The forest was asymphony Kaelen no longer heard. The whisper of pine needles, the chatter of the stream, the low hum of the earth's own dormant power—all of it was drowned beneath a single, screaming note in his soul: vengeance. It was a cold, sharp thing, this new purpose. It had crystallized in the silent rain as he held his mother's cooling form. It did not warm him; it sustained him, a frozen core where his heart had been. He could not mourn now, he could only do it later; mourning now would defeat the whole purpose of the words his mother drilled into him.
Nyxia had taught him to move through the world without sight. To listen to the pressure of the air against a cliff face, to feel the subtle vibration of a rabbit's heartbeat through the soil, to taste the shift in humidity that signaled a clearing. She had taught him to fight, too—fluid, efficient forms using body and breath, how to use an opponent's momentum as a lever, how to strike where the architecture of bone and sinew was weakest. "It is a dance of pressure and void," she'd said, her voice a calm contrast to their sweating, grappling forms in the moss. "You create the void, and their own force fills it, to their detriment."
He had never applied those lessons in true violence. Not until now.
The first kill was not a dance. It was butchery.
He had tracked the retreating Caelum patrol for two days, a phantom using their own noisy passage as cover. He found their night camp. He waited until the watch shifted, until one soldier—young, his inner light a flickering, untrained warmth—was left alone on the southern perimeter, stifling a yawn.
Kaelen's eyes were shut. Sight was a distraction, a torrent of meaningless, agonizing light he could not yet interpret. He navigated by the map his other senses drew: the smell of the man's oiled leather, the sound of his breath, the faint tremor of his foot tapping restlessly on a root. He was a shadow woven from silence itself.
He used no power. He had none to use. He was, for all spiritual intents and purposes, not there.
The soldier died without a sound. Kaelen's arm locked around his throat from behind, cutting off air and cry. There was a struggle, frantic and strong, but Kaelen's body, tempered by a lifetime in the power-rich wilds and forged in the blood of a god, was denser, harder. The crack of the spine was a sickeningly intimate vibration up his own arm. He held on until the twitching stopped.
The guilt came, a nauseating wave. He vomited silently into the ferns. Then the coldness returned, sharper. He stripped the body, donning the grey and silver tunic, the leather vest, the too-large boots. He took the man's dagger from its sheath. The metal was cold, inert. A tool. He dragged the body into a thicket.
One.
---
The Caelum palace, when he found it at dawn on the third day, was not a building to his senses. It was a mountain of oppressive vibration. He felt the march of countless feet on stone, the distant clang of forges, the low, resonant thrum of powerful, concentrated energy in one place—a hive of disciplined, hostile presence. The main gates were impossible. He found a drainage culvert where the scent of stagnant water and rot masked his own. He crawled through filth and into the bowels of the fortress.
His stolen uniform was his passport. In the bustling, smoky kitchens, amid the roar of hearths and the shouts of cooks, a blind soldier was just another faceless grunt. He kept his milky eyes half-lidded, head bowed, moving with a purposeful shuffle he'd observed from the guards on the walls. He navigated by the currents of air, by the echoes of sound bouncing off vaulted ceilings, by the feel of flagstones worn smooth by generations of traffic.
The first guard he passed in a narrow, torch-lit corridor died with a single, upward thrust of the dagger under the chin, through the soft palate and into the brain. Kaelen caught the body, eased it into an alcove stacked with dusty casks. The man's inner flame—a dim, steady pulse of earthy presence—snuffed out like a pinched candlewick. Kaelen felt nothing but a slight shift in the atmospheric pressure, a localized silence where noise had been.
Two.
He moved upward, following the paths of least resistance, the routes meant for servants and low-ranking soldiers. His senses painted a ghostly image: here a staircase, its edges sharp in the echo of his breath; there an archway, the air cooler beyond it. He heard snippets of conversation, gleaning fragments of the castle's rhythm. "...rotation at the Sun Tower..." "...Lord Valerius is in a black mood since returning..." "...the Lady Lyra hasn't left her chambers..."
