The scarlet petals fell in reverse.
As if time itself had hiccupped, rejecting gravity's command. One by one, the velvety red blossoms spiraled upward, curling lazily through the air before vanishing into the throbbing crimson sky like embers swallowed by dusk. I stood alone at the heart of a vast arena, ancient and unholy, forged from interlocking rings of white bone and jagged black obsidian. Each stone hummed with a low, unsettling resonance—like a heartbeat beneath the earth—alive and listening.
The arena's shape was circular, infinite in feel though not in scale, its edges bleeding into a shrouded fog that refused to encroach but never retreated. Obsidian pillars loomed like fangs around the perimeter, each etched with glyphs that pulsed faintly in shades of garnet and ash. Despite the silence, the air felt full—crowded by unseen eyes, like I was not the first to be here. And perhaps not the last.
Beneath my feet, the ground bore no scars of conflict. No blood stained the black glass. When it was shed, it disappeared—consumed by the arena itself. Erased, as if pain here held no history.
Above, the sky churned—a deep, visceral red, not the red of sunsets, but the red of wounds. Clouds moved like smoke through the air, thick and sluggish, colored with the same burning hue as old embers. And scattered among them… stars. Not pure white or distant. These stars pulsed with odd rhythm, flickering crimson, gold, and occasionally violet, like blinking eyes—watchful and cruel.
I exhaled.
My breath misted, curling silver in the blood-colored light.
But there was no cold. My skin remained untouched by chill, as if the mist wasn't mine at all. As if it belonged to the arena, a borrowed breath through my lungs.
This was the Crimson Loom.
As I stood at the center, my scythe rested across my back like the wingbone of a fallen seraph. My eyes narrowed.
"Initiate the Weave," I whispered, my voice echoed into the air.
The System responded immediately.
[Still-Bloom Detected]
[User Focus: Martial Intent]
[Bloodline Recognized: Vladiscar / Widow's Line]
[Initiating Practice Mode: Widow's Weave – Crimson Fang Scythe Style]
The arena then shifted.
Crimson mist bled in through the tiles, curling up like mourning incense. Threads snapped taut from above, forming shifting runes in midair. From the mist, a Blood Echo emerged.
Blood Echoes were manifested versions of my ancestors, past selves, or bloodline-linked adversaries that appeared within the Still-Bloom to test, teach, or torment me. They were drawn from my blood's memory—its pain, victories, regrets, and inheritances.
A tall woman, cloaked in spiderweave and sorrow. Her face was obscured by a sheer black veil. But the scythe in her hand shimmered with the same hunger as my Nyxiphage.
Closing my eyes, I reached out into the loom of my bloodline, and plucked a thread bound to the scythe martial arts I wanted and downloaded it directly into my mind, nerves, and muscle memory. This process was called Memory-Thread Synchronization. It allowed me to see threads suspended in the air like floating veins of red and silver silk. Each thread was linked to a single movement, spell, or emotion once experienced by a Vladiscar. They hum with ancestral memory. When I touch a thread, it sinks into My skin—usually the fingertips, heart, or back of my neck—like warm oil or a tattoo being drawn in reverse. The memory floods my system in a surge of heat, disorientation, and perfect knowledge. I may briefly feel the temperature, emotion, or pain of the original moment. In rare cases, I think I may see it through the ancestor's eyes.
There are five different types of threads that I could use Memory-Thread Synchronization:
Thread Color | Memory Type
Crimson Combat techniques & finishing moves
Silver Ritual magic and protective stances
Black Forbidden or cursed motions
Pale Gold Velomirra's memories (restricted)
Violet-Tethered Emotional memories tied to betrayal or love
With a gasp, the memory had fully downloaded into my psyche.
[Memory-Thread Sync Engaged]
Origin: Nyxaria Vladiscar, Age 17, Creation of Widow's Weave: Crimson Fang Scythe Style
Technique: first form→ Silken Veil Stance
I watched as the memories surfaced.
~ | 💮 | ~
Inside of Nyxaria Vladiscar's memories,
The battlefield was silent.
Not the quiet of peace—but the hollow hush after slaughter, when even ghosts are too breathless to linger.
The moon overhead was split by clouds, casting a fractured, flickering light across the broken remnants of House Vexmoor's southern garrison. Obsidian banners lay trampled in the mud, torn and soaked with blood. The wind carried the smell of cinders, charred flesh, and the faint sweetness of burned thread-silk.
Nyxaria stood at the center alone.
She was seventeen years old. Her armor was cracked, her cape was in tatters, her skin bruised and smeared in ash and blood that wasn't hers. Her scythe—a ceremonial relic never meant for war—was chipped at the curve, its once-ornamental spine now jagged from killing too much, too fast.
Around her lay the bodies of her fallen comrades, their limbs folded like broken marionettes. Thin trails of thread-magic still clung to their fingers—signatures of spellcasters whose chants had been severed mid-word.
She dropped to her knees in the center of the ruined outpost, ignoring the sting in her side where a jagged blade still stuck, forgotten. Her eyes—black ringed with crimson—drifted over the scattered corpses of her unit.
"You were all weak," she whispered. "We all were weak. I need a better way to fight."
She reached down and yanked free a severed combat-thread from one of the witches—a skein of blood-infused silk, still humming with latent power. She tied it to the back of her scythe, letting it drag behind her like a widow's train.
Then she stood and began to move.
She retraced the steps that had gotten them killed—an unsteady charge, a high stance, a sharp pivot left that had left a blind spot. One by one, she mimicked them.
"Too high."
"Too loud."
"Too slow."
Her voice was flat. Her mind sharp. Every correction etched into her bones like chalk on black slate.
Then she lowered her stance. Her feet feet wide. Her knees bent. Her spine coiled. With her stance corrected, she began again but this time with intention. Nyxaria flowed across the blood-muddied ground.
Her scythe moved in arcs, not swings. Her feet never left the ground, only glided. Her profile remained angled, as if behind a curtain. Her strikes came from below, behind, beside—never where expected.
The trailing thread followed her movements in a swirling spiral—each motion creating a shifting veil of red around her. Like a curtain of silk and suggestion. A lure. A trap.
She twisted and turned through it, using the momentum of her enemy's imagined strikes against them.
"You must bait the blade," she muttered, eyes narrowing. "Force them to overextend... then sever the line."
She pivoted. Slid. Ducked. And swung.
And in one breathless instant, the torn battlefield seemed to acknowledge her rhythm. The air changed. The wind slowed. Her scythe no longer resisted her—it obeyed.
She halted in perfect stillness. Her scythe tip down, the blood-thread coiled in a spiral around her like a blooming spider lily.
"This is not a guard," she whispered. "It is the veil that invites a strike… then delivers death beneath it."
She stepped forward once more, trailing silk behind her like a funeral shroud, and whispered, "Silken Veil Stance."
That night, she buried her comrades with thread and ash. She did not shed tears.
And the next night, she used the stance to kill eleven blood cultists in one motion.
From that point forward, every form in the Crimson Fang Scythe Style would begin with that motion.
It was the curtain. The spiral. The silence before the strike.
~ | 💮 | ~
I exhaled slowly and raised my weapon. I slid my left foot back, drawing Nyxiphage across my body in a diagonal arc, the tip trailing a thread of red light. I twisted my wrist, letting the blade dip low before flicking it upward in a slow, elegant spiral.
The Blood Echo answered in kind, lowering her veil with a slow tilt of the head. Then she moved, there were no words, no hesitation.
"First Form: Silken Veil Stance."