Six months.
That was how long Liriel had been working in the Sect's kitchens when she first saw him.
The kitchens occupied the lowest level of the Moonveil complex, carved into the bedrock itself. They were hot, windowless, and smelled perpetually of smoke and broth. The stone walls wept with moisture that never quite dried. It was the kind of place designed for people the Sect wanted to forget—servants and failures, broken tools that were kept around because waste was inefficient.
Liriel had become efficient at being ignored.
She worked the morning shifts, preparing breakfast for the five hundred disciples and thirty Master Teachers. The work was rote and forgiving: chopping vegetables, tending fires, stirring massive pots of congee and broth. Her hands had become tough. Her shoulders ached constantly. She had forgotten what it felt like to have time to think.
Which was, she suspected, the point.
"Ashenbrand!"
Liriel looked up from the pot of ginger broth she was stirring. Old Fang, the head cook, gestured from across the kitchen. His face was round and weathered, his eyes permanently irritated from sixty years of cooking over open flames.
"The disciples' dining hall is out of white tea. Take a crate up to the storeroom on the third level. Don't let anyone stop you—you've got clearance."
Liriel wiped her hands on her apron and retrieved one of the heavy wooden crates of prepared tea. The walk from the kitchens to the storeroom took her through sections of the Sect she hadn't seen since her first days as a student. The stone corridors were different in the mornings—cooler, quieter, with filtered sunlight falling through high windows. She tried not to look at the training yards visible through the archways, where disciples were running through cultivation forms with breathtaking grace.
She was halfway to the storeroom when someone slammed into her.
The crate of tea scattered across the floor, cups breaking, tea leaves spilling across the stone. Liriel fell backward, catching herself on her palms. For a moment, the world was just noise—breaking pottery, exclamations of surprise, the sound of her own breathing.
Then hands appeared, offering to help her up.
"I'm so sorry. I wasn't watching where I was going." The voice was warm, apologetic, and expensive-sounding. Liriel looked up to see a young man, probably her age, maybe a year or two older. He had the kind of face that suggested generations of good breeding—sharp cheekbones, eyes the color of winter water, black hair that fell perfectly to his shoulders. He wore the indigo robes of an advanced student, and there was the faintest shimmer of Resonance around him, visible only to those who could sense such things.
He was everything Liriel had failed to become.
"I'm fine," she said curtly, not taking his hands. She pushed herself to her feet, brushing tea leaves from her drab gray servant's robes.
"No, really, that was my fault. I was training and lost track of time." He was studying her face with an odd intensity. "I'm Kael. Kael Stormborn."
Of course he was. The Stormborn clan was one of the Four Great Houses. Their heir wouldn't need to introduce himself—everyone in the Sect knew who Kael Stormborn was. He was the type of person who walked through doors and made them larger just by being present.
"Liriel," she said, and bent to start picking up the broken cups.
Kael knelt to help her without asking. "You're from the Ashenbrand line, aren't you? I remember you from the Awakening Ceremony."
Liriel froze. There was a careful neutrality in his voice, but that didn't matter. The fact that he remembered meant he had seen her break. Everyone in the Sect had seen it. Five hundred witnesses to her failure, passed down in whispers and pitying glances for six months.
"I was," she said quietly. "I'm not anymore."
"I'm sorry that happened." Kael placed a handful of tea leaves into the crate. "If you need anything—if there's any way I can help—"
"I don't need anything from you," Liriel said sharply. She stood, holding the crate with its remaining cups and scattered tea. "I need to finish my work."
She expected him to look offended. Instead, something flickered across his face—recognition, maybe, or respect. He stood as well, brushing tea leaves from his robes.
"Right. Of course. Again, I'm sorry."
Liriel nodded curtly and walked past him toward the storeroom.
She felt his eyes on her back for a long moment. Then, mercifully, she heard his footsteps receding down the corridor.
That night, back in her servant's quarters, Liriel tried to do something she hadn't done in six months: cultivate.