The name Valerius was a hook in his gut. The man who had given the order. The source of the poison. It had not taken him very long to figure out where the royal palace of House Caelum was.
Security tightened as he ascended. The corridors grew wider, quieter, the tapestries underfoot thicker, muffling his already silent steps. A pair of guards stood at a junction where the servant way met a broader, cleaner hall.
"Halt. Purpose?" The voice was bored, but the presence behind it was a watchful, vigilant coldness. A perceiver.
Kaelen kept his head down. "Message for the east barracks quartermaster," he mumbled, pitching his voice rough. "From the kitchens. Spoilage in the grain store."
A pause. He felt the guard's gaze on him, a slight pressure. "You're a bit turned around, aren't you? East barracks is two levels down, other side of the keep."
Kaelen shrugged, a gesture of confused frustration. "New. Got lost in the damned smoke."
The other guard snorted. "Let him through, Erek. He's not getting far. The Silvers will turn him around at the inner gallery if he's stupid enough to try."
The vigilant guard grunted. "Move on. And keep your eyes down. Officers don't like being stared at by the likes of you."
Kaelen shuffled past, head bowed. He took two steps, three. He felt the guard's attention begin to withdraw from him, dismissing the inconsequential recruit. In that moment of dismissal, Kaelen moved.
It was a single, fluid motion. His left foot planted, his body pivoted. His right arm, holding the stolen dagger, spun out in a tight, backward arc. The blade, driven by the torque of his spin and his dense muscle, did not slash. It punched. It sank into the side of the first guard's neck with a wet thock, piercing flesh, the carotid artery, and grating against vertebrae. The man's breath exploded in a silent, wet gasp.
Kaelen didn't stop. The momentum of the strike carried him through the spin. As he pulled the dagger free, a hot arc of blood followed the blade. It caught the second guard—Erek—directly across the eyes, blinding him with a sudden, terrifying crimson film.
Erek choked, hands flying to his face. "Wha—?"
Kaelen's second full rotation completed. The dagger, now a red blur, made a clean, deep cut across Erek's exposed throat before his hands could even rise in defense. A final, gurgling sigh escaped him. The two guards collapsed almost in unison, their inner flames—one vigilant and cold, one dull and warm—snuffing out into the cold stone silence. Kaelen caught Erek's body, easing it down to muffle the fall. He listened. Only the distant, routine sounds of the keep. No alarm.
He vanished into a shadowed niche behind a massive marble statue of a stern-faced ancestor and waited. He listened. The castle breathed around him. And then, he heard the lesson.
"...and you must remember, boy," an older, gravelly voice was saying nearby, full of weary authority. "Beyond this arch is the family wing. No one below a Silver Star on their collar sets foot here without express summons. Not even to clean. That includes the Lord's solar, the Lady's garden terrace, and their private chambers at the end of the hall. Understood?"
"Yes, Sergeant," a younger voice replied, eager. "And the Starfall Vault?"
"Beneath the Lord's chambers, accessed through his study. But by the gods, don't even think about it. Your head would decorate the gatehouse before you touched the lock."
The voices faded, footsteps receding. Kaelen's world narrowed to the corridor beyond the arch. The private chambers. At the end of the hall.
He couldn't walk in. The instruction was clear. He needed a diversion.
His chance came with a maid carrying a large, empty linen hamper. She was heading for a side passage, yawning. As she passed his hiding spot, Kaelen's foot shot out, a precise tap against the back of her knee. It was a gentle, almost accidental-looking touch, but it was enough. With a yelp, she stumbled, the hamper clattering. The noise echoed sharply in the quiet hall.
From down the family wing, a door opened. "What in Astraea's name is that racket?" an irritated voice called.
"Sorry, sir! Clumsy me!" the maid called back, flustered.
A Silver Star guard, his presence a bright, annoyed heat, stomped into view. "You there! Help her pick that up and get out of this wing! Now!"
