The path spat them out into silence.
No celebration. No fires. No drums.
Just a straight, narrow corridor of blackened stone that led toward a throne carved from melted iron and bone. The walls on either side were lined with the statues of former initiates, some triumphant, some shattered, some missing their heads.
The cult called this place The Maw.
Those who entered left as one of two things: Graduates or ghosts.
Kael and Seret stepped forward, footsteps echoing like distant thunder. They were stripped of their weapons. Clad in ash-gray robes. No masks. No sigils. Just two silhouettes against the looming dark.
The Flayer awaited on the throne.
His face was still shrouded, wrapped in the same bloodied linen he'd worn the day they were taken. But now, his eyes glowed through the cloth. Two burning pinpricks of malice and amusement.
"Children," he crooned. "You've made it through the belly of the beast."
Kael didn't respond.
His blood still buzzed from the forest.
Seret's hands twitched at her sides, fingers curling unconsciously.
The Flayer leaned forward.
"But the belly is not the end. It is digestion. The true trial, the truth of power, comes when we ask the final question."
He raised a hand.
And the far wall opened with a grinding groan.
A figure stepped out.
Or rather, it crawled.
It looked like a boy their age. Or what was left of one. Shaved head. Hollow eyes. Nails torn out. Skin carved with runes and brands. A collar fused to his throat, chained to a harness that was part of his spine.
Kael remembered him.
His name had been Miren.
He had disappeared two years ago during a failed mission.
The Flayer chuckled.
"Your brother in blood. Your shadow in suffering. A failure, until we repurposed him."
Miren stood upright now.
Something inside him clicked.
His jaw unhinged, mouth stretching wider than natural, metal teeth glinting from within. Arms thickened, veins bulging black beneath skin that had forgotten what healing meant.
Seret stepped between them instinctively.
"Is this the test? Fight a broken dog for your amusement?"
"No," the Flayer whispered. "The test is what you do when faced with something that was once your friend."
Miren moved like lightning.
Seret barely dodged the first strike.
His clawed hand scraped her shoulder, leaving behind four jagged gashes that hissed and steamed as blood hit the floor. Kael moved to intercept, his body remembering the rhythm of combat even while his mind screamed.
Miren turned to him.
Not snarling.
Smiling.
A smile that had too many teeth.
He leapt.
Kael blocked with his forearm.
Flesh tore.
Bone cracked.
Kael dropped to one knee.
Seret was already behind Miren, slashing with the chain she'd hidden in her robes. It wrapped around Miren's neck, biting in, but he didn't choke. Instead, he pulled her forward, flipping her over his shoulder and slamming her into the stone floor with enough force to crack it.
Kael rose, panting.
His robe was shredded.
He kicked off the remains and stood bare-chested, bleeding, muscles tense.
This was no friend.
This was a weapon. Like they'd wanted him to become.
The Flayer spoke again.
"Kill him, Kael. Do what he couldn't. Graduate."
Kael didn't respond.
He ducked under another strike.
Countered with a jab to the throat. It stunned Miren long enough for Seret to sweep his legs out from under him. They moved in tandem, silent, brutal, efficient. They'd fought together for too long. They knew each other's rhythms. Trusted each other's timing.
But Miren adapted.
Too fast.
He caught Kael's wrist mid-strike and bit down.
Kael screamed as his flesh tore open.
Seret shoved a shard of stone into Miren's eye socket.
It didn't kill him.
But it bought time.
They fell back, panting.
Blood everywhere.
Kael's arm hung uselessly at his side.
Seret whispered, "He's not stopping."
Kael nodded.
"I know."
"Do we kill him?"
The question hung there.
Heavy.
Unfair.
Kael stepped forward.
"Not we," he said. "Me."
Miren lunged.
Kael didn't dodge.
He stepped into the blow.
Took the claws to the ribs.
And hugged Miren.
Arms around the monster.
Tight.
"I'm sorry," Kael whispered. "I should've looked for you."
Miren shuddered.
