"A cipher is a test. Only someone who thinks like the encoder can decode the message." — Edric Varn, margin note
---
Dark came slow.
Kael cooked dinner because he couldn't sit still any longer. Fish from the cold-store — the catch from two days ago, still good — seasoned with wild thyme he'd found growing behind the woodshed, right against the wall, obvious as anything, and Aldric had apparently never noticed it in three years. Kael found this baffling. It was right there. The fire in the hearth was the only light. The crack in the table ran through the middle of the board like a seam. He'd set two places. Normal. As if it were any other night. It wasn't. Aldric had said *tonight, after dark* and the dark was here now, and the old man had barely spoken since they'd sat down.
Aldric ate the fish and looked at it like it had personally offended him by tasting good.
"Where did you learn to cook?"
"Another life," Kael said.
"You keep saying that."
"You keep not asking what I mean."
Aldric chewed. Swallowed. Set his fork down. "I figured, when you were ready, you'd tell me." A pause. "Are you ready?"
Kael thought about it. Actually thought about it, for the first time in three years. Telling Aldric the truth. *I died in another world. I was a different person. I remember all of it. Your world has no word for what I am because it's never happened here before, or if it has, nobody survived long enough to explain it.*
"No," he said. "I don't think I am."
Aldric nodded. This time the nod was right. The nod that said *I'll wait.*
After dinner the old man stood, slower than usual, one hand on the table's cracked edge.
"Come with me."
---
The barn. The ozone smell was stronger today — sharp, metallic — and Kael didn't say *I already know about the hidden room* because he wanted to see how Aldric would play it. The old man pulled a key on a leather cord from under his shirt. Brass, tarnished, teeth that didn't match any lock in the cottage. He knelt, joints cracking, and fitted the key into the floorboards.
The hatch opened onto a room full of shelves and books and glass jars and a forge too small for horseshoes surrounded by tools too delicate for anything but the fine work of inscribing magic into objects. The air was cooler than the barn, and the ozone was stronger — the smell of something that had been used here, often. Kael had smelled it for weeks. He'd been dying to see this. The shelves held rows of jars with labels in a tight hand he didn't recognise. Powders. Liquids the colour of rust or honey. A small anvil. Tongs. Needle-fine tools that might have been for engraving metal or something else. The workbench was scarred and stained. Someone had worked here for years. His father? Aldric? Both?
"All of this," Aldric said, "is yours now."
*Now.* Not someday.
Kael sat at the workbench. Warm wood, burn scars, chemical stains. A bench somebody had used hard for years.
And Aldric told him everything. Or nearly everything — there were gaps, places where the story bent around something Aldric wasn't saying — but the shape of what he revealed was devastating enough without the missing pieces.
His real name was Kael Varn. His father had been Edric Varn, a second-tier Crucible Adept, unregistered, murdered by the Crown's Silver Office on Athenaeum orders. His mother was Lira Ashwood, a healer, unlicensed. Also murdered. He was nine months old when it happened.
Kael processed this the way he'd processed everything since the aneurysm: information first, reaction later. The reaction was building underneath — grief, rage, something cold he didn't have a name for yet. The analytical layer was faster. It got there first. Orphan. Political assassination. Institutional cover-up. One thing rose above the noise: *I will learn what they died for. I will survive. Everything else can wait.*
"I am Aldric Varn," the old man said. "Third-tier Channeler, Covenant Path. Iron Covenant, retired. I'm your grandfather."
"I know," Kael said quietly.
Aldric blinked.
"The photograph behind the chimney stone. You say 'Edric' in your sleep once a week. The birthmark behind your ear is the same as mine — that's inherited, not coincidence." He shrugged. "I figured it out about a year ago."
Pride crossed Aldric's face, just for a moment, before it sank under something heavier. "Everything I've taught you. Breathing, observation, physical training. All of it was preparation."
"For what?"
"For surviving."
And he told him about the Paths. Six of them. Six different ways humans could channel aether, the energy that ran through everything in this world.
The Crucible Path was transmutation — changing the structure of materials. The more you understood a material, the more precisely you could alter it. Kael's brain went somewhere very fast at that. Real transmutation. If you knew how a thing was built, where it was weak, when it changed, you could take it apart and put it back together. The rabbit. The knife. The way he'd felt where to cut through the blade that morning. *I already did it. I didn't know what to call it.*
His hands were on the workbench. He didn't trust himself to speak yet.
"You're doing the thing," Aldric said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where your eyes go blank and you start doing math nobody asked you to do. Your father did it too." He paused. "It's what made him brilliant and it's what got him killed."
The Covenant Path enhanced the physical body — speed, strength, endurance pushed beyond human limits. Iron Covenant soldiers, Aldric's old unit, were Covenant-enhanced. That explained how a sixty-seven-year-old man could cross a room in half a second.
