Years had passed but they did not know how many.
Years had passed since his father began training him. More years of silence, hunger, and the weight of a ceiling that had never known light.
Caelen looked like a young teen now according to his father.
Still thin. Still hollow-cheeked. But something had changed. His arms were lean, corded with sinew earned through countless days of surviving. His legs were steady. His back was straight. His body no longer trembled in the cold. His breath no longer showed panic when the rats crept too close. And his eyes—those were the most changed.
They watched. Measured. Absorbed.
The boy who had once clung to stories and warmth had become something else. A shadow. A vessel carved in stillness. He wore silence now, not like a burden, but a mantle.
He had tried once to climb the gnarled roots that hung from the crumbled ceiling. He'd wanted to see—something, anything. But the roots had betrayed him. He'd slipped, hit the stone floor hard enough to bruise ribs. He didn't cry. He didn't scream. He waited for the pain to pass, then crawled back into stillness.
The Vein Tomb had not broken him.
It had honed him.
But where the son was sharpening, the father was fading.
Kaelion's back had begun to curve. His breath rattled in his chest some mornings, his skin stretched thin across fragile bones. He moved slower now, his meditations interrupted by spasms and long silences. He barely ate. The food they received was already meager, but he gave most of it to Caelen.
"You must grow," he said once, as he pushed the crust of stale bread toward him. "If one of us is to live, it will be you."
Yet even now—when he spoke—the Vein Tomb listened. The rats stilled. The roots above seemed to hush. Even the shadows held their breath.
"Again," Kaelion said now, his voice thin but firm.
Caelen lay flat on the cold stone, arms by his sides, breath stilled, heartbeat slowed until it barely existed. The instinct to gasp, to twitch, to move was crushed. He imagined himself not as a boy—but as stone. As ash. As the last echo of a forgotten name.
A minute passed. Then two.
Kaelion knelt beside him and placed a trembling hand on his son's chest.
Still. No heartbeat.
He waited. Then finally, a nod.
"Good," he whispered.
Caelen opened his eyes.
"Three minutes," Kaelion said, pride faint but real. "You're nearly there."
"Nearly?" Caelen asked.
Kaelion looked at him, and for the first time in weeks, something glimmered behind his tired eyes.
"You've made death your cloak," he said. "Now you must learn to make it your weapon."
Training had changed.
It was no longer just about hiding, about breathing shallow in cracks between stones. Kaelion now tried to teach him how to fight. But that, Caelen quickly learned, was a different challenge altogether.
Kaelion had never fought anyone.
Neither had the others who were sent down here.
All the warriors of their race—the Elarathi—had been slain during the Purge. Only the weak, the unawakened, the artists, healers, and dreamers had been sent to the Vein Tomb to rot. Kaelion had heard whispers of battle, of stances and strikes, passed down from those who remembered old songs or broken chants.
But memory was not a blade.
What Kaelion did know—was how to vanish. How to become unseen. How to fold breath and stillness until you were no longer a person, but an echo. And from that, Caelen began to learn the foundations of a different kind of combat—one born not from strength, but from inevitability.
"You were never meant to be a warrior," Kaelion admitted one night, "but if you are to survive… you must become one, something worse then a warrior."
'We would not have even known how to feel the Veyrith,' Kaelion often thought, 'had they not sent her down. Our Velastra—our Queen. Stripped of title. Nameless. Sent here by mistake.'
And from her—they had remembered.
Veyrith.
The semi-divine current that flowed through all life. It responded to the soul. It evolved with trial, suffering, blood. Each race wielded it differently, unlocking branches of power passed down through bloodlines, myths, and awakening rites.
"Veyrith is like breath," Kaelion said. "Not just power. Not magic. It is life's memory. Every living thing exhales it. Every dying thing clings to it. The strong command it. The weak obey it. And you—are learning to hear its song."
Caelen believed him.
There were moments—brief, eerie—when the world whispered. When he could feel the rats before they came, even sense their hunger. When he could hear the faint heartbeat of a guard behind six feet of stone. Faint… but real. Like distant thunder in the bones.
He was learning to vanish.
He was learning to become the ghost the world had made of his people.
And one day, as they meditated, Kaelion said: "You've reached the first tier. I believe… you are now Dormant."
"A Dormant?" Caelen asked.
Kaelion nodded. "The first tier. The beginning. The moment one feels the Veyrith—but cannot yet bend it."
He gestured to the damp floor, the cracked roots, the dust-filled air.
"Veyrith has existed long before us. Over time, we learned to grasp it. The races created a system—a structure. Tiers of attunement and power. The ones I remember are:
1. Dormant
2. Sparked
3. Brand
Beyond that… only rumor. Only fire behind a fog."
Caelen's voice rose, eager. "Then tell me how to become Sparked. Tell me how to reach Tier Two."
Kaelion looked at him, sorrow etching lines deeper into his face.
"I can't."
The hunger in Caelen's eyes dimmed.
"Why?" he whispered.
"Because every race had its own awakening. Some performed sacred ceremonies—binding Veyrith through blood and name. Others threw their young into trials of death. Our people… had a ritual. A rite. But it's lost now. Gone with the last Temple. Gone with her."
He didn't need to say the name. Caelen had heard it in his father's dreams.
Velastra.
"I never learned it," Kaelion said. "And so… neither will you."
Caelen didn't speak.
He just stared at the ceiling. At the root-veins trailing down like grasping fingers. And for the first time in years, the silence between them felt heavy.
Still—hope clung.
Like Veyrith. Like life.
But not every night was forged in strength.
Some nights, Caelen dreamt of his mother. Saw her kneeling beside him, humming that nameless melody. He reached for her—but she always dissolved into mist before his fingers closed.
Other nights, he dreamt of the sky. That endless blue Kaelion had described. But it was wrong. Too wide. Too bright. It burned. He'd wake gasping, tears blurring his vision, as if the sun itself had tried to blind him.
Once, after one such dream, Kaelion whispered:
"You fear the sky because you've never seen it. But you were not made for chains, Caelen. You were born to burn brighter than the stars."
"Then why am I still down here?" he asked, bitterly.
Kaelion looked away.
"Because stars," he said softly, "are born in the dark."
The guards had grown lazy over the years.
They no longer checked the cell closely. They tossed food through the bars and turned their backs. The two Elarathi weren't prisoners anymore—they were myths. Forgotten relics breathing dust.
And that, Kaelion said, was the true gift of time.
"They will not see you coming," he murmured. "They no longer believe you matter."
Caelen stared at him.
"Then when do we escape?"
Kaelion did not answer immediately.
He only breathed, chest rising and falling with visible effort.
Then, at last: "When you are ready… to leave me behind."
The silence that followed lasted for hours.
Caelen didn't sleep that night.
He lay awake, staring up at the crack in the ceiling where a sliver of moonlight should have come—but never did.