Hesitated.
Kael's fingers closed around the broken dagger hilt strapped to his thigh.
He drove it into the base of Miren's skull.
Quick.
Merciful.
Miren's body convulsed.
And collapsed.
The chamber went still.
The Flayer stood.
Clapping slowly.
"You killed him with mercy. Interesting. Soft. But not weak."
He raised his hand.
Cultists emerged from hidden doors.
All silent.
All masked.
The Flayer's voice thundered:
"Let it be known, Kael and Seret have passed. They are no longer children of the Hollow. They are Sons of Ash."
Kael dropped to his knees.
Not in submission.
In exhaustion.
And Seret stood behind him.
Watching.
Not the Flayer.
But Kael.
Worried.
Because something inside him had shifted.
And the forest wasn't done with him yet.
Freedom didn't feel like freedom.
It felt like waking up in someone else's skin.
The Hollow had released them, briefly. Not out of kindness, but necessity. The cult needed time to arrange their new identities, forge records, position them like pawns into the political boardgame that was the Academy of Bastivar. Until then, Kael and Seret were permitted to exist outside of chains, outside of training pits and blood rites.
They were given a house.
Small. Remote. Half-buried in a cliffside forest that stank of wet moss and old ghosts. It sat at the edge of the Obsidian Ridge, where black stone bled silver in the moonlight and the wind howled like it was mourning something ancient. The cult called this land The Cradle of Iron, a place where old weapons rusted and old warriors came to disappear.
Kael and Seret were the youngest ghosts to haunt it.
They arrived without fanfare, escorted by a silent wagon and two masked handlers who vanished before the sun touched the treetops. No instructions. No schedules. Just a set of keys and a note scratched into flayed parchment: "Make yourselves whole. You'll need to be."
Kael read it once. Then burned it.
The first few days passed in a haze.
Kael didn't speak much. He woke before dawn, trained until he bled, then wandered the woods until night swallowed him whole. He ate in silence, bathed in silence, dreamed in silence. The nightmares never really left, they just changed costumes.
Sometimes they wore Miren's face.
Sometimes his mother's.
Sometimes the Flayer's eyes glowed in the dark above his bed, laughing silently as Kael choked on screams he never released.
Seret tried to talk to him. At first.
But Kael's words were jagged things. And Seret, for all her fire, was exhausted. She'd seen the change in him during the trials. The way he fought. The way he'd held Miren. The way he looked at his hands afterward, as if they no longer belonged to him.
So she gave him space.
But she didn't leave.
Instead, she carved out her own rhythms.
She hunted small game, trading meat in the nearby hamlet for clean clothes and books. She scavenged herbs Kael didn't recognize, brewing things in quiet that reminded him of his mother's tea, but bitter, and not meant for comfort.
She trained too.
But differently.
Her weapons were quieter. Short blades, pressure points, poisons. She moved like smoke now. Harder to see. Harder to pin down. The cult had sharpened her edges too, but unlike Kael, she still tried to hide the blade.
At night, when he returned bloodied and mud-soaked, she lit the hearth and made them eat together. Even if they didn't speak.
Even if the silence was its own language.
On the tenth night, it rained.
Hard.
Kael stood in it, shirtless, head tilted toward the sky as water mingled with the dried blood on his skin. Seret watched from the doorway, arms crossed.
"You'll catch fire fever."
Kael didn't move. "Let it come."
"You're not invincible. You're just trying to feel something."
He looked at her then. Hollow-eyed. Rain streaking down his cheeks like tears he would never admit.
"Maybe I am."
She stepped out into the rain.
Pushed him. Not hard. Just enough.
"No you're not."
He blinked.
And for the first time since the forest, he laughed.
Raspy. Broken. But real.
They sat by the fire that night.
Closer than usual.
Kael's arm was wrapped in fresh linen. Seret's fingers smelled like crushed wildroot and oil. Neither said much, but the silence was softer now.
"We leave in three weeks," she said finally.
Kael nodded.
