Kael
The world had gone quiet.
Not the soft kind of quiet that comes after snowfall or just before dawn. This was a wrong quiet. A silence that held its breath too long, waiting for something to scream.
Kael stood at the edge of the crater, breath fogging, boots sunk ankle-deep in cold mud. He shouldn't have moved closer. Every instinct told him to run, but his feet stayed rooted, drawn by the pull in his gut. The same instinct that told him where to dig, what to steal, and when to lie. It was whispering now, louder than ever.
'Down there.'
At the centre of the blast-scorched pit, half buried in steaming soil, pulsed something small, smooth, dark, and wrong. It wasn't stone, nor was it metal. It looked like a shard of blackened bone, veined with faint silver light.
It pulsed again.
And again, he heard it.
"Kael..."
His name, not in his ears, not in the air, but inside.
He shook his head hard. "Nope. No gods, no ghosts, no getting hexed by a shiny rock in the middle of the damn night."
Still, he stepped closer.
The ground was warm, too warm. Steam hissed up from the crater's centre like breath from a sleeping beast. Kael knelt, half aware of how his fingers trembled as he reached for the shard.
'Don't touch it.'
Too late. His fingertips brushed the surface...
And the world tore open.
Fire licked down his spine. Not heat. Memory. Someone else's memory. A battlefield of bone. A hand raised high, wearing a full crown, bringing silence down upon thousands with a single word.
He screamed, but no sound came out.
Then came the voice, deeper now, clearer, inside his skull.
"At last... you've returned to me."
He woke up on his back, cold mud soaking through his cloak, the shard clutched in his palm.
Still dark. Still snowing. Still alive.
But not alone.
Footsteps crunched above him.
Kael blinked. A tall figure stood at the edge of the crater, cloaked in ragged furs, face hidden, but holding a lantern of violet flame. Behind them, two more emerged from the trees, cloaks embroidered with the sign of a broken sun.
The first one raised a gloved hand.
"He has it. Kill him quickly. Do not let the shard take root."
Kael didn't wait.
He bolted.
He ran not like a man fleeing, but like a prey that had already seen what happens when it's caught. Through trees and stone, across the old grave trail, breath slicing his throat, heart pounding like a war drum.
Behind him, shouts, steel drawn, magic sparked in the air; that same wrongness he'd felt in the crater.
The shard burned in his pocket, his name whispered in his ears again and again.
"Run, Kael. Run now. But soon... you will kneel."