Kaelen scrambled from his niche, head bowed. He helped the maid stack the scattered linens, his movements quick and efficient. The guard watched, hand on his sword hilt. As soon as the hamper was righted, the guard jerked his thumb. "Out. Both of you."
The maid scurried back the way she came. The guard turned, expecting Kaelen to follow her. Instead, Kaelen moved. Not a run, but a silent, explosive surge toward the family wing arch. He slipped through as the guard's footsteps began to fade back toward his post.
Kaelen flew down the plush carpet, his bare feet making no sound. He had only taken a dozen strides into the hushed luxury of the family wing when a voice, cold and authoritative, rang out behind him.
"You. Stop."
Kaelen froze. It was the same guard. He hadn't returned to his post; he had noticed Kaelen's disobedience and followed.
Kaelen turned slowly toward the voice. He could feel the man's presence, that same focused, annoyed heat, now sharpening into suspicion. He dipped into a deep, formal bow, his right arm crossing to his waist in a show of respect. His fingers found the hilt of the stolen dagger tucked into his belt.
"My apologies, sir," Kaelen mumbled, his face toward the floor. "I was ordered to report to the armory for polish duty. I think I took a wrong turn."
"Polish duty? In the family wing?" The guard's boots clicked on the stone as he stepped closer. "Which armory? The East or the Lower?"
"The… Lower, sir," Kaelen ventured, his mind racing.
"Lower's closed for inventory. Who gave you the order?"
"The sergeant, sir. From the kitchen post."
A silence stretched. Kaelen felt the weight of the guard's scrutiny, a pressure on his skin.
"Look at me," the guard commanded, his tone shifting from annoyance to cold authority.
Kaelen remained bowed, his body coiled. "Sir?"
He heard the faint rustle of the guard's glove, likely gesturing at his chest. "Your uniform. There's blood on it. Fresh." The guard's voice was flat. Kaelen's heart lurched; he hadn't felt the wet splatter. Then the guard's tone sharpened further, a new, more profound suspicion entering it. His presence flared subtly, not in attack, but in focused perception. It was the act of a trained warrior checking an opponent's spiritual presence. Kaelen felt the man's attention lock onto him—and then hesitate, confounded. Where there should have been the faint, tell-tale glow of a soldier's inner flame, even a weak one, there was only a chilling, absolute blankness.
"Your name," the guard said, each word precise and heavy. "What is it?"
He's checking the tag, Kaelen realized with a jolt. He had no idea what name was sewn there. He gave the first name that came to him. "Jace, sir."
The silence that followed was icy. It was the silence of a lie laid bare.
"The tag on this uniform," the guard said, his voice now lethally quiet, "reads 'Pell'. Not 'Jace'." Kaelen heard the soft, unmistakable shick of a blade being drawn from its scabbard.
Time snapped. Still bowed, Kaelen erupted upward. His left leg kicked out in a blur, his boot connecting not with the guard but with the man's sword hand. The brutal impact caught the guard's wrist just as the blade cleared the scabbard by three inches. The weapon was knocked sideways, its edge scraping against the metal lip of the scabbard with a jarring shriek before being driven back down.
The guard grunted in shock, his balance disrupted by the unexpected, savage strength of the kick.
In the same motion, Kaelen's right hand moved. The dagger, already drawn and held flat against his forearm during the bow, swept upward in a short, vicious arc. He didn't stab. He sheathed it. Upwards, under the guard's chin. The point punched through soft tissue, drove into the base of the mouth, and crunched into the floor of the skull.
The guard's body stiffened. A hot, wet gurgle bubbled from his ruined throat. The heat of his presence winked into nothingness. Kaelen held him for a second, then let the weight slide off his blade. The body folded to the floor with a dull thud and the quiet rattle of scabbarded steel.
Kaelen stood, listening. Only his own heart hammered against his ribs. He wiped the dagger clean on the guard's cloak and moved on, a colder void settling in his chest where the panic had been.
