We spent that last year as ghosts in our own lives. Every conversation, every shared meal, every moment felt borrowed. We were already gone, our minds fixed on the cold sea and the misty island that awaited us. Our secret cache grew in a forgotten corner of the armory, hidden behind a loose stone wall—furs, dried meat, flint and steel, and a coil of good rope, all stolen with a quiet, desperate stealth. Torren handled the physical supplies. My task was to reach for the impossible.
After the boulder incident, I'd learned fear. I never again tried to wrestle the power into submission. Instead, in the dead of night, I would sit and simply… listen to the buzzing behind my ribs. I tried to find a rhythm in its chaos, a pattern in the storm. I stopped trying to move rocks and started with something smaller. I focused on a need, a single, sharp intent. We need a compass that won't freeze. One that will point to the island.
I reached for the hum, not with my hands, but with my mind. I pictured the compass, not the bronze ones in my father's map room, but something better. Something perfect. I felt a strange lurch in my gut, like falling, and for a heartbeat, my consciousness wasn't in the cold stone room anymore. It was in a place of quiet, shimmering potential—the resource dimension. I saw it, an object of dark, smooth metal with a needle of pure, captured light, and I pulled.
The feeling of it materializing in my hand was the strangest thing I'd ever experienced. One moment, my palm was empty; the next, it held a compass that was cool to the touch and impossibly heavy for its size. The needle didn't point north. It pointed toward my destiny, a single, unwavering line to our prison.
Torren stared at it, his usual composure gone, replaced by wide-eyed awe. He touched it reverently. "Rudr," he breathed. "What is this?"
"Hope," I said, my voice hoarse. It was. It was proof we wouldn't be entirely helpless.
My interactions with my family became a study in grief. I'd watch my mother humming by the fire and feel a pang of loss so sharp it almost brought me to my knees. One evening, my father found me alone, staring out from a half-finished parapet of the castle. He stood beside me, the silence stretching between us. He didn't understand me, and he knew it.
"A man needs good steel," he said finally, pressing the hilt of a dagger into my hand. It was beautifully made, the pommel a snarling wolf's head. "No matter where he goes."
The gesture, meant to connect, only highlighted the chasm between us. I took the dagger, its familiar weight a stark contrast to the alien compass hidden in my pocket. "Thank you, Father," I said. It felt like goodbye.
The final sign came on a cold, moonless night. A sharp, burning itch erupted on my chest, right over the heart of the hum. It wasn't painful, but it was insistent, impossible to ignore. I tore open my tunic and looked down.
There, on my skin, was a mark. It was a faint, swirling pattern like a spiral galaxy, and it was glowing with a soft, pale, sickly light. It was the Children's magic, the brand of the curse, finally rising to the surface. It was a leash, making itself visible.
I found Torren sharpening the dagger my father had given me. I didn't speak. I just pulled my tunic aside.
He saw the glowing mark. The whetstone fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. He looked from the mark to my face, and in his eyes, I saw our shared childhood flicker and die. The summons was no longer a dream or a feeling. It was here. It was time.