The rain hammered against the cobblestones of Eredor's merchant quarter like a thousand tiny fists, each droplet carrying the weight of Kaelen Voss's failures. He pressed himself against the damp stone wall of a shuttered bakery, his breath coming in ragged gasps that misted in the cold night air. Behind him, the sound of boots splashing through puddles grew closer.
"Find him!" a voice barked. "Lord Drayen wants his head before sunrise!"
Kaelen's hand instinctively moved to the empty scabbard at his hip. Three years ago, he would have drawn a knight's blade forged in Valorian's sacred forges. Three years ago, he would have stood his ground, confident in his training and his cause. Three years ago, he hadn't been branded a heretic and driven from the only home he'd ever known.
Now he had nothing but a rusty shortsword he'd bought for two copper coins and a death sentence hanging over his head for refusing to massacre a village of innocent civilians.
*Some knight I turned out to be*, he thought bitterly, sliding deeper into the shadows as two armed mercenaries passed his hiding spot. Their torches hissed and sputtered in the downpour, casting grotesque shadows on the walls.
"Check the alleys!" one of them called out. "He can't have gone far."
Kaelen counted to ten, then slipped out of his hiding place and moved in the opposite direction. His boots were nearly worn through, and every step sent a jolt of cold water seeping between his toes. The Eredor city-state was supposed to be neutral ground, a place where power users of all kinds could find refuge. But Lord Drayen's coin spoke louder than any law, and Kaelen had learned the hard way that mercy was a luxury mercenaries couldn't afford.
He'd made his choice two days ago when Drayen's company had been hired to "pacify" a farming community suspected of harboring shadow magic users. Kaelen had seen the truth—they were just farmers, their only crime being too poor to pay Valorian's protection taxes. When his squad leader gave the order to burn the village with the people still inside, something inside Kaelen had snapped.
The squad leader now had a broken jaw and three cracked ribs. Kaelen had twenty armed men hunting him through the rain-soaked streets of Eredor.
*Not exactly a fair trade*, he mused grimly, ducking under a low archway that led toward the city's eastern gate. If he could make it to the Morwen Marshlands, he might lose his pursuers in the cursed fog that clung to that forsaken place. Nobody would be stupid enough to follow him there.
Of course, that meant Kaelen had to be stupid enough to go there himself.
The archway opened onto a narrow street lined with warehouses. Most were dark and locked for the night, but a few showed signs of life—illegal gambling dens and black market dealers who operated when the city guard looked the other way. Kaelen had almost made it halfway down the street when a crossbow bolt sparked off the cobblestones inches from his feet.
"There!" someone shouted. "Eastern warehouse district!"
Kaelen broke into a sprint, his exhausted legs screaming in protest. More bolts whizzed past his head, one close enough that he felt the wind of its passing. He zigzagged between crates and barrels, using every trick he'd learned during his years at the Valorian Knight Academy. His instructors would have been proud of his evasion techniques.
They would have been less proud of the circumstances.
A bolt caught him in the shoulder, punching through the leather of his worn coat but mercifully stopping against the chainmail he still wore beneath. The impact sent him stumbling, and he crashed through a rotten wooden door into what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse.
"Seal the exits!" Drayen's lieutenant commanded from outside. "I want him alive! The boss wants to make an example of him!"
Kaelen staggered to his feet, pressing a hand against his bruised shoulder. The warehouse was vast and empty, stripped of whatever goods it had once held. Rain poured through holes in the roof, creating a cacophony that almost drowned out the sound of men taking up positions around the building.
Almost.
He was trapped, surrounded, and running on nothing but adrenaline and stubborn pride. Kaelen's hand moved to the rusty shortsword at his belt, then stopped. What was the point? He'd killed men before—it was part of a knight's training, part of a mercenary's job. But these were just hired swords following orders, same as he'd been until two days ago.
Same as he'd been when—
*No*. He forced that memory down, locked it away with all the others he didn't want to face. Focus on the present. Focus on surviving.
"Come out, Voss!" the lieutenant called. "Make this easy on yourself. Lord Drayen might show mercy if you surrender!"
"Drayen wouldn't know mercy if it stabbed him in his fat gut," Kaelen muttered. He scanned the warehouse, looking for any possible escape route. There—at the back of the building, a section of wall that looked newer than the rest, probably covering up an old loading door.
He ran for it, knowing he'd only have seconds before the mercenaries burst in. His shoulder throbbed with each stride, and his lungs burned from the exertion. Ten feet from the wall, the warehouse doors exploded inward, and Drayen's men poured through like a flood.
"Take him!"
Kaelen lowered his shoulder and hit the weak wall at full speed. The rotted boards gave way with a satisfying crack, and he burst through into the rainy night beyond—
—and into empty air.
