Requiem of the Silver Chain
In the nineteenth-century borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lies Silvawald, the eternal-winter city shackled by a double curse:
• every youth turns wolf on the night of the winter solstice;
• Lord Cassian, the vampire count, binds these wolves with silver chains and bleeds them to sustain his own immortality.
On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, the wolf-slave girl Lísa is locked in the dungeon, awaiting her first transformation. The vampire bard Andreas—returning to avenge his mother’s blood-sacrifice ten years ago—steals into the fortress with his double-bass, determined to set her free. During their escape, Andreas is bitten by Lísa; their blood mingles, forging history’s first “hybrid,” forged of wolf fury and immortal blood.
They shatter the silver chains, only to learn the curse’s root: the heart of the wolf-saint was forged into “blood-silver” and split into three fragments—hidden beneath the city, within the monastery crypt, and inside the castle’s grand organ. To end the chains forever, the fragments must be reunited within a hybrid heart and unlocked by the saint’s lost score—the “Ash Waltz.”
And so they journey against the tide:
• at the Ash Camp, the old bard Hera dances amid fire and roses, buying them time with her last breath;
• in the Rose Saloon, the Wind-Seer strings the wind and drums the snow, gifting the hybrids heartbeats that can hide themselves;
• through the Royal Under-way, amid the ruins of an ancient throne, they shatter wolf-skin drums and snap silver strings, letting the saint’s heart beat its final thunder within their own ribs.
Avalanches, burning bridges, falling bell-towers… every escape adds another heavy note to the score.
When the third bell tolls across the snowfields, the gates of Silvawald burst open. Side by side, the hybrids race toward dawn—not to flee, but to inscribe a new first measure upon the ruins of the curse.
Wolf and blood shall at last play the same heart, and from it sound the rhythm of freedom.
