Tear of Iron smelled like hot metal and old rain.
It was the first thing Kael really noticed, once his new body stopped being a constant emergency.
At the beginning, everything had been noise and hunger and sleep. Instincts. His new brain spent its days trying to figure out what to do with fingers and eyes and the strange tightness in his chest whenever his mother left the room.
That passed.
He learned, very quickly, that in this life his name was "Kael" said with three different voices:
"Kael," soft and exhausted, with a laugh hiding inside it. Lina.
"Kael," deeper, a little clumsy, always with pride jammed into it. Haren.
And "Kael!" high and annoyed, the neighbor's girl when he crawled too close to her bucket.
The house was one room, technically. Four walls of rough stone, a low ceiling with a crack that let the leak in when it rained, and a curtain dividing "bed" from "not bed." They had a bed: a wooden frame that creaked like an old man with every movement and a mattress that had clearly been stuffed three times and beaten flat four.
The first time Kael managed to sit up alone on that bed, Lina cried.
He stared at her with serious eyes, trying to understand why watching a baby wobble upright was enough to make a grown woman cover her mouth and wipe tears on her sleeve. He didn't find a useful answer.
He decided it didn't matter. Let her cry. Let her smile. As long as they fed him and didn't get in the way, they could do what they wanted.
Haren's boots always left little trails of iron dust on the floor when he came home. The dust got everywhere—on the bed legs, in the cracks of the crooked table, into the lines of Lina's hands. It didn't bother them. It bothered Kael because it changed how the mana felt.
The city was full of it: metallic breath from the foundries, heat from the smelters, the slow pulse of ore being dragged up from the mines beneath the fortress hill. Even as a toddler, he could feel it. Not clearly, not like before, but as a heavy flavor in the air that had nothing to do with smoke.
Mana.
He remembered what it was. His new body didn't. That was the problem.
At night, when Lina and Haren slept—too exhausted to do anything but collapse side by side on the bed—Kael lay on his back in the little pallet of rags they'd made for him on the floor. He stared at the underside of the table and tried to feel.
Not feelings. Those were easy. Hunger, warmth, cold, the weird twist in his chest when Lina hummed some old tune while washing clothes. No. He reached past all of that, groping for the quiet hum he knew the world should have.
Sometimes, if he stayed very still, he caught it: a faint thrum, like someone tapping their fingers under the skin of reality. Weak. Slippery. Nothing like the clean, sharp rush of Profound Night.
But it was there.
Once, when he was about two and a half by Lina's proud counting, the shadow under the table moved when it shouldn't have.
He'd been staring at it for what felt like an hour, trying to ignore the itch on his neck and the smell of soup cooling in the chipped bowl nearby. The candle on the shelf had burned low. Its flame was steady.
The shadow under the table twitched. Just a little. Like it had flinched.
Kael blinked.
The candle hadn't moved. The table hadn't moved. His own hand was still.
He focused on the shadow, on that slight wrongness, and tugged.
For half a heartbeat, the darkness thickened.
Then it snapped back into place, thin and ordinary. A headache bloomed behind his eyes. His nose started to bleed. Lina noticed both at exactly the same time.
"Kael!" she gasped, scooping him up and pressing a cloth to his face. "Haren! Haren, he's bleeding, he's—"
"I'm fine, woman," Kael wanted to say. What came out was a pathetic whimper.
Haren rushed in from outside, ducking under the door frame. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Lina stammered. "He was just lying there and then—look!"
She turned Kael's face toward him like he was a piece of broken pottery. Haren's eyes widened at the sight of the thin red trickle.
"Took a bump?" he asked. "Did he fall? Kael, did you fall?"
Kael stared at him. He made a small, unhappy noise because that's what babies did. It worked. Haren winced like someone had stabbed him.
"Hey, hey," he said, softer. "It's alright. Just a nosebleed. Kids do that, right? They do that."
Lina nodded too fast. "Right. They do that. Of course they do that."
They didn't know. They had never raised a child before. They had no idea what was normal.
Which was lucky for him.
After that, Lina watched him more closely. For a few days she wouldn't let him lie under the table. She kept him either in her lap or within arm's reach while she scrubbed clothes in a basin or swept iron dust into a pile that never quite went away.
Kael was careful. He didn't pull on shadows again. Not where anyone could see.
Time moved in a strange way after that.
Days blurred together: Haren leaving before dawn when the sky was still the color of ash, coming back when the foundries' fires painted the clouds black-red. Lina walking back and forth between home and the wash yard, arms full of wet clothes, hands cracked from soap and cold water.
Kael grew.
It was annoying how slow the process was from the inside. He remembered walking through collapsing cities with a single step. Now he celebrated the day he managed to cross the room without falling on his face.
