CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST CHAPTER AND WHAT IT ENTAILS
The Grand Order of Dread was established in a time before counting by an assemblage of beings that remain a mystery for their names alone would cause incurable madness and entire realms to collapse—at least, that’s what the current iteration of the Grand Order has to say when asked about their history of poor record keeping. One certainly couldn’t write things down once upon a time on account of the madness and the collapsing and the other inconvenient possibilities, so inadequate archives were just an unavoidable misfortune. The fault belonged with no one, least of all with any of the Grand Order’s elusive and anonymous, six-member council, but someone was surely held accountable, tortured appropriately, and disposed of anyway.
The Grand Order of Dread, or GOoD, had since come to appreciate the art of documentation as failing to do so in the past lent itself to unmitigated disasters like Yvlcon two hundred and fifty-three when proper communication was not drafted and the meeting location turned out to be a direbadger mating ground or Yvlcon six hundred and eleven when a summons was sent to a direct descendant of a dominion instead of the intended demonic offspring due to an ill-placed apostrophe who subsequently slaughtered half of the attendees.
Eventually, the Grand Order evolved with the cycling of its council, and record keeping became not just an unfortunately necessary good, it became unconditional. If one were an Yvlcon attendee, one would absolutely be accounted for in sextuplicate,and one who had failed to send the proper forms in via raven, shark, or viper post for approval to bring along a non-GOoD-sanctioned being to Yvlcon—especially a seemingly non-evil one—would soon learn things would become messy.
Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne knew this.
Baroness Ammalie Avington, however, did not.
Amma was by no means innocent. In fact, she hadjustkilled a man, and had she been given longer than a few shaky breaths to think about it, she would have been delighted by not only knowing Marquis Cedric Caldor was dead, but that it was theoretically by her hand. This knowledge would have been quite interesting to the Grand Order, and as that dead man was trained in the holy ways of Osurehm, an inheritor of a march of Eiren, and a descendant of a dominion, it may have made her sudden and unapproved arrival at Yvlcon a tad bit easier, but Amma wasn’t truly meant to be killing or maiming or overthrowing or really even spiting, and everything about her, from her soft but tangled blonde curls, to her frightened but bloodshot blue eyes, to her prey-animal thumping but sincere heart, screamedgood. Not GOoD, just good. And to GOoD, that was bad. And not the preferable kind of bad that meant evil, just more of a sort of unacceptable atrocity.
Amma found herself being walked down a long, dimly-lit, windswept corridor, the vague sound of torturous howls echoing up into the forever-high darkness above. She had become used to forever-high darknesses and sourceless winds, but the screaming was new.
Damien’s hand on the back of her neck was new too. His grip was tight, though not necessarily unpleasant, and if she had to admit, she would not say shehatedit, rather she would have simply preferred it happening somewhere a bit more private.
While Damien’s touch, even like this, was a comfort, she knew something was quite wrong. There had been a momentwhen his violet eyes went wide with distress as he tried to impress upon her the importance of doing exactly as he said, the implication that the consequence of not doing so would lead to something terribly unpleasant, like her death. Exaggeration was sort of his thing, especially when it came to Amma’s life and the threatening of it, but he, nor anyone else, had killed her yet.
Yet.
Still, Amma sensed a shift the moment they translocated into the small chamber where Damien had gone from passed out to panicked wreck. He had since corrected his demeanor to carry himself with the cool confidence she was used to. In fact, he was downright chilly, back straight, eyes boring into the darkness ahead, mouth drawn into a tight line.
And those fingers. They burrowed into her flesh so tightly she couldn’t have torn herself away if she tried. Amma dared to peek up at him, but his gaze did not flick back down to meet hers, his grip only digging in as if in warning.Do nothing, do not even speak, without my permission—that was what he said, and though she’d thought it a joke at first, the seriousness was hemming in as they traveled down the dark hall on the heels of an imp that was not Kaz. Those strangled, far-off screams continued to prod at the back of her head, and she clasped her hands to keep from fidgeting.
