The Null District's night was a blanket of despair, heavy and suffocating. Kael fled the central square, the humiliation of the Failed Awakening pressing on his shoulders like iron. Shadows clung to him, indifferent yet suffocating. He had nowhere to go. The streets, lined with broken statutes and abandoned buildings, felt alive watching, waiting.
His hand unconsciously brushed the broken Name Fragment. The Seed pulsed violently, a heartbeat in his chest louder than his own. He tried to calm it. Tried to breathe. Tried to tell himself it was nothing.
It was too late.
A scream echoed from a nearby alley. A thief a ragged, desperate boy lunged at a merchant carrying the meager proceeds of the day. Kael's muscles tensed. Time slowed.
The Seed answered.
Reality bent. Not elegantly, not subtly. Rules that had existed for centuries the order of matter, the logic of cause and effect fractured. The merchant froze mid-step, his hand suspended in air above the coins. The boy hovered like a marionette, his dagger suspended, useless.
Kael didn't want this. He didn't even understand it.
And then… the boy fell.
The fragment in Kael's hand pulsed violently. A cold, inhuman voice whispered around him, slicing through the alley's quiet:
"Take. Or be taken."
The boy's dagger slid from his hand, cutting across the merchant's throat in an impossible, silent motion. No sound, no struggle just death. The Seed had claimed it, bending the rules, erasing hesitation, enforcing a cruel, chaotic order that Kael had not intended.
The world snapped back. The merchant collapsed. The boy lay on the ground, his eyes wide and empty. Kael's stomach heaved.
He had killed.
The first kill. Not with intent, not with malice but by accident. By the uncontrollable hunger of the Seed.
Reality around him flickered. Streetlights bent toward him, shadows stretched unnaturally. The minor Edict he had accidentally unleashed didn't just bend rules it erased them temporarily. Walls no longer obeyed physics, coins floated, air shimmered. A crate teetered on the edge of a roof and stayed there, hovering.
Kael fell to his knees, trembling, the fragment burning in his palm. His mind screamed, but no sound emerged. The Seed had tasted blood, and it had reacted. It was alive, and it was hungry.
From the shadows, something moved. Not human. Not fully. Just a figure, observing. A witness or perhaps another Seed's echo. Kael didn't know. But he felt it: the world was watching, judging, waiting. And if he failed to control the Seed again, death wouldn't just be accidental it would follow him.
He scrambled through the alleys, clutching the fragment like a lifeline. The taste of failure and terror burned in his throat. For the first time, Kael understood the true danger of Authority: power without control was a predator, and he had just been its prey.
And somewhere, in the fractured streets of the Null District, a shadow moved silently, recording, calculating, waiting for the moment Kael would awaken again.
The hunger within him did not fade. It only grew.