SIDE NOTE: Brace yourselves, this chapter is quite on a slow pace. It's a chapter that requires it by the way. Enjoy!
The morning she decided to find Kael, the light had the look of something grieving.
It came thin through the trees, stolen light, pale and unwilling to touch skin. I sat at the edge of the village long after the others had left for work and watched smoke drift from where Kaylan had burned the outlying huts. The people had returned to sift ash and whisper curses under their breath. They looked at me sometimes the way one looks at a wound: flinching but unable to look away.
I had planned to leave that night. Then the fires had started again, and I'd stepped in and cracked the world open to save those running children. The portal had taken half the street. It had also taken more of me.
So I left at dawn instead, with a pack that carried two days' food, a rope, a blade that had not yet chosen its purpose, and a handful of coins I had stolen from a Nightwalker courier months ago. I wrapped my wrists in thick cloth to hide the scars where silver had seared me. I hid the leather so the wind could not see my tremor.
I did not tell the villagers. They would have begged. They would have tried to stop me. They would have offered me bread and a child's hand and a thousand small prayers that meant nothing.
I needed no prayers. I needed Kael.
"You must not go," old Corren told me once more as I hoisted the pack. He was an exile who patched boats and told stories for coin. He had been the first to say Kael's name without spitting it out. "He eats kindness like bread."
"I know," I said.
"You don't know," he said, blunt as a hammer. "You never do until you stand before the man who made you."
I wanted to argue. Instead, I folded my cloak and tied it small, and when I bent to leave he murmured another line.
"He taught me to fix nets," Corren said quietly. "Then he took my wife and gave me something worse. If you meet him, remember to watch his hands. They tell his lies."
I tucked the warning away like a shard.
Outside the hamlet, the world was raw. The road that led north cut through scrub and stunted oak trees. It was a track that remembered horses more than men. I walked it slowly, every step a bargaining with the land. My shadows lay along the path like coiled ropes, hungry but obedient. Each time I used a portal in the nights before, a little piece of me had slipped through. Portals were necessary — to escape, to hide, to steal time — but they cost me more than I liked to count. Each one spooled out sanity in thin threads.
I told myself that Kael would give it back. That was vanity. Kael did not give. He took, but he took elegantly, like a priest performing a rite.
Midday found me at a crossroads. Three men sat beneath a hawthorn trading ledger and cheap wine. They looked like shepherds who'd learned to carry knives. One of them lifted his head and recognized me.
"Storm-witch," he called quietly. The name had the bite of someone who had been saved once too often.
"It's Aria," I corrected. I stepped past and left a coin at a child's feet playing with a cracked wooden toy. The boy glanced up and grinned. I had not expected that reaction.
"Why would you run to him?" one of the men asked me as I passed. His voice carried with the wind; news ran faster than horses. "If Kael taught you, he'll teach you to tear up your town next."
"Kael can teach me what I already have," I said. "And I will learn whatever I must."
They watched me go, and for a long time the sound of their conversation followed like a chorus: "She's mad. She's brave. She's doomed."
I thought of Liam then — a name that arrived on the wind like a piece of bone. Was I going to Kael to become stronger or to bury the last thread of what had been human in me? The answer was both. I wanted the power to find him. I wanted to stop the hollow that shouted when I closed my eyes.
The road angled into higher ground. The trees thinned and the air sharpened. The shadows under my feet grew noisier — small things stirred in them, like thoughts.
When I stopped by a shallow stream to drink, I saw him for the first time.
Lucian watched from a slope above me, a dark silhouette against pale sky. He did not move to hide. He hardly seemed surprised to be seen. He simply watched, head tilted like a wolf listening for a direction in the wind.
His presence meant things I did not want to measure. He had been loyal to Marcus at first and then… something had shifted. Maybe curiosity. Maybe hunger. Maybe pity. Whatever the reason, he was there, and his eyes tracked me carefully.
"Going north," he said when I looked up and met his gaze. He sat cross-legged like some country lord, grey cloak flapping. He had the affable air of someone who only needed to watch the play to understand its end.
"You following me?" I asked, my voice rough from travel.
"Observing," he said, and for the first time his voice lacked that amuse-me tone. There was a curiosity under it, like someone reading a map with edges missing. "Marcus wants results. Kael is an odd curiosity."
"Then leave."
Lucian's smile folded into something softer. "Do you still think he is who you need?"
"Maybe I do." My answer sounded smaller than the thought.
"Or maybe Kael is what you need to die trying." He stood slowly, picking at a blade of grass as if he could study me through it. "Either way, let me know if you find the truth."
We watched each other in a silence that tasted like old fires. Finally he turned and strolled away, not quickly, not leaving a clean cut. He did not hide; he merely kept his distance, a shadow a step off my back.
I watched him go, and then the road, and thought of the crossroads of everything I had ever lost.
Night came sooner that day, thick as wool. I bedded near a ruined chapel, folding my cloak tight and covering my hands. I did not sleep; I let the shadows keep watch while I listened to my heartbeat. When I closed my eyes, the whisper of Liam's presence in the bond fluttered like a moth — a pulse, a confusion, then silence.
In the morning, I found a sign nailed to a tree. The letter was crude, but the message was clear: Kael.—North Gate. Follow the raven.
