Arrival in Daggerhollow
The stench hit them first.
Not rot, not sewage—greed. It wafted off the stone like humidity, clung to the clothes of passersby, thick as perfume. Daggerhollow was a trade-town carved into the bones of an ancient canyon, its winding alleys and hanging bridges weaving a complex network between stone pillars and cave-tunnels. Smugglers, mercenaries, and rogue ability-brokers rubbed shoulders with nobles disguised in dirt.
Kael's eyes roved over everything. He counted entrances, exits, shadows. The faint shuffle of footsteps three alleys over—nothing escaped his attention.
Selene walked beside him, her posture cautious but curious. A week had passed since the black blade had been forged. Her eyes still sometimes flicked to it when she thought he wasn't looking.
They weren't alone.
Kael had left the five children in the previous village with a sealed pouch of bartered silver and a warning no one would soon forget. They were safe—for now.
But something darker had pulled him and Selene toward Daggerhollow: a trail of rumors, scattered coin-stamps, and markings too familiar to be coincidence. The same sigil had been burned into the collar of one of the children.
The Crimson Coil was here.
The Web Beneath the Streets
Kael paid in silence, slipping a tarnished coin etched with false glyphs into the barkeep's hand. The man looked at it once, then nodded toward the back.
Selene followed him down a creaking stairwell, into a tavern basement that smelled of wet stone and wine dregs. The walls were lined with murals of twisted beasts, eyes scratched out with blades.
Inside, Kael met an informant—a Gifted with a photographic memory. She had a scar that ran from cheek to collarbone and spoke only in riddles unless paid in memory-locks.
Kael didn't flinch. Instead of money, he offered a single fragment from a merchant's mind he'd devoured—memories of prices, taxes, and the route to a certain auction house hidden below Daggerhollow's lower spine.
That got the woman talking.
"Tomorrow night. The Hollow Auction. No children this time, that's what they say. But you know better. You know how to read between the lines, don't you, boy with the silent blade?"
Kael didn't reply. But Selene saw the faint shift in his eyes—the one that meant he was already thirty moves ahead.
Later, as they rested atop a half-collapsed watchtower overlooking the town, Selene sat with her knees pulled to her chest.
"He always sees more than I do. Every whisper, every flicker of motion. It's like he's already played out the ending in his head, and I'm just catching up."
She watched Kael below, practicing silent movements in the moonlight—drawing and sheathing the black blade without sound, balancing each motion like a dance of weight and memory.
"I was raised in cages. He was raised in silence. I don't know which one of us is more broken. Or more dangerous."
She touched the scarf he'd given her—blood-red silk, salvaged from one of the raiders. It wasn't kindness. It was camouflage. But it was the first thing anyone had ever handed her without expecting her to bleed for it.
Infiltration
The next night, the real game began.
Kael mapped the auction compound from rooftops and tunnels. He used reflections in broken glass to mark guard paths, noted which lights flickered offbeat—indicating illusions—and measured their radius by tossing pebbles that vanished too soon.
He learned their timing. Smelled the sulfur in their alchemical traps. Counted heartbeats of guards through the vibrations in the stone.
Selene followed his lead, though her steps weren't as silent. She was fast, and light, and when Kael handed her a dart-laced chisel coated with sleeproot, she didn't hesitate.
They slipped inside through the waste ducts, emerging into a maintenance tunnel that led directly beneath the auction pit.
Above them: muffled voices, laughter, bidding. A child's sob.
"This isn't a rescue. Not yet," Kael whispered to Selene in the dark. "This is information. Every bloodline tag, every buyer's name, every route they plan to use once they leave here—I want it all."
Selene nodded. Her hand trembled. But her eyes burned with clarity.
"Then we make it burn," she said. "Not yet," Kael answered. "Why not?""Because we kill the root. Not the leaves."
"Whispers Beneath the Auction Hall"
The night deepened, bringing with it the stale hush of tense breath and fraying restraint. The auction house was a spiraling stone structure carved into the cliffs of Redwater Gorge—a tiered amphitheater built more for discretion than spectacle. Within its shadowed alcoves, elites and monsters alike bartered for lives and legends, trading in the vilest currency: blood and suffering.
Kael moved like a phantom through the underbelly of the structure, shadows folding around his presence as if the night itself chose to shelter him. He didn't rush. Every motion was controlled, rehearsed in his mind a dozen times before it touched muscle.
Selene moved behind him with calculated steps, eyes flickering between doorways, faces, and flame-lit corridors. She had insisted on following. He had let her—more for what it revealed than what she could offer. She wanted to help, but she also wanted to see. To understand how someone like Kael operated. To grasp the true nature of the devourer who hid beneath a calm surface.
