Kariel was five the first time he heard the word Gargon.
He was in his mother's lap, in the lamplight, in the warm quiet of the bedroom after his father had gone to sleep. This was their time — his and Eria's. The hour when she brushed out her long blonde hair and talked, and Kariel curled against her and listened to everything. Outside, someone was playing a flute somewhere in the street below. Low, slow music that floated up through the open window like smoke.
'"Mama, what's a Gargon?"
The brush stopped.
'"Where did you hear that word, little one?"
'"Two men at the market. They were talking fast and one of them said a Gargon appeared outside the third district and three Marions were sent. What's a Marion? Is a Gargon a monster? Are Marions the ones who kill monsters? Why do monsters appear? How big are they? Does it hurt when—"
'"Breathe," Eria said.
Kariel breathed.
'"One question at a time."
'"What's a Gargon?"
Eria was quiet for a moment. She put her brush down on the nightstand. She settled Kariel more comfortably across her lap and looked at the open window — at the dark city and the lamplight on the wet stones below. Then she started talking, in the voice she always used for important things. Slow. Careful. Like each word was a stone she was placing deliberately.
'"You know that people die, right?" she said.
'"Yes. Everyone dies."
'"And most people — when they die — their bodies return to the earth. They become part of the world again. That's how it works for most people."
'"Most people?"
'"Most," she said. "But some people, Kariel — people who have done truly terrible things. Things so bad they cannot be forgiven. Things that hurt other people deeply and deliberately, and were never faced, never answered for — those people die differently."
'"How?"
'"Their sin doesn't die with them. It stays. It clings to the body like dark smoke. And slowly — over one year, or two, or three — it bleeds upward. Rising through the earth, through the air, all the way up into the sky."
Kariel was very still. He was looking at her face with those burning eyes. She could always tell when he was really listening — he got completely motionless, like a rabbit in the grass that has spotted something important.
'"And in the sky?" he whispered.
'"In the sky it gathers. It builds. And when enough of it has come together — when the weight of it becomes too much — it falls back down. Like lightning, but wrong. Like light that has learned to be dark." She paused. "And from where it lands..."
'"A Gargon is born," Kariel finished.
'"Yes."
'"So they're made from dead sinners?"
'"From the sin inside dead sinners. Yes."
'"What do they look like?"
Eria picked her brush back up, but she didn't use it. She turned it slowly in her hands.
'"They look different every time. They take shapes from the sin that made them. Some are enormous — thirty metres tall, bigger than buildings. Some are fast and low to the ground. Some breathe fire. Some have armour like stone. Some have too many limbs. Some have none. But they are always big, always dangerous, and they are always hungry."
'"Hungry for what?"
'"People," she said simply.
'"They eat people?"
'"Yes."
'"And nobody stops them?"
'"The Marions stop them."
Kariel sat up straighter.
'"Tell me about Marions."
'"You want the whole story?"
'"Yes. All of it."
'"It's late, Kariel—"
'"Mama. All of it."
She smiled. She could never say no to those eyes. She had tried, many times. She had failed every time.
'"The Marions are people trained to hunt and kill Gargons," she said. "Every kingdom has an academy — it's called the Garlion. Young people who want to become Marions go there to learn magic, to get stronger, to earn a rank."
'"What are the ranks?"
'"Five of them." She held up her hand and counted on her fingers. "The lowest is Miro. Then Kairo. Then Zairo. Then Gairo. And the highest of all — the rank that only a small number of people in any kingdom ever reach — is Vairo."
'"Vairo," Kariel repeated quietly. Like he was tasting the word.
'"The king himself recognises a Vairo Marion. They are the strongest. They fight the biggest, most dangerous Gargons — the ones that appear with armies of smaller ones behind them. The ones that can level entire districts in an hour."
'"Have you ever seen one? A Vairo Marion?"
'"Once," she said. Her golden eyes went soft and distant. "I was about your age. There was a Gargon near our district — a Zairo rank, though it seemed so much bigger to me then. It was destroying everything it touched. People were running. Buildings were on fire. I remember the smoke and the screaming." She paused. "And then he came."
'"The Vairo Marion?"
'"He landed in the middle of the street. Just... landed. From nowhere. Tall, with hair like silver. He looked at the Gargon and the Gargon looked at him and for a moment nothing moved." She smiled. "And then he moved. And then it was over. I didn't even fully see it happen. It was like watching lightning choose to become a person for just long enough to do what needed to be done."
'"And then?"
'"And then the Gargon was gone. And the street was quiet. And he walked away without looking back."
Kariel was quiet for a long time. Eria watched him process.
'"I want to be a Marion," he said at last.
