"A soldier does not grieve on the battlefield. He grieves after, when the silence comes."— Iron Covenant field manual
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Dark came slow.Kael cooked dinner because he couldn't sit still any longer. Fish from the cold-store, seasoned with wild thyme he'd found growing behind the woodshed — right against the wall, obvious as anything, and Aldric had apparently never noticed it in three years. Kael found this baffling. It was right there.Aldric ate the fish and looked at it like it had personally offended him by tasting good."Where did you learn to cook?""Another life," Kael said."You keep saying that.""You keep not asking what I mean."Aldric chewed. Swallowed. Set his fork down. "I figured, when you were ready, you'd tell me." A pause. "Are you ready?"Kael thought about it. Actually thought about it, for the first time in three years. Telling Aldric the truth. I died in another world. I was a different person. I remember all of it. Your world has no word for what I am because it's never happened here before, or if it has, nobody survived long enough to explain it."No," he said. "I don't think I am."Aldric nodded. This time the nod was right. The nod that said I'll wait.After dinner the old man stood, slower than usual, one hand on the table's cracked edge."Come with me."
The barn. The ozone smell was stronger today — sharp, metallic — and Kael didn't say I already know about the hidden room because he wanted to see how Aldric would play it. The old man pulled a key on a leather cord from under his shirt. Brass, tarnished, teeth that didn't match any lock in the cottage. He knelt, joints cracking, and fitted the key into the floorboards.The hatch opened onto a room full of shelves and books and glass jars and a forge too small for horseshoes surrounded by tools too delicate for anything but inscription work. Kael had smelled the ozone for weeks. He'd been dying to see this."All of this," Aldric said, "is yours now."Now. Not someday.Kael sat at the workbench. Warm wood, burn scars, chemical stains. A bench somebody had used hard for years.And Aldric told him everything. Or nearly everything — there were gaps, places where the story bent around something Aldric wasn't saying — but the shape of what he revealed was devastating enough without the missing pieces.His real name was Kael Varn. His father had been Edric Varn, a second-tier Crucible Adept, unregistered, murdered by the Crown's Silver Office on Athenaeum orders. His mother was Lira Ashwood, a healer, unlicensed. Also murdered. He was nine months old when it happened.Kael processed this the way he'd processed everything since the aneurysm: information first, reaction later. The reaction was building underneath — grief, rage, something cold he didn't have a name for yet. The analytical layer was faster. It got there first. Orphan. Political assassination. Institutional cover-up. One thing rose above the noise: I will learn what they died for. I will survive. Everything else can wait."I am Aldric Varn," the old man said. "Third-tier Channeler, Covenant Path. Iron Covenant, retired. I'm your grandfather.""I know," Kael said quietly.Aldric blinked."The photograph behind the chimney stone. You say 'Edric' in your sleep once a week. The birthmark behind your ear is the same as mine — that's inherited, not coincidence." He shrugged. "I figured it out about a year ago."Pride crossed Aldric's face, just for a moment, before it sank under something heavier. "Everything I've taught you. Breathing, observation, physical training. All of it was preparation.""For what?""For surviving."
