Reputation did not spread because Kael wanted it to.
It spread because people needed explanations.
Aerthyra was too large, too old, and too violent a world to accept coincidence comfortably. Things happened for reasons, or so people told themselves. When something broke that pattern—when a problem ended without a god's sign, a spell's flare, or a hero's banner—fear rushed in to fill the space where certainty should have lived.
And fear told stories.
A boy who killed monsters without spells.
A wanderer who refused to bargain with gods.
Someone who arrived quietly, solved a problem that had been gnawing at a place for months or years, and vanished before gratitude could harden into expectation.
People did not like unanswered questions.
So they answered them for themselves.
In one village, Kael was spoken of in hushed tones as a blessing—sent not by a god, but in spite of them. Mothers pressed their children close when he passed, then whispered prayers of thanks after he left, unsure who exactly they were thanking.
In another place, he was a curse. Crops failed the season after he dealt with a burrowing horror beneath the fields, and it was easier to blame the quiet stranger than accept that the land had simply been exhausted long before he arrived. His name—when they used one at all—was spat rather than spoken.
Along old caravan roads, rumors twisted further. Traders claimed he appeared before disasters, that wagons broke down only to be saved by his intervention, that beasts grew bold when he was near. Some swore they had seen him standing alone on ridgelines hours before storms hit, unmoving, as if waiting.
An omen that walked.
Kael heard these stories sometimes.
Not directly. Never directly.
He heard them in fragments—half-spoken warnings from innkeepers, the way guards' hands hovered closer to weapons when he approached, the careful distance people kept even while asking for help. He heard it in the way children stared, not with awe, but with curiosity sharpened by caution.
He never corrected them.
Correction required explanation.
Explanation required staying.
And staying was dangerous.
He learned quickly that reputation was not a single thing. It bent depending on who carried it and why. A desperate village saw him as hope. A threatened authority saw him as a variable. Priests who noticed his refusal to kneel saw him as something unfinished—an error the world had not yet resolved.
Once, in a border town built around an old stone bridge, a man confronted him openly.
"You think you're better than the gods?" the man demanded, breath thick with cheap ale and borrowed courage.
Kael looked at him for a long moment before answering.
"No," he said. "I think I'm irrelevant to them."
The man did not know what to do with that and eventually walked away.
That answer followed Kael farther than he expected.
Because gods tolerated defiance.
They did not tolerate irrelevance.
As Kael moved from place to place, the work grew heavier—not in difficulty, but in consequence. Killing a beast that threatened livestock was one thing. Ending something that had shaped a region's fear for generations was another.
In one valley, he destroyed a creature worshipped by a fringe cult—not because it was divine, but because it fed on belief, growing stronger each time someone feared it enough to kneel. When it died, the cult collapsed overnight. Some members thanked him. Others swore vengeance. All of them were suddenly free in ways they did not know how to handle.
In a coastal settlement, he refused payment after stopping something that dragged fishermen into the deep at night. He left before dawn. By the time the villagers woke, they had already decided he had been testing them.
"He wanted to see if we'd change," they told one another.
Kael had wanted only to leave.
Stories layered themselves over him the way dust layered over roads—thin at first, then thicker, then impossible to fully clear. Each retelling bent him further from truth and closer to myth.
Someone said he never slept.
Someone else swore he healed without scars.
Another claimed animals bowed their heads when he passed.
None of it was true.
Enough of it was close enough to make people uncomfortable.
Kael learned to read reputation the way he read terrain. In places where his name traveled ahead of him, he moved carefully. He chose which problems to solve and which to walk past. Some evils survived simply because drawing attention to them would cost more lives than it saved.
That, too, became part of his reputation.
"He doesn't help everyone," people said.
As if help were an obligation rather than a choice.
Kael learned something else during those years: reputation aged faster than people did. In a matter of months, stories hardened. Details sharpened or vanished entirely. Nuance died first.
He could feel when a place expected something from him before he arrived.
That expectation was more dangerous than any monster.
Expectation turned help into duty.
Duty turned presence into dependence.
Dependence attracted gods.
So Kael kept moving.
He stayed long enough to solve problems that could not be ignored. He left before gratitude could turn into worship or resentment into fixation. He did not correct lies because lies burned themselves out faster than truths ever did.
And slowly, without choosing it, he became something specific.
Not a hero.
Heroes stayed.
Not a savior.
Saviors were claimed.
He became a measure.
When people said, "Even Kael wouldn't take this job," danger was real.
When they said, "If Kael passed through here and didn't stop," something worse lay ahead.
The world adjusted around him.
And Kael walked on, knowing that every step forward made it harder to ever disappear again—but easier to remain himself.
Because the moment he stayed long enough to explain who he truly was, the world would decide what to do with him.
And he had seen enough of Aerthyra to know that most decisions were made with blood rather than understanding.