Lina did most of the celebrating, to be honest. "Did you see him?" she would say to anyone willing to listen—and a few who weren't. "Walked all the way, didn't even hold on to the wall once. Strong legs, this one."
Haren would grin and ruffle his hair until Kael's neck hurt. "Of course he did," he'd say. "My boy."
Your boy, Kael thought the first time. For now.
He pretended to wobble more than he needed to when people were watching. Better to look like a normal child. Nobody paid much attention to clever poor children. Clever poor children who looked like they should still be figuring out how spoons worked? People noticed those. And when people noticed, Towers noticed.
He wasn't ready for Towers yet.
Outside, Tear of Iron lived up to its name.
From the doorway of their little house, Kael could see one of the main streets: a stream of carts loaded with ore, men pushing wheelbarrows, women carrying baskets, kids darting between them like cats. Above it all, the fortress itself rose, built into the black rock of the central hill like something that had grown there instead of being made.
Thick walls. Iron bands. Watchtowers. Banners snapping in the dirty wind.
If he squinted and ignored the smoke, he could almost pretend he was looking at some minor citadel from his old life. Almost.
He watched a lot.
The neighbor's girl, Mira, was three years older and thought that made her important. She taught him crucial things like which corners to avoid if he didn't want his feet stepped on, how to spot when a cart driver was about to turn, and where to find the best spot to listen to gossip.
"Right here," she told him one afternoon, pulling him behind a broken barrel near the corner of a tavern. She pushed his head down until he was crouched beside her. "The wall carries the sound. My dad says it's because of the stone. I say the tavern just likes telling secrets."
Kael probably should have been offended at being dragged like a sack of grain. He let her do it. It was a good spot.
Through the wall, voices bled out from the tavern's main room: laughter, curses, the clink of cups on a battered counter. Haren's voice wasn't among them; he almost never had money for ale. But other men who worked the same jobs did, and they were very free with their words once alcohol loosened their tongues.
"…I'm telling you, the last caravan didn't come back," one said, voice slurred. "Not all of it."
"Bandits?" another guessed.
"Bandits don't take wagons and leave the horses," a third snorted. "Something's wrong on the south road. My cousin saw smoke near the ravine."
"Everything's wrong these days," someone else muttered. "War here, war there… Assuming the Dominion doesn't march through first."
Kael listened. Mira mouthed the words along with the more interesting curses.
He filed the information away.
South road. Ravine. Smoke.
Bandits were a tool that tired governments liked to pretend they couldn't control. Sometimes true. Sometimes useful fiction.
"Are you even listening?" Mira whispered, elbowing him.
He blinked and made a face at her. She grinned, missing one front tooth.
"If my dad catches you here, he'll tan your hide," she said.
"He'll have to catch me first," he said.
The words came out a little thick. His tongue still wasn't as quick as his thoughts. Mira laughed anyway.
Later, when Lina scolded him for running off and Haren told him to "listen to your mother, boy, she knows trouble when she smells it," Kael just nodded at the right times and thought about roads.
You didn't need to be a genius to predict that sooner or later, poor people in a noisy corner of the city would decide danger on the road was worth the chance at a better job somewhere else.
He could feel it like pressure building in the air.
Magic came into his life the way a storm does: with rumors first.
"The Tower's sending testers down next month," one of Lina's friends told her while they bent over a tub of shirts in the wash yard. "Children between five and eight. Can you imagine? Imagine if one of ours gets chosen."
Lina snorted. "I can't imagine them looking down here long enough to notice. They'll fill their ranks from the upper streets before they ever step foot in Rust Row."
Rust Row. That was what people called their part of the city. Because of the dust. Because everything left out in the open for more than a day ended up turning the color of dried blood.
Kael sat on an upside-down bucket close enough to hear, playing with a piece of broken ceramic. He didn't look up. He didn't need to.
The Umbral Tower.
He could feel it even when he wasn't thinking about it: a tall, thin spike of mana on the hill, rising above the fortress walls. In his old life, it would have been a provincial tower. Maybe worth a day's attention. Here, it was the center of power.
Children with "talent" went there and came back as robed mages, or didn't come back at all.
"We should try anyway," Haren said that evening when Lina repeated the news. He sat on the edge of the bed, unlacing his boots with slow fingers. "Doesn't hurt to stand in a line if there's even a chance."
Lina looked at Kael, who was pretending to struggle with a wooden spoon and a too-thick soup.
"They won't take a child from down here," she said.
"They took Jorin's boy last year," Haren argued.
"Jorin's boy is from Copper Street," Lina shot back. "That's practically a different world."
