The stars wheeled overhead, their cold, indifferent light doing nothing to illuminate the turmoil within me. The boy, Lys, was a still point in the universe, and I was the chaotic force orbiting him, pulled by a gravity of my own making. To awaken his Spark was to light a candle in an endless, predatory dark. To leave it dormant was to let the wick rot, unused. Both choices felt like a violence.
I looked at my hands, the instruments of negation. Could they be used for creation? Or was any act I performed merely a different shade of ending? To awaken him was to end his safety. To still him was to end his potential.
Croft was silent, a feathered judge observing my internal trial.
The memory of the Warden surfaced, not its power, but its purpose. It had been a guardian, a creation of my god meant to protect a shard of his power. It had recognized me as its heir. And what was an heir but a steward? A custodian of a legacy, tasked not only with its reclamation but with its continuation.
Lys was not a shard of a god. He was a shard of the world that was. A piece of the future that had been stolen. His hair, in the starlight, was a tangled mess of pale gold, the colour of sun-bleached wheat from a field I could barely remember. It was a stark contrast to the grime on his cheeks and the dark, hollow fear in his eyes. To still his Spark forever would be to extinguish that last, faint echo of a brighter world. It would be an admission that the blight had not just scoured the land, but had scoured away all hope for what could come after.
I would not give it that victory.
The decision crystallized within me, cold and clear. I would not subtract his potential. I would attempt to kindle it.
As the first hint of grey touched the eastern horizon, I rose. The movement broke the long silence. Lys, who had been feigning sleep, went rigid. I walked to where he lay and knelt before him.
His eyes opened, wide with a fear he could no longer hide. In the growing light, I saw they were a light, clear blue, like a faded summer sky.
"The stillness inside you has kept you safe," I began, my voice low and measured. "But safety is a cage. The world is broken, Lys, but it is not gone. There is power in you. A Spark. It sleeps. I mean to try and wake it."
He stared at me, his breath catching. The fear was still there, but beneath it, I saw a flicker of that ancient, buried want. The memory of the mages and their cupped flames.
"It will be… painful," I warned him. "Ignition is a shock to the system. And once it is awake, it will make you visible. To many things. You will no longer be a stone. You will be a flame."
He swallowed hard, his small throat working. For a long moment, he said nothing, just looked from my face to the waking sky. Then, he gave a single, sharp nod.
"Okay," he whispered.
I had him sit cross-legged before me. Croft took a perch on a nearby rock, his head cocked in academic interest. I placed my hands on Lys's thin shoulders. He flinched at the contact, then stilled. He was so slight beneath the rough wool of the cloak, all sharp bones and fragile will.
"Close your eyes," I instructed. "Find the quiet place. The still, grey sphere. Don't try to touch it. Just… know it is there."
I closed my own eyes. My shadow-sight turned inward, then projected outward, focusing on the dormant Spark within his chest. It was as I remembered: a pale, motionless moon, a perfect sphere of unrealized potential. How did one ignite a sun? I was a creature of void, of cold, silent places. I had no fire to give.
But I had will. And I understood energy.
I could not create life from nothing. But I could provide the friction.
I focused my will not on adding energy, but on creating a disturbance within the perfect stillness of the Spark. I imagined my own divine power—the cold, silent fire of my shard—as a whetstone, and his dormant Spark as a blade. I would not strike a spark with a hammer. I would sharpen the stillness until its own latent potential grew so keen, so focused, that it had no choice but to ignite.
It was an act of profound pressure. A gentle, insistent grinding against the fabric of his soul.
A gasp escaped Lys's lips. His small body trembled under my hands. A strand of his pale hair, stuck to his damp forehead, shook with the effort.
"Hold fast," I murmured, my voice strained. The process was excruciatingly delicate. Too much pressure, and I would shatter the Spark entirely. Too little, and nothing would happen. It was a balance I had to feel in the feedback between our two beings.
I poured my awareness into that point of contact, the interface between my ending and his beginning. I felt the resistance of his dormancy, a deep, ingrained inertia that had become his identity. I pushed against it, not with force, but with relentless, focused intent.
Awaken.
Lys cried out, a short, sharp sound of pain. A fine sweat broke out on his brow, darkening the fair hair at his temples.
And then, I saw it. A single, tiny crack appeared on the surface of the grey sphere. A hairline fracture of brilliant, silver light.
It was enough.
The Spark did not explode into life. It unfurled. The crack spread, a web of luminous filaments, and the grey shell fell away like ash, dissolving into a soft, silver radiance. The sphere began to pulse. A slow, hesitant, but undeniable rhythm. Thump… thump… thump.
It was the sound of a heart starting to beat after a lifetime of silence.
I pulled my hands away, my own energy depleted from the precise, grueling work. I was breathing heavily.
Lys's eyes flew open. They were wide, unfocused, filled with a silver sheen that slowly faded to reveal his normal, startling blue. He looked down at his own chest, then at his hands, as if seeing them for the first time. The new, soft light from his soul seemed to make his fair skin and blonde hair glow from within.
"I… I feel…" he stammered.
"Breathe," I commanded. "Just breathe."
He did. And with each breath, the pulse of his Spark grew stronger, steadier, syncing with the rhythm of his lungs. A faint, warm, silver glow—a true soul-glow—began to emanate from him, so new and fragile it was almost translucent. He looked like a dandelion seed caught in a beam of light, ethereal and terribly easy to blow away.
He was awake. The seed had sprouted in the ashes.
The training began that day. It was not the training of Aethelian sorcerers. There were no scrolls, no incantations. There was only necessity.
"Your Spark is a muscle you have never used," I told him as we resumed our trek, Twilight moving with a careful slowness. "You must learn to feel it. To sense the energy around you."
I had him focus on the simplest of things. The heat of the sun on his skin. The bite of the wind. The latent energy in the ancient stone beneath our feet. He would squint his blue eyes in concentration, his blonde brows furrowing, a look of intense effort on a face that should have been carefree.
"For now, do not try to shape it. Only try to feel the difference between the energy outside, and the energy now glowing within you."
He tried. For hours, nothing happened. Then, as we made camp that evening, he looked at the small fire I had kindled and pointed a trembling finger.
"It… it feels hungry," he whispered.
A profound quiet fell over our camp. Croft, who had been preening, went still.
I looked from the boy to the fire. He was right. Fire was a process of consumption, a demand for fuel. He wasn't seeing the flames; he was sensing the fundamental want of the reaction itself.
He was not perceiving the world as a mage might. He was perceiving it as I did. Through the lens of fundamental forces, of needs and absences.
"You are not sensing energy," I said, the realization settling like a stone in my gut. "You are sensing purpose. The purpose of the fire is to consume. The purpose of the wind is to flow. The purpose of the stone is to endure."
His Spark, awakened by a shard of Death, resonated not with the creation of things, but with their intrinsic nature. Their reason for being. And their reason for ending.
Lys looked at me, his new glow flickering with confusion and a dawning fear. The silver light played over his fair features, highlighting the dust and exhaustion, but also a new, sharp awareness. "Is that… bad?"
I looked at the child, now glowing with a soft silver light, who saw the world not as a collection of objects, but as a chorus of intentions. He was not a mage. I had no name for what he was.
"No," I said, the word feeling inadequate. "It is… what you are." I placed another piece of wood on the fire, its purpose to be consumed. "Now, tell me what you feel from the darkness between the stars."
His training had begun. And I, an angel of death, had become the teacher of a boy who could hear the world's silent, desperate song.