Chapter 4: The Abyss Gazes Back
The Atheneum's interest was a key that unlocked a new, more intricate cage. Sister Margot's pinched face now wore a veneer of saccharine concern, her eyes like chips of flint behind it. I was no longer just Witch-Boy. I was "our Kaelan, the gifted one." My chores were halved, ostensibly to "nurture my fragile talent." In reality, it was to keep me rested and presentable for the weekly visits from Mage Alaric, the tired junior mage who now saw me as his personal project.
The other orphans' reactions were a spectrum. Some, like Elian, watched me with genuine, wistful curiosity. Most, including Garret, treated me with a wary, hostile distance. The dynamic had shifted. I was no longer at the bottom. I was an anomaly, and anomalies are either worshipped or destroyed. Garret's crew seemed to be deciding which.
The attention was a nuisance, but it provided cover. With fewer chores and more time supposedly spent in "focused meditation," I had greater freedom to explore the true nature of my power. The incident at the lodestone pillar had been a spark; now I needed to map the contours of the inferno it came from.
My experiments began in the deepest shadows of the woodshed, late at night. I summoned Arran, my Skeleton Warrior. The cost was familiar now, a significant dip in my inner reservoir. I focused on that reservoir, trying to perceive its nature. Mana, in my past life, had felt like a glowing, volatile gas in the center of my chest, difficult to contain and quick to dissipate. This was different.
I closed my eyes and turned my senses inward.
What I found was not a pool of energy, but a space. A vast, internal vault of perfect darkness. It was cold, silent, and deep beyond measure. This was my Shadow Reserve. It didn't hold power; it was the absence that generated power, a cosmic negative from which all my abilities drew. Using it wasn't about expelling energy; it was about allowing a measured portion of that absolute void to leak into the world, taking shape as my will commanded.
I directed a trickle from the Reserve into my hand. A wisp of darkness, tangible and cold, coiled around my fingers like living smoke. I willed it to change. First, to mimic the ever-burning flame from the Atheneum. The shadow writhed, its edges glowing with a faint, heatless violet ember. It gave light, but no warmth. I shifted it, mimicking the swirling water. It flowed like liquid obsidian, silent and heavy. I mimicked the shifting sand, the wisp of cloud. Each transformation was effortless, a matter of conceptualization. The shadow was a primordial clay, and my will was the sculptor.
The true revelation came when I tried to combine it with the physical world. I picked up a rotten piece of firewood. Focusing, I pushed a thread of shadow into the wood, not around it. The brittle, spongy texture changed. It darkened, hardened, its weight increasing slightly. When I tapped it against the shed wall, it didn't crack; it rang with a dull, solid thunk. I had Infused it with shadow, temporarily altering its properties. The effort was marginally more than simple manipulation, but the principle was earth-shattering. My power could enhance, corrupt, or transform.
This led to the next, critical discovery. Shadow Extraction. I had used it on the dead fly, the mouse, the sparrow. I had assumed it only worked on biological death. One afternoon, trapped in a "meditation session" in the barren orphanage yard under Sister Margot's watchful gaze, I tested a theory.
A rusty hinge on a nearby gate had finally given way that morning, snapping after years of corrosion. The broken piece lay in the dirt. It was not alive, but its useful existence was over—a kind of death. Boredom and that constant, gnawing hunger prompted me to act. Focusing from my seated position, I extended a filament of shadow, finer than a spider's silk, from my own shade toward the broken hinge.
I willed not to consume biological essence, but to extract the concept of its failure, the residual energy of its structural demise.
The shadow touched the rusted metal. A faint, greyish vapor, visible only to my shadow-attuned sight, seeped from the iron. The shadow filament drew it in. The sensation was different—not the cool vitality of a life extinguished, but a gritty, metallic tang of entropy and conclusion. It flowed into my Reserve. The quantity was minuscule, less than even the sparrow, but it was something. The broken hinge didn't vanish; it simply looked more inert, more finally broken.
My Reserve, I realized, could be fed by any ending, any conclusion. The death of a living thing was the richest source, but not the only one. A shattered tool, a faded letter, a collapsed friendship—all held echoes of entropy I could potentially harvest. The Shadow Monarch's hunger was for the silence after any final note.
This changed everything. The orphanage was no longer just a place of emotional scraps. It was a gallery of small endings. The crust of moldy bread tossed to the pigs (the end of its edible life). A torn, discarded shirt (the end of its utility). Each yielded a whisper of power, slowly topping up my Reserve between my nocturnal visits to the Potter's Field.
It was during one of these field visits, with Arran standing silent vigil, that I made the most unsettling comparison. I had summoned Arran and, on a whim, tried to push a thread of shadow into his bony frame, to Infuse him as I had the wood.