"Still," Haren insisted. "Our Kael's smart. Stares too much for his own good, but he watches everything. Maybe—"
"Haren," Lina said. "Don't fill your head with dreams."
They looked at him.
Kael made sure to miss his mouth with the spoon on the next attempt. Soup slid down his chin. Lina sighed and leaned over to wipe it with the corner of her apron.
"See?" she said, smiling a little. "He's still figuring out his own face. Let him be a child for a while."
Haren chuckled and ruffled his hair. "Fine. We'll let you be small a bit more, eh?"
Kael tolerated the touch. Barely.
The truth was, he didn't want the Tower yet. Not like this. Not dragged through its doors as some lucky charity case. He needed a better foundation. More control. A stable core.
His core, right now, was a mess. He could feel it when he concentrated: a weak little thing, flickering in his chest like a candle in a draft. Healthy children his age probably had brighter, cleaner cores than this cracked, re-forged thing cobbled together from a falling Archon's last gamble.
He couldn't risk anyone looking too closely at it.
So he tripped sometimes when he could have kept his balance. He mispronounced words on purpose. He pretended not to notice details unless Lina or Haren pointed them out.
It was boring. Necessary. Survival often was.
On his fourth winter, the city felt tighter.
The war far away—far in the sense that maps existed between here and there—was closer in how people talked. Prices went up. Thin soup got thinner. Haren came home more tired. Sometimes he didn't come home the first night at all, sent straight from the foundry to the mines because someone had "miscounted shifts."
Lina's hands cracked so badly they bled when she wrung laundry. She hid the worst of it from Kael, turning her palms away. As if blood would shock him.
"Another caravan left," Mira said one evening, sitting on the doorstep with her chin on her knees. "My aunt says there's work in the south, if you get past the bandits."
"If," Kael said.
She shrugged. "Better 'if' than 'never.' That's what she said."
Inside, Haren and Lina were whispering. Their voices carried more than they thought.
"…they're hiring carriers for a south run, good silver, more than I make in two months," Haren murmured.
South road isn't safe," Lina answered. "You said it yourself. Smoke near the ravine, people going missing. You want to drag a five-year-old out there?
"If we stay, what happens?" Haren asked. "Prices keep climbing. The Tower takes the rich kids and leaves ours to rot. I break my back for crumbs. You scrub other people's shirts till your fingers fall off. And when he's grown, he'll do the same. Is that better?"
Lina was quiet for a moment.
"He deserves more," she said finally.
Kael sat on his little pallet, turning a smooth stone over in his hand, pretending not to listen.
More.
They were talking about him like he wasn't there. Like his whole future was a ball being pushed back and forth between them.
He shouldn't care. In his previous life, he'd watched entire kingdoms rise and fall without blinking. People were pieces. Always had been.
But this was different. Not because they loved him—they did, clumsily, desperately—but because their decisions actually touched him now. Literally. If they decided to stay, his path would twist one way. If they left, another.
He closed his hand around the stone until it dug into his palm.
The lights in the room were low. One candle on the table, a coal in the little stove. Shadows stretched long and thin.
He breathed in. Slowly.
Tasted metal and smoke.
Reached for that faint familiar wrongness at the edges of the dark.
The shadow of his own hand on the floor thickened. Just a fraction. The line around his fingers sharpened. For a heartbeat, the darkness there felt a little more like his Night than the world's.
Good, he thought.
The strain hit him a moment later. His head swam. His stomach twisted. He felt something in his chest flutter, then steady again.
He let the shadow go. It snapped back to normal.
Not yet. Not strong. But it was a start.
"We'll go," Haren said suddenly.
Kael's eyes opened.
"We'll go?" Lina repeated, startled.
"We'll go," Haren said again, firmer. "We sign on with the caravan, do one trip, maybe two. If it's as bad as they say, we come back. If it's better… we don't."
Silence stretched.
Lina sighed. It sounded like someone letting air out of a punctured bellows.
"Fine," she said. But if something happens to him
Nothing will happen to him, Haren cut in quickly. I swear it.
Outside, somewhere in the distance, a hammer rang three times on metal. Shift change.
Kael lay back on his pallet and stared at the underside of the bed.
He didn't need a prophecy to know that nothing will happen was a lie. The Profound Night he used to command hummed faintly in the back of his mind, like a memory of a song. Danger and opportunity always traveled together.
Bandits Ravine Caravan.
His new life was inching toward the first real break
He closed his eyes, fighting the heaviness in his limbs. His body wanted sleep. His mind wanted to plan.
Later he told himself. You'll have time. On the road.
He let go.
The candle burned low. The shadows in the corners stretched and yawned, a little darker than they should be.
No one noticed.