A Forbidden Chronicle of Blood, Betrayal, and the Creature the Empire Tried to Erase

The Discovery That Should Have Stayed Buried

The leather-bound journal was never meant to survive the winter.
Its owner didn’t survive either.

In 1894, after a rockslide exposed an abandoned guard outpost near the northern American frontier, archeologists uncovered a rotting satchel sealed with wax from a long–extinct empire. Inside it lay the final written testimony of a young caretaker—Marco Álvarez, a man hired for a job no one else dared take. His notes were fragmented, water-damaged, but unmistakably real. They described a prison carved into the mountains… and a captive that defied every natural law known to science.

For decades the government sealed the discovery, classifying it under internal security protocols. When portions were leaked to historians in the 1960s, scholars dismissed the accounts as myth, folklore, or the hallucinations of a starving mountain laborer.

That theory collapsed the day the second journal was found.

What follows is the first complete reconstruction of the events, pieced together from the original journal fragments, military manifests, oral mountain lore, missing-persons logs, and the testimonies of the last living witnesses.
It is not a legend.
It is a record.

And it begins the morning the emissaries arrived.

I. The Summons No Man Wanted

Villagers would later say the hoofbeats sounded wrong that morning—too heavy, too deliberate. When the emissaries entered the square, sunlight clattered off their armor like cold fire. At their head rode a broad-shouldered Mongol soldier whose left eye had been stitched permanently shut, the scar puckered like a warning.

He carried a black pouch. He carried authority.
He carried death.

When he announced the job—“The Khan seeks a caretaker. Five taels a month.”—the plaza filled with murmurs, raised eyebrows, then dread.

And when he added “The work is in the forbidden northern mountains”, the crowd dissolved like water into earth.

Only one man remained standing:
Marco, twenty-something, unemployed fourteen months, mother bedridden since the rains.

Desperation has a scent.
The emissary recognized it.

What Marco could not yet know was that the empire wasn’t offering wages.
It was offering a sacrifice.

II. The Law of Cursed Jobs

Marco’s mother tried to stop him—with warnings, with superstition, with fear sharpened by poverty. But hunger wins more arguments than reason.

On the fourth day of travel, after carts, barges, a mute driver, and a trail that felt carved by ghosts, he reached Blackstone Outpost: a tower of black rock, two guards, and a map pointing toward a narrow, deadly trail.

“The last caretaker lasted three weeks,” one guard said.
“They found him running barefoot in the valley.”

What was he running from?

No one volunteered the answer.

III. The Creature in Chains

The trail nearly killed him.
The fog tried to swallow him.
The bridge tried to throw him into the abyss.

But what truly threatened his sanity waited inside the mountain prison.

He first heard it before he saw it—chains scraping stone, slow, deliberate, patterned. Not an animal’s rhythm. Not quite human either.

When he left the first offering of dried fish outside the bars, something moved.
Something large.
Something aware.

Two green eyes opened in the dark.

They were not hungry.
They were intelligent.

IV. What the Empire Captured

The journals describe her only with fragments at first:

A silhouette. A woman’s outline. A pelt soft and speckled. Jewelry made of old gold. Hands that were almost human—too human. Strength enough to drag a grown man. Eyes that could hold you still… and end you.

Her name would come much later: Fleina, one of the “northern kin”—a species the empire had hunted, feared, and erased from its records.

But on that first night, she did not attack him.
She watched him.
Studied him.
Waited.

Why?

V. Hunger, Wolves, and the First Blood

The old caretaker had warned him:

“Keep the fire alive. Wolves come at night.”

He hadn’t warned what would happen if the fire died.

Marco learned that lesson when the wolves arrived—eyes, dozens of them, circling the camp. With the flames dead and nowhere to run, he chose the only place left:

Inside the cell.
With her.

By morning, the wolves were gone.
So was his certainty that she was a monster.

VI. The Weeks the Empire Never Accounted For

Routine became survival.
Survival became curiosity.
Curiosity became… something the journal never fully names.

He fed her.
She approached the bars.
Their fingers brushed.
Not by accident.

The empire thought it was imprisoning a beast.
But Marco was slowly discovering the truth:

She wasn’t their prisoner. She was their secret.
A secret worth killing for.

