Villa Exactum
Terminus, Obsidian Heights
A Biopic of Return, as seen by Vakhari Korden
They had not told her what to expect—not really. A letter dressed in alchemically pressed parchment, sealed with wax that pulsed faintly as if it bled. It gave no image, no forecast. Merely a name. A claim.
"You belong to House Lutris. Come home."
Now, as the transport's hiss gave way to the biting, sterile wind of Terminus's upper atmosphere, Vakhari stood at the threshold of a world she never asked for.
Before her sprawled Villa Exactum, the Lutris Family Estate, if such a word could even describe what rose before her. It was not a villa. It was a monument to engineered legacy, a surgically beautiful edifice of obsidian and intention, rising like a spine cracked from the planet's crust and left jutting against the sky.
The walls shimmered faintly, polished to a glasslike sheen. They reflected nothing.
The estate stood in silence, not welcoming, but watching. There were no guards in sight—only servitor droids sculpted like statues, fused to alcoves along the causeway. Some turned as she approached, subtle lenses within sculpted eyes pulsing to life. One twitched as she passed, emitting a high-frequency chirp only something like M0rtis might have noticed.
The causeway itself was too clean. Every step felt sacramental. Beneath her boots, the stone shimmered with embedded micro-circuitry—bloodline sensors, she realized. Not security. Recognition.
The air smelled of disinfected history. Incense laced with formaldehyde. Wind carrying the faint ozone of bio-reactors deeper within.
The front of the manor was carved from blackstone and inlaid with gene-coded sigils. The serpent curled in infinity. The ruby eye above obsidian. Each was etched in gold and silver, not as embellishment, but declaration. They pulsed faintly as she passed.
Tall columns bore faces—not sculpted statues, but castings. Preserved masks. Portraiture of former family members pressed into alloy: expressionless, but unmistakably real. One of them—paler than the rest—stared a moment too long before the lighting shifted and she realized it wasn't staring at all.
To the locals, the estate was simply known as The Spire—but here, within its walls, it was something else.
Inside, sterility ruled. Not the clean comfort of hospitals, but the surgical precision of laboratories. Floors of hematite and onyx, arranged in angular fractals, refracted her reflection back in unsettling tessellation. Walls bore bone-white inlays, woven with microscopic etchings—memory-scripts, she would later learn. Silent archives embedded into the very structure, always listening.
Lighting came from nowhere, cold and even, giving no sense of time. Each room hummed faintly, the sound of air filtration, data streaming, and distant heartbeats. Not hers.
As she moved deeper, servants materialized from nowhere—expressionless, hairless, their faces marked with non-verbal servitor sigils in place of eyes or mouths. Not droids. Not quite human. They took her bags without words and vanished through seamlessly sliding partitions.
One corridor she passed bore rows of doors. At each stood a recess—half-display, half-vault. Within floated preserved spines, embedded with glowing crystals. The Mark of the Chosen, she would come to understand. Their ancestors didn't die here. They were repurposed.
In the atrium stood the mirror of judgment—a vast, circular room where polished blacksteel walls refracted her image dozens of times over, as if testing her. Watching her soul from every angle.
And ahead, finally, the inner gate of the family wing: silver-wrought, curved like a serpent's fang. Etched with script that refused to sit still.
A figure awaited her in that threshold: draped in obsidian robes, a coat moving as though the air bent around it. Face cast in partial shadow. She recognized nothing—and yet her breath caught.
This place remembered her, even if she had forgotten it.
Villa Exactum was not a home. It was an argument.
Every surface, every rune, every shadow whispered the same thing:
"You were made. You were measured. You are not finished."
Even as warmth began to build in her chest, Vakhari knew it for what it was—not nostalgia, but recognition. A primal resonance tugged at her bones, her blood. Here, family was not kin. It was design.
And she had returned to be... evaluated.
Vakhari Lutris
soon after, a message there in given with a bow and ritual. It was old fashioned, far too old fashioned to be anything but flair, but its message rang true;
