The compound watched him differently now.
Not openly. Not with words. But Kael knew.
He felt it in the way conversations tapered off when he passed by. The way two instructors exchanged a glance before allowing him into the training circle. The way he was handed food after the line had ended, no matter when he arrived.
Something had shifted.
And it hadn't shifted in his favor.
Bran left that morning.
So did two others—recruits Kael had trained beside for weeks. Faces he'd bled with, bruised beside, laughed with between mouthfuls of dry bread and curses at Ser Whitmer's lessons.
They were called at dawn. Given equipment. Whispered orders.
A real mission. Their first one.
"Town near the river bend," Bran had told him as they laced up gear in the cold half-light. "Rumors of a Gloam cult taking root. Nothing special. Mostly recon."
Kael forced a nod. "Be careful."
Bran gave him a crooked smile, but his eyes were steady. "You'll get yours soon. Probably something bigger. You're scary now."
Kael didn't answer. Because he wasn't sure.
Not about the mission.
Not about anything.
When the gates closed behind Bran and the others, something inside Kael shut with them.
He'd spent weeks trying to climb from the bottom—suffering mockery, training injuries, the whisper of shadow curling in his blood. And now that he'd started winning—now that he'd proved himself useful—the walls closed tighter.
He wasn't given a task that day. No assignments, no instruction.
Instead, a quiet escort of two senior Whisperers—hooded and masked—followed him wherever he walked.
One pretended to be checking runes along the hallway walls.
The other read from a ledger he never flipped.
Kael tried not to react.
He ate in silence. Sat alone in the courtyard beneath the stone serpent statue. Stared into the narrow slits of the training ground gate until dusk bled the sky red.
He tried to ask Whitmer—but the old Whisperer simply met his gaze, held it too long, and said nothing. As if daring Kael to break the silence first.
That night, Tenebris stirred in his dreams.
Not violently.
Just present.
Like fog curling beneath a locked door.
"They fear what you are."
Kael sat upright in the dark, sweating.
His room was quiet. Too quiet.
Even the ward-flame at his bedside burned lower than it should have.
He dressed quickly, muscles still aching from yesterday's duel, and slipped into the silent corridors of the east wing—toward the archive vaults.
The records weren't open to recruits.
But Kael had memorized the patterns of the patrols. The blind spot under the observatory stairs. The loose sigil behind the tapestry of the Nine Oaths that could be nudged with shadow-sense.
He moved quietly. He didn't blink—not here. Not when they might detect it.
He didn't know what he was looking for.
Only that whatever this was—whatever they'd started to suspect—it began long before his duel with Renn. Before Eline's warning. Before the night Tenebris had whispered "mine" inside his soul.
And deep in the quiet hum of the archive vault, between weathered tomes and cracked parchments, Kael found it.
A single page.
Misfiled. Torn.
The title barely legible:
"Of Those Veil-Touched and the Broken Line."
His fingers hovered above it.
The air grew cold.
"Step away from the page."
The voice was calm. Measured.
Eline.
Kael turned slowly, pulse hammering. She stood just outside the archive door, arms folded, the ever-present distance in her eyes now sharpened to something like warning.
"You shouldn't be down here," she said.
"Neither should you."
"I'm allowed to be."
He said nothing. Her eyes flicked to the page still hovering beneath his hand.
"Whatever you think you'll find," she continued, "it's not worth it."
Kael studied her for a long moment.
Then, quietly: "Is that what you told yourself?"
A flicker of something—pain, maybe regret—crossed her features. But it vanished before he could catch it.
She stepped aside. "Return to your quarters, Kael. That's not a suggestion."
He left without touching the page.
But the shadow of it followed him back.
In his dreams, the voice of the cultist returned.
The one he'd only glimpsed in the cellars of memory, before the mission that never came.
Only this time, the words echoed differently:
"You don't wear a mask. You are the mask."
And then, fainter—
"We see you, Little Kin."
Kael woke with a whisper in his throat, a flicker of darkness behind his eyes, and a growing, gnawing certainty:
The Whisperers weren't protecting him.
They were preparing him. Or containing him.
Maybe both.