CHAPTER 1: THE UNWORTHY
Kael Arden learned early that being born without a Blood Doctrine didn't make you harmless.
It made you useful.
Useful meant you were sent first.
First into the choke tunnels where the air tasted like copper and wet stone. First through the ruin-gates where the floor might be a mouth. First to touch the door that might not be a door at all.
Kael's job was simple: trigger the trap so someone important didn't have to.
He stood with the other runners at the mouth of Gate Seventeen while the clan heirs joked behind him.
Their armor shone the way money shines, polished so bright it looked like it had never seen blood. Their insignias were stitched in gold thread. Their Blood Doctrines sat inside them like sleeping gods.
Kael had nothing.
No mark. No inheritance. No sacred fever in his veins.
Just a cheap blade with a handle wrapped in cloth because the metal tang cut into his palm, and a scar running across his eyebrow from when a noble kid threw a stone at his face and called it training.
A man in slate armor watched them, unmoving. Vaelor Creed's presence always had the weight of a closed fist.
He was High Clan. A ruler in everything but crown. His Blood Doctrine was rumored to be so pure it terrified the other clans. They said his blood could command other blood.
Kael had only seen him twice before. Once when Vaelor passed through the ward where the Unworthy slept stacked like firewood. Another time when Vaelor's men dragged a crying woman out into the street at dawn and the world pretended not to notice.
Kael never forgot faces.
Vaelor's was carved from calm, the kind that didn't need to prove itself.
The gate shuddered, a low animal sound.
The handler barked, "Runner!"
Kael stepped forward.
His teammate Riven Hale reached out and caught Kael's sleeve. Riven had a Fire Doctrine, weak by clan standards but still a miracle among the Unworthy. He'd been born wrong in a right family and thrown away.
His eyes were too bright, too restless. Like a match that wanted to become a wildfire.
"You don't have to," Riven muttered.
Kael didn't look at him. "If I don't, someone else will."
"And if you die?"
Kael gave the smallest shrug. It wasn't bravery. It was accounting.
Riven's grip tightened. "Then I go in after you. And I'm tired of burying people."
Kael finally looked at him. "Then don't let me die."
Riven's mouth twisted like he wanted to laugh and couldn't.
Kael approached the gate.
A seam in the air, vertical and wrong, leaking cold.
He stepped through.
The ruin swallowed sound first. The world on the other side was a cathedral of stone ribs and half-fallen arches. Carvings crawled along the walls like writing that didn't want to be read. The floor was damp with black water.
Kael moved slow, blade out, eyes tracking the corners.
He'd done this dozens of times.
He knew the pattern: pressure plate, spike bloom, poison mist, collapsing ceiling.
He found the first plate just past a broken pillar. He marked it with chalk for the heirs behind him.
Then the floor shifted under his foot.
Not a plate.
A pulse.
The stone was warm.
Kael's stomach dropped.
He stepped back, but the ruin had already decided.
The corridor's walls flexed inward with a wet grinding sound. A throat tightening.
Kael ran.
The ceiling peeled open and a rain of bone needles fell like white hail.
He ducked, rolled, felt one slice across his shoulder and another bite his thigh. Hot pain, immediate and clean.
Behind him, the heirs screamed, confused, furious. Someone yelled Kael's name like it was a curse.
Kael sprinted toward a side passage.
A hand caught him.
Not Riven's.
A noble kid with a silver insignia, eyes wide, face slick with panic. "You did this!"
Kael tried to shake him off. "Let go!"
The corridor contracted again.
The noble's grip became desperate, dragging Kael back like an anchor.
Kael saw it then: the ruin didn't want the heirs.
It wanted him.
Or maybe it just wanted whatever it could crush first.
Kael didn't have time for fairness.
He slammed his elbow into the noble's jaw, hard enough to break teeth. The boy fell.
Kael ran.
The passage forked. He chose left.
It ended in a chamber with a pit in the center, lined with teeth-shaped stone. The far exit was sealed by a slab etched in spirals.
Kael's breath came in ragged knives. The floor trembled. The corridor behind him screamed with collapsing stone and dying voices.
He backed away from the pit, searching for a release.
A click.
The slab door shifted.
Hope sparked, thin as wire.
Kael lunged for it.
The chamber's edge crumbled.
The floor dropped out from under him like a trapdoor in a nightmare.
Kael fell.
Stone walls blurred. The air tore a scream from his throat.
He hit hard, the impact shattering his breath. Pain exploded through his ribs. The world flashed white and then black.
Above, the pit sealed itself like a closing eye.
Kael lay in the dark and listened to the ruin settle.
No footsteps came.
No voices called his name.
No one cared enough to check if the runner was still alive.
Kael's chest rose in shallow jerks.
He tasted blood.
Somewhere in the dark, something moved.
Then a whisper, not in his ears, but inside his bones:
If no blood wants you…
Kael's vision swam.
…become the blood.
His heart stuttered.
Stopped.
The dark held its breath.
Then something inside him turned over, like a lock finally giving up.
And Kael Arden woke up wrong.