Smoke coiled through the shattered remnants of Sector Delta. The stone corridors, once echoing with screams and the clank of chains, were now silent tombs. Charred iron. Scorched bones. The scent of burnt flesh clung to the air like a curse.
Kael stood in the center of it all breathing, shivering, bleeding.
His collar still glowed faintly, cracked and half-melted. Around him, corpses of guards lay twisted in unnatural shapes. Some were shredded, others crushed against the walls as if some invisible force had slammed them with divine fury. One had been turned completely inside out.
The other prisoners watched from behind collapsed barricades and bent steel, their eyes wide with a terror deeper than any they'd known.
They didn't speak.
Not to him.
Not even to each other.
They just stared.
As if Kael were something they didn't understand. As if he had never been one of them at all.
He didn't blame them.
He wasn't sure either.
He remembered the pain. The trial. The nightmare that had felt more real than anything he had ever lived. The voice ancient, cold, endless. The shadow that had whispered not with sound but with truth.
Then the screaming.
Then waking here, in this broken world.
"Who… am I?" he whispered.
No answer came. Just the wind whistling through shattered stone.
He staggered forward, stepping over a severed limb. His legs ached, but the strength inside him felt unnatural like it wasn't his alone. Like something had been poured into him.
A man one of the older slaves took a step back as Kael neared. His eyes full of tears. Of fear.
Kael paused. "I didn't… mean to—"
"Stay away," the man croaked, voice shaking. "Please."
Kael lowered his eyes.
He wanted to explain. To tell them he didn't understand it either. That something broke during the trial that the thing he faced wasn't just pain, it was memory. That he had seen faces he couldn't name, deaths he couldn't stop, and truths that clawed at his soul like wild beasts.
He had been asked, "What are you?"
He had no answer.
And still didn't.
But something had answered for him.
And now, this was the result.
Later That Night
They didn't sleep,most of the survivors just huddled together in what remained of the Sector's outer hallway. No guards came. No alarms. No rescue.
The tower was a grave now.
And Kael sat alone in the dark, back against the cracked wall, staring at his trembling hands.
He saw what they had done.
But he hadn't moved.
He hadn't lifted a finger.
His mind had been elsewhere inside a collapsing dream of agony and judgment, a trial by shadows and blood. Yet something within him had responded to the danger here. Something that wasn't bound by chains or rules or fear.
Something older than the prison.
Older than the world.
The flames had been black. Not smoke, not fire but raw absence. Screaming shadows that bent the walls, devoured sound, and silenced life. They surged from him like a curse he never knew he carried.
And yet he lived.
He clenched his fists, nails digging into skin. "What did you do to me?" he whispered to the air. "What… am I?"
No voice answered.
But deep in the pit of his soul, where the whispers still lingered, he felt it again.
Not a word.
Not a name.
Just a presence. Vast. Ancient. Watching.
Xha'veth.
Beyond Sector Delta
Elsewhere, in a vast tower overlooking the lower prison sectors, robed figures gathered before a pale mirror.
Smoke twisted within it, showing the aftermath of Kael's awakening.
One of the robed ones turned to the others.
"Was it him?" the voice was ragged. Unsure.
Another spoke, voice older, firmer. "No. It was not him. Not yet. But it has begun."
They all turned to the mirror as Kael walked alone through the wreckage of Sector Delta, prisoners parting like waves before him, as if he carried death in his shadow.
"He doesn't know what he is."
Good,the eldest said. "Let him find out the hard way. If he survives…
They all turned toward the black sigil etched into the stone wall a circle with an eye in the center, bleeding ink-like smoke.
"…then we'll know if he's truly touched by Xha'veth."