The air above the black glass of the Abyss trembled with molten heat and cold law. Dreadfang stood like a mountain of sleeping fire, his human form tall and terrible beneath the bleeding sky. Around him, runes sank into the ground like teeth; dragon-light braided with obsidian, and the raw smell of creation hung thick.
Kael knelt inside the circle the dragon had drawn, palms pressed to earth that hummed as if alive. He could feel it all—each bead of qi that threaded the formation, each strand of Dreadfang's power wound into place. The dragon had promised him a thing of danger and hope: a vessel that could walk the mortal realm while Kael's true self remained hidden in the pocket dimension. The vessel would be built to Tier-Three strength, strong enough to bear Kael's spiritual form and appear as him to any ordinary eye — but not so bright as to scream to gods.
"Concentrate," Dreadfang said, voice like a bell struck at the bottom of the world.
Kael obeyed. He drew his spirit narrow, felt the Immortal Book's faint heartbeat at the center of his chest, and let his current gather. The formation glowed, responding to the frequency of his qi.
Dreadfang began the forging. He did not work like a mortal smith — there were no hammer strikes, no tongs — only the slow, deliberate motion of a creature that bent essence to will. From the dragon's palms spilled a molten thread that cooled into glass-black bone. Scales shed like petals and rearranged into a lattice that would be the skeleton of the body. Drums of energy, each the size of a fist, sank into the ground, becoming cores that pulsed at Tier-Three resonance.
"At this strength," Dreadfang murmured, "the vessel will be stout enough to hold your spirit yet shallow enough to deflect divine scrutiny. But the transfer must be clean. Any leak, any overflow of the Immortal Book's mark, and the sensors above will flare."
Kael swallowed. He had seen how gods could feel the faintest of currents; he'd felt their ire as pressure in his bones. The risk was not theoretical. It existed in every trembling breath.
The dragon's breath shaped the cheeks of the new face. Dreadfang traced runes across the forehead — sigils not of man, but of oldkeepers. Gold and black braided together, burning ancient laws into the new vessel. Heat and cold laid upon it like an artist's hand. Slowly, a body stood up: a young man sculpted from dragon-forged glass and molten light, his features familiar enough to pass as Kael's, yet not quite alive.
Kael watched the formation of his double with a sensation that could best be described as a hollow hope. This body would go where he could not. It would smile his smile and feel his family's hands. It would, they hoped, divert the world's attention long enough for him to grow.
Dreadfang placed a palm against the vessel's sternum. "Now," he said.
The runes around the circle flared. Kael's breath came shallow. He pulled inward, collecting every memory he wished to preserve in the vessel — faces, tones, those small private jokes with his sister, the way his father inclined his head. He threaded them like beads and looped them over the bone of the new body. But there was more to be moved than memory: spiritual energy, the essential shape of his cultivation, the subtle attunement to qi that would let the clone breathe without drowning; all of it had to slide across the threshold without spilling.
He began the transfer.
At first it was like emptying a cup into another cup: sensation drained away in a warm, dizzy slide. Then the process deepened. The Immortal Book's mark lit along his ribs, a faint star that pulsed and answered the formation's pull. Kael felt his soul unhooking, the edges of himself smoothing and then passing into the vessel. Thoughts bled like oil into water — names, the taste of jasmine, the memory of a pushup count performed in the courtyard — delicate, familiar things.
And then something slipped in that did not belong.
Images came through the vessel as if from a room next door. Kael did not reach them — they were not his — but he caught them in the periphery: a sky split into luminous axes, a throne made of folded light, a war that sang in the bones of the earth. They arrived like a cold wind through a window he had never opened. For the briefest second the vessel stilled, and its eyes — those new, glassy eyes — flickered with knowledge that made the hair along Kael's neck prick.
Dreadfang's fingers tightened. He felt it too — the wrongness — and his brow, forever calm, contracted. "Do not stop," the dragon said quietly. "Seal what must be sealed. Let it pass, but keep a lock upon it."
