Kael had studied cruelty like other boys studied alphabets: with the clinical patience of someone who knew the alphabet would later become a ledger. He understood that certain instruments—torture among them—were not ends but means: a way to force a hidden pattern into the light so the Eye could trace it and the Pathway could drink from the resonance of despair. He did not enjoy the pain he inflicted. Enjoyment is messy. The utility was clean.
The Enlightened he sought was not a pillar of the academy. He was a flayed shadow of a man called Myren—small, clever, and once promising. Myren's grade in the old system had been modest: a middling student at a peripheral temple of craft, talented in minor sigils, uninterested in politics, and dangerously curious. Curiosity in a city like Nyth is either a ladder or a noose.
Kael found him in a house that pretended to be broken by poverty and yet kept a door that locked too well for comfort. Myren's neighbors knew him by the way he hummed foreign prayers at twilight, the way his hands glowed faintly when he folded paper into charms. He was precisely the kind of person Kael needed: a living catalog of a system Kael intended to read and, later, to rewrite.
The capture was simple because Myren was simple. Kael's men were taught to move like unanswered debts; they approached like shadows that accept only the shape of an error and then fold it away. Myren resisted for the small time that made theater and no more. He was taken to the cellar under the warehouse—the cellar that smelled of old contracts and ink. Kael liked his settings to be plain: tools, ledger, and a place that made the sounds of confession thin and clean.
They did not bind Myren with iron. Kael preferred methods that revealed the architecture of a mind under pressure without immediately destroying the data. The first night he sat across from the bound man and watched him struggle. The Eye warmed in Kael's vision, low and patient, reading seams.
Myren's seams were tidy and domestic: a small scar at the wrist from a childhood accident that made him flinch at certain grips; a doubled line of guilt whenever the word faith was used; an obsession with a forgotten tutor's flute whose tone could soothe him. The Eye recorded nodes; Kael noted them down in the margin of the ledger as coordinates.
Torture, as Kael practiced it, was choreography. It had movement, rhythm, and purpose. He began with hunger: he withheld food and light, watching the days fold into each other. Hunger is a slow instrument that makes memory thin and rumor loud. The Pathway hummed softly as small transgressions—the petty thefts Myren had committed to survive, the lies told to fellow acolytes—lit like candles inside the lantern of his mind. Kael fed on these small echoes, and they sharpened his patience.
But hunger alone would not coax doctrine from a man schooled in silence. Kael escalated with precision: a cold bath timed just to the edge of shock; whispers of names that tugged at Myren's fixed spots; a staged mockery of the tutor's flute, its thin tone wrong enough to irritate. Each action was designed to press the same seam in different ways—psychic pruning to reveal how Myren's spirit-energy system responded under variable stress. The Pathway took what the city had already registered as wrong and refracted it into power.
It worked because Myren's shame was layered. He confessed small things first—where he kept minor charms, whom he sent messages to—then, when fatigue and humiliation thinned the mind into a porous thing, major things. He spoke of the temple's modest codex: a list of sigils, the names of a few tutors, the method for binding a minor astral knot used to steady a man's breath during meditative storms. He shrugged when he said it, as if the knowledge was not sacred but an unconcerned fact.
Kael absorbed the words, not with wonder but with calculation. The codex Myren described was not complete—temples never left everything raw—but it contained structural knowledge: how spirit-energy flowed in channels, how certain sigils required not just concentration but calibrated intent, how a practiced ritual could be stabilized by a pattern of communal memory. Most important was the acknowledgment that the system was regulated by consensus: sigils functioned because many people agreed to the rules. That agreement was a social law, and social laws produced echoes. The Pathway liked structure; it could eat structure and turn it into leverage.
Myren, between confessions, sobbed not for himself but for the tutor who had been quietly broken by authorities—a fact Myren could only hint at because his memory tightened where loyalty had once been. Kael listened with the Eye and noted another seam: institutional fear. The temple's discipline was not merely doctrinal; it was a network of threats and favors, the sort of pattern the ledger could map.
On the fourth night, Myren revealed a small thing that mattered: a sealed scrap of vellum tucked beneath his mattress, a sigil scrawled in the tutor's hand, a compact pattern used to amplify a minor luminal spark. It was not the Heart of Frost, no cosmic artifact of legend. It was small, technical, and therefore perfect. Kael took it and pressed it to his face like a hunger that needed measurement. The sigil hummed faintly under his fingers—an encoded method of directing attention in ritual, a way to focus a crowd's belief for a single breath.
He did not try to perform the sigil immediately. That would be clumsy and presumptuous. He catalogued it, folded it into the ledger under a new header: Traditional Technique — Stabilization Sigil (minor). He noted Myren's description of how the sigil required a steady, calming ritual—a rhythm of breath, a shared song, a held gaze. The sigil's power rose from coordination; without the agreed rhythm, its effect collapsed.
That observation mattered. It meant spirit-energy was, in significant part, a social technology: its efficacy depended on pre-existing structures of belief and ritual. Sin Energy, by contrast, fed on transgression—the echoes of broken agreement. The realization was simple and elegant: one system rose from consensus, the other from rupture. Both produced resonance; both were legible. Both could be mapped.
Myren's ordeal produced another yield beyond facts: a chord of guilt so dense that the Pathway drank it like a tonic. Kael felt the resonance not as blaze but as an increase in bandwidth—his Eye sharpened, revealing seams further afield, his intuition of social structures extending like a tuned string. He catalogued the gain and the cost. The process of extracting such a chord required cold steps that shaved off something human in him: a warmth, a memory, perhaps the echo of a lullaby. He marked it as cost: sentimental residue -0.03 and moved on.
There was a line where cruelty becomes creativity and another where it becomes emptiness. Kael watched Myren's last coherent moment before the man broke into silence: the acolyte's eyes, wide and clean, held a question—more of the child than the student—about meaning. He did not answer. Meanings were expensive and usually paid in sentiment.
Before Myren lost coherence, he offered one final, useless prayer—words for a ritual Kael could not yet perform. The prayer was small, pedestrian, and human. It reverberated in Kael the way a forgotten song rattles a shutter. For an instant the ledger hesitated, and an unaccounted feeling crept in—not pity but the recognition that the Pathway's appetite could one day ask for more than Kael was willing to give.
He recorded Myren's last confession, took the vellum, and left the man broken but alive. Killing would have produced a chord, perhaps larger for its finality, but it would have also erased a future instrument. Myren, insofar as he could be used, was now a quiet asset: a source of knowledge, and later, if needed, a public example whose ruin could generate ritualized shame. The economy required living instruments as well as corpses.
After Myren's recovery—slow, drugged, and medicated by Kael's men—Kael studied the vellum in careful light. He traced its sigils and found that they engaged attention patterns; they did not create power by themselves. They taught a structure by which group focus could be stabilized. He wrote a short note in the margin beside the sigil's transcription: Note: Spirit-energy efficiency ∝ communal agreement; sin-energy yield ∝ strength of rupture. Intersection potential unknown but promising.
He did not yet have a method to fuse the two systems. That would come later. For now the prize was knowledge and the chord Myren's suffering had produced. He fed the Pathway with both: the factual map of the temple's rituals and the dense moral echo his torture had produced.
As Kael left the cellar that night, Myren's muffled sobs carried like a distant instrument. The city breathed around the warehouse: markets that traded in small cruelties, priests who kept their own ledgers, children who learned with a rapid hunger how to survive. Kael closed the ledger and wrote the progress line.