Someone had been there before me. Someone else had come. Good. Kael liked company even in solitude.
I kept to the paths the raven indicated. The road turned from beaten track to goat trail, to scrabbled stone. The land changed: knuckle-boned hills gave way to thin cliffs, and the trees grew taller and closer. The air had weight in it now — damp and metallic.
That was when I felt the first pull.
Not from the bond. Not yet. This was a tug at the base of my skull, like someone had hooked a magnet there and was testing the current. My shadows tightened. The ground beneath my feet hummed.
Portals were no longer an option for travel. The idea of stepping through and skipping ground would tempt the parts of me that had become hunger; I would not let the road vanish under me when I needed to have each breath counted. I walked, and the landscape seemed to watch me.
At the crest of a ridge, I stopped and looked back. The valley below cupped the hamlet like an open palm. Far beyond it, in the distance, a strip of darker air cut the horizon. My mouth dried. I had not yet seen Kael's Gate, but the world bent toward it like a tide toward a stone in a river.
The track narrowed. The trees leaned in as if they had been told to whisper. The raven that had been carved on the sign reappeared — a black feather on a stump, a scratch on the bark. Someone had been ahead of me, or someone wanted me to feel followed.
Midway through the third day I saw the first ruin of Kael's making: a circle of obsidian spires jutting from the slope like black teeth. The ground around them had been scorched into glass, patterns swimming in the sheen. The air hummed with something like old music.
I should have been afraid. I was not. Not in the reckless way that comes with ignorance; instead there was a focused wariness that pushed me forward, step by careful step.
I camped at the edge of the spires. I did not dare forge a portal there. Kael's influence felt too close, like live wires under the skin. Each time I considered threading a shadow to strip pain or to step past danger, the thought of him — that slow smile, those hands that took what he wanted — tightened my resolve. I would meet Kael standing, not slipping away.
At dusk a shape moved between the spires — a slim figure that folded into shadow like a fish into water. A raven alighted on a broken pillar and watched me with black bead eyes.
Kael waited at the threshold.
He did not step out in the thunderous way I had imagined. There were no trumpets, no fanfare. He appeared like a question in the dark. He was smaller in that moment than I had expected, no vampire god, just a man in clothes that never quite held their shape. His eyes were brighter than they should have been in that failing light. For a moment he looked tired, not of living, but tired of being the thing he had become.
"You came," he said.
"You sent me a sign," I said, though I knew that might not be true. Men like Kael owned more than they admitted.
He smiled then — not the dangerous, hungry smile from the alley, but a gentler thing that made my stomach twist. "You always did know how to walk toward ruin and call it courage."
"I'm not a child."
"You act like one."
His words matched themselves into an accusation I could not deny. He crossed the threshold slowly, not coming fully into my world, but enough that the air between us changed. The feathered raven shrank to a shadow at his feet, and for the first time the spires around us seemed to hum in relief.
"I need to know," I said. "I need to know if you made me because you loved me, or because you were cruel. Answers are the only reason I keep going."
Kael cocked his head. "And if the answer is worse than you imagined?"
"Then I'll still go on," I said. "I'll use whatever you gave me to burn you down."
He laughed once, a short, surprised sound. "You have learned anger well."
"You taught me how," I said. It came out sharp and true.
He reached out, not fast, not slow, and his finger brushed the hollow of my palm. It was as cool as river stone and as hot as coals. The touch sparked something beneath my skin and the shadows at my feet flinched. He withdrew his hand as if burned.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we will begin."
"Begin what?"
Kael's gaze slid over the spires, over the broken circle of glass, over the raven perched and watching. "Teaching," he said. "And tests. There will be no mercy. There will be no kindness. Only truth. You asked for it."
I wanted to step forward and ask him a hundred raw questions. Instead, I simply answered him with a nod.
"Tomorrow," I said back. "But tonight—"
"Rest," he interrupted gently. "You can walk the road tomorrow with a lighter step."
He lingered at the threshold like a man who fished for words before choosing them. "And Aria?" he added, softer.
"Yes?"
He bent very close, and for the first time I felt something like tenderness flash through him — a dangerous tenderness.
"Don't die on the road," he said. "You'll only find me less interesting that way."
Then he walked back into the shadow of his spires. The ravens among the glass shifted and went quiet. The threshold folded shut like a book being closed.
I slept badly that night, as expected. The world felt thinner, like a page in a book someone else was writing.
When dawn finally bled pale through the trees, I packed and stood at the threshold. The road behind me was a small silver line. The land ahead dipped into darker shapes. I swallowed and placed a hand over the place where Kael had touched me. It still tingled.
I knew, without a doubt, that if I crossed into his domain I would not return unchanged. That was the point.
I took a single step toward the spires.
Then I stopped.
I had not yet told a single soul of my plan to meet Kael beyond Corren. I had not written a letter, not left a marker. I had not arranged anything in case I failed. For the smallest beat I considered turning back to the hamlet, to the children, to the meager comforts of mortal life.
But Liam's name was a dull ache, a beacon. The bond flickered faintly — a pulse. Not a call, not yet, but enough.
I crossed the threshold.
The spires swallowed the light.