He reached the door at the end of the hall. Ornate, heavy wood. He placed a hand against it, feeling the minute vibrations from within. Two sources of breath. Slow, rhythmic. Asleep.
His own breath was ragged now, not from exertion, but from a fury so intense it threatened to shatter his icy focus. Valerius. Lyra. The names were curses. He saw Nyxia's smile, extinguished. He saw the basket sinking into the black water.
He tested the door. Locked, from the inside. But the mechanism was old, a simple bar of iron. From a pouch on the stolen uniform—the dead soldier's pouch—he pulled a narrow sliver of Skyfall Iron, the one Nyxia had kept. It was utterly non-reactive, inert to any energy-based detection or ward. He slipped it between door and jamb, feeling for the bar. With a patience that belied the storm inside him, he worked it upward, millimeter by millimeter, until it cleared its bracket.
The door swung inward a crack on silent hinges.
The room beyond was vast, quiet, and warm. The air smelled of beeswax, fine perfume, and a faint, acrid hint of something sharp—spent power. Kaelen's senses exploded with input. The soft crackle of a dying fire. The rustle of silk sheets. Two distinct heartbeats, slow in sleep. One stronger, a deep, powerful drum. The other lighter, quicker.
He stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. He closed his eyes tighter, relying solely on the vibration-map. The room resolved: large bed in the center, furniture along the walls, a balcony with tall doors to his left. He moved like liquid, each step a calculated transfer of weight. The plush rug drank any sound.
He found the bed. He could smell them now—sandalwood and steel, jasmine and sorrow. His hands clenched. The dagger was a cold comfort in his grip.
He stood over the shape his senses painted as the larger, more powerful source. Valerius. This was the man. The author of all his pain.
An eye for an eye.
He raised the dagger. The faint light from the balcony doors caught the tip, a pinprick of cold star against the dark. In that suspended moment, he was not a boy, but an instrument of finality.
And then his world erupted in violence.
It wasn't a sound he heard first. It was a pressure—a sudden, violent displacement of air directly in front of his chest. His body reacted before his mind could parse it. Instinct, drilled into him over countless hours, took over. He couldn't dodge—the attack was too close, too fast. Instead, he twisted, bringing the dagger in his hand across his own body in a desperate parry.
SHRIING!
The sound was a deafening shriek of steel on steel that tore the quiet apart. A shockwave of pure force blasted through the dagger, up his arm, and slammed into his ribs. He was thrown backward, skidding across the rug, his boots scraping for purchase. Pain, bright and hot, flared in his forearm. The stolen dagger was sheared clean in half, the tip spinning away into the dark.
The atmosphere in the room changed. The two heartbeats became frantic drums. Sheets ripped. The heavier form exploded from the bed with a guttural roar.
"What is the meaning of this?" Valerius Caelum's voice was a blade itself, ringing with outrage and a lethal, waking fury.
Kaelen scrambled to his feet, his senses reeling. The vibration-map was now alive with hostile motion. Valerius was a pillar of contained violence, his feet planted firmly on the floor. Kaelen could feel his stance, the balance, the power coiled in his legs and core. This was no soldier. This was a lord, a warrior who had carved his way to power. And his feet were now on the ground, giving Kaelen the seismic clarity he needed.
Then Kaelen felt it—or rather, he felt the profound, chilling lack. Valerius's furious scrutiny washing over him and finding… nothing. No inner flame. No spiritual signature. A perfect void where a man should be.
The lord's fury chilled into something sharper, more dangerous. "What manner of betrayal is this?" he hissed. But the question was reflexive. His eyes, Kaelen could feel, were not on the uniform, but on him, seeing the milky, sightless eyes, the too-young face contorted in hate.
Valerius wasted no more breath. He moved. It was terrifyingly fast. Not a lunge, but a surge, like a landslide. The blade—a black void in Kaelen's vibration-sight—cut a horizontal arc meant to bisect him at the waist.
