My Taboo Harem!

Some Legacy families were cursed.

Or at least, that was what the other families whispered behind silk fans and crystal glasses—those fortunate houses that had produced sons in generous abundance, who had secured their patriarchal succession for another generation, who could afford to look down upon the less fortunate with the particular, poisonous cruelty of the blessed observing the damned.

The curse had a name, though no one dared speak it aloud in polite company… Filial Extinction.

Through the long centuries since the Legacy bloodlines first manifested upon this world—since the Original Progenitors had walked among mortals and planted seeds of power that would bloom into dynasties—the families had obeyed one immutable law: patriarchal succession.

Sons inherited. Sons ruled. Sons carried the bloodline forward with the cold certainty of sunrise following night.

A male child born to a Legacy family was more than a blessing. He was a secured future. A promise kept and… a dynasty preserved.

A daughter was… something else.

Not lesser, oh, never lesser… Legacy daughters carried the same supremacy in their veins, the same terrible potential coiled within their marrow.

But daughters married. Daughters left. Daughters took their bloodline into other houses, and the cold mathematics of inheritance grew tangled in ways that made patriarchs lose sleep and consult ancient texts by flickering candlelight.

When a generation produced only daughters—or worse, only a single daughter—the family faced a choice that had shaped Legacy politics for millennia.

They married in.

A male from outside the Legacy families would be selected. Carefully. Deliberately. A man of acceptable breeding by mortal standards, of suitable station, of tolerable genetics—though in truth none of that mattered.

What mattered was simpler, crueler, more absolute: he would provide seed, and the children born of that union would carry only the bloodline of the Legacy mother.

This was not speculation. This was not hope… IT was immutable biological law since the Progenitors.

When a Legacy wed a non-Legacy, the children belonged entirely to the superior bloodline.

The mortal contribution vanished like morning mist before the furnace of supernatural heritage. Every gift, every power, every drop of potential in those children’s veins came from one source and one source alone.

The Legacy parent.

For example… Clara Moreau could marry whatever handsome Frenchman caught her family’s eye, and her children would still be Moreaus to the marrow—pure and undiluted, as though the father had contributed nothing beyond the mechanical requirements of conception.

This was how the Legacy families had survived for centuries. This was how bloodlines that should have withered into extinction continued to flourish. This was how families “cursed” with only daughters in one generation could still produce patriarchs in the next.

Men like Damien Ashford were living proof of such arrangements.

His mother had been the oldest daughter Ashford child of her generation but no male sibling but a little sister—a single daughter bearing the weight of an entire dynasty on her slender shoulders. She and her sister had married appropriately. Quietly. A man whose name history had already forgotten, because history only remembered the bloodlines that mattered.

And she had given birth to an heir but her sister did not.

Damien Ashford. Pure Ashford. Not a single drop of his father’s mundane heritage had survived the crucible of Legacy conception.

This was also how the Immediate families proliferated—cadet branches and lesser houses, descendants of Legacy daughters who had married out and produced children carrying diluted but still potent versions of the original bloodlines.

Close enough to taste true power. Yet so far enough to never quite grasp it.

Dean Dravenna Ashford was one such Immediate but from Damien’s mother sister who too had only gave birth to her and not a male—trusted enough to run the Academy but a core member and loved so much to create an enmity between Ashfords and Heavenchilds for how they caged her.

But this elegant system of controlled breeding and careful succession carried within it a terrible complication.

What happened when Legacy married Legacy?

The question had haunted the families since the earliest generations, when young heirs and heiresses had looked upon each other with equal parts desire and cold ambition—seeing not just beauty, but power; not just passion, but dynasty.

The answer had been written in blood and buried children.

Legacy bloodlines were all supreme. Each one purely and untainted since the generation of the progenitors who had walked between worlds. These bloodlines were aggressive. Territorial.

They did not share space within a single vessel any more than two apex predators could share a single hunting ground.

When a child was conceived from two Legacy parents, the bloodlines went to war.

Inside that tiny forming body, in the private darkness of the womb where no healer’s magical capabilities could reach, two supremacies clashed for dominance. Two inheritances fought to claim the vessel as their own.