The warehouse backed onto one of Eredor's many canals, and Kaelen had just launched himself off a fifteen-foot drop. He had a single moment to appreciate the irony of trading twenty armed mercenaries for a plunge into cold, polluted water, and then he hit the canal surface with a tremendous splash.
The shock of the cold water drove the air from his lungs. The current, swollen by the storm, immediately grabbed him and dragged him downstream. Kaelen kicked frantically, fighting to reach the surface. His chainmail, which had saved him from the crossbow bolt, now threatened to drag him under like an anchor.
His head broke the surface just long enough to gasp a breath and see the blurred lights of the warehouse district receding behind him. Then the current pulled him under again, spinning him in the darkness. His knee cracked against something solid—a submerged post or piece of debris—and pain exploded up his leg.
*This is it*, he thought with strange calm. *This is how Kaelen Voss dies. Drowned in a sewer, hunted by the people he used to work with, branded a traitor by the kingdom he tried to serve.*
His vision started to fade, dark spots blooming at the edges. The cold seeped into his bones, numbing the pain, numbing everything. Maybe this was better. Maybe he deserved this for all the orders he'd followed before he finally grew a conscience.
Something bumped against him in the water. Not debris—something smooth and hard, pulsing with an energy that made his skin prickle even through the numbing cold. Without thinking, his fingers closed around it.
The world exploded into light and shadow.
Kaelen's eyes snapped open, though he couldn't tell if he was seeing or hallucinating. The dark water around him seemed to boil with black mist, tendrils of shadow rising like smoke from the object in his hand. Through the murk, he caught glimpses of what he held—a sword hilt, ornate and ancient, wrapped in leather that looked both pristine and impossibly old.
*No*, a voice whispered in his mind. Not a voice—voices, layered and echoing, as if a dozen people spoke in unison. *Not an end. A beginning. Power for the weak. Vengeance for the wronged. Take it. Take us. Become.*
"Get... out... of my... head," Kaelen tried to say, but water filled his mouth. He should let go. He knew he should let go. Whatever this thing was, it reeked of wrongness, of the forbidden magic that Valorian hunted and destroyed.
But dying reeked of wrongness too.
His grip tightened.
The shadows exploded outward, and Kaelen felt something surge through him—power, pure and terrible and intoxicating. The water around him flash-froze into black ice, then shattered into a thousand pieces. The current lost its hold on him as he rose, lifted by tendrils of darkness that responded to his will like extensions of his own body.
He breached the surface of the canal, gasping and shaking, the ancient sword now fully manifested in his hand. It was beautiful and horrible all at once—a longsword with a blade of midnight steel that seemed to drink in the light, etched with runes that writhed and shifted when he looked at them directly. The crossguard was formed from what looked like crystallized shadow, and the pommel held a gem that pulsed with sickly purple light.
"What..." Kaelen's voice came out as a rasp. "What are you?"
*Soulrender*, the voices answered. *We are Soulrender, and you are the first to grasp us in three hundred years. Welcome, wielder. Welcome to damnation.*
A scream split the night air.
Kaelen's head snapped toward the sound, his trained reflexes overriding his shock. There—on the canal bank, barely visible in the rain—figures in dark robes surrounded a smaller form. Even from this distance, he could see the ceremonial daggers they carried, could see the shadow magic crackling between their fingers.
The Cult of the Shade. Here, in Eredor. Hunting someone.
The smart thing would be to use this distraction to escape, to run for the Morwen Marshlands and never look back. Kaelen had done enough heroic stupidity for one lifetime. He'd thrown away his career, his reputation, and nearly his life for people he didn't know. He didn't owe these strangers anything.
The smaller figure—a woman, he realized—managed to break free from the circle and ran directly toward the canal. Toward him. In the flashes of lightning, he caught a glimpse of her face—young, maybe twenty, with determination and terror warring in her eyes. Her hands blazed with pale blue light, tracing symbols in the air that exploded into barriers of shimmering force.
A rune mage. A good one, by the look of those defensive spells.
"Purification won't save you, girl!" one of the cultists called out in a voice like grinding stones. "The Shadow Lord rises, and all light will be consumed!"
*Let them take her*, the sword whispered. *Her struggle means nothing. Her death means nothing. Run. Survive. Grow stronger.*
Kaelen looked at the sword in his hand, at the shadows still writhing around the blade. He looked at the woman stumbling toward the canal, her barriers cracking under the cultists' assault. He thought about the village he'd saved two days ago, about the children who might live because he'd chosen to do the right thing instead of the easy thing.
"Shut up," he told the sword.
Then he lunged out of the canal and threw himself into a new fight he couldn't hope to win.
---
*Welcome to the darkness, Kaelen Voss. Your choices will be your salvation—or your damnation.*