From the Journal of Elion Karsis
On the Covenant Amphitheatre
They call it clarification.
They always do.
The Covenant Amphitheatre sits beneath the Imperial Ward like a lung that breathes cruelty upward into the city. A perfect circle. No corners to hide intent. No shadows deep enough to pretend innocence. The floor shifts, reforms, opens, closes—mutable stone and brass responding to valves and dials turned by people who will never step onto it themselves.
Pink haemotechnical steam rises constantly, not to obscure the view, but to soften it. To make the blood look ceremonial. To make the screams feel processed.
This is where surplus humanity is resolved.
Children and adults are brought here.
Not always alone. Sometimes with siblings. Sometimes with parents forced to watch from the upper galleries, restrained, told that observation is participation in justice. The games change, but the logic does not. Race the floor before it collapses. Choose doors while the wrong ones seal permanently. Carry weighted relics until exhaustion decides who is unnecessary.
They say it teaches resilience.
They say it reveals aptitude.
They say the weak would not have survived the Night anyway.
I have seen people freeze—not from fear, but from comprehension. From realizing the rules are designed not to test skill, but hesitation. That mercy toward another contestant is punished. That cooperation is bait. That kindness is logged as inefficiency.
Some of them try to protect smaller ones. They fail quickly.
The Amphitheatre corrects them.
What enrages me is not the violence. Violence is honest. What enrages me is the lie that this is governance. That this is necessary. That this produces clarity instead of trauma that metastasizes through generations.
They call it covenant because it implies agreement.
There is none.
The ruling class watches from velvet balconies while brass gauges tick upward, measuring pulse rates, blood loss, reaction times. They speak of probability curves and acceptable attrition. They toast survivors as if survival under coercion is consent.
I have watched a child win.
They lifted her from the floor, bloodied but breathing, and declared her worthy of reassignment. She did not cry. She did not celebrate. She stared at the bodies around her with an expression I recognize too well.
She had learned the lesson.
Not how to live.
How to endure anything.
This is why the Forever Night must end.
Not because of vampires. Not because of darkness. But because systems like this do not arise accidentally. They are maintained. Curated. Defended with language until horror becomes administration.
The Amphitheatre does not exist to reduce numbers.
It exists to teach obedience through terror
and to convince survivors that they earned their continued existence.
I will not allow this to be reframed as culture.
I will not allow it to be archived as necessity.
I will not allow it to persist because people are tired.
If gods are watching, let them look here.
If they are silent, then silence will not save this place.
I do not seek to reform the Covenant Amphitheatre.
I seek to erase it so completely that no one remembers how easily the world agreed men, women and children could be used this way.
This is not spectacle.
This is a crime that repeats itself
because too many people have learned
to call survival
justice.