Kael focused. He poured the remainder of what he wanted into the vessel. He left tremors of himself, but he did not pull the dark shard that had flashed through. It was not his to own, he told himself. Yet as the last of his personal resonance slid over the threshold, the vessel's mind began to anchor itself.
The clone's chest rose, little staccato breaths like paper bells. Light breathed into its pupils, which burned with an odd depth. Kael's spirit — the essential current of him — sat nested in that stranger body now: his instincts, his memories, his voice, and a little more. The little more were images the vessel had absorbed as it had been shaped; impressions of something older, an echo of a life not fully his.
Dreadfang moved in with deft claws of energy, threading seals behind the clone's ears and along its spine. "I will not let the old shadow corrupt it," he said. "But do not be naive. Seals hold only to a point. You will need to grow them with cultivation. The Book's mark may awaken aspects that do not belong to you."
Kael's hands shook. "If the clone begins to… remember things I do not, will it—will it act on them?"
The dragon's eyes were unreadable. "Possibly. This is why the vessel is not perfect. It will act like you in manner but not in all core purpose. It will carry your love; it might carry other things too. That is a hazard we accept because the alternative is your death."
A thin line of black smoke curled from the vessel's mouth as if it were sighing. The clone pushed itself to sit, and its gaze met Kael's. There was an oldness in that look that Kael could not name — not cruelty, not warmth, only an understanding that seemed to peer past him into some axis of history.
For a moment the two Kaels — the original and the vessel — regarded one another. The original felt light and hollow, oddly cleansed of certain darker hues that the vessel now held. It was as if a sheet had been pulled across a painting and a new version hung in its place.
"You look like a man I might have known," the vessel said in Kael's voice but not quite his cadence. There was a timbre in the clone's words that made Kael's heart constrict. The clone's face tightened as if trying to remember something painful. "Who… am I?"
Kael's reply was immediate. "You are my clone. You will go outside. You will live my life."
The vessel nodded slowly, as though testing the idea of self. "Live," it repeated. "And if I dream of stars I do not belong to — will you wake me?"
Kael could not think of a pleasant lie. "I will be here," he said. "I will watch from the pocket-dimension."
Dreadfang sealed an array above the vessel's temples, a lattice of dragon-sight that would keep the most obvious of gods from sniffing the Immortal mark. "It will last" — his voice was careful — "only if the vessel behaves ordinary. No screaming of divine hues. No revelations on the steps of palaces. Keep to the smallness of life and the gods will be blind."
For a long, excruciating minute, Kael reviewed what he had moved. He had transferred memories that could prove dangerous if the clone misunderstood them — glimpses of something huge, shadowed plans not wholly his — but he had not given the vessel the core of that rage. Or so he believed. He had withheld the part that wanted to tear gods down; he had not given the vessel the why, only the images, and that was a dangerous split.
"You must understand," Dreadfang told him quietly, "the Book trickles to those who carry it. Sometimes it attaches echoes from other seams. We will monitor, but this vessel must walk among men. If it falters, bring word. I will send counsel."
Kael closed his eyes, the aftertaste of the transfer clinging like iron. When he opened them the clone's chest rose with even breaths; the young man who had been formed from dragon-forged matter now sat composed and breathing. He was strangely peaceful, and yet there was that edge — a sense the clone had glimpsed rooms of time that Kael had not.
Dreadfang extended a palm. The vessel rose, stood, and then bowed to its maker. Its movements were precise: the mimicry was perfect. The dragon stepped forward and laid his hand, smoky and warm, on that mimicry's head, transferring the last layer of instinct that would let the body move without screaming outward its mortal core.
"Now," Dreadfang said, "I will send it with a shadow cloak. It will appear as you and will travel without the gods' notice. It will not carry the Book's active signature unless awakened. You will remain here, hidden. Train. Grow. When you are ready—truly ready—you will not need a vessel. You will not fear the heavens."