VII. The Day the Emissaries Returned

Two soldiers arrived for monthly inspection. They expected a starving creature. A degrading spectacle.

They mocked her.
They threw stones.
They grabbed Marco by the throat and pressed him against the bars.

That was their mistake.

A flash.
A scream.
Blood.
A body collapsing.

The creature the empire feared didn’t hesitate to defend the only human who had shown her mercy.

VIII. The Escape That Altered History

Marco killed the second emissary, driven not by rage but by the knowledge that the empire would torture his mother if the truth came out.

He broke her chains.

For the first time, Fleina stepped out of the cell and spoke:

“Take me to my territory.”

Her voice was deep, melodic, unmistakably human.

Wrapped in a dead soldier’s cloak, she walked beside him—not as a beast, but as a woman who had survived captivity… and who understood the cost of freedom.

Hand in hand, they vanished into the mountain fog.

What happened after remains disputed.
What they found—or what found them—is still redacted in surviving documents.

The journal breaks off there.
But the second recovered journal—written decades later in the voice of a woman with speckled fur and human eyes—suggests Marco lived long enough to learn the truth of her people.

A truth the empire feared.

IX. The Missing Pages the Government Still Refuses to Release

Why was Fleina captured?
Why was her species erased from records?
How many caretakers died before Marco?
What did the empire fear so deeply that they built a prison in the mountains of the American frontier?

The answers exist.
Locked in archives.
Buried in witness accounts.
Echoing in the legends of the northern tribes.

This article presents the facts we can prove.
The rest?
Still sealed under “national historical security.”

But one line in Marco’s journal—barely legible, written in trembling strokes—has never been explained:

“She was not the last of her kind.
But I may be the last to tell the truth.”

X. The Unanswered Questions That Still Haunt Historians

If Fleina survived… where did she go?
If more of her kind exist… why has no one seen them?
If Marco disappeared… who wrote the final pages of the second journal?

And the darkest question of all:
If the empire once hunted her people… what stopped them?

Some say it was mercy.
Others say it was fear.

But those who have studied the final, forbidden testimonies whisper a different theory—one so unsettling scholars refuse to publish it.

Because if the northern kin still live in the mountains…

They are not hiding.
They are watching.
And they remember.

 

XI. The Woman in the Snow

Three days after their escape, the storm finally broke.
The mountains fell silent—too silent.

Marco woke first. Fleina was already standing, unmoving, her eyes fixed on a point beyond the frost-coated trees.

“What is it?” he whispered.

She didn’t answer. Her breath misted in slow, controlled rhythms. Then she said:

“Someone follows us.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the cold crawled up Marco’s spine.
He scanned the ridge but saw nothing—no tracks, no broken branches.

“Who?” he asked.

Fleina closed her eyes. “Not the empire. Not wolves. Someone older.”

Older?
Older than the empire?
Older than the mountains themselves?

That was the moment Marco realized something terrible:

Fleina wasn’t running from the empire.
She was running from something she refused to name.

And it was catching up.

XII. The Man With the Black Lantern

Near dusk, they reached an abandoned trading post. Only bones and rusted tools remained—an American frontier settlement swallowed by snow decades earlier.

The moment they stepped inside, Fleina froze.

A lantern sat on the table.
Jet black.
Unlit.
But warm.

Marco turned to Fleina.

“Yours?”

She shook her head.
Her voice dropped to a whisper:

“It belonged to a keeper.”

“A keeper like me?”

“No,” she said. “A keeper of us.”

Before Marco could ask more, a sound echoed across the cabin walls:

A cane tapping ice.
Slow.
Measured.

A figure approached through the snow—cloaked in furs, face hidden, carrying another black lantern.

Fleina’s fur rippled with fear.
Fear so sharp Marco felt it like a wound.

“Do not look at him,” she whispered. “Do not speak. If he speaks to you, run.”

Marco had survived wolves, soldiers, and the empire’s lies.
He wasn’t prepared for the man who opened the door.

Because the first thing the stranger said was Marco’s name.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

XIII. The Last Archivist

He removed his hood.

His face was deeply lined, eyes entirely white—yet he moved without hesitation, without the confusion blindness should have brought.

“I am The Archivist,” he said. “Last of the record-keepers of the northern kin.”

Fleina bowed her head, trembling.

