Ashes, Ashes (Damnation’s Creed #1)

Prologue

Everybody talks about the Corinthium like it’s some untouchable, holy thing.

Like we should all be proud to kiss the boots of a system built to keep the powerful sitting atop the broken.

The families—the old ones—call themselves Dukes and Duchesses, pretending that shit still means something in a world full of blood and betrayal. Their heirs get fancy titles too; Lords and Ladies, all prim and proper until it’s time to sharpen their knives.

It’s a pretty lie they tell themselves.

Aristocracy, legacy, nobility. All just prettier words for corruption. Always have been.

The Corinthium is supposed to be the “guiding force” bequeathed to the founding families who inked the first pacts in blood.

Pacts signed not with ink but with something primeval—something lethal and alive beyond any human thought.

We don’t shout it from rooftops, but the truth is seared into every lineage: This empire never rose on mere ambition.

It was erected on debt, on a covenant with a god as ancient as sin itself.

A god who demanded everything sacred in exchange for power—souls. First ours, then our children’s.

No one speaks of that night. But I found it once, buried in my father’s library—a journal bound in flesh that smelled of decay, scrawled in letters that seemed to squirm when you blinked.

The tale goes like this:

Five families knelt in the ashes of their enemies, power-hungry and desperate, drenched in blood and ambition. Our God came to them cloaked in smoke, wearing a crown of bone and a smile carved from sin.

“You want thrones?” it rasped, voice like grinding stone. “Then pay in blood. One firstborn son of each generation must become one with me. This will secure your legacy, but your souls will forever and always be mine.”

They nodded. They agreed.

My ancestors—the voracious, whoring Knoxs—sealed the bargain in the blood that runs through my veins, my brother’s veins, and never looked back.

My family sat at the Corinthium’s table, pillars holding up a rotten empire.

Until I fucked it up.

Until I handed them the blade and let them cut us down.

They’ll tell you we were stripped of our rite for recklessness. That I was too dangerous, too young, too wild. And they’ll whisper that it was my fault—and they’re not wrong.

But they don’t know everything. They don’t know about the god burrowing into my skull, whispering venom in my dreams, feasting on my pride, twisting my anger until it screams like my own. I opened the door—I made that choice. But the hands pushing me through weren’t mine.

Now our rite is lost. Our name is blackened.

Our seat at the table, reduced to smoldering memory.

So I stay away from their vaulted chambers, from their faux-polite gatherings, though we are always invited, not as the revered family we once were—they want us to grovel our way back to grace.

And I won’t drag my brothers along and pretend I didn’t light the fuse that set our world aflame.

Kaios, though—our youngest brother—he thrives on their disdain.

Where Nyx and I have refuted every reluctant invitation, he strolls into every meeting dressed like midnight, lips curved into a grin that says he knows precisely where their skeletons lie.

Not to beg forgiveness, not to claw our way back in.

He goes to remind them of their sins, to show them that no matter how they try to polish their crowns, the blood under their fingernails will always shine through. He’s there to remind them when our God comes to collect its due; no title, no lineage, no hushed prayer will save any of them.

We are all doomed.

And just when I think this wreckage has become my world—she reappears. A ghost from a past I’d buried deep and vowed never to see again, tethered to a family who's shielded her from our rot.

They keep her in sunlight, polished and untouchable, as if ignorance could steel her against what lives inside us.

Her brothers—my friends, my family—smile and swear it’s protection. And once, I might have believed them.

But now I know keeping her in the dark is laying a fuse at her feet. When she learns the true shape of our sins, not even their pretty lies will patch the gash in her heart. And in our world, pretty lies don’t keep you alive.