The wind had turned hollow. It moved through the valley like something that had forgotten how to breathe, long, rasping exhalations that carried the dust of broken centuries.
We'd set camp by the skeleton of a war long buried. Spears jutted from the ground like half-grown trees. Shields were fused to stone by glassed sand. Every gust sounded like a voice half-remembered. Lyren called it cursed. Aurelius called it history. I didn't call it anything. I could feel the storm watching me again, and that was enough.
The fire crackled low. Aurelius sat apart, quill scratching against a metal tablet, eyes reflecting the dim flame like twin shards of amber. Lyren sharpened her dagger on a fallen helm, her movements deliberate, clean, and without a word wasted. Drokmar's absence hung between us, a silence we didn't speak of but always heard.
I lay awake. The sky above was bruised purple, starless, a storm brewing somewhere beyond the horizon. It hadn't rained for days, yet I could feel the pressure building behind my eyes, the static crawl under my skin.
When I finally drifted off, the dreams came, not mine, not really.
Flashes of iron walls, a city crowned in thunder. Men kneeling before a figure wrapped in shadow and steel. A voice, low, deliberate, calm. "Divinity was never meant to die."
I woke to my name, carried in a voice that wasn't from this camp.
"Kael."
I sat up fast, breath sharp, hand on the bow beside me. The fire had burned low to embers. The air pulsed faintly, like distant thunder behind the ribs. Aurelius was watching. He'd been awake the whole time.
"You heard it," he said, not a question.
I nodded.
He sighed, rubbing his forehead with ink-stained fingers. "The connection's deepening faster than I expected. The storm's not just yours anymore. It's listening back."
I frowned. "Listening?"
He looked at me the way a man studies an equation that refuses to balance. "Every current has a return path. You call the storm, it answers. But now, Kael, it's calling you."
Before I could respond, Lyren's voice cut through the air from beyond the rocks. "Both of you, up here."
Her tone was off. Controlled, but tight, the kind that meant danger without saying it. We moved quickly. The hill rose above the camp, giving view over the valley's hollow center. What we saw was… wrong.
The land stretched like a scar, ridges of glassy earth, melted and refrozen into twisted shapes. There were forms in it. Human forms. Entire lines of soldiers petrified mid-strike, armor fused into their bodies, faces still caught in the instant of death.
"Gods," Aurelius breathed. "It's a graveyard carved by lightning."
Lyren's eyes flicked to me. "Your kind of lightning?"
I didn't answer. I didn't have to. The storm inside me stirred, restless, recognizing something buried here.
Aurelius knelt by a fragment of blackened spear. "These aren't recent. Centuries, maybe millennia. The alloy's unknown." He ran a gloved thumb over it and frowned. "But this… this valley remembers."
I stepped closer to one of the frozen figures, a man locked in a kneeling posture, sword raised against an unseen foe. His face was calm. Not terrified. Resigned.
When my hand brushed the glass around him, the storm inside me surged, and the world split.
The sky shattered into blinding white.
I was standing in the same valley, but alive, burning with the screams of battle. Armies clashed, divine sigils blazing above banners. Stormlight cut the horizon in half. In the heart of it, a god fell, light collapsing inward, his crown turning to ash.
And there, amidst it all, I saw a figure that looked almost like me, eyes like molten silver, hand raised to command thunder itself. But his expression wasn't victory. It was guilt.
Then, as quickly as it came, the vision snapped back. I was on my knees, the smell of ozone sharp in the air, Lyren's hand on my shoulder.
"Kael," she hissed. "What did you do?"
The valley had changed. Every glass statue around us was glowing faintly, veins of light pulsing through them like heartbeats.
Aurelius backed away, whispering calculations to himself. "It's reacting to him, to the resonance in his storm."
I could still see it, faint shapes moving through the air, echoes of that ancient war replaying in fractured motion. The storm wasn't just power. It was memory.
Lyren's voice broke through the hum. "We're leaving. Now."
We packed in silence. The air had grown too thick, the valley too awake. But even as we moved, I could feel something following. A rhythm. Heavy. Mechanical.
When we reached the ridge's edge, Lyren stopped dead, eyes narrowing.
Across the plain, three figures were approaching. Humanoid, but not human. Their bodies shimmered like molten iron under thin armor, joints sparking with faint arcs of blue light.
Aurelius swore under his breath. "Stormforged. Varok's scouts."
The name twisted the air between us.
Lyren's hand went to her dagger. "How far do we run before we fight?"
I looked toward the horizon. The storm was rolling closer now, its front a curtain of bruised clouds and light. I could feel him, Varok. Not his words, not his mind, but his intent.
He knew where we were.
"He's coming," I said quietly.
Aurelius met my gaze. "Then we can't stay above ground."
We descended fast, following a fissure into the valley floor, an old trench that might have once been a command line. The deeper we went, the louder the echoes became, whispers of soldiers, fragments of battle cries, names repeated until they dissolved into static.
At one point Lyren stopped and looked back at me. "This isn't just power to you, is it?"
"What do you mean?"
She tilted her head slightly. "Every time you call it, it calls you back harder. You think it's strength. It's chains."
Her words hit harder than I wanted them to.
We reached an underground chamber, a half-collapsed tunnel lined with black stone and fragments of ancient sigils. Aurelius traced one and frowned. "These are not mortal runes. They're divine seals."
"From the gods?" I asked.
"Or what killed them," he murmured.
A sudden roar tore through the earth above us, metal grinding, lightning cracking. The stormforged had found the camp.
Lyren drew her blades. "We fight in shadow, then."
Aurelius shook his head. "We fight nothing until we know what calls the shots. Kael, if you draw on the storm again, you might open another resonance."
I stared up at the ceiling. The thunder was almost rhythmic now, like a heartbeat synchronized with my own.
"I don't have a choice."
I reached inward, and the world responded instantly. The storm surged through the cracks, bleeding blue light into the chamber. Every sigil on the wall ignited. For a moment, I could see beyond the stone, to Varok himself.
He stood in a tower of steel and lightning, eyes closed, lips curved faintly. He spoke, though no sound crossed the distance.
"So. The storm remembers its heir."
The vision shattered. The power in me collapsed like a wave against stone, leaving behind nothing but ringing silence.
When I opened my eyes, Aurelius was staring at me like he'd seen the end of the world. "He knows you."
Lyren spat, turning toward the tunnel mouth. "Then he'll find us soon."
Above, the ground shook. The first stormforged dropped into the fissure, eyes burning like twin forges.
Lyren moved without waiting. Steel flashed, swift and cold. The creature staggered but didn't fall. Its blood wasn't blood, molten lightning hissed where the blade struck.
"Kael!" she shouted. "Now would be a good time to be a god!"
I drew the storm to my palms, it came fast, wild, alive. The valley answered too. Lightning tore through the fissure, slamming into the stormforged and shattering it into fragments of glowing metal. The second one lunged, claws scraping stone, but Lyren met it mid-leap. Aurelius hurled a pulse of raw kinetic energy from his staff, snapping it backward into the dark.
For a heartbeat, the silence after the fight felt unreal. Then the thunder rolled again, closer.
Aurelius leaned against the wall, breathing hard. "He's testing you. These weren't soldiers. They were beacons."
Lyren kicked the remains of the creature. "Then he's found his mark."
I stared up through the cracks of the ceiling, at the slivers of stormlight bleeding through.
Somewhere beyond those clouds, I could feel him waiting. Calm. Certain.
The wind began to shift again, carrying whispers not from this world, names, oaths, echoes of the fallen.
The storm wasn't warning me anymore. It was calling me home.
And for the first time, I wasn't sure if I feared that or wanted it.