They reached the upper tier of the auction's substructure. A vantage point, quiet and nearly abandoned. Below, masked bidders lounged in private boxes. Most wore ceremonial garb laced with clan symbols, emblems of nobility, or marks of darker affiliations. Among them, Kael spotted two individuals cloaked in white—and his gaze lingered.
"Ivory Court," he murmured. Selene glanced at him, silently asking for clarification.
"They trade bloodlines. Sell refinement serums. Modify children with ancient lineages. They're more dangerous than they appear."
And then the stage shifted. A handler stepped forth, dragging a girl by the arm—no older than ten. Her eyes were dull, mouth gagged, wrists marked with fresh binding sigils. Another child. Another item to be sold.
Kael's fingers twitched against the hilt of his blade—not the black one yet, but the ordinary steel he still carried. The black blade… it would come. But this moment wasn't for brute power. It was for calculation.
A glint of golden light shimmered briefly to his right. He turned his head—just enough to observe. A data relay crystal sat mounted inside a discreet alcove. It was linked to the handlers' private quarters.
A plan started to form, threads weaving in his mind with surgical precision. You don't attack an auction like this with rage. You unmake it with silence.
He turned to Selene. "There are twelve guards stationed across the tiers. Three of them are Masters. One Eternal—a broker named Vraelin. But he hasn't moved in ten minutes. Likely in the center booth."
She frowned. "And the children?"
"In cages behind the west curtain. Five others. They'll move them in pairs as the bidding heats up."
Selene's voice was taut with tension. "What's the play?"
Kael glanced down, then at the hallway behind them.
"We start with the sigil relays. Shut down the reinforcement runes that prevent teleportation or gateway exit. Then we deal with the Masters—quietly. Take their tokens. Pose as a buyer for one lot. Smuggle out two children, disrupt the bid, and trigger confusion."
She blinked. "That's… a lot."
Selene nodded, more to herself than to him. And in that moment, as they slipped back into the shadows, she realized something deeper—Kael wasn't driven by vengeance alone. He had learned the art of control not just to survive, but to dismantle systems from within.
She didn't know if she feared him more for that… or admire him.
"The Silent Collapse"
The sigil relay chamber was guarded by a single Master-ranked enforcer—older, half-asleep, confident in the sanctity of the walls and the lethality of his presence. A mistake.
Kael didn't strike immediately. He watched. The man's pacing had rhythm, and rhythm meant predictability. He whispered a thought, and the faint imprint of the black katana stirred in its sheath, responding to intent, not sound. Kael's hand brushed the hilt of his lesser blade instead.
Selene positioned herself by the corridor's blind curve, breath held, hands trembling but steadying with purpose. She wasn't here for blood—Kael had made it clear. Distraction, not combat.
The guard turned.
She stepped out—hesitantly, visibly terrified, playing the role of a lost courtesan. "S-sir, please… I was told to wait near the buyer's booth, but I got turned around—"
His scowl cracked into a leer. "You're not supposed to be—"
Kael moved in the space between words.
No footsteps. No breath. Just the flicker of metal and a sharp twist of silence. The blade pierced beneath the ribs, angled upward—nonlethal, paralyzing. The man collapsed, convulsing once, before his body slumped into unconsciousness. His core would remain intact—for now. Kael didn't need to devour him.
"I said no blood," Kael murmured, cleaning the blade.
Selene exhaled. "He'll live?"
"If he's lucky."
They slipped into the relay chamber. Runes and crystal arrays pulsed with low blue light—each one woven into the foundation of the auction structure. Escape wards. Barrier seals. Kael traced them with trained eyes. Glyph-layered intersections… runes made to suppress gateway tears. But the lattice is old. Too dependent on centralized energy feed.
A smile ghosted across his lips.
"You can disable it?" Selene asked.
"I can redirect it."
He altered a single keystone node, turning the array inward—an energy loop that would overload the wards if triggered from multiple points. But the failsafe would hold until he needed it to break.
"If we make it to the children and open two cages at once, it'll destabilize the lattice. That buys us under a minute to extract everyone."
Selene stared at him. "That plan was already in your head, wasn't it? Before we even got here."
"Yes," he said without arrogance. "That's how you outmaneuver monsters. You don't fight fair. You don't fight loud."
---
Back in the upper auction tiers, masked bidders leaned forward as the next pair of captives was dragged forth. A boy and girl—twins, perhaps. Malnourished, tattooed with Crimson Coil brands.
