Blood In

“Kneel.”

A single word was all it took to command the line of men and women arrayed before her.

They obeyed as one, sinking onto the hard, abrasive floor. They did not falter despite the rough stone biting into their flesh, nor the suffocating dark of their blindfolds, nor the absolute void of certainty regarding what was to come. A lone voice possessed the gravity to bend them to its will. Together, they raised their arms, locking their hands behind their heads in a posture of absolute surrender. In the stifling, windowless confines of the small chamber, the air hung dead and heavy, slicking their bare skin with sweat. Try as they might to conceal it, a tremor of profound terror rippled through their ranks.

She exhaled a long, heavy sigh. “Do you truly understand what you're trying to get into?”

The woman’s question was cold, stripped of mercy. She moved with a slow, predatory grace around the perimeter of the congregation, casually twirling a dagger between her fingers. One, two, three... twenty souls in total, brought to their knees before her.

“Y-Yes, Mistress!” they cried out in unison, their voices ringing loud yet fractured by a trembling dread.

“4-3-9,” she murmured, giving every single number its own deliberate breath. To an uninitiated ear, it was a mere sequence of numbers, but in the shadows they inhabited, it was a moniker—an alias. Turning to the man in the black tailcoat standing at her flank, she extended the dagger. He accepted the blade with a reverent nod, turning his gaze toward the flock of lambs.

“Kāishǐ,” the lady commanded, the word slipping from her lips in a tongue foreign and jarring to their ears.

Instantly, the room erupted into a choir of agonized shrieks and lamentations, a chorus torn from the depths of the underworld itself.

“Until death!” they wailed, as blood began to seep hot and heavy from their flanks.

A plunge of steel.

A deluge of crimson.

Agony.

An oath.

Scarcely ten seconds had elapsed when her own body began to violently shudder against the horror unfolding before her. Closing her eyes tightly against the sight, she drew a sharp, deep breath.

Just a little longer

One minute...

“E-Enough! Mercy!”

Two

“I swear it!”

Five

“I will obey. Until death. I will obey. Until death.”

Ten

Ten minutes. Then, an absolute, suffocating silence.

“Huánghòu.”

At the sound of that familiar voice, her eyes snapped open. The man in black was down on one knee, his head bowed low as he presented the blood-slicked dagger like an offering to a wrathful deity.

As the tenth minute passed, the stillness of the dark chamber grew so absolute it felt as though nothing had happened at all. Yet a tempest of conflicting emotions surged within her as she looked upon the floor, now a lake of crimson where the fallen bodies lay bathed in their own warmth.

This was the crucible. The final test. Whosoever survived this night would be bound to her until their final breath. From this moment forth, her word is their law. Her body, their temple. Their very lives belonged to her. There would be no looking back, no returning to the ghosts of who they used to be; they were to be reborn under a new name.

Her hand trembled, but she did not hesitate as she took the stained dagger from her trusted servant. And there, with a slow, deliberate stroke of her tongue, she tasted the iron of their allegiance, licking the blade clean.