Eria's brush stopped again.
'"I want to be a Vairo," he added, just to be thorough.
'"That is a very dangerous job," she said gently.
'"I know."
'"Marions die, Kariel."
'"People also die doing nothing. The poor people in the lower district die slowly just from having no food or medicine. At least if I'm a Marion I die doing something that matters."
'"You are five years old and that is a very serious thought for a five-year-old."
'"You always say I think like someone older."
'"I say that, yes." She looked at him for a long moment. "Your father will not like this."
'"I know."
'"He will argue."
'"I know."
'"He will argue loudly and at length."
'"I know that most of all," Kariel said.
Eria laughed — a real, surprised, warm laugh. She pulled him close and pressed her lips to the top of his black hair.
You wonderful, impossible thing, she thought.
She picked up her brush and went back to her hair. The flute outside played on in the dark, slow and low and peaceful.
Kariel closed his eyes and listened. And somewhere behind those purple-red eyes, something that had been waiting quietly for five years settled into place and felt, for the first time, like it knew exactly where it was going.
Kariel started school the year he turned six. The district academy was three streets from home — a wide, solid building with stone walls and wooden floors and forty children between the ages of five and twelve, all pressed into the same rooms and expected to learn reading, arithmetic, history, and the unspoken curriculum that every school in every district of every kingdom ran quietly beneath the official one: your place in this world, and how to stay in it.
His eyes caused a problem on the very first day.
It wasn't that unusual eyes were rare in Zargon. A billion people meant every kind of face and colour imaginable. But Kariel's eyes weren't just unusual. They glowed. Faintly, but undeniably. And they moved like something inside them was awake and paying attention at all times, cataloguing everything, missing nothing. On a six-year-old with a quiet face and neat black hair, the effect landed somewhere between fascinating and deeply unsettling.
Children being children, they chose unsettling.
The boy's name was Tord. He was eight — two years older, a head taller, the son of a mid-level administrator who had apparently never told him the word no and meant it. He had wide shoulders and a narrow face and the kind of confidence that isn't earned but absorbed from a world that kept agreeing with everything he did.
He noticed Kariel during the first break time.
'"Hey. New kid."
Kariel looked up from the grass where he was sitting, reading.
'"What?"
'"What's wrong with your eyes?"
'"Nothing," Kariel said.
'"They're a weird colour."
'"Yes."
'"Like, really weird. Purple and red."
'"I know what colour they are."
'"It looks creepy."
'"That's your opinion."
Tord blinked. He had expected tears. Maybe running away. He was not used to calm.
'"You know you're creepy, right?"
'"Being unusual isn't the same as being creepy. Those are different words."
'"Whatever, freak."
'"That's also just your opinion," Kariel said, and went back to his book.
Tord walked away, feeling a strange annoyance he couldn't name. The new boy was small. He was younger. He should have been easy. But something about the way he just sat there — calm, unbothered, eyes already back on his page — felt wrong in a way Tord didn't understand and therefore hated.
I'll try again, Tord thought. Kids like that always crack eventually.
He had no idea who he was dealing with.
✦ ✦ ✦
Over the weeks that followed, Kariel made exactly zero friends.
Not for lack of being interesting — several children were curious about him, drawn toward those strange eyes and the quiet way he always seemed to know the answer before the teacher finished asking the question. But Tord's social reach was wide and his message was simple: the new boy with the creepy eyes was bad luck. You didn't want to be near him.
Children are not born mean. But they are very, very good at learning it from whoever is loudest.
Kariel noticed. He was not the kind of person who didn't notice things.
They look at me the way the nobles look at the lower district people, he thought one afternoon, watching a group of kids deliberately turn their backs when he approached. Like I'm something they've already decided is less.
It's the same thing. Every time. Different clothes on the same idea.
He went home. He ate dinner. He answered his parents' questions about school with 'it was fine' and 'yes I made friends' because the truth would make his mother's face do something he didn't want to see and would make his father go up to the school and make everything worse.
And at night, alone in his room, staring at the ceiling in the dark, he let himself feel it.
All of it. The snubs and the whispers and the way three kids had laughed when he tripped in the corridor — not because anything was funny but because laughing at him felt safe and being near him did not. He lay there and felt every bit of it and pressed his hands flat against his chest and breathed.
I will not cry at school, he decided. I will cry here, in the dark, where nobody can see it and nobody can use it.
And one day I won't cry at all.
He stared at the ceiling until he fell asleep. Outside, the city made its nighttime sounds. Inside, a six-year-old boy learned the difference between strength that looks strong and strength that doesn't need to.
(Chapter 2 Finished)