Kaelen drifted through the crowded hallways, the noise of other children ricocheting off the walls in chaotic, jarring rhythms.
When the final bell released him, he didn't join the groups of students laughing and planning their evenings. He slipped outside into the schoolyard, moving like a shadow across the pavement.
Always to the same place.
His refuge.
The one corner of this fortress of steel where he could still hear himself think.
He crossed the yard and settled beneath the old oak tree. Its broad branches cast a cool halo of shadow that swallowed the afternoon heat and muffled the world's intrusive noise. Here, under the rustling leaves, Kaelen could finally breathe again.
He opened the small lunch bag his aunt Aria had packed. But before the first bite reached his lips, the taunts arrived—right on schedule.
"Hey, Kaelen!"
The voice belonged to a tall boy, bulky for his age, with freckles scattered across a smug expression. Trouble clung to him like a second skin. He stepped forward, towering over Kaelen, his eyes sharp and his grin wide with a hunter's instinct.
"Gonna ruin the football team's luck again with your curse?" the boy called out, loud enough for the surrounding students to stop and watch. "Maybe cheer for the other guys this time. We might actually win if the 'Grave-Walker' isn't on our side!"
The boy snorted, and the group around him burst into a chorus of giggles and cruel whispers.
Kaelen's jaw tightened until his teeth ached. He refused to look their way. He refused to give them the reaction they hungered for.
He took a slow, deliberate bite of his sandwich, his knuckles whitening around the bread.
On the outside, he looked distant. Unfazed. A statue of ice.
On the inside, a dark heat curled and tensed in his gut. Shame bit deep, and a sudden, jagged anger flared hot in his chest. Tears pricked at the corners of his cobalt eyes, but he swallowed them down with the dry bread.
They would never see him break. Not here. Not now.
The final bell ending the day arrived at last.
Kaelen didn't linger. He was the first through the gates, his footsteps quick and sharp, as if he could outrun the voices chasing him through the air.
After his parents' deaths in the Blackwood accident, Kaelen had come to live with his aunt Aria in the heart of the city. He was still a minor—too young to live alone, and too fractured to truly want to.
His walk home carried him through the center of town, where the War Memorial stood in solemn, grey stillness. It was a vast monument of cold stone, etched with the names of thousands lost in the Great War against the Shadow Demons.
The last bouquet at its base had already wilted, the petals turning to brown dust.
Kaelen stopped, as he always did.
His eyes traced the rows of names until they found the two carved deepest into the stone—and into his heart.
Elara Tores.
Valerius Tores.
His mother. His father.
He touched the cold lettering with trembling fingers. Since the accident, Kaelen hadn't cried. Not once. Not even in the quietest hours of the night when the grief felt like a physical weight on his chest. He wouldn't allow it.
Strength was the only armor he had left in a world that wanted to crush him.
Every day he brought flowers. Every day the pain stayed exactly the same—a wound the world insisted on reopening every time someone whispered his name.
Today, he lingered longer than usual. He stayed until the pressure in his chest swelled too big to contain, until the air felt like it was running out.
Kaelen turned and ran.
He ran all the way back to Aria's warm little home.
She met him at the door with a gentle smile, her arms open, offering the simple comforts he didn't know how to accept—tea, a biscuit, a softness that felt alien to him.
"How was school, Kaelen?"
"Um… fine," he mumbled, dodging her gaze and the pity he feared was hiding behind her question.
Before she could press further, he slipped upstairs. His room greeted him with its familiar, silent stillness.
Kaelen dropped his bag beside the old oak dresser and stepped onto the small balcony. This was his true sanctuary. Here, the world's noise dimmed to nothing and the shadows felt kinder, stretching out to meet him like old friends.
He settled into the hammock and pulled a faded photograph from his pocket.
A younger version of himself stood between his smiling parents. Three faces shaped by sunlight and hope—a hope the world had since stolen and replaced with ash.
The setting sun stained the sky in bruised violets and molten gold. Kaelen gazed upward as the first stars began to pierce through the twilight veil.
"I wish…" he whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, raw longing. "I wish there was a way to change everything."
A breeze stirred, rustling the treetops like distant, secret whispers. It carried the faint scent of rain and something older—something metallic and sharp that he couldn't quite name.
For the first time in many nights, Kaelen let his thoughts drift toward the impossible. Past the clouds. Past the boundaries of the world he knew.
Somewhere, he imagined, there had to be more. Something beyond the whispers and the stares. Somewhere he might finally belong.
He lay there until the air turned cold enough to nip at his fingers.
Kaelen stepped back inside, closing the balcony door with gentle care. He sat at his desk and began his homework, the pages filling slowly. Each line of math was a small escape, a way to focus on logic instead of loss.
Later, when he returned downstairs, Aria was curled on the sofa. An old action movie flickered across the screen in bursts of orange light.
"Want to join me, Kaelen?" Aria asked
He gave a faint, tired smile and shook his head.
"I've seen that one too many times. I'm just tired. I'll grab some cookies and head up. Maybe play that new game."
He retreated to his room and powered on his console. He loaded a multiplayer RPG and picked a sorcerer—always his favorite.
In the game, he wielded power. In the game, people feared his magic rather than mocking his "curse." For an hour, he roamed another world—vast, strange, and brimming with dark energy.
There, he wasn't Kaelen Gev. He wasn't the orphan of the Blackwood crash. He was someone impossible.
But eventually, the yawns thickened. The screen dimmed.
Kaelen shut the console off, letting the darkness of the room settle around him like a heavy blanket. He slipped into bed and stared at the ceiling, watching the shadows shift faintly across the plaster.
He breathed out slowly, and at last, sleep claimed him.
If Kaelen had stayed awake for even a moment longer…
He might have noticed the faint, oily shimmer gathering at the edges of his room. A glow like black dust suspended in moonlight, pulsing in time with his breathing.
It was a promise.
It was a warning.
It was the beginning of a transformation that no wall, no armor, and no prayer could stop.