“You abandoned us,” she said.

“No,” he replied. “We were forbidden to intervene. Forbidden by the war your kind started centuries ago.”

Marco stepped between them.

“What war? She’s done nothing!”

The Archivist placed a bony hand on Marco’s shoulder.
The room shifted. The air thickened.

“History chooses no sides,” the old man murmured. “Only witnesses.”

And then the lanterns ignited with a sound like tearing fabric—filling the cabin with swirling visions.

Marco saw:

• Fleina’s people—tall, furred, beautiful—living among the mountains
• humans hunting them
• treaties made, then broken
• an ancient pact that demanded one northern kin must always remain in captivity to preserve peace

And finally—

• Fleina as a child, being taken by soldiers
• A man screaming her name
• A figure with green eyes shouting: “Take me instead!”

Marco staggered.
He had seen those eyes before.

“Who was that?” he whispered.

Fleina didn’t answer.

The Archivist did:

“Her father.”

XIV. The Debt of Blood

The Archivist turned his blind gaze toward Fleina.

“You should not have escaped. The pact is broken.”

Fleina’s voice quivered with rage.

“You left me to rot!”

“You were the last daughter of the northern kin,” the Archivist replied. “Your captivity protected your people. Your escape endangers them.”

Marco stepped forward.

“There are more of her kind?”

The old man nodded.
“Hidden. Waiting. Watching you, even now.”

Marco swallowed hard.

“But why can’t she go back to them?”

The Archivist’s expression was carved from regret.

“Because the empire has found their hidden valley.”

Silence.
Thick.
Suffocating.

Fleina collapsed to her knees, a sound escaping her that was not quite a cry.

Marco knelt beside her.

“What do they want?” he asked softly.

The Archivist answered with three words that changed everything:

“They want extinction.”

XV. The Burning of the Valley

The Archivist led them through a hidden mountain path. By dawn, smoke filled the air—black smoke, thick and unnatural.

When they reached the ridge, Marco’s breath shattered.

Below them stretched a valley Marco had never known existed—vast, breathtaking, wild.
A sanctuary.

And it was burning.

Dozens of imperial soldiers marched through flames.
Creatures like Fleina—some smaller, some towering—fled in every direction.

Men shouted. Guns cracked.
Bodies fell.

Fleina clutched Marco’s hand so tightly he bled.

“This is because of me,” she whispered.
“No,” Marco said. “This is because of them.”

The Archivist gripped Marco’s shoulder.

“You can still save her. But to save her people…”
He hesitated.
“…You must become their final keeper.”

“What does that mean?” Marco demanded.

The old man didn’t answer.

Not with words.

He placed something in Marco’s palm:
A chain of bone, carved with ancient symbols, warm to the touch.

The Mark of the Keeper.

The weight of responsibility.
The weight of sacrifice.

XVI. The Oath of the Keeper

Smoke burned Marco’s lungs. Screams tore through the valley.
Fleina’s people were dying.

Marco closed his hand over the bone chain.

“What do I have to do?”

The Archivist spoke like a judge delivering a sentence older than language.

“You must bring her back to captivity.”

Marco recoiled.
“No! I won’t imprison her!”

“You misunderstand,” the Archivist said.
“Captivity is not a cage. It is a covenant.”

Fleina turned to Marco, tears streaking through the frost on her fur.

“If I return,” she whispered, “the soldiers will stop hunting my people.”

“No,” Marco said. “There must be another way.”

“There isn’t,” the Archivist replied.
“The empire honors only one law: the law of exchange.”

Marco felt the world tilt beneath him.

Exchange?
Exchange for what?

The Archivist placed a hand over Marco’s heart.

“For her freedom… they will take yours.”

XVII. The Choice

Flames devoured the valley.
Gunshots echoed across the mountains.
Soldiers advanced toward the last group of fleeing northern kin.

Marco faced Fleina.

“You saved my life,” he said.
“You saved mine,” she answered.

“I won’t let them take you again.”
“And I won’t let my people die.”

The Archivist’s voice cut through the smoke.

“Choose.”

Marco closed his eyes.

He thought of the prison.
The chains.
The darkness.
The years of isolation.

He thought of Fleina’s hand in his.
The calm in her eyes.
The way she said his name.

And then he made the only choice a man like him could make.

