mid-leap, half-wolf, claws raking the air. Lightning answered his call, arcing from his palms to slam into the creature. It barely flinched.
Lysander was a blur of silver and frost, blood-ice spears forming and shattering against the Beast's hide.
Riven shoved Kael behind him, crimson runes flaring across his arms. Shadows exploded outward in a protective dome.
It lasted three seconds.
The Beast shattered the dome like glass.
Kael hit the floor hard, air driven from his lungs. The bond screamed—Riven's pain, his own terror, the Beast's hunger all braided together.
He looked up.
Cillian and Lysander were back-to-back, storm and ice fusing into a single, blinding lance of power. It struck the Beast dead centre—and did nothing.
The creature laughed, a sound like continents breaking.
**FOUR INSTEAD OF TWO.
THE CAGE WEAKENS.**
It was right.
The original binding had required two bloodlines in perfect harmony.
Now there were four heirs, split by hatred and pride.
Kael staggered to his feet. Blood ran from a cut above his eye, dripping into the cracked glass. Where it fell, black shadows bloomed.
Riven caught his arm. "Kael—"
"We have to work together," Kael said, voice raw. "All of us. Or it gets out and kills everyone."
Cillian snarled, amber eyes wild. "I don't take orders from—"
Lysander's hand clamped on Cillian's shoulder, hard enough to bruise. "He's right."
For one heartbeat, the tower held its breath.
Then Lysander stepped forward, silver hair whipping in the storm, and extended his hand toward Riven.
"Truce," he said simply.
Riven stared at the offered hand like it might bite him.
Kael reached across the space between them and took Lysander's hand first.
The moment their skin touched, the bond *surged*—not just Kael-Riven, but something older, ancestral. Thorne and Nox blood recognizing each other after a thousand years of war.
Riven's fingers closed over both of theirs a second later.
Cillian swore in three languages, but he stepped forward too, clasping Kael's wrist in the old warrior's grip.
Four heirs.
Two bonds.
One cage.
The Beast roared and charged.
They met it together.
Storm met eclipse.
Ice met shadow.
Wolf met vampire met human met death.
Power poured out of them in a single, perfect note—lightning braided with blood, shadow woven with frost, thunder and night and memory and choice all fused into something the tower had never seen.
The Beast screamed as the binding circle re-formed beneath its feet, brighter than the moons, stronger than hate.
The chasm sealed.
The violet light died.
Silence fell, broken only by four ragged breaths and the soft patter of rain that hadn't been there a moment ago.
They stood in the centre of the deck, hands still linked, tether scars glowing in perfect synchrony: black-crimson, storm-grey.
Cillian was the first to speak, voice hoarse.
"My grandmother was wrong," he said, staring at the place where the Beast had been. "Some cages aren't built to hold monsters out. They're built to hold us apart."
Lysander's fingers tightened around Cillian's. "And some monsters are just mirrors."
Kael looked at Riven. Riven looked back, eyes no longer cold.
"Truce?" Kael asked quietly.
Riven's smile was small, stunned, and utterly real.
"Truce."
Far above, the eclipse moon slid out from its shadow for the first time in a thousand years, bathing the tower in pure, unbroken silver.
Sunrise was still hours away.
But for the first time all night, the storm was quiet.
**To be continued…**