Her room was a small stone cell with a narrow window, a sleeping mat, and a single shelf for her few possessions. The Sect provided the minimum necessary for survival—plain meals, basic clothing, shelter from the elements. Everything else had to be earned or done without.
She locked the door and sat in the center of the room, assuming the meditation posture she'd been taught before the Awakening Ceremony. Legs crossed, hands resting on her knees, spine straight, breathing slow and deep. The foundational position for reaching inward and touching one's own Resonance.
She had tried this perhaps thirty times since her core shattered, each time hoping for a different result. Each time ending in the same crushing disappointment.
This time would be no different. She could feel it before she even closed her eyes.
Liriel took a breath and reached inward with her mind, searching for the familiar sensation of her core. It was there—she could sense it like a phantom limb, a presence defined mostly by its absence. The fracture that had destroyed her power was still there too, though it had stopped actively bleeding spiritual essence. Now it was just a scar, dark and twisted and useless.
She tried to visualize healing it anyway, gathering what little Resonance still leaked through the cracks and trying to shape it into something functional. It was futile. She'd known it was futile for months. But desperation was a stubborn thing.
Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened.
Liriel opened her eyes and found tears on her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, angry at herself for the weakness.
There was a soft knock at her door.
She froze, listening. It came again—two quiet taps.
"Who is it?" she called.
The door was locked, but in the servants' quarters, locks were more polite suggestions than actual barriers. The person outside could probably have picked it in seconds, if they were cultivated. Liriel stood, ready to face whoever had come to tell her some servants' duty needed doing at an inappropriate hour.
But when the door opened, it was Kael.
He stood in the doorway in plain clothes—linen shirt and dark pants, no robes—which made him look young and strangely vulnerable. Behind him, the corridor was empty.
"What are you doing here?" Liriel demanded, immediately wary. There was no good reason for an advanced student to be in the servants' quarters alone.
"I wanted to apologize properly," Kael said quietly. "For this morning, and for... everything else. The dismissal of your student status. That shouldn't have happened so quickly."
"I don't need your pity," Liriel said flatly.
"It's not pity." He stepped into her room without being invited, closing the door behind him. "I was there when you broke. I was in the ceremony hall. I saw how hard you were fighting to maintain control."
Something in his voice—a kind of recognition, a specific kind of understanding—made Liriel pause. "Why does that matter to you?"
"Because I've seen people break," Kael said. "I've seen them give up. And I've never seen anyone fight back the way you did." He studied her face. "You're still fighting, aren't you? Even though they told you to stop."
There was no point in lying to him. Cultivators could sense deception—it created little disharmonies in Resonance that showed up as tells. Kael wasn't actively reading her (it would be rude), but she wouldn't be able to hide if he decided to look.
"What would be the point?" Liriel asked. "My core is broken. I'm not a cultivator anymore."
"Not right now," Kael agreed. "But that doesn't mean you can't become one again."
The words were so preposterous that Liriel almost laughed. "You can't heal a shattered core. Physician Wei said it herself. There's no technique, no medicine, no force in the world that can put it back together."
"Not if you work alone," Kael said quietly. He looked toward her window, where the moon was rising over the Sect's walls. "But what if someone worked with you?"
"Why would any cultivator risk their reputation helping a failed servant?"
Kael turned back to her. "Because I think you deserve better than this. And because..." He trailed off, seeming to wrestle with something. Finally: "Because something about you was different when you broke. Something I can't quite sense. Something the Council seemed very interested in keeping quiet."
Liriel's breath caught. She wanted to ask him what he meant. But there was something in his eyes that warned her—a depth of knowledge or concern that went beyond the casual kindness of an upper-rank disciple.
"I should go," Kael said, seeming to realize he'd said too much. "But I want you to know: you're not invisible. Not to everyone. You're not a failure just because they say you are."
He opened the door and left before she could respond.
Liriel stood alone in her tiny room, her heart racing in a way it hadn't since the Awakening Ceremony. She looked at her hands—rough from kitchen work, stained with vegetable juice and old tea—and felt something shift inside her.
Something that tasted, unexpectedly, like hope.