#sanguis lunae

Splayed parchment mocks the professor in its varied purposes — graded and ungraded essays, letters of recommendation, returned inquiries meant for the headmaster, and an unsent detention slip. Yet it is not disarray that plagues him, nor his cooling supper on the side. What troubles him sits heavy in his hands: the object he had retrieved the night prior, now freed from its confinement.

It had remained sealed in his desk most of the day, weighed under scrutiny and caution until a rare moment of stillness offered itself. 

His fingers, absentminded in their movements, skim the surface — occasionally catching on a groove too shallow to be seen. Beneath the pads, the artifact gives a fractional yield. Bayek’s chin dips, curiosity flickering behind his gaze.

The seams slacken.

With deliberate care, he coaxes the surface open, thawing away centuries of neglected shine. Light glances off the dulled finish as ancient inscriptions reveal themselves:

Ubi draco primus spiritum dedit, vita et mors coniunctae sunt.

Where the dragon first breathed his last, life and death were united.

Murmurs stir around him, as though the room itself exhaled — the ancient call of something long-buried rising to meet the air.

"Where the first-born dragon resides, the expiration of a long-vanished light awaits those who dare to pursue. Your answer is closer than you assume. Once every five years, many will face this beast."

Bayek studies the text, his eyes narrowing. The words are familiar in syntax, yet riddled with layered meaning. Dragons, while uncommon in his current life, are not foreign to him. Their habits, classifications, regions — yes, he knows those. But this? This is ritual.

The egg’s color, shape, and material might narrow its origin, but that alone will not answer its question. So instead, he turns to what he does know.

Dragons are typically held in strict reserve, revealed only on sanctioned occasions — tournaments, exhibitions, disasters. Among those, the Triwizard Tournament stands foremost. Held once every five years. And its first trial? Always the same. Always the same place.

"The Forbidden Forest," he speaks aloud. "Foresta Vetitum."

The egg does not stir.

Bayek's gaze flicks back to the inscription. The etchings seem to ripple, only slightly, as if responding to a magic far older than what pulses through his wand. The words dance — familiar and alien in equal measure.

He glances toward the silver tray set on his desk, untouched — lavish fare from the castle kitchens. His appetite has long since abandoned him.

A breath, low and deliberate. Then, with practiced ease, he pulls a square of parchment toward him and scrawls a single cryptic note. His fingers brushes the feathers of Nephthys, who accepts the missive without complaint. She will find her way to his eldest daughter, Danai. She always does.

His thoughts coil inward, spiraling toward what waits beyond the castle walls. He pictures twisting vines climbing up gray stone, a ruined archway looming, ready to crush. Warnings, plainly stating dangers. The bridge — rickety, weather-worn — sways in memory. He can't waste more time.

With a sharp inhalation and the final snap of resolve, he Apparates. The crack of his departure split the quiet like a snapped bone.

He has arrived at the forest’s edge.

The trees loom, unmoving, as if in mute anticipation. Evening has begun its descent — the last of the light clings stubbornly to the horizon. Bayek’s heart thuds once in its cage before settling. The forest beyond the bridge sleeps restlessly. Creatures turn in their burrows; deer graze with twitching ears, alert to what the night will bring.

No time to linger.

Smoke lingers faintly in the air, curling past his boots as he steps beneath the arch. The egg, warm in his non-dominant palm, gives a low hum in response.

He moves quickly, crossing the timeworn bridge with the caution of the nearby fauna. The planks groan underfoot, and damp soil soaks through the edges of his boots as he touches down on the other side. Without hesitation, he presses forward into the trees, choosing an old path shaped by centuries of travel.

The open egg sits heavy in his hand.

A voice — sweet and stern — whispers in the wind, “Seek where the stone holds memory of flame, long before first breath was hatched.”

Bayek’s pace slows. He listens. Measures each sound. Foliage grows denser as he continues, dragging against his boots in a futile attempt to hold him back. Still, his stride is sure.

The hum of the metallic shell swells as he enters a clearing. It vibrates so fiercely in his hand that he thinks it might leap from his grasp into a motherly embrace. The sensation runs up to his bicep, sharp and expectant.