Kael's throat tightened. He looked into his clone's eyes once more and saw, for a breath, a flash of something dangerous: not wholly his, a hunger as old as ruin. He did not speak it aloud. Instead, with hands he tried to steady, he placed a palm on the clone's shoulder.
"Go," he said.
The clone inclined its head and stepped toward the runic arch Dreadfang prepared. The dragon's sigils glowed; the pocket-veil thinned; a corridor of light opened toward the mortal world. On the threshold the clone paused, and for one moment — an almost imperceptible moment — its face twisted in a memory that was not Kael's: a memory of standing before a throne and calling storms into being. It shook its head as if to clear fog and then walked through.
When the light closed, Kael felt emptier and fuller at once. Part of him had been sent to walk the world again, and part had stayed; the separation was a wound and a promise. He clutched at the fact that the Book still throbbed like a pulse at his core. He had not shed the mark. He had only split his life into two hands.
Dreadfang watched him with a patience that had outlived empires. "Listen," the dragon said. "You have made a necessary choice. The clone will play your part. But understand the next truth plainly: fighting gods as you imagine is not a matter of sword and courage alone. You must become outside the limits of mortality."
Kael's eyes were hot. "God-level?"
Dreadfang's mouth was a line. "There are levels beyond the Sages and the Elders. To stand among the divine you must remake your vessel. The Immortal Book can alter flesh and fate — it can grant the pattern of a god-body — but it cannot do it for you without a will to hold it. It will not carry you through the growth those bodies require. Normally, humans must cultivate a thousand years, two, perhaps more. They require trials that hint at creation itself."
Kael let the words sit. Thousands of years. His voice was small. "So the Book is a shortcut."
Dreadfang's laugh was low and dangerous. "Not a shortcut. A scalpel. You cut yourself open and the structure heals differently. It may correct, or it may kill. The Book will not hand you divinity without your marrow adapting to it. You must rip your flesh, reshape your bones, temper your spirit to a new climate. The Book is an instrument; you are the smith. If you let it do all the work, you will be overwritten."
Kael thought of the Steward's trembling promise to return in fifty years. He clenched his fists until the nails bit white. "Then I will not waste time," he said.
Dreadfang studied him as if weighing a rare ore. "Good. You must do three things. One: solidify the core inside until it becomes a furnace that no god can extinguish. Two: learn to walk under a mask of lesser qi — the false breathing I taught you — so the clone's existence remains undetected. Three: cultivate patience to receive the Book's reshaping. It will be violent. It will be holy. It will change you so fundamentally you may not be the man you remember."
Kael's heart slammed. The idea of losing himself to power frightened him, but a fiercer thing rose beneath the fear: resolve. If gods wanted to hunt him, he would train until their hunt led nowhere. If the book had chosen a vessel in him, then he would prove worthy. The cost — time, lost youth, perhaps even the erosion of self — did not matter.
"Teach me," Kael said.
Dreadfang's eyes flared like coal. "We begin now." He turned, walking toward the ridge where the lotus lake shimmered with hidden strength. "You will not be left untried. And remember this: the memories the clone carries — the flashes you withheld — they are threads. One day you may pull them loose. Until then, do not let them define you."
Kael bowed his head. "I won't."
He re-entered the pocket-dimension with hands still trembling from the transfer and an ache like wings in his chest. The Immortal Book thrummed against his skin with a new cadence, as if pleased at the decision. The world beyond the veil warred, burned, and schemed. Darius bore his missing hand like a hideous medal and schemed still; Elira's love had become a blade and a shield in equal parts; the clans drifted toward blood.
For now the clone walked among them, breathing the life Kael had left. For now Kael had a sanctuary and a single, terrible instruction: grow into something that could stand where gods roamed.
He knelt again by the lotus lake, and this time the meditation was not for mere endurance. It was a baptism by will.
The Immortal Book's mark pulsed, and Kael, gathered like a fist around flame, resolved to make himself a thing that would one day be feared not for the meat he came from, but for the law he could become