The result was not a simple enhancement.
The shadow poured into him, and the skeleton's violet eye-lights flared into bright amethyst stars. His bones darkened from aged ivory to a sleek, onyx-like finish. He grew taller, his frame thickening with implied strength. Jagged spurs of solidified shadow erupted from his knuckles and elbows. He was no longer just a Skeleton Warrior. He was a Shadow-Infused Skeleton Brute.
The power drain was significant, a continuous draw from my Reserve to maintain this enhanced state. But the difference was staggering. I commanded him to strike a nearby rotting fence post. The uninfused Arran could have cracked it. The Brute's shadow-clad fist obliterated it, exploding the wood into splinters and dust with a sound like a cracking bone.
This was the potential. My soldiers were not static. They could be upgraded, customized, empowered directly by my Reserve. An army of the dead, each unit a canvas for my shadow's corruption.
The plot, as they say, thickened precisely because of my progress. Sister Margot's surveillance escalated from watchful to invasive. She began "checking" on my meditation at random intervals, her eyes scanning the area around me with a suspicion that went beyond mere curiosity about a mage's habits. One evening, I returned from a clandestine trip to the field to find the straw of my pallet subtly disturbed. A search. She was looking for something.
Then, Mage Alaric arrived for a session with a new, sharper focus. "The Atheneum masters are intrigued, Kaelan," he said, his tired eyes now alert. "Force affinity of your raw strength is rare, but not unique. What is unique is the lack of strain, the… purity of the effect. There's no mana signature bleed, no psychic feedback. It's as if the force is generated from a perfect vacuum."
He produced a small, complex device of crystal and copper. "This is an aetheric resonance scanner. It measures the background magical fluctuations of a spell. Perform your 'push' on it. Let us see the signature."
A cold knot formed in my gut. This was a danger I hadn't anticipated. My shadow mimicry might fool the eyes, but would it fool an arcane instrument?
I had no choice. I focused, creating a small, concentrated tendril of shadow from my Reserve, directing it to press against the scanner's crystal plate with precise, telekinetic-like force.
The device hummed. Its crystals glowed not with the steady blue of force mana, but with a flickering, deep violet and black morass, like oil on water. Alaric frowned, peering at it. "That's… not right. It's reading a profound absence, a negative energy. Almost like… necromantic residue, but far more condensed. And something else… something older."
He looked from the scanner to me, his earlier excitement tempered by dawning, professional unease. "What exactly are you doing, boy? This isn't standard force manipulation."
The moment hung in the balance. I let my shoulders slump, adopting Kaelan's old, weary vulnerability. "I… don't know, sir. It just happens. It feels… cold. Empty. Is it wrong?" I layered a hint of fear into my voice.
He studied me for a long moment, the scholar warring with the guild mage. The scholar won, for now. "Not wrong… just unprecedented. We must be cautious. The Atheneum must run more tests. Do not demonstrate for anyone else."
The warning was clear. I was no longer just a prodigy; I was a specimen. An anomaly to be dissected.
That night, the stakes were irrevocably raised. From my narrow window, I saw a cloaked figure meet with Sister Margot in the moonlit courtyard. Not Mage Alaric. This figure was taller, thinner, and the hand that passed a heavy pouch to Margot gleamed with a ring that bore not the Atheneum's eye, but a symbol I recognized from my second life's darkest campaigns: a stylized, weeping sun.
The Order of the Dawn's Weeping. A fanatical, heretical sect obsessed with purging "unnatural corruptions." They believed any power not born of the sun, the elements, or pure divine grace was a blight to be cleansed. And they paid well for leads.
Sister Margot wasn't just curious or greedy. She was a hunter, and she had sold the scent of her prey.
I watched the figure melt into the shadows—shadows that now felt like my only allies. The cold well within me didn't churn with panic; it settled into a glacial, calculating calm. The orphanage was no longer a cradle or a hunting ground. It had become a trap.
They were monitoring my magic, my movements. They suspected something, but they didn't know the truth. They saw a strange boy with odd powers. They did not see the king in the beggar's clothes, the general with a single, perfect soldier waiting in a field of graves.
I looked at my hands, pale in the moonlight. I could feel the vast, dark space of my Shadow Reserve, deeper now, fed by a hundred tiny endings. I thought of Arran, my Infused Brute, a fragment of my will given brutal form. I thought of the extraction that could feed on rust and ruin.
The Order of the Dawn's Weeping sought to purge the unnatural. They would soon learn a harsh lesson.
You cannot purge the dark. You can only make it angry. And a dark that is fed on endings, that can wear the face of any magic, and command the silent dead… is a dark that is very, very hard to kill.
The time for subtle experimentation was over. The time to arm my shadow had begun.