And he told him about the Paths. Six of them. Six different ways humans could channel aether, the energy that ran through everything in this world.The Crucible Path was transmutation — changing the structure of materials. The more you understood a material, the more precisely you could alter it. Kael's brain went somewhere very fast at that. Real transmutation. If you knew how a material was built, where it was weak, when it changed state, you could take it apart and put it back together however you wanted. The rabbit. The knife. The way he'd felt tissue boundaries through the blade that morning. I already did it. I didn't know what to call it.His hands were on the workbench. He didn't trust himself to speak yet."You're doing the thing," Aldric said."What thing?""The thing where your eyes go blank and you start doing math nobody asked you to do. Your father did it too." He paused. "It's what made him brilliant and it's what got him killed."The Covenant Path enhanced the physical body — speed, strength, endurance pushed beyond human limits. Iron Covenant soldiers, Aldric's old unit, were Covenant-enhanced. That explained how a sixty-seven-year-old man could cross a room in half a second.Aldric poured himself a swallow of water from the jar on the shelf. When he set it down, his hand was steady."There are others," Aldric said. "Tide controls elemental forces — fire, water, wind, lightning. Raw energy, directed and shaped. Bastion creates barriers and wards, defensive structures woven from aether. Veil is perception — reading aether signatures, sensing intention, detecting lies. The Athenaeum uses Veil mages as investigators. Interrogators. They're the reason hiding is so hard.""That's five," Kael said.Aldric's face changed. The room felt heavier."The Hollow Path." He said it the way you'd say the name of something that bites. "Mind, memory, shadow, consciousness. It was banned four hundred years ago by the Compact of Iron. If they catch you practising it, you die. If they catch you researching it, you die. Your father was killed because he mixed Hollow principles into his Crucible work.""Who taught him? If it's been banned for four hundred years?"The silence after that question went on for a while. Aldric's jaw worked."There's a word in the old texts," he said slowly. "Before the Compact. They called them Convergences. Places where the Paths overlap. Bleed into each other. Most mages walk one Path their whole lives. A rare few can walk two. But the Hollow Path isn't really a Path at all. It's what happens when you reach so deep into one Path that you break through the bottom and fall into something else.""That's not a who. That's a what.""Because the 'who' is the answer I don't have." Aldric's voice was harder now. "Your father believed the Hollow wasn't banned because it was dangerous. He believed it was banned because it was real. Because the Athenaeum had discovered something about it that threatened their understanding of how magic worked, and rather than rewrite the textbooks, they burned them.""That," Kael said, "sounds exactly like every institution I've ever studied."Aldric gave him the look. The one that said you talk about things you shouldn't know about."That is the question," Aldric said finally. "And I don't have the answer. You'll have to find it."The lantern flickered. Somewhere among the shelves, a glass jar ticked as it cooled. Kael looked at the workbench. The journal. The crystal. The letter. He didn't know what to do with his hands."There's more," Aldric said. Then he stopped himself. His jaw worked, and for a moment Kael saw the old man weighing one thing against another, choosing what to say and what to bury. "That's enough for now."That's not all of it. He's holding something back. Something about the Hollow specifically.He filed it. Another piece without a picture.
Aldric pulled three things off a shelf. A thick leather journal with cracked binding. A small pale crystal that caught the light in ways that shouldn't have been geometrically possible. And a sealed letter."Journal is your father's research. Coded. The key is 'mind the edges.'" He set the crystal down carefully, the way you'd set down something that could bite. "Crystal is a Covenant catalyst from the Iron Covenant armoury. Stolen. By me. Only crime I've ever committed that I'd do again.""The letter?""For a man called Vex Arden. Runs a shop in Aldmere — The Broken Compass. He's been waiting fourteen years.""Why didn't he come here?""Because I told him not to. Every road to this cottage leads to you, and hiding you was the only good thing I've managed in sixty years." He paused. "If you can't find Vex, if the shop is empty, if something's gone wrong — look for the Broker. Doran Kell. Trade Quarter." His voice hardened. "Be careful with that one. She collects more than information."He reached into his pocket and put something in Kael's hand. A river stone. Smooth, dark grey, still warm."Your mother collected these. Said they remembered the water." He cleared his throat. "She was usually right about that sort of thing."Then his voice changed, and Kael knew — before the words came — that this was the part that mattered most."When you learn what I did. Before I retired. What I was part of." His hands were shaking. "You're going to hate me for it. I need you to hold onto two things. I loved your father. And I lo—"The cough hit before he could finish.Not the morning cough. Something deeper, from a place that was load-bearing and structural, and it didn't stop. It folded him over the workbench and when his hand came away it was covered in blood. Not traces. Bright, arterial — the kind that means something inside has torn."Aldric—""Listen." The grip on Kael's arm was iron. How, from a man whose lungs were filling with blood, Kael didn't know. "The Silver Office wants a device your father built. It's not in the journal — I looked. That means it's hidden somewhere only Edric knew, or somebody else has it. Vex might know. Find him.""You need a healer, I can—""I need you to live." Blood in his teeth. Blood running off his chin. "Don't spend what I bought you on a dead man.""You're not—""I've been dying for six months. I know you've been counting the coughs." The smallest smile. "You're too smart. Same as your father."The cough came back and this time Aldric let it take him. He sat down on the floor — or rather he stopped being upright, the way a building does when the last support goes. Found the workbench edge. Held on. Breathed. Thinner and thinner."Go east," he whispered. "Wayfare Road. Caravan to Aldmere.""Aldric—""Don't tell—" A breath. You could see the effort of it in his throat. "Don't tell anyone your real name. Not until you're ready."He tried to say something else. His hand opened, finger by finger.The lantern went on burning. The room was quiet.
