Chapter 8: A Knight's Shadow

Chapter 8: A Knight's Shadow

While Kaelen and Elara raced through the city's subterranean veins, a different kind of predator arrived in Aethelburg. It came not through the shadows, but from the sky, in a matte-black executive jet with no call signs, landing on a private, pre-cleared airstrip far from the city's commercial hubs. The whine of its engines was a discordant hymn in the pre-dawn quiet.

The ramp lowered, and the first to emerge were a dozen figures in slate-grey tactical gear, their faces obscured by ballistic masks with silver-etched symbols. They moved with the chilling, synchronized efficiency of a special forces unit, securing the perimeter. But they were merely acolytes. The man who followed them was the true weapon.

Sir Gideon de Montfort stepped onto the tarmac, and the very air seemed to grow thin and cold, as if in the presence of a vast, ancient pressure. He was a mountain of a man, his severe, hawkish features looking as if they were carved from granite. Over his modern, graphite-colored body armor, he wore a surcoat of antique chainmail, its rings meticulously maintained for nine centuries. But it was his eyes that held the true terror; they burned with a faint, internal silver light, the gaze of a man who had stared into the heart of both heaven and hell and found them wanting.

He was not here for a routine purge. He was here because he had been summoned.

Hanging from a simple leather cord around his neck, resting against the cold steel of his mail, was a small, leaden phylactery. It contained a microscopic sliver of what his Order believed to be the centurion's spear that pierced the side of Christ. For centuries, it had served as his compass, vibrating with a low hum in the presence of the profane. But two nights ago, it had not hummed. It had screamed. A piercing, silent shriek that had resonated through his very soul, a signature of abyssal corruption he had not felt on this earth in an age.

"Brother-Captain," Gideon’s voice was a low rumble, like stones grinding together at the bottom of a tomb. "Report."

A masked knight stepped forward, his posture rigid. "The local chapter confirmed the energy spike originated in the industrial sector, my lord. They tracked its residual signature to an apartment building, but the source had already fled. The scene was... complicated. Signs of a recent, unsanctioned Turning."

"A fledgling," Gideon mused, his silver eyes scanning the distant, glittering skyline of Aethelburg. A fledgling did not possess the power to make his holy relic cry out in such agony. "No. The fledgling is a symptom, not the disease. The power we felt was ancient. Primal. It was the energy of blood itself being twisted into a weapon. A blasphemy of the highest order."

He placed a gloved hand over the phylactery on his chest. Through the leather and lead, he could feel it, a faint, insistent pulse pointing him towards the city's Nocturne District, the sprawling, semi-sanctioned ghetto where most of Aethelburg's Anomalies dwelled.

"We will begin our crusade there," Gideon declared. "The vermin of this city have grown complacent in their dens. We shall remind them what the light of the Argent Sun feels like."

Their arrival in the Nocturne District was not an infiltration; it was an invasion. Three armored black vans screeched to a halt in the middle of a rain-slicked plaza that served as an open-air market for minor magics and black-market blood. The knights disembarked, forming a cordon, their sanctified silver weapons gleaming. The Anomalies—pixies hawking glamour-dust, goblins selling repurposed tech, a pair of off-duty vampire sentinels—cried out in alarm and pain. The very presence of the knights, their armor etched with prayers and their bodies infused with holy rites, was anathema. The air crackled, and the lesser creatures shrieked as if their skin were on fire.

Gideon strode into the center of the plaza, his massive, silver-inlaid greatsword held loosely in one hand, its tip scraping against the cobblestones. The sound was like a funeral dirge.

"I seek a practitioner of a forbidden art," he announced, his voice booming with righteous power, needing no amplification. "A vampire who commands the very essence of life as a puppeteer commands a marionette. This creature was involved in the illegal turning of a human two nights past. Information leading to its capture will be seen as an act of penance. Obstruction will be seen as heresy."

His silver eyes swept the cowering crowd. "And heresy," he finished softly, "is a sin that can only be cleansed by fire."

A hulking vampire bouncer, his face a mask of defiant stupidity, lunged from the doorway of a blood-den, fangs bared. "This is House territory, human! You have no—"

He didn't finish the sentence. Gideon moved with a speed that seemed impossible for a man his size. He didn't even appear to swing his sword. One moment the vampire was charging, the next he was stumbling to a halt, a look of utter shock on his face. A thin, perfectly straight line of silver light appeared down the center of his body. For a heartbeat, he stood there, before falling apart into two separate, cauterized halves that dissolved into ash before they even hit the ground.

The message was delivered. Panic erupted.

Gideon’s knights moved with brutal efficiency, grabbing a sniveling goblin information broker known for selling secrets. They dragged the creature before their Grand Master.

"My lord, this one sees all," a knight reported.

Gideon loomed over the trembling goblin. He didn't ask a question. He simply placed the flat of his greatsword on the creature's shoulder. The goblin screamed, smoke rising from the point of contact. The holy power of the relic blade was a truth serum and an instrument of torture all in one.

"A ghost!" the goblin shrieked, thoughts and secrets tumbling from its lips in a desperate, unfiltered torrent. "An Exile! Goes by Kael! Works the graveyard shift at the 24/7 gas station on the fringe! He was there… the night the Argent Sun patrol swept through! He was with a girl… a new one, reeking of fresh blood and terror! He bought blood for her in the Undermarket, drew the eye of a Valerius Enforcer! They ran, they vanished into the ground!"

Kael. The name meant nothing to him. But the rest of it… it formed a perfect, damning trail. The location, the fledgling, the collision of jurisdictions. And beneath it all, the unique, sickening signature of the profane energy his phylactery had detected.

As the goblin babbled, a memory, cold and sharp as a shard of ice, pierced the veil of nine hundred years.

He was young again, a mortal knight, his armor battered and scorched. The air of the Holy Land was thick with smoke and the screams of the dying. His family's pavilion was ablaze. Inside, a creature, a woman of terrible beauty with eyes like burning coals, stood over the bodies of his wife and son. She was not feeding. She was... commanding. The blood from their wounds was rising in the air, forming crimson spears that she hurled at his men, impaling them where they stood. She was a Blood-Witch, a practitioner of the most reviled and chaotic of all dark arts.

He had charged her, his heart a supernova of grief and rage, his blessed sword aglow. He had battled the monster and, by the grace of God, he had won, but not before her profane magic had scarred his soul forever. It was the memory of that day that had led him to found the Order of the Argent Sun, to swear an eternal oath that no other family would ever suffer as his had.

He blinked, the memory receding, leaving only a cold, hard certainty. The energy he had sensed was the same. A direct inheritance of that ancient evil. This wasn't just another vampire. This was the heir to the very monster that had destroyed his mortal life.

Gideon looked up from the now-unconscious goblin, his silver eyes blazing with the cold fire of a distant star. This was no longer a mission. It was a holy sacrament. He had been given a chance, after nine long centuries, to finally finish his personal crusade.

"He has a name," Sir Gideon de Montfort said, his voice a vow whispered to the heavens and the ghosts of his past. "Find this Exile named Kael. Find the fledgling he protects. I will personally oversee their purification. I will burn this ancient heresy from the world, and salt the very earth with its ashes."