The chains were too tight for a child.
Iron links, rusted and stained with old blood, cut into his wrists as the cart jostled through the mountain pass. Every bump sent pain flaring up his arms, but Kael didn't make a sound. He had stopped crying days ago. Or maybe weeks. It was hard to tell. Time blurred when you were bound, starved, and paraded like livestock through the frozen spine of the Ashen Peaks.
Around him, robed men chanted in low, droning voices, as if trying to lull the gods awake. Their faces were hidden by veils of ash, their fingers clutched bone talismans and jagged prayer knives. Kael didn't know their names. He didn't care to. They were the ones who came after the screaming stopped. After the smoke rose. After his home—his family—was taken.
He wasn't supposed to live.
But the gods, they said, had chosen him.
That word again chosen.
It echoed in his head like a curse. As if being shackled, dragged through snow, and offered like meat to some ancient altar was a gift. As if the gods had ever cared about what he wanted.
The cart finally came to a halt. The torches flickered against frostbitten wind. In the distance, rising like a jagged tooth from the cliffside, stood the Temple of Ashmoor. A cathedral carved into the bones of the mountain, its once-grand spires now blackened and broken, like a carcass left to rot.
The guards dismounted. Kael's numb legs crumpled beneath him when they yanked him out, but they didn't stop to let him stand. Two pairs of hands dragged him through the snow and stone, through the broken archway into the hollow cathedral where light didn't dare linger.
The air changed inside. Warm, thick, stinking of incense and rot. Bones crunched underfoot—hundreds of them, maybe more—brittle remnants of past offerings. Every step felt like walking through the belly of a beast that had forgotten how to die.
High Priest Malreck stood waiting before the altar.
His robes were stitched from the skin of beasts and men alike, layered with glyphs that pulsed faintly in the firelight. His face was old but untouched by age, his eyes sharp as obsidian.
"Lay him down," he said, voice echoing off stone and shadow.
Kael was thrown onto the altar. The stone was too cold to be real. It hummed beneath him, like it had a heartbeat of its own.
Malreck raised his hands, addressing the silent, watching congregation of veiled priests.
"Tonight," he said, "the Covenant is renewed. The boy's blood shall open the Vein once more. Through pain, we buy peace. Through death, we earn favor."
The others bowed.
Kael didn't move.
His eyes stared upward, to the hollow dome overhead, where once there had been a mural of the old gods—now shattered, cracked, and scorched by centuries of sacrificial fire. He tried not to be afraid. But fear had claws, and it dug in deep.
Malreck approached the altar. In his hands, he held a ceremonial blade—long, thin, jagged like a lightning bolt. It had tasted the blood of hundreds, maybe thousands.
"This is an honor," the priest whispered, more to himself than to the boy. "You should be proud."
Kael turned his head slightly. Just enough to meet the priest's gaze.
"I hope they choke on me," he said.
Malreck blinked, the faintest crack in his mask.
Then he plunged the blade down.
But the moment steel touched skin—
The altar screamed.
Not a sound, but a feeling—deep, bone-shattering, wrong. The stone beneath Kael pulsed, cracked, and split down its center with a sound like thunder. Red light bled from the fracture. The flames in the braziers turned black. Whispers filled the chamber, too many voices, too fast to understand.
Malreck stumbled back. "What is this?!"
Kael gasped, but not in pain.
It felt like something ancient was waking up inside him.
A warmth surged through his veins—not fire, not light, but something colder. Older. A memory not his own. Something buried.
The chains snapped.
The glyphs on the altar flared, then shattered like glass.
And in the chaos, Kael stood.
His silhouette burned against the red glow as the world around him began to collapse. The priests screamed. The walls cracked. The gods—if they were watching—turned their faces away.
And in that moment, with blood dripping from his chest and power crackling at his fingertips, Kael was reborn.
Not as an offering.
Not as a martyr.
But as a curse.