Chapter 1
Violeta
The Beginning of the End
If this were a myth, I would have no scars to hide and no name to fear.
For centuries, humanity preferred to deny the existence of guardian spirits. Saying they had never existed was easier than accepting that they had walked among us… and still did. Some people knew. Very few understood the consequences.
I lived among them.
The spirits looked human, but they could never completely blend in. Ears impossible to hide, tails that defied logic, eyes far too ancient for a single body. They were guardians of the forces that kept the world in balance. Among them all, one appeared again and again in warnings and legends: the nine-tailed fox, keeper of the future.
Spirits could do things humans never could.
But they could also love.
And that changed everything.
When a spirit bonded with a human, their children were different. Not monsters. Not miracles.
Something far worse in the eyes of the world:
Heirs.
Bearers of a power that awakened far too early, when they still did not know how to control their emotions, their bodies… or their anger.
That power became known as an attribute.
Some could manipulate the elements. Others could alter strength, vitality, or gravity. The problem was not the power itself, but the moment it awakened.
A frightened child with an attribute was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
And so the tradition began.
Locking the heirs away was not considered cruelty, but prevention. Keeping them separated from the rest of the world would prevent tragedies. Prevent deaths. Prevent wars.
The Zodiac heirs, being the most powerful, were isolated even more severely.
Not out of hatred, but out of fear…
And convenience.
But confinement did not make us invisible.
In the fifteenth century, the Red Warriors appeared. They did not want to destroy us.
They wanted what we carried inside.
They learned how to extract attributes, rip them from their bearers, and reuse them as weapons. Every captured heir became ammunition against the others.
That was when the true hunt began.
The Blue Knights emerged in response.
Not to hide us, but to prevent our powers from being stolen and turned against us.
They founded sanctuaries, hidden academies where we would learn to control what we were before someone tore it from our bodies.
They did not train us for war.
They trained us so we would not disappear.
Now I am at the Swiss compound, hidden among mountains that never seem to stop freezing. The cold here is constant, precise, like a silent warning.
My family came from France.
My grandfather, bearer of the attribute of light, fled after a war that reduced the world to ashes. He chose the cold because the cold does not betray you.
It kills or protects.
But it never pretends.
My parents discovered early on that I was not an ordinary child. A Zodiac attribute awakened within me.
And with it came every rule.
I was separated from the world for one simple reason:
I was dangerous before I even knew it.
My childhood was not a tragedy.
It was involuntary training.
I learned to observe before speaking, to judge people by the way they fell silent rather than by the things they said.
Isolation did not make me fragile.
It made me fast.
The letters from that boy were my first real connection to the outside world. I never saw his face, but I came to know him through his words.
When he disappeared, I did not break.
I learned something far more important:
No one stays forever.
When I arrived among the Blue Knights, it did not take long for me to adapt.
I watched.
Imitated.
Adjusted.
Socializing was easy.
Trusting people was never the problem.
Choosing who deserved that trust was.
My name is Katia Violeta Van-Austrea de Soeil.
I am fifteen years old.
And I bear the attribute of Leo.
An attribute that appears only once every hundred years.
There are twelve Zodiac heirs scattered across the world.
No one knows who they are.
No one knows where they are.
But everyone knows that if they fall, the balance will fall with them.
And then there is the inheritance no one wants to name aloud:
the ancestral attribute of the nine-tailed fox.
The only one whose extraction could bring everything to an end.
Some believe it is only a myth.
I know it is not.
And everything began that morning, when I met two boys who should never have been there.
From the moment I met Leo.