"I know."
"They're going to expect us to act like normal students."
Kael looked into the fire.
"I don't remember what normal looks like."
Seret smirked.
"Then we fake it. Until we become something they don't expect."
He turned to her.
For a moment, the firelight made her look like someone else, stronger, older, unbroken.
"Like what?"
She met his gaze.
"Dangerous."
By the twelfth day, the books arrived.
A bundle wrapped in oilskin, dropped at their doorstep with no messenger, no note, and no warning. Inside were nine tomes and twenty-two scrolls, inked in the distinct red-black hue of cult scribes. The titles were clinical: The Hierarchies of Bastivar, Great Houses of the Hollow Crown, Bastion Nobility and Political Alliances: 943–960, Etiquette for the Educated Bastard. And then, the last one, newer, bound in grey leather, simply titled: Know the Game.
Seret rolled her eyes.
Kael said nothing.
That night, instead of training, they sat by the hearth and read.
The kingdom of Bastivar was a parasite wrapped in silk.
That was the first thing Kael realized as the words bled into him.
Ruled by the Dyralon Dynasty, a family that had once been human, but was rumored to have made pacts with something buried beneath the Old Capital during the Nightfire Wars. Three hundred years of iron rule, supported by six Great Houses, each controlling vast swathes of land, armies, and old magicks.
The nobles warred behind smiles. Assassinations were art. Alliances were weapons. Every generation, a handful of "commoners" were permitted to ascend through the Academy, groomed to serve the noble houses as administrators, commanders, or pawns. It was a reward for obedience, for exceptional talent, or for being politically useful.
Kael and Seret were about to become ghosts in that machine.
Buried among the real children of monsters.
Seret devoured the scrolls with a scholar's hunger.
She took notes. Sketched the crests of each House. Memorized the known vendettas between House Vhalcrest and House Ordane, the trade wars between Greydorn and Marcell, and the number of times nobles had been publicly executed for treason in the last decade, sixteen.
Kael read slower.
He didn't care about crests.
He looked for names. Events. Patterns. Stories.
And then, on the fifteenth day, he found something.
A footnote.
Buried in a transcript of royal decrees.
A single line:
"...following the child's disappearance, Queen Vaelira ceased all public appearances for two years. It was widely believed she'd fallen ill with the Blight, though no formal diagnosis was ever released."
Kael stared at it for a long time.
Vaelira.
He didn't recognize the name.
But something inside him tightened.
Something cold. Familiar. Not memory, but echo.
He spent the next three days pulling apart the timelines.
Cross-referencing dates. Noting discrepancies. Reading the archived mourning speech of King Thalen Dyralon II, where he referred to "the gods' cruel hand" and "the irreplaceable loss to House Dyralon."
No name was mentioned.
No child's name.
Not even a gender.
Just "the heir."
A royal child vanished twelve years ago.
During a military parade.
Presumed dead.
Kael leaned back from the book, heart hammering.
Twelve years ago.
He'd been four.
He remembered... music. A woman's laughter. Perfume like crushed roses and warm sun.
And then, nothing.
A gap.
A void.
Then the cult.
Then the pain.
He didn't tell Seret at first.
He wasn't sure what he was chasing.
There was no proof.
No photographs. No drawings. Just fragments of records and the phantom ache in his ribs when he thought too hard about that name.
But the next morning, he asked her: "Did the Flayer ever mention where we were taken from?"
She frowned.
"No. Just that it was 'from the cradle of liars.' Why?"
Kael shrugged. "Curious."
She stared at him.
Then went back to sharpening her blades.
That night, he dreamed again.
But this time, the nightmare didn't start in the Hollow.
It started in a palace.
White marble. Golden light. A woman's voice singing an old lullaby in a language he couldn't remember, but which made his bones ache.
He was a child again, in silk. Holding a wooden sword.
Running.
Laughing.
Then,
Screams.
Fire.
And a face.
A masked man with burning eyes, like the Flayer, but not him.
Someone worse.