The following is the recount of those fateful hours, written through the eyes and mind of Cuscuta:
THE RECORD OF THE UNRAVELING
As written by Cuscuta
I have spent my life clinging to the edges of light, telling myself that the thorn and the ivy serve the tree. That the duty I bore was a holy thing.
I was wrong. Stehlenwald is not a city; it is a slaughterhouse wrapped in marble and velvet, and on this night, the blood finally washed over my boots and drowned whatever saint I was trying to be.
I. The Bargain of Ashes
The air in the grand ballroom did not taste like air. It tasted of burning souls—hot, metallic, and screaming.
Salome stood amidst the crimson pulses of that blasphemous engine, her Inquisitorial pride stripped away like rotting bark. When she admitted—violating every sacred vow of her cold order—that her authority had failed her, that her power was fading near the machine, we did not strike her down.
We made a bargain with a hound. We left her to fight off the screeching aetheric wraiths clawing out of the dark, while we plunged into the belly of the palace to find the architect of this nightmare.
II. The Sub-Level Depths
We shattered the hidden iron grate behind the dais and descended into the dark. What met us below was not merely a dungeon. It was the true face of Stehlenwald when the lanterns are snuffed out.
The debauchery of the nobility lay bare in those cold, wet stones. The iron chains, the broken bodies, the silent horror of captives harvested like cattle for the pleasure and longevity of monsters in silk. It was a court of rot.
And it was there, in the damp, reeking dark, that I finally broke.
III. The Line Crossed
For so long, I held her at bay. I fought the Matron’s whisper in my mind, the crawling hunger, the dark promises clawing at the back of my throat. I held the shield up until my arms bled.
No more.
Down in that pit of human filth, I succumbed. I let the Matron take what was hers. I let the hunger flood my veins, tearing away the quiet vows I had whispered to myself for years.
The light did not save those chained in the dark, and it would not save me. I stepped across the line. I ceased to be a soldier of oaths and became a true creature of the dark. The vine split; the thorn drank deep.
IV. The Truth of the Vessel
We dragged Professor Alarica from her anti-magic cell, but the woman we found was not a triumphant inventor—she was a broken vessel spilling secrets that turned my blood to ice.
She spat the truth at us, word by terrible word:
The Vessel's True Name: The child was never a child. She is Project B.I.A.N.C.A.—Bürach Imperial Aetheric Nexus Conduit Archive.
The Minds Within: Alarica built her with only two governing minds: The First Emperor and The Great Beast. The soft, innocent child persona we carried through the mud was nothing more than a fragile cage meant to keep those two horrors from devouring each other.
The Councilwoman’s Hand: Councilwoman Yule had altered BIANCA's schematics behind Alarica’s back, setting a new, unknown trajectory for the vessel.
The Origin of the Judges: Die Blutrichter were not Alarica’s creation. They belonged to the 4th Division itself—the Special Technology and Advanced Research Subdivision (S.T.A.R.S.). Every commander within their ranks was a Blood Judge, or a blueprint of one.
The Upstart Captain: Yule had elevated a recruit to Captain with impossible speed, bypassing battle-tested veterans. A man named Valerius Vane.
V. The Execution of the Sixth Seat
We dragged Alarica back to the ballroom, but it was already too late.
Before Alarica could touch the brass relief valves to kill the engine, the screaming core fell deathly silent. The air dropped past freezing. Heavy, jagged frost webbed across the marble columns, freezing the floating wraiths into glass before they shattered into dust.
Then she floated in.
Bianca. But the child was gone. The Imperial Empress had taken the throne of her flesh.
Salome drew her steel, opening her mouth to command the girl in the name of the Hearthkeepers. Bianca didn't even look at her. With a single flick of two pale fingers, Salome froze. The Inquisitorial tattoos on her skin liquefied, turning to liquid silver, and with a sickening, wet crunch, Bianca physically tore the Velvet Dictum Core out through Salome's chest plate.
Bianca opened her mouth and swallowed the Judge's soul-core whole. Salome dropped onto the frost—hollow, empty, and permanently dead.
VI. The Ultimatum & The Betrayal
Floating above the shattered engine, Bianca raised the Eye of Ulmyr. Without flinching, she drove the crystalline relic directly into her left eye socket, fusing flesh and divine starlight until her gaze burned with absolute, terrifying omniscience.
She looked down upon us and delivered the ultimate choice: Swear fealty and reign at her side, or be erased from existence right here and now.
I braced my blade, ready to fight the god-child to my last breath. But the iron cracked beside us.
Rufhausen, our Laurendor dwarf, dropped to his knees.
Jackson, the Wechelkind hunter, knelt into the frost beside him.
They bent the knee. And Bianca reward them with damnation.
Aetheric black lightning coiled around them as her divine corruption washed over their bodies, twisting their forms, reshaping their minds, and binding their souls to her absolute will. She did not just take their oaths—she remade them into Die Obersten Richter.
Her Supreme Judges.
VII. The Line Drawn
Now, the frost closes in.
Standing in the ruined ballroom, surrounded by the ice and the dead, the rest of us hold our weapons against a rising Empress.
Beside her stand our former brothers, transformed into her hounds.
I gave my soul to the dark down in the dungeons. Now, let us see if the dark is strong enough to kill a god.