Kaelen didn't block. He couldn't. He dropped, letting the blade hiss over his head, and rolled toward the balcony doors, the only clear space. Pain shot through his ankle from the fall from the ridge, but he ignored it. He had to get out. The plan was ash. He had to run.
As he came up, he sensed Valerius already recovering, pivoting, the blade coming down in a vertical, crushing blow. Kaelen did something stupid, something desperate. He didn't retreat. He launched himself forward, inside the arc of the swing, past the deadly tip, and drove his own body, shoulder-first, into Valerius's midsection.
It was like hitting a stone wall. But it was a wall that grunted in surprise. Valerius hadn't expected such a suicidal, close-quarters move. The lord staggered back a single step, his balance compromised for a fraction of a second. Kaelen's hand, stiffened into a blade, shot up in a vicious strike aimed at the throat.
He never connected.
Three bands of searing, cold light—vivid and terrible in the sight he was desperately suppressing—slammed into him from the side. They wrapped around his torso, his arms, locking them to his sides. A binding of pure, chilling energy. It didn't just hold him; it introduced a terrifying inertia, a draining apathy that fought to still his very will. He fell to one knee, the breath knocked from him.
"Stay back, Lyra!" Valerius barked, regaining his footing, the blade coming up to guard.
Kaelen struggled against the bindings. They were strong, but they were just energy. And he was a void. He could feel them fraying at the edges where they touched him, the coherent force breaking down into chaos as it tried to contain nothing. It would take time he didn't have.
Valerius stood over him, a towering presence of wrath. "Who are you?" he demanded, his voice low and deadly. "Who sent an abomination like you to do their killing?"
The question, the disgust in the word 'abomination,' shattered the last of Kaelen's control. His head snapped up. He opened his eyes, not to see, but to glare, to direct all the venom, all the loss, all the desolate fury in his soul at the man who had caused it. His clouded, unseeing eyes fixed on where he knew Valerius's face to be.
The effect was immediate.
Valerius's breath caught. The aggressive pressure of his presence flickered. In that hate-filled gaze, he didn't see an assassin. He saw an echo. A ghost. A mistake given flesh.
And in that moment, Kaelen's own suppressed sight broke free. In his desperation, his new vision flared, painting the room in a catastrophic burst of information.
Valerius was a sun of violent, majestic energy, a swirling vortex of power so potent it distorted everything around it. At his center, his core burned like a captive star. Pathways of immense force, thicker than any Kaelen had glimpsed, radiated out to his limbs. The woman, Lyra, was a softer, warmer luminosity, her pathways fine and intricate, one arm outstretched, her will maintaining the bindings that now looked like fraying, sickly ropes around his own black silhouette.
Lyra's gasp was a knife in the quiet. She took a step forward, the bindings around Kaelen wavering. Her eyes, wide with shock, were fixed on Kaelen's face—on the clouded eyes, on the raven black hair plastered with sweat and blood, on the hateful scowl that was a mirror of the one now twisting her husband's features. She also could not ignore the lack of aura he displayed despite his presence in the room. Her mind recoiled, then raced. The river. The midwives' whispers. They said he was gone. Valerius said the river took him. But those eyes… that look… it's Valerius's own fury. And the hair… Mother's hair. Astraea have mercy, it's him. My son. He's alive. The thoughts were a silent scream, trapped behind her lips as she stared, paralyzed by a devastating, impossible hope.
Valerius's silence was more terrifying than any denial. It was an admission. When he spoke again, his voice was glacial, devoid of any humanity. "I should have killed you the moment you were born and decided to stain this world and my wife's womb with your existence." Each word was a hammer driving a nail into Kaelen's reality. "You are nothing but an abomination. A void. And you are most certainly no child of mine."
His wife's womb!? The thought flashed in Kaelen's mind.
Valerius raised his blade. The weapon began to hum, drinking in the violent energy from his core, its edge shimmering with annihilating force. This was it. The final strike.
Then, a new vibration. Small, light. A patter of bare feet on the rug. A child's voice, thick with sleep, called from the chamber door. "Mother? Father? I heard shouting."