He handed her the bone chain.

“I’ll go back,” he whispered.
“But you will live free.”

Fleina let out a sound—half sob, half snarl of grief.

“No… Marco, no.”

He touched her face gently.

“Go. Protect them. Remember me.”

The Archivist nodded solemnly.

“So be it.”

Marco turned to the burning valley.
To the soldiers.
To destiny.

And walked toward the men who would take him.

XVIII. The Last Thing She Ever Saw

Fleina watched him descend the ridge.

One soldier spotted him.
Raised his weapon.
Shouted.

Marco lifted his hands.

The Archivist spoke a word.
The wind shifted.
A barrier of shimmering light surrounded Fleina and the remaining northern kin.

They were safe.

Marco was not.

The last image Fleina ever saw of Marco Álvarez was this:

A lone man standing in the snow, hands raised, offering himself as the final keeper so her people could live.

Then the soldiers reached him.
The smoke swallowed him whole.

Fleina screamed his name.

The mountains echoed it back.

XIX. The Prison With No Doors

Marco expected chains.
He expected darkness.
He expected torture.

But what he found… was worse.

The empire did not put him back inside the mountain cell.
They built a new prison—for him alone.

A circular stone chamber.
No windows.
No doors.
No bars.

Only a single slit in the ceiling, dripping meltwater in slow, maddening drops.

A voice echoed above:

“Marco Álvarez. You are now the Keeper.”

He recognized the voice—General Ishida, commander of frontier operations.

“You will live here,” Ishida continued. “Your life guarantees the safety of the northern kin. As long as you breathe… we will leave them alone.”

Marco shouted until his throat tore.

No answer.
Only the dripping water.
Drop by drop.
Second by second.
A slow execution—not of the body, but the mind.

And yet… Marco clung to one truth:

Fleina was free.

That alone kept him sane.

For now.

XX. The War That Should Have Ended

Far beyond the prison, Fleina’s people mourned what remained of the valley.

Survivors gathered around her, whispering:

“He gave himself for us…”
“A human took our burden…”
“Why would he do that?”

Fleina said nothing.

Grief and guilt carved a hollow place inside her—deeper than any wound the empire could inflict.

Her people urged her to lead them.
But she refused.

“How can I lead,” she whispered, “while the man who freed me sits in chains made for my kind?”

The Archivist bowed before her.

“You cannot return to him.”

“I must.”

“You will die.”

“Then I die.”

But the Archivist stepped closer.

“There is one thing you must know, Fleina. The empire lied. Marco is not simply their hostage. He is their weapon.”

Fleina’s breath caught.

“What weapon?”

The Archivist closed his eyes.

“They intend to use the Keeper to find the rest of your kind.”

The floor seemed to tilt beneath her paws.

“How?”

“Through the bond.”

“What bond?”

The Archivist’s voice cracked—old guilt spilling free:

“The bond you formed with him in the prison was real. They can sense you through him.”

Fleina collapsed.

The empire didn’t free her people.

They marked them.

XXI. The Mind That Would Not Bend

Inside the prison, Marco began to hear whispers.

Voices.
Soft at first.
Then clear.
Then commanding.

“Where are they, Marco?”
“Where do they hide?”
“Let us in—show us her face.”

He grabbed his skull, nails digging into his scalp.

“Get out of my head!”

But the voices were not hallucinations.
The empire’s scholars stood above the chamber, using forbidden techniques.
Marco’s bond with Fleina had created a path.

A path they wanted to pry open.

Again the voice pressed:

“Show us the northern kin.”

Marco screamed, clenching his jaw until he tasted blood.

He pictured snow.
Darkness.
Silence.

Anything to hide her.

But the pressure grew.

And then—

He felt Fleina.

Not as a memory
Not as a dream
But as a presence—warm, bright, trembling.

She was looking for him.

The empire sensed it instantly.

“There,” a soldier gasped. “The link—strengthening—”

“Push harder!” Ishida barked.

Marco roared in pain.
And then, through the agony, he managed one broken whisper:

“Fleina… run…”

XXII. The Decision That Split a Tribe

The northern kin council gathered.
Fleina stood before them, still shaking from the moment she felt Marco’s torment through the bond.

“We must leave these mountains,” she said.
“They will track us. They will destroy us.”