Two powers—each accustomed to absolute rule—refused to yield.

The outcomes were limited… brutal and absolute.

Sometimes one bloodline dominated completely. The child would be born carrying only the victor’s heritage, the defeated bloodline crushed into nothingness as though it had never existed.

Such children were Legacy through and through—just Legacy of only one family.

Sometimes, impossibly rarely, both bloodlines survived.

These children were the true tragedies.

They would be born apparently healthy… they would grow through childhood showing no outward signs of the war being waged within their cells. They would live and laugh and love, never knowing that their own blood was a battlefield where no peace treaty could ever be signed.

Then adolescence would arrive—that sacred transition when Legacy bloodlines stirred from dormancy and granted their hosts supremacy that separated them from mere mortals.

And the child would die.

Screaming, usually. As two bloodlines that had coexisted in uneasy truce suddenly demanded full activation at the same moment. As powers that could not share space tore their vessel apart from within, each trying to awaken fully, neither willing to remain dormant.

The body caught between them like a man drawn and quartered by horses galloping in opposite directions.

Cripples, they were called in the old texts. Though “cripple” implied survival.

The truth was simpler.

They died.

Always.

Without exception.

Before their twentieth year, usually. Some during the stage itself. Some in the months after, as the failed activation poisoned them slowly from within.

This was why Legacy intermarriage remained rare. This was why families with abundance could afford the risk while families with scarcity could not. This was why political alliances between great houses were usually sealed with gold and contracts rather than wedding vows and children.

Although this did not stop some few intermarriages if the families could stomach the loss.

The Maxtons and Heavenchilds were connected by exactly such an arrangement.

Harold’s mother—the mother of Cassiopeia, Harold and Danny—was a Heavenchild by birth. A daughter of that apex family, given to the Maxtons in a union that had cemented alliance and consolidated power across Paradise.

Her three children had taken the Maxton bloodline. All of them. The Heavenchild supremacy within her had yielded to her husband’s heritage, and she had produced heirs who would continue his dynasty rather than her own.

Such arrangements required calculation. Required families with multiple children who could afford to lose one branch to another house’s bloodline. Required patriarchs willing to watch their daughters’ children carry other names.

But there was another issue now.

A complication that had begun to whisper through Legacy halls like the first cold wind of an approaching winter.

The last generations before the Destined Day.

The ancient texts spoke of it. The prophecies warned of it. The Progenitors themselves had left instructions that had been passed down through millennia, encoded in traditions and taboos that most modern Legacies followed without understanding why.

When the Destined Day approached, something changed.

The bloodlines grew hungry. Restless. The supernatural heritage that slumbered within Legacy bodies began to stir with increasing desperation, seeking… something. Demanding… something.

The old arrangements—the careful breeding, the controlled succession—began to break down in ways that terrified the patriarchs who understood what was coming.

And the daughters of the cursed families—the sole heirs, the only children, the girls who carried their bloodlines with no brothers to share the burden—faced a fate that no amount of marriage or politics could avoid.

Elena Ashford… Sole daughter of the main Ashford line.

Sierra Montgomery… Only child of the Montgomery patriarch.

Maddie Whitmore… Single heiress to the Whitmore oil dynasty.

Jade Park… Solitary daughter of the Park automotive empire.

Natasha Sinclair… Lone inheritor of Sinclair political influence.

Clara Moreau…. Only child of the ancient French fashion aristocracy.

Yuki Tanaka… Single daughter bearing the weight of Tanaka technological supremacy.

Priya Kapoor…. Sole heiress to the Kapoor pharmaceutical kingdom.

Juliette Howard…. Only daughter among brothers who could not save her from what was written in her blood.

All of them.

All of them were going to die.

The Destined Day did not discriminate. Did not negotiate. Did not care about wealth or beauty or power or the desperate prayers of families who had sacrificed everything to preserve their bloodlines.

It was coming.

And when it arrived, Legacy daughters without a male heir to absorb the burden—every sole inheritor, every only child, every princess who had been born alone into families that had been promised dynasties and given instead a single fragile vessel for all their hopes—would discover what it meant to carry a bloodline that refused to die quietly.

The Awakening was going to consume them.