Kael had always felt pain as a constant, a familiar shadow that followed him from his first breath. But what happened that night was not pain. It was something different. Something that tore at his insides...and left nothing behind.
The test had been simple: prove he could do what it took to belong to the society that had taken him in. The assignment: end an internal betrayal. A boy, barely older than him, had tried to escape with information about the bloodlines. The punishment had to be exemplary.
-Do it," Salen told him, handing him a curved blade, black as the void. Do not hesitate. A single second of hesitation and you will lose more than your place among us.
Kael looked at the boy. His eyes were swollen with fear, his wrists bound, his body trembling. He was not a monster. He was not a traitor. He was just a frightened child. Just like him, just a few years ago.
-I don't want to die..." the boy whispered.
And something inside Kael snapped.
Not out of pity. Not out of pity.
But because, for the first time, he felt the weight of a choice. And he chose to feel nothing.
The blade cut through the air. The silence that followed was more brutal than the scream that never came out.
Kael did not cry. He didn't scream. He didn't hesitate. He just did. As if his soul had left his body before the final blow.
That night, as the clan leaders watched him in silence and some nodded in respect, Kael knew something was gone from him. Something that would never return.
In the days that followed, he felt it in his breathing, in the way it no longer bothered him to see blood, in how his heart did not race even in the face of danger. He walked like a shadow among the corridors of the underworld, and his eyes, once full of suppressed fire, were now deep wells where not even the reflection of his soul remained.
The others noticed him. Some avoided him. Others respected him more. They said he was "one of the marked." That he was born to darkness.
But Kael didn't know if that made him strong... or just empty.
In his dreams, he no longer saw the golden light. Nor Ixchel. He saw only a field of faceless bodies and a hooded figure, standing at the end of the path, whispering his name in a voice that was not human.
Kael.
Kael.
Kael.
A soulless child... but still with a spark buried so deep even he couldn't feel it.
For now.