Kael now wore the stolen sigil of a Master buyer, his hood drawn low, seated in Box 7—a private balcony overlooking the stage. Selene sat beside him, playing the part of a silent retainer.
He activated the bid rune with a subtle flick of his index finger. "Box 7. 5,000 crimson shards."
Murmurs rippled through the chamber. The current bid leader, an Eternal from the Azure Syndicate, raised a brow but nodded. "7,000," he countered lazily.
Kael let it hang.
"12,000," he said at last.
Gasps followed.
One of the masked handlers bowed from the stage. "Box 7, final offer. Sold."
Selene tensed. "They'll expect a transfer."
"They'll get one," Kael said coolly, rising. "But not what they're expecting."
They left the box just as the twins were led toward the private retrieval corridor. Kael slipped behind the shadows lining the path, motioned once—and struck.
The handler never saw the blade.
Selene caught the falling child, cradling her gently. "We have them."
"Then it begins."
Kael drew the black katana for the first time that night.
It did not shine—it drank the light, turning even the torches dim. The air changed. Something ancient stirred in the marrow of the world.
In the west chamber, two more cages unlatched as the relay circuit collapsed. Lights flared and shattered. A scream rose from below—then two, then a dozen.
Alarms failed to ignite. Runes sputtered.
And chaos was born.
Kael turned to Selene, voice calm in the rising frenzy. "We go now. Through the north shaft. Then we vanish."
And just like that—bids were forgotten, titles stripped of power, and bloodlines unraveled.
Not with an explosion.
But with a whisper.
---
The north shaft was never meant for exit—only for waste. A forgotten service corridor built into the bone of the fortress, long sealed, long irrelevant.
Kael had seen it hours ago.
He led the way now, carrying one of the freed twins—silent, unconscious, but alive. Selene followed close behind, clutching the other child, bare feet slapping against the grime-slick floor. Behind them, the underworld howled. Orders clashed, footsteps thundered, runes flared and died.
A Sovereign's ghost might've stirred in the panic—but none would act fast enough.
"Keep moving," Kael ordered without looking back.
Selene didn't ask questions. Not anymore.
The corridor narrowed. Kael stopped at a rusted valve-door, inscribed with what looked like meaningless junk runes. He pressed his palm against them.
The door groaned, hissed—and opened.
Fresh air.
Distant night wind.
Beyond the tunnel was the outskirts of the canyon wall—where jagged rocks met the ghost remains of the old path network. The Crimson Coil had buried this exit years ago… but only with stone, not thought.
They climbed.
Above them, a single flare burst across the sky—scarlet and crackling with fury.
The Coil had noticed.
Kael didn't care.
They reached the ridgeline moments later, barely catching breath as the canyon fortress roared behind them with alarm. Distant figures poured from the walls. Hounds released. Magic trails cut the dark like lances of flame.
Kael turned to Selene. "Can you run while carrying her?"
"I can," she said. "If I collapse, leave me. Get the children out."
"I won't," he said, and turned away before the moment became too much.
They ran.
Down through shale gullies, across old forgotten trade paths that Kael's memory recalled in eerie precision. Twice they doubled back, once leapt into a gulch and climbed the far side. Pursuers howled in every direction.
But they never caught him.
The black katana pulsed once—shielding them when a heat-seeker rune almost struck. Kael guided them through the weave of ancient laylines—paths untouched since the old wars.
By the time dawn began to bleed over the horizon, they were gone from the reach of the Crimson Coil.
---
Later, in a ruined waystation near the marsh valleys:
Selene wrapped the twins in spare cloth, brushing dust from their bruised faces. They slept now—finally, safely.
Kael stood by the doorway, black blade resting beside him, eyes scanning the stillness.
"They'll hunt us," she said quietly.
"They'll try," he replied. "But their reach is long only when you stay still."
"And what are we now? A ghost squad? A pair of cursed runaways?"
Kael didn't answer immediately.
"We're a pattern they can't follow," he said. "No lineage. No brand. No place to chain us."
She looked at him.
"Are you always this calm?"
"No," he said. "But I don't need calm to act."
A long silence passed.
Then, Kael turned toward the rising sun, its light fractured through the swamp mist, painting the ruins gold and ash.
"We move again by nightfall," he said.
"Where?"
"To the village north of Lake Verrin. I know someone there. Someone who owes me truth."
She hesitated. "You trust someone?"
"No," Kael replied, "but I know his kind. And if he's still alive, he'll want what we've stolen."
Selene furrowed her brow. "What have we stolen?"
Kael looked down at the children.
And then at the katana that now hummed with the residual echoes of devoured abilities.
"…A future," he said.