Everything froze.
"Astraea!" Lyra cried, her focus shattering. The bindings around Kaelen vanished instantly as she spun, her presence flaring with protective panic. "Baby, no! Don't come in here!"
Kaelen's sight caught her—a small, radiant form at the door, her core a brilliant, pristine light, smaller than the others but shining with a painful, pure intensity. Who was that? Their child? She called them mother and father.
In that splinter of chaos, as Valerius's lethal attention wavered for a heartbeat, torn between the threat and his daughter, Kaelen moved.
He didn't stand. He kicked out with both legs, a powerful sweep at Valerius's ankles. It was a distraction, not an attack. As Valerius instinctively shifted his weight, Kaelen coiled and exploded upward, not toward the door, but toward the balcony.
He hit the ornate doors shoulder-first, bursting them open with a crash of glass and wood. The cold night air swallowed him. He didn't hesitate. He vaulted over the stone balustrade.
The drop was a lifetime of howling wind. He hit the steep, tiled roof of a lower building back-first. Tiles shattered. Agony bloomed across his spine, the air blasted from his lungs. He slid, tumbled, and fell again, landing in a heap on a stone courtyard.
Pain was a universe. He embraced it. It was real. It was his.
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself up. Every part of him shrieked in protest. He could hear the alarm now—shouts, bells clanging. He oriented himself by the memory of his infiltration, by the scent of the kitchens, by the distant, chaotic vibrations from the main gate.
He ran. A loping, pained, but brutally fast sprint. He encountered a guard rounding a corner. The man barely had time to raise a spear before Kaelen was inside his guard, snapping his neck with a wrench of his hands. He took the man's short sword.
Three. Four. Five. The count was meaningless now, he had lost count a long time ago; counting now was only to keep his mind straight.
He was a storm of pain and rage cutting through the castle's lower levels. He left a trail of bodies in his wake, each kill quieter than the last, each a release of a fraction of the inferno inside him. He reached the postern gate he'd noted earlier—a small, iron-bound door used for refuse.
As he slammed the locking bar aside with a screech of metal, he felt it. A gathering of power so immense it dwarfed everything he'd felt before. It came from high above, from the balcony.
He threw the door open and risked a glance back with his new sight.
High above, framed in the shattered doorway of his chambers, stood Valerius Caelum. His presence was no longer just a sun; it was a collapsing star, a maelstrom of pure hatred. He held his blade aloft with both hands, the weapon now a conduit for that impossible energy, glowing so brightly it was a column of solid light.
With a roar that seemed to shake the very stones of the keep, Valerius brought the blade down.
A crescent of pure power, taller than three men, sheared through the night. It didn't whistle; it silenced the air it passed through. It struck the roof where Kaelen had landed moments before.
There was no explosion of wood and stone. There was erasure. A perfect, semi-circular section of the roof, the supporting walls, the very matter itself, vanished into nothing, leaving a smooth, clean-cut edge glowing with faint embers before the rest collapsed in a conventional roar of rubble.
The force of the passing energy, even at a distance, buffeted Kaelen, a wave of spiritual nullification that made his own void-core resonate with sympathetic agony.
Their eyes met across the chaos—the lord with his world-shaking power, and the blind boy with his stolen sword, standing in a doorway of shit and offal.
In that final, searing snapshot of his new vision, Kaelen saw more than hatred in Valerius's magnificent, terrible light. He saw fear. A deep, primal fear of the abyss that had just crept into his house and bled his guards dry.
Then Kaelen turned and fled into the welcoming, concealing darkness of the night. The cold in his heart was now fused with a new, terrible understanding. The possibility that he had a father. A mother. A sister. And he would spend every breath left in his body ensuring they regretted it.
He ran, not just from the castle, but from the horrifying light of that knowledge, leaving behind only echoes of blood and a silence that spoke of a promise yet to be fulfilled.
Mark my words. I will kill you.