Aldric poured himself a swallow of water from the jar on the shelf. When he set it down, his hand was steady.
"There are others," Aldric said. "Tide controls elemental forces — fire, water, wind, lightning. Raw energy, directed and shaped. Bastion creates barriers and wards — defensive structures woven from the same energy that runs through everything. Veil is perception. Veil mages can sense what magic has been used in a place. Sometimes they sense intention. They detect lies. The Athenaeum uses them as investigators. Interrogators. They're the reason hiding is so hard."
"That's five," Kael said.
Aldric's face changed. The room felt heavier.
"The Hollow Path." He said it the way you'd say the name of something that bites. "Mind, memory, shadow, consciousness. It was banned four hundred years ago by the Compact of Iron. If they catch you practising it, you die. If they catch you researching it, you die. Your father was killed because he mixed Hollow principles into his Crucible work."
"Who taught him? If it's been banned for four hundred years?"
The silence after that question went on for a while. Aldric's jaw worked.
"There's a word in the old texts," he said slowly. "Before the Compact. They called them Convergences. Places where the Paths overlap. Bleed into each other. Most mages walk one Path their whole lives. A rare few can walk two. But the Hollow Path isn't really a Path at all. It's what happens when you reach so deep into one Path that you break through the bottom and fall into something else."
"That's not a who. That's a what."
"Because the 'who' is the answer I don't have." Aldric's voice was harder now. "Your father believed the Hollow wasn't banned because it was dangerous. He believed it was banned because it was real. Because the Athenaeum had discovered something about it that threatened their understanding of how magic worked, and rather than rewrite the textbooks, they burned them."
"That," Kael said, "sounds exactly like every institution I've ever studied."
Aldric gave him the look. The one that said *you talk about things you shouldn't know about.*
"That is the question," Aldric said finally. "And I don't have the answer. You'll have to find it."
Kael sat with that. Six Paths. His father had mixed the forbidden one into his work and been killed for it. The Athenaeum had burned the textbooks rather than admit they were wrong. It was the kind of story that would have made him furious even in his first life. It made him furious now — and cold. The cold was useful. It kept the other thing down, the thing that wanted to ask *why didn't you tell me before*, *why now*, *how long have you known you were dying*.
The lantern flickered. Somewhere among the shelves, a glass jar ticked as it cooled. Kael looked at the workbench. The journal. The crystal. The letter. Three objects. A whole life reduced to what could be carried. He didn't know what to do with his hands.
"There's more," Aldric said. Then he stopped himself. His jaw worked, and for a moment Kael saw the old man weighing one thing against another, choosing what to say and what to bury. "That's enough for now."
*That's not all of it. He's holding something back. Something about the Hollow specifically.*
He filed it. Another piece without a picture.
Aldric pulled three things off a shelf. A thick leather journal with cracked binding — the kind of book that had been opened and closed a thousand times. A small pale crystal that caught the light in ways that shouldn't have been geometrically possible; when Aldric set it down, Kael's eyes wanted to slide off it, as if it didn't quite belong in the same space as the rest of the room. And a sealed letter. The wax was dark. No crest he could see. Just a name, he assumed, on the outside. His inheritance. All of it.
"Journal is your father's research. Coded. The key is 'mind the edges.'" He set the crystal down carefully, the way you'd set down something that could bite. "Crystal is a Covenant catalyst from the Iron Covenant armoury. Stolen. By me. Only crime I've ever committed that I'd do again."
"The letter?"
"For a man called Vex Arden. Runs a shop in Aldmere — The Broken Compass. He's been waiting fourteen years."
"Why didn't he come here?"
"Because I told him not to. Every road to this cottage leads to you, and hiding you was the only good thing I've managed in sixty years." He paused. "If you can't find Vex, if the shop is empty, if something's gone wrong — look for the Broker. Doran Kell. Trade Quarter." His voice hardened. "Be careful with that one. She collects more than information."
He reached into his pocket and put something in Kael's hand. A river stone. Smooth, dark grey, still warm.
"Your mother collected these. Said they remembered the water." He cleared his throat. "She was usually right about that sort of thing."
Then his voice changed, and Kael knew — before the words came — that this was the part that mattered most.
"When you learn what I did. Before I retired. What I was part of." His hands were shaking. "You're going to hate me for it. I need you to hold onto two things. I loved your father. And I lo—"
The cough hit before he could finish.
Not the morning cough. Something deeper, from a place that was load-bearing and structural, and it didn't stop. It folded him over the workbench and when his hand came away it was covered in blood. Not traces. Bright, arterial — the kind that means something inside has torn.
"Aldric—"