Chapter 1: The Sinner's Inheritance

Chapter 1: The Sinner's Inheritance

The cold of the Bavarian monastery was a familiar discipline. It seeped through the stone floor, crept up the sleeves of Kaelen’s woolen habit, and settled deep in his bones. He welcomed it. The cold was a physical reality, a simple truth to focus on when the storm within him threatened to break its banks.

Here, in the scriptorium of St. Michael’s, silence was law. The only sounds were the scratch of his quill on vellum and the rhythmic breathing of the other acolytes. Kaelen kept his head bowed, his close-cropped black hair a stark shadow against the pale page. He was copying a passage from Augustine—“Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis.” Grant what you command, and command what you will. A prayer for grace, a plea for control. It was the prayer that had defined his entire existence.

A sudden, sharp sting of frustration—a blot of ink had bled from his quill, marring the perfect calligraphy. It was a minor error, yet his heart hammered against his ribs. On the back of his left hand, hidden beneath his sleeve, an arcane symbol, a knot of intersecting lines, pulsed with a faint, silvery light.

No.

He squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles white as he gripped the quill. He focused on the cold floor, the scent of old paper and beeswax, the distant tolling of the vespers bell. He forced the emotion down, smothering it like a fire, until the light faded and the frantic beat of his heart slowed to a funereal pace. He was Kaelen Frost. He was in control. The Madness was not.

This was his life: a constant, exhausting vigil against the curse that ran in his veins. The Frost Madness, his parents had called it, their voices hushed with terror before it had consumed them both, leaving a young Kaelen orphaned in a whirlwind of shattered glass and screams he could still hear in his nightmares. The monks had taken him in, taught him to channel his mind into scripture and his body into punishing labour, all to starve the beast within.

“Brother Kaelen.”

The Abbot’s voice, low and grave, cut through the hallowed silence. Kaelen looked up, startled. Abbot Theron stood at the entrance of the scriptorium, his face a roadmap of stern piety. To be summoned by him was a rare and usually grim event.

Kaelen rose, bowing his head. “Yes, Abbot?”

“A letter has arrived for you. From the world outside.” The Abbot’s tone was laced with disapproval, as if the very concept of ‘outside’ was a contagion.

He led Kaelen to his spartan office. A single letter lay on the heavy oak desk, its crisp envelope a stark white against the dark wood. It was sealed with a lawyer’s crest. A knot of ice formed in Kaelen’s stomach. Nothing good had ever come from his family name.

His hands trembled slightly as he broke the wax seal. The legalese was dense, but the core message was brutally clear. His grandfather, Otto Frost—a man he’d never met but whose monstrous reputation was the foundation of his nightmares—was dead.

Kaelen felt nothing. No grief, no relief. Only a cold, hollow dread. He had spent his life running from that name, and now, even in death, it had found him.

“He has left you an inheritance,” the Abbot said, watching him with weary eyes. “It is… all that remains.”

A week later, a heavy, foot-locker-sized crate arrived. The delivery men grunted under its weight, their modern clothes a jarring sight against the ancient monastery walls. Inside, nestled amongst straw packing, was a single object: a book.

It wasn't a book so much as a slab of history bound in something that was not cowhide. The cover was a dark, mottled brown, smooth and unnervingly supple, like preserved skin. There was no title, only a single, complex sigil embossed in tarnished silver that mirrored the mark on his own hand. A visceral revulsion coiled in Kaelen’s gut. This was his grandfather’s work. This was the source of the Madness.

His first instinct was to hurl it into the monastery’s furnace. To burn it, to watch the profane thing be consumed by holy fire and pray its taint would be cleansed from the world. That was what the disciplined acolyte, Brother Kaelen, would do.

But the fear-stricken orphan, the boy who still woke up screaming from dreams of his parents’ final moments, needed to know why.

That night, long after the final prayers had been whispered and the monastery was draped in a profound and watchful silence, Kaelen sat on the edge of his cot. The book lay before him, a dark cancer in the sanctity of his cell. The moonlight slanting through the high, narrow window gave its strange cover a sickening sheen.

His hands shook. This was a sin. A betrayal of everything he had built, every wall he had erected to keep himself safe. Yet he couldn't stop. With a final, shuddering breath that felt like a surrender, he opened the journal.

The first page was not written in German or Latin, but in a spidery, arcane script that should have been indecipherable. But as his silver eyes scanned the lines, the meaning bloomed in his mind, a direct and terrifying injection of knowledge.

The heart is not a vessel of sin, but a furnace of power. Emotion is not a weakness to be scourged, but fuel to be burned. Regret sharpens the mind. Fear hardens the flesh. Rage… ah, rage is the fire that can remake the world.

The instant he comprehended the words, it happened.

It was not a thought or a feeling, but a cataclysm. A dam within him that had been cracking and groaning for twenty-four years didn't just break; it vaporized. A torrent of every suppressed emotion he had ever denied himself—every flicker of anger, every pang of loneliness, every spike of terror—erupted from the core of his being.

The symbol on his hand blazed with the light of a dying star. His silver eyes glowed, pupils blown wide, seeing not the stone walls of his cell but the roaring, chaotic inferno of his own soul. The air crackled, the small wooden cross on his wall splintered, and the stone floor beneath his feet fractured in a spiderweb of cracks. The 'Frost Madness' wasn't madness at all. It was power. Raw, untamed, and utterly terrifying.

And it did not stop at the monastery walls.

The surge of arcane energy, a silent, psychic scream of pure, unleashed emotion, shot out from the Bavarian Alps. It ripped across continents and oceans, an invisible shockwave moving at the speed of thought, a dinner bell rung in the heart of a psychic storm.

---

Thousands of miles away, in the humid, jasmine-scented dark of a New Orleans garden, a silver serpent tattoo coiled around a woman’s arm writhed as if alive.

Liberté Leclair gasped, dropping the silver shears she’d been using to prune her night-blooming cereus. Her amber eyes, usually burning with fiery confidence, widened in shock. She felt the pulse—a wave of chaotic, thundering power, jagged and raw like a scream. It was a magical signature she had never felt before, yet one she recognized on a genetic level. It was the taste of ozone before a lightning strike, the scent of blood on the air. It was a flavor her ancestors had passed down through generations of whispered warnings and vows of vengeance.

The screen door to the Creole cottage creaked open. An old woman, the Matriarch of the Crescent Coven, stood silhouetted against the warm interior light, her face a mask of grim certainty. The antique silver charms woven into her long, grey curls chimed softly.

“You felt it,” the Matriarch stated. It was not a question.

Liberté pressed a hand to her serpent tattoo, which was still tingling with a strange, hostile energy. “What was that? I’ve never felt anything so… violent. Uncontrolled.”

The Matriarch’s gaze was fixed on the northern horizon, as if she could see across the world to the snow-capped mountains of Bavaria. A cold, ancient hatred hardened her features.

“For a century, we have watched. We have waited,” she whispered, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves. “The poison has slept. But the bloodline endures.”

She turned her dark, knowing eyes to Liberté. “That was not a what, my child. That was a who.”

“A Frost. A descendant of Otto Frost lives.”