At the clearing’s center lies a crater — blackened at the edges but still faintly glowing, like embers long buried. The scent hits him at once: sulfur, scorched roots, something nostalgic beneath. Bayek recoils, momentarily, suppressing the rising sting at the back of his throat.

But there, just beyond the rim, an indent. Subtle, precise. Hardened earth cracks like old skin. He glances between it and the egg, and the match is unmistakable. Without further doubt, he lifts his wand and guides it home.

Kaleidoscopic light cradles the egg in a halo of shifting color, pulsing like a heartbeat beneath the earth’s rising wail. Wind surges through the clearing, carrying with it the scent of scorched earth and prophecy. Latin incantations circle the space like waltzing ghosts, their syllables ancient, reverent. Beneath them, something older still stirred — a presence, vast and insistent, brushing against the edges of his mind.

"Primordium ex ovo venit, sed quis creavit draconem?"

The beginning came from an egg, but who created the dragon?

Bayek narrows his eyes as grit and ash kiss his lashes.

This question lingers, weighty in the charged air. His mother would have offered the name of Atum, or perhaps Isis. His father, with no less certainty, would invoke God the Father. Yet neither explanation has ever rooted itself in him — not in heart, nor reason. Faith has been a foreign tongue, even in the warmth of family.

He shifts his stance, settling at the rim of the precipice, where earth fell away and sky stretched wide with unspoken possibility. This is work typically reserved for teams — ritual, containment, observation. But he hesitates still, unwilling to invite another soul into this sacred unknown. Not now. Not when trust is so scarce in his immediate proximity.

Bayek closes his eyes, drawing in a breath as deliberate as a prayer. Inhale — slow, deep, grounding. Exhale — slower still, unraveling the tight weave of thought and fear. The wind calms with him, echoing the rhythm of his breath.

He is ready.

A willing vessel for knowledge to flow through.

The pain is unlike anything Bayek has known — not the kind that pierces, but the kind that enters. It slithers beneath his skin, tendrils moving like intwined serpents through marrow and organs. Something brushes the underside of his ribs, the tips of a beastly claw, or perhaps a memory given form. Beneath the cloth of his undershirt, the outline of a hand presses outward from within.

Its touch is oddly tender. Almost reverent. But no gentleness could disguise the wrongness of it. The sensation fades not in mercy, but in claiming. Pressure settles over his shoulders like a mantle passed down by something ancient and buried.

His tongue betrays him. It dances, flicks, speaks. The cage of his teeth cannot hold the words back. He doesn’t recognize the voice. A brother speaks through him. Not of kin or blood, but of some old, spectral bond.

"You have cursed us until our names rot in the soil. As the worms tunnel through our brain stems and eye sockets. Was she worth the blade you gouged through my spine, brother?"

"I am not your executioner," Bayek whispers, but his mouth is parched, his lips cracking with each word. "I seek only understanding, not torment. Please, let me receive what you offer."

Then, light. Blinding. Not warm, but bleached — a radiance that devours shape and meaning. It bursts against his retinas and leaves them blind in a cradle of white. The ringing begins. High, sharp, ritualistic. And somewhere in the stillness, the reins are loosened, but not returned. The thing — whatever or whomever it is — allows him control of only his mouth and jaw, as though to speak is his duty and binding.

Dust stings his eyes, yet he cannot blink, and the lower lids well with need.

"What realm does your pain belong to now?" he asks, or thinks, or dreams aloud. His voice swims somewhere between his skull and the air, untethered from his body.

Deliberation lies solely on the voices within. Masculine. Feminine. Some young, others cracked with age. They plead still — not for him, but through him — aching for escape, or worse, dominion.

One holds the others at bay.

"Time has been of no mercy. My torment is untethered, used as reaping by one," the voice says.

Though sight flickers and splinters, impressions are etched behind his eyes. A mosaic of sorrow fractured across time. Within it: a woman bent in silent grief. A child laughing beneath a canopy of acacia. A promise once whispered into a sleeping ear. The memory is not his, and yet—

Tepid solution begins to seep from the fissures of his skin — plasma, tears, or something far older. He cannot tell. Sensation is fragmented, warped by the residue of whatever lingers inside him.

"Do you bleed through me to be heard—" he begins, but the question chokes as the pain anchors itself in the hollow of his chest and at his corneas, sharp and steady.

