Page 7 of The Sin Binder's Chains

Lucien

Luna walks beside me, her pulse a steady rhythm in the air, but something about her is… shifting. I don’t have to look to know she’s reaching out again, testing the frayed bonds between her and the ones we lost. I can feel it, the subtle pulse of magic stretching thin between worlds. It’s weak, barely more than a whisper, but it’s there.

She is adapting.

Faster than she should be. Faster than any Sin-Binder before her.

And that is the problem.

I keep my gaze fixed ahead, but my thoughts slip backward, unraveling into things I have not let myself dwell on in centuries.

She doesn’t know what she is yet. Not really. Not the depth of what she has inherited. We have always been here. Not just since the Academy. Not just since the kingdoms that rose and fell like tides. Not just since the first whispers of civilization clawed their way into existence.

Before the first mortal city was carved from stone. Before men knew how to name the things they desired.

We were before.

The Original Sins.

We did not belong to any one world. We moved between them as we pleased, untethered, unburdened. We were not created toserve or be ruled, we simply were. A force as natural as hunger, as inevitable as death.

Humans were never meant to survive us.

They were meant to fall into us.

And they did. They indulged, they craved, they raged, they became us. And the world unmade itself in our wake, over and over, because that is what happens when mortals are given no restraints. No guiding hand. No balance.

They would have destroyed themselves entirely. Until something saw what we were doing and decided it had to end. The first Sin-Binder.

A woman, woven from something incorruptible. Designed to be a force of balance, an anchor to bind us to the world without letting us destroy it. She was meant to be pure. Untouched by greed, by indulgence, by wrath, by us.

And at first, she was.

The first of her kind was everything she was intended to be. An unshakable hand, a force of will as strong as the magic that held us to her. We fought against her. Raged against her. But she never took more than she needed. Never wielded us selfishly.

But that was the exception.

Not the rule.

The others who followed her were not so pure. They were human. And humans are flawed. Some grew addicted to the power they were never meant to have. Some wielded us against one another, playing games with forces they barely understood. Some took and took and took until the balance was destroyed.

And then, they were destroyed.

The force that created them did not allow corruption.

It cleansed. It wiped them from existence as easily as the tide erases footprints in the sand. One after another, burnedfrom history, reduced to nothing. And every time a Binder fell, another was made in her place.

For thousands of years, the cycle continued.

Sin and balance. Chaos and order. Over and over.

Until we arrived here.

Until her.

I don’t know what will happen to her. I don’t know if she is meant to be different. But I know what happens when a Sin-Binder fails. And I will not let history repeat itself.

Not this time.

---