Kael Veyrin died at dawn.
The sun had barely crested the treeline when the spear pierced his chest. It was a clean thrust—well-trained, merciless, practiced. The iron tip punched through ribs, muscle, and heart in a single motion.
Kael felt the moment his pulse stopped.
He remembered thinking, So this is it.
The raider yanked the spear free and Kael fell backward into the mud, staring at a sky far too blue for a dying world.
His last breath left him.
And then—
Reality refused.
The air screamed.
Not aloud. Not with sound. With meaning.
Time convulsed.
Kael's blood surged back into his body, reversing its spill like a river flowing uphill. His shattered heart reformed, knitting itself together with an authority that allowed no argument. The mud beneath him dried, cracks racing outward in perfect symmetry.
The spear corroded in the raider's hands.
Rust bloomed instantly, devouring iron until nothing remained but red dust drifting away on a wind that had not existed a moment earlier.
The man holding it aged.
Wrinkles carved themselves into his skin. His hair whitened, thinned, fell out in clumps. His scream turned brittle, then silent as his throat collapsed inward.
He crumpled into a pile of bones.
Kael sat up.
Alive.
Breathing.
Unhurt.
The raiders—hardened men who had burned villages and butchered soldiers—stared at him in frozen horror.
Kael looked down at his chest.
No wound.
No scar.
Not even blood.
Something inside him unfolded.
Not power rushing in.
Power remembered.
He stood.
The ground stilled beneath his feet.
The wind halted.
The raiders ran.
Kael watched them flee and knew, with calm certainty, that they would never return.
Because the world had already decided the outcome.
And the world, apparently, was on his side.