"—or to be reborn?" he finishes off, quieter now, as if afraid the answer will echo too closely and crush him.

"I desire to foretell. If left unattended…" the voice continues. Bayek's vocal cords curl, as though protesting the intrusion. It rattles within and rasps.

"you will be gifted armistice, but caution, or else all whom you love shall perish."

Sympathy passes over him like a cloud’s shadow — cool, brief, and vanishing. Duty burns brighter. What was offered was not a gift, but a wound dressed in prophecy. A mark traded between the living and the long-dead, woven with resentment and rot.

Even in death, some cannot let go.

Is this what became of his mother? What gnaws at his father’s future? What might await his daughters, should he falter?

Murk weaves through orbital crevices like larvae desperately burrowing in pulped earth. Their task complete, their hunger ended. They still, the only sign of their being there, being their sliding down crimson waterfalls. 

"Leave. Now."

He rises without question.

His legs protest. The clearing spins in blurred rings of dark and dust. Sight has not returned — only a bleached smear at the edges of things. His hands find bark. Roots. Air. Forward is guesswork. Gravity is guidance.

The forest groans with his every misstep. Branches claw, unseen roots tangle, thorns whisper threats. Yet he presses on, staggering from tree to tree, shoulder to trunk, breath to breath.

Merriment stirred the halls far beneath her confinement — a gloom-soaked chamber elevated in the northeast tower. Joy pulsed faintly through the stone, reaching even the envisioned iron bars with its breathless cadence, animating walls once dulled by chipping, steely varnish. It was the first flicker of life the manor had allowed in weeks — particularly the week she had reached peak maturity.

Having completed every etiquette lesson expected of a well-bred young lady, Esther considered herself entitled to the celebration denied to her for nearly half her life. And yet, magicless, she remained a stain in the pristine canvas of the Chapuis name. All save one, for he still looked at her with warmth.

He had heralded her word, her little bird. Edmond, who spoke in hushed tones of whispers overhead: that she would soon vanish from the estate. The chambermaid murmured of a “cleansing” to come. The chauffeur offered a piteous glance and a cryptic farewell. The house-elves, in their wisdom, said nothing at all.

So she began arranging a private arraignment, one which her father could not refuse.

Her chosen armor was a discarded relic of her mother’s finery, once cream and docile, now a thing reborn in gaudy canary-yellow, trimmed in floral darkness at the collar and sleeves. Where the outdated hem once fell, she hacked and stitched until the silhouette suggested rebellion more than fashion. What she couldn’t modernize, she made memorable.

No time remained to tame her hair, but she slicked her lips in a wine-hued stain and clasped platinum to her wrist. The bracelet glittered under candlelight — too ornate for her taste, but rich in implication. Her little bird had reminded her why it mattered before he’d retired.

Murmuring the words she planned to say, she took one final, decisive glance at her reflection.

Tonight, she would reclaim the smallest of victories: the right to choose.

The soft staccato of heeled boots marked her descent — too subtle for ears dulled by champagne and symphonies. Two flights passed in silence. On the fourth, she emerged.

Strings snapped.

The cello’s bow fractured mid-stroke, and enchanted instruments crashed to the marble. The revelers stilled.

She relished in the shock, not in strangers’ eyes but in those of her blood — mouths curled in wrath that dared not bloom fully beneath society’s gaze. Faces arranged themselves in polite horror just as the whispers began.

“Bonsoir, mes amis et ma famille,” she offered sweetly, lowering her head in a practiced curtsy. Her right foot — not left — slid behind the other in grace. Both hands lifted the sides of her altered gown in perfect mimicry of debutante decorum.

Without another word, she moved toward a house-elf and plucked a delicately browned palmier from the silver tray — yet another she has been deprived of. Before it could touch her lips, however, her gaze caught upon a figure.

Dark-haired. Dressed as though mourning the very hour. Only one soul would dare dress so solemnly on a night marking renewal. And oh, how she had grown since they last met. 

Recognition played faintly on her features, just long enough to be questioned. Then, calculated steps.

Esther crossed into her orbit and lifted a hand — not in greeting, but to tilt the young woman’s chin. The bracelet winked, a half-inch looser than she remembered. It tapped faintly against her wrist as she murmured: