Kaia didn't believe in fate.
Fate was a lullaby sung by dying elders, a soft croon meant to soothe the dying or the damned, a balm for old wounds wrapped in lies. It was the story the broken told themselves to explain why the stars no longer answered, why the gods had turned their gaze from blood-streaked soil, why the world itself had sharpened into silence and ash.
She had listened to those songs once, long ago, when the frost still clung to the Frostfang Grove in glittering threads rather than in the memory of pain. She had knelt beneath the World Tree, palm pressed to chest, whispering oaths to the Ridge-Wind Spirits with breath warmed by hope, with heart lifted by the belief that the old powers — the old laws of balance and sky — could still bend in favor of those who dared to call them.
That had been before the burning.
Before the Grove fell like a candle snuffed by wind.
Before the silence that stretched wider than mountains, stretching into the marrow of her bones.
Before Blackstone.
Now, she believed in chains. In bloodlines crushed beneath iron. In what remained after fire and betrayal had taken the rest.
And yet…
When he spoke his name — soft, fragile, almost ashamed, as if exhaling a memory too delicate to hold — something inside her stilled.
"I think… I'm Rei."
The air shifted without wind. The frost on the walls seemed to twitch, and the shards of violet light reflected in the corners pulsed faintly in rhythm with the mark beneath his ribs, slow and deliberate, alive in the way only things older than men could be.
She did not show it. Did not blink. Did not move. But beneath the frost she had wrapped around herself, beneath the armor of scars and quiet that kept the world at bay, her breath caught in her throat.
Rei.
The name meant nothing in the old tongue. Not beastkin. Not elvish. Not Solheim's scorched sands or the frozen chants of Druvadir. It carried no prophecy, no ancient weight.
And yet it sounded real. Not forged. Not branded. Not taken from her, from the Order, from the Void.
It was a name.
A real name.
And real names had roots.
Her ears twitched. One small, almost involuntary motion — instinct slipping past discipline. A flicker of life under stone.
She remembered the night they dragged him into Blackstone.
Half-conscious. Limbs shaking. Barely breathing. Another offering, another body tossed to the dark like spoiled meat for the mark. She had written him off then, as she had written off so many before. Another failed summoning. Another whisper the Void would consume.
But the mark had pulsed.
And the shadows around him — she remembered, with precision, because it had burned into her memory — had twitched. Not obedient. Not bending. Not enslaved. Recognizing. A war already lost somewhere deep inside him, yet rising anyway.
Now…
Now he named himself.
And the mark responded. Not with flame, not with the violence she had expected. But with a pulse, deliberate, living. Like a seal awakening from sleep. A memory beneath the skin she could not touch but could feel.
Her own name once meant fire. Kaia of the Frostfang Clan. Daughter of Nhal'Tara. Chosen of the Ridge-Wind. Last voice of the Old Oaths.
It had been carved in snow and sung to stars. Now? She was Eighty-Nine. A ghost with teeth, a number dragged through dust and ice.
But when he spoke… he did not whisper it like a victim. He said it like a thief. Like someone reclaiming it from the thing that had stolen it.
And somehow, that gave her something she hated.
Hope.
Hope was poison in Blackstone.
It festered in the marrow. It made you soft. It made you think doors might open before the blade fell. It made you remember warmth as a temptation instead of a memory.
She turned her face away, as though that would exorcise the thought. But it lingered, settled, like frost in corners that sunlight never reached.
Not just because of the name. Because of what came after.
"Whatever comes… we face it together."
He had not said it as a vow. Not as a plea. Not desperate. He said it as a law already written, as truth unfurling through bone and blood and chain.
And that… shook her.
Because deep beneath the frost, past the hurt and hunger, something remembered. Words once whispered beneath branches that had touched the sky, before fire and betrayal and ruin:
When the Void wakes true, it chooses not a blade… but a bond.
She did not believe in prophecy. She did not believe in Chosen or chosen ones. But she knew the Rift. Every day. Every hour. Every second, like inhaling ash through a cloth that promised life.
And she knew what it meant when the mark pulsed without feeding. Not as a curse. Not as a chain. Not as a blade.
A calling.
The walls were cold, unyielding, but the silence vibrated faintly against her senses. It was not empty. It did not wait. It watched. And now, it measured him — Rei — not as a prisoner, not as a number, but as a vessel. Something that the Void itself could not ignore.
Her hands itched for the knives she did not have, for the steel that would have answered instinct with precision. But she did not move. She watched him, studying the subtle bloom of life beneath his ribs, the slow awakening of something dangerous and bright in a place meant for decay.
Chains clinked faintly as he shifted, his voice small but anchored, calling out in defiance to the stone and shadows.
The air between them seemed to bend. Something alive moved through it — not the Void, not the whisper, but the recognition that passed between two souls who had been sharpened by loss and fire and still stood.
Kaia did not believe in destiny.
She did not.
But as she looked at him — really looked, past the half-healed wounds, the exhaustion, the rusted chains, the mark pulsing with its quiet insistence — she wondered, for the first time since the Grove burned, since her family fell, since she became Eighty-Nine…
She wondered if she would not have to carry this burden alone.
Because for the first time in years, she felt a tether.
Not of gods, not of stars, not of prophecy.
Of him.
And for all the bitterness she had carried, all the frost that had been her armor, all the teeth she had bared to survive — that tether made her chest ache. Made her claws itch for the impossible. Made her heart, long folded into a knife, tremble.
The mark beneath his ribs pulsed again. Slow. Deliberate. Alive. Waiting. Not for her. Not for the Order. But for him. And for what he would do with it.
And she would stand by him.
Not because the world demanded it. Not because she believed in destiny. Not because the stars might answer.
But because he had chosen her, in his quiet, fractured way.
And that… was enough to ignite something inside her she had long believed dead.
Something like hope.
And hope, she knew, was fire.