The Prologue: An Introduction to Hikaru Saito

 Streetlights stood like sentinels, casting silver shadows across the rail where I leaned.

Below, the river shimmered black, disturbed only by whispers the wind wasn’t meant to carry.

I used to think silence meant safety. I still want to believe that. But silence is a verdict.

People like to say, “Don’t care what others think.” Easier said when they treat you like you matter. In my life, I’ve always been a mistake waiting to happen—too large, too quiet, too awkward. A misplaced puzzle piece no one wants to find.

School was survival training in humiliation.

The monsters I was supposed to call classmates flung words like knives, each cut sinking deeper.

They called it “banter.”

Teachers called it “a phase.”

I called it Tuesday.

Over time, I learned to shrink, dim, and vanish. But even invisibility was a crime. Speak up, you’re annoying. Stay quiet, you’re creepy. Simply exist, and you’re wrong. I’ve come to accept I’ll never fit into their little world.

So, I started walking this bridge every night, letting the river hum its lullaby. Not to jump—but I’d be lying if I said I never thought about it.

Not a day passes that I don’t.

Can you blame me?

I’d need more fingers to count the people who want me gone just for existing.

But tonight, something changed.

The whispers grew louder. Not cruel. Not mocking. Voices I’d never heard yet somehow knew.

If I’m not mistaken, the shadows weren’t obeying physics. They bent toward me.

One streetlight flickered… then went dark.

The river shuddered—once—like something beneath had stirred.

And then I heard it.

My name. Hikaru Saito.

Not to wound me, as usual, but to summon.

That voice—I’ve heard it before. But where?

Lights around me flickered in a pattern that wasn’t random. I told myself the darkness was getting to me and turned to leave.

It was right then—at that unsettling moment—that I knew.

My life was about to change.

??? POV:

He does not know I am watching.

Not in malice, nor in pity, but in silence—as if the world itself holds its breath for him.

He walks, unaware of his own gravity.

The boy believes himself a footnote. Yet even from here, I see the thread binding him to the heart of the underworld, pulsing—waiting—restless. Not every birth is ordinary.

Some are echoes.

And Hikaru?

He is of a heritage once spoken in hushed tones and sealed in iron. He is oblivious.

For now.

Akane may not know this truth, but she feels it.

Their threads have crossed before—in dreams, in fleeting moments neither recalls—and they will cross again. She walks the boundary between light and ruin, and he… he walks the edge of memory. Together, they will stir what should have remained buried. And when they do, the stars will bend, as they once did.

When Hikaru awakens, the seal that binds the underworld—Noctarra—will fracture.

Not with fury, but with memory.

Because the underworld does not forget its monarchs.

It waits. And tonight, it listens.

I step down from my throne—not because I must, but because some truths demand movement. The marble underfoot carries a cold I cannot tell is in the stone, or in me.

Across the hall, a single portrait remains untouched by time.

I halt before it.

Crimson velvet armour wraps the figure. Eyes glow a deep, dark red.

His hair—a pale tangle of silver—falls over his shoulders with the softness of silk.

His gaze does not burn; it binds.

The placard beneath bears a single name, and two titles:

Lucien Vale

First Progenitor – The Crimson Monarch

He does not smile.

He does not rage.

He watches, as if he never truly left.

I remember him.

Not a warlord. Not a tyrant.

But a martyr king—the vampire sovereign who gave his life for the underworld.

An unstoppable force, yet noble.

Not forged in fire but carved from silence.

And tonight, that silence tilts toward the boy on the bridge.

A three‑thousand‑year slumber is about to end.

Hikaru Saito will awaken something greater in himself.