The silence after the tunnel collapse was a living thing, thick with dust and disbelief. It was broken by Bramble's gruff, echoing clap on Kaelen's shoulder. The gesture was as subtle as a rockslide, but it landed with the weight of a royal decree. He had passed the test.
The others dispersed, the immediate tension easing. But Morwen's sharp eyes missed nothing. She saw the slight tremor in Kaelen's hands, the way he stared at the pile of rubble as if it might suddenly reassemble and condemn him.
Later, as the cistern settled into its nightly rhythm of hushed voices and the crackle of the central fire, she cornered him. She wasn't holding a rusted box or a metal pipe. In her gnarled hand was a single, fresh leaf, plucked from some stubborn weed growing in a crack near the ceiling. It was vibrantly green, a tiny defiance of the gloom.
"Sit," she commanded, not unkindly, pointing to a stump near her own perch on a barrel.
Kaelen sat, eyeing the leaf warily.
"You think you had a lesson today," she began, her voice a low rasp that didn't carry beyond their corner. "Bramble gave you a task. You performed it. You learned to use a hammer to break a wall. Good. Necessary." She held up the leaf, pinched between her thumb and forefinger. "This is a different lesson."
"What can I do with a leaf?" Kaelen asked, exhaustion making him bold. "Besides turn it into compost?"
"Exactly that," Morwen said, her eyes glinting. "But not all of it. Just a part."
She leaned forward, her gaze intense. "Bramble and Thorn will teach you to break things. To fight. To be a weapon. A weapon is what the world expects you to be. It is what you expect yourself to be." She shook the leaf gently. "I will teach you to see."
She handed him the leaf. "Don't destroy it. Listen to it."
Hesitantly, Kaelen took it. It was soft, pliant, filled with a thrumming vitality that felt alien to his touch. He closed his eyes, as he had with the lock, the pipe, the tunnel wall. He reached for the void.
"No," Morwen's voice cut through his concentration. "Not like a club. You are not attacking it. You are having a conversation. Listen for its song. Every living thing has one. Find it."
Frustration bubbled up. This was vague, impossible. But he tried again, pushing down the instinct to command. Instead, he let his awareness sink into the leaf. He felt the flow of moisture through its veins, the process of photosynthesis, the constant, minute cellular activity that was its life.
And there, underneath it, he felt the other song. Fainter, but inevitable. The slow, constant process of cellular death. The tiny, microscopic endings that were as much a part of its life as the beginnings.
"There," Morwen whispered, as if she could see his discovery. "That is the note. The leaf is already dying. It just doesn't know it yet. You are not a destroyer, boy. You are a… facilitator. You are giving a quiet truth a louder voice."
Guided by her words, he focused on that single, faint note of decay within the leaf's vibrant symphony. He didn't pour power into it; he simply… amplified it. He gave that natural process a gentle push.
He opened his eyes. A single, perfect brown spot, no larger than a pinprick, had appeared on the leaf's green surface. The rest of it remained lush and healthy.
A profound sense of understanding, different from the triumph of collapsing the tunnel, washed over him. This wasn't destruction. This was precision. This was choice.
Morwen nodded, a rare smile touching her wrinkled lips. "Good. The Church sees only the ending. They are terrified of it. They build their eternal flames and their unyielding stone walls to pretend it doesn't exist. But without decay, there is no growth. Without death, there is no life. They are two sides of the same coin, and you, boy, are the mint."
She took the leaf back, examining the tiny spot. "This is your true power. Not the crumbling of stone, though that has its uses. It is the understanding of the cycle. You can see the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end. That is a knowledge that terrifies empires."
For the next week, his training split in two. His mornings were spent with Bramble and Thorn: brutal, physical sessions learning to brawl, to dodge, to use his power in combat to weaken an opponent's weapon or armor. It was desperate, messy, and fueled by fear.
His evenings were spent with Morwen. Their lessons were quiet, meditative, and infinitely more strange. She had him practice on a myriad of things: a cup of water, encouraging a specific patch of algae to bloom and then die; a piece of wood, steering the spread of a pre-existing fungus along a specific grain; even a lump of clay, accelerating its drying in one precise spot to make it easier to break.
He was learning the grammar of ending. Morwen was teaching him to speak it fluently.
One night, as he successfully encouraged a patch of moss to release its spores on a rock, she spoke again, her voice casual but her words deliberate.
"The Hounds are not just trackers," she said, watching the invisible spores float away. "They are theologians. Their hatred is not just fear; it is doctrine. They believe your existence is a theological problem. A flaw in the divine plan."
Kaelen looked up, confused. "What does that mean?"
"It means they won't just stop," she said, her eyes dark. "They can't. To them, you are not a person to be captured. You are a heresy to be erased. A mistake to be corrected. They will never negotiate. They will never tire. They will chase you to the edge of the world because their faith demands it."
The weight of that settled over him, colder than the void in his chest. It was one thing to be hunted for what you could do. It was another to be hunted for what you were.
He wasn't just a criminal. He was a blasphemy.
The comfort of the Rusted Chain suddenly felt fragile, a paper shield against a holy war. He looked at his hands—hands that could now age a single leaf spot or collapse a tunnel—and saw them for what they truly were in the eyes of the world above: an affront to creation itself.
Morwen's lesson was over. She had taught him to see more than just the weakness in objects. She had taught him to see the true nature of the hunt. And it was far more terrifying than he had ever imagined.