The hall’s end opened up, and Amma was hit with a bracing breeze that made all of her already aching muscles go tight. This new chamber could hardly be called that at all, massive and going on into eternity to either side, blustery like they stood at the top of a cliff, but without egress to the outdoors. Thick columns of dark stone rose upward, illuminated at their bases by blue flames that danced in the gusting wind. The carvings laid into the pillars were unsettling though hard to decipher in the moving light, an agonized face, a ribcage rent from its chest, a kicked puppy.
The columns ran ahead of them, carving out a makeshift walkway in the otherwise empty expanse of a cavern. The imp led them onward, tiny in comparison, but Amma felt just as small as they passed several statues at least double the height of what they were crafted after. Though, she supposed, they could be to scale, as each statue was robed, and there were no visible features to tell her exactly what or who the creature beneath was meant to be. The bases had name-like carvings into them, and she recognized the Chthonic letters, but could only discern something likecouncil memberand a symbol she thought was a number, but then Amma’s ability to translate the language of the dark gods was still fledgling.
It was a long walk across the cavern, but they eventually came to a wall that crawled up into the darkness above, and a small desk sitting just before it. The imp scurried off into the shadows, leaving them. Rather ordinary in relation to the imposing stonework and ominous darkness all around, the desk was wooden—cherry, if Amma wasn’t mistaken in the low light—and behind it sat a woman.
“Running a little late,” she said, lifting her eyes, all six of them, from a thick ledger.
Amma started, pressing back, but Damien’s hand held her still.
Set into three rows up her forehead, each red eye flicked over Damien, and she grinned. Then they darted to Amma, and that grin plummeted off. “Registration?”
A pyramid-shaped crystal slid across the desk, and Damien pressed his thumb to its sharp point. As his blood seeped over the sides and was drawn in, the crystal’s color deepened to violet, and the woman watched as words wrote themselves over the parchment in her book.
Her lips twisted into a deeper smile. “Lord Bloodthorne, welcome. We were afraid you wouldn’t make it. You missed theopening ceremonies.”
She turned then and glanced up at the wall behind her. Drawers were set into it, each marked with a symbol, and one pulsed in that same deep violet color as the crystal. It was much too high for her to reach, but as she stepped away from the desk, Amma saw that she did not need a ladder to access it.
A long, spindly, black leg reached up and poked itself into the wall followed by another and another until all eight were carrying the woman’s mostly human torso atop a mostly-spider body vertically up the wall. Amma gasped, and she expected Damien to again squeeze her, but this time his fingers slid upward into the hair at the base of her skull, massaging in a small circle that sent pleasant tingles down her spine. She took a fuller breath, the tension in her shoulders lessening. As the woman descended, his hand slipped back down to hold her in place again.
The woman had retrieved a thin bit of metal that she held out. Damien offered up the hand he sliced on the crystal, thumb already healed, and she pressed the blade-like piece down over his wrist. The metal wrapped itself around him, and an arcane jolt encircled his arm, sealing the silver ring. Damien flexed his fingers, lip turned up at the unadorned band like it was there solely to offend him.
“There is only the one,” the woman said. One pair of disapproving eyes was enough, but with all three narrowing on her, Amma wanted to shrink into the shadows and hide.
“She’s unregistered. A very recent captive.”
The woman’s mouth fell open and revealed a set of fangs, much less of a surprise to Amma at this point, but then she gasped which did surprise her—that was a reasonable reaction to hearing someone was being held hostage. “You mean you didn’t file form D2-WL3?” That reaction seemed slightly less reasonable.
Damien’s stoic look barely faltered. “Why would I? She’s here only to serve carnal needs.”
Amma’s stomach tightened, throat constricting, his touch suddenly prickly on the increasingly sweaty nape of her neck.