Kael sat with him for a while after. How long, he couldn't have said. He kept waiting for the next cough, the next word, and when it didn't come the silence was wrong. He put his hand on Aldric's shoulder. Still warm. He left it there until it wasn't.He didn't cry. He'd cried before, in the other life, at his mother's funeral in a cemetery in Oregon. Tried it once. Didn't take. Here his eyes stayed dry and his throat stayed closed and the only thing that moved was his hand on the old man's shoulder, until he made himself stand.He buried him under the oak next to an unmarked stone that might have been his mother's. The digging took a long time. His arms hummed with whatever energy had cracked the table and the shovel went into the frozen ground deeper than it should have. Once, halfway through, his hands shook so badly the shovel slipped. He stood in the hole and breathed until he could pick it up again. Control the breath and the rest follows.He stood over the grave when it was done. Said nothing. Nothing would've been enough. Aldric deserved a eulogy — a ceremony, something with weight and ritual and other people who remembered him. Instead he got a fourteen-year-old with blistered hands and a head full of two lives' worth of loss, standing in frozen dirt at three in the morning, trying to feel something that wasn't anger.He had the river stone in his pocket. For a moment he thought of putting it in the grave. She said they remembered the water. He didn't. He kept it. The selfishness of it sat in his chest and he let it.The anger was easier. Cleaner. It had edges he could hold.The Silver Office killed your parents. The Athenaeum ordered it. And Aldric kept you alive for fourteen years, and the cost was everything he had left.He'd deal with the grief later. Right now grief was a luxury. Anger was a tool. He intended to use it.
He went back to the cottage. Packed. Journal, crystal, letter, stone. Clothes, dried meat, water, a knife. The whole life fit in one bag. Everything that didn't fit he left standing.Then he burned the cottage.Not grief. Training. Fire destroys evidence. Aldric's voice in his head, and Aldric's rules. Nobody should find what was in that cellar. Not the Silver Office, not the Athenaeum, not whatever else was out there watching.He stood at the treeline while the fire ate through the roof and the walls fell in and the smoke went up grey against a grey sky. The journal was in his bag. The crystal was in his boot, wrapped in leather to muffle whatever it was broadcasting. The stone was in his pocket.East. A city he'd never seen. A man he'd never met. A letter fourteen years too late.He didn't look back. The first hundred steps were the hardest. Branches caught his bag. The ground was uneven — roots and frost-heaved soil — and the dark was so complete he had to slow down or risk a turned ankle. He could still smell the smoke. When the wind shifted he could taste it: ash, old wood, the end of something.He went by the stars when he could see them through the canopy, and when he couldn't, by the slope of the ground and the memory of the way Aldric had pointed once, years ago. That way is Aldmere. When you need it.When his legs gave out he stopped. Found the lee of a fallen log, pulled his coat tight, didn't build a fire. The cold crept in. He didn't sleep for a long time. When he did, it was thin and broken. He woke before first light, stiff and hungry, and walked again. East, always east.
Behind him, the smoke climbed. And at the edge of the forest, where the road bent south before turning east, something moved.Not an animal. Too deliberate. A figure standing at the boundary of the clearing, just beyond where the fire's light reached. Watching the cottage burn with a stillness that had nothing to do with surprise.They'd been waiting.Kael didn't see them. He was already gone, walking east with his back to the fire and his mind on a dead man's letter.But the figure saw him. Noted the direction. And after the boy disappeared into the trees and the cottage collapsed into embers, the figure stepped forward, crouched beside the grave, and pressed two fingers into the fresh-turned earth.A pause. Then the figure stood, brushed the dirt from their hand, and pulled a silver pin from inside their coat. The pin caught the last light of the fire.The Crown's mark. Silver Office.They'd found the cottage. They'd found the grave. And they knew which way the boy had gone.The hunt had already begun.