A chieftain answered:

“And where will we go? The world killed us once. It will kill us again.”

Another added:

“Why should we save humans? They never saved us.”

But an elder female stepped forward.

“He saved one of us. That counts.”

Arguments erupted.
Voices clashed like blades.

Some wanted to flee south.
Some wanted to fight.
Some wanted to abandon Fleina completely.

Then the Archivist raised his staff.

“Silence.”

All obeyed.

“We face two truths,” he said.
“One: Marco Álvarez is suffering because of our ancient laws.
Two: If we do nothing, the empire will find us through him.”

The council murmured.

Fleina whispered:

“So we must free him.”

The Archivist met her gaze.

“Yes. But freeing him will break the covenant forever. The moment he escapes—war begins.”

Fleina lifted her chin.

“Then let it begin.”

XXIII. The Monster the Empire Created

Back in the circular chamber, Marco lay trembling on the floor.
His heartbeat slowed.
His thoughts blurred.
His memories slipped like water through fingers.

He wondered if this was how the previous caretakers died—not by violence, but by unraveling.

Then General Ishida descended the ladder, boots clanging against iron steps.

He studied Marco like a scientist examining a specimen.

“You surprise me,” Ishida said. “Most men break within a week.”

Marco managed a weak laugh.

“Sorry… to disappoint.”

Ishida crouched beside him.

“We don’t want to hurt you, Marco. We only want her location.”

Marco spat blood at his boots.

“You’ll never… have her.”

Ishida sighed.

“Then we will remake you.”

He nodded to two soldiers.

They lowered a device into the chamber—iron needles, coils, humming with unnatural energy.

Marco tried to crawl away.

The device activated.

Pain swallowed him.

But beneath the agony, something else stirred—

A pulse.
A surge.
A wildness not his own.

Fleina’s instinct.
Fleina’s strength.

The bond worked both ways.

XXIV. The Night the Mountains Howled Back

The empire’s search parties swept through the forests.
Torches.
Dogs.
Rifles.

They moved with confidence.

Until the mountains answered.

A howl tore through the sky—deep, ancient, thunderous.

Soldiers froze.

Another howl.
Then another.
Then dozens.

Green eyes flickered through the trees.

The northern kin had chosen their side.

They struck with the force of an avalanche.

Claws.
Fangs.
Stone-hardened muscle.

Soldiers fell.
Torches died.
The search parties screamed into the night.

And leading the charge—
Covered in ash and snow, eyes burning—

Fleina.

XXV. The Breaking of the Covenant

The Archivist led Fleina and a small war party to the hidden prison.
It stood like a metal wart against the mountainside.

Inside, Marco lay unconscious, the device still gnawing at his mind.

Fleina rushed forward, ripping the machine from his body with a snarl.

His eyes fluttered open.

“…Fleina?”

She touched his face.
“Marco. I’m here.”

He exhaled a broken laugh.

“I told you… run…”

“Not without you.”

The Archivist placed his hand over Marco’s heart.

“You understand what freeing him means.”

Fleina nodded.

“Yes. The covenant ends tonight.”

The Archivist whispered an ancient phrase—words older than any empire.

The bone chain shattered.

A shockwave ripped through the mountains.
Ice cracked.
Winds roared.
The sky itself trembled.

The empire felt it instantly.

“This is it,” Ishida whispered from his outpost.
“They’ve broken the covenant.”

He turned toward his officers.

“Prepare the annihilation order.”

XXVI. The First Dawn of War

Marco stood shakily, leaning on Fleina.

“Your people… the valley… did they survive?”

She nodded.
“Some. Enough.”

“And now?”

She looked toward the horizon—toward the empire’s fortresses, their armies, their machines.

“Now,” she said softly, “they will come for all of us.”

Marco squeezed her hand.

“Then we fight together.”

The Archivist raised his lantern.
Its flame burned black.

“War begins at sunrise.”

And as the first light crested the peaks, reflecting off snow like shattered glass, Marco saw them:

Hundreds of northern kin emerging from the forests.
Warriors.
Survivors.
A nation reborn.

Fleina stepped beside him.

“Marco… are you afraid?”

He nodded.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she whispered.
“It means you’re still human.”

Then the war drums began.

And the mountains themselves seemed to rise.