The sky above Ironshade was the color of rusted steel, and it smelled like smoke.
Kairo's back slammed against the academy wall, the breath crushed from his lungs as the crowd of students laughed.
"Still breathing, slum rat?" Claine Morvan sneered, towering above him. His golden hair gleamed, his coat marked with the sigil of House Morvan—three burning suns stacked like a crown.
Kairo didn't answer. He couldn't. His ribs throbbed. Blood slid from his nose onto the dust-caked bricks behind him.
Another kick landed in his side. Someone else—maybe a Windblood boy—laughed as the blow lifted Kairo an inch off the ground.
"Don't bother," a girl's voice said. "He won't awaken. He's unmarked. Bloodless."
That word.
Bloodless.
It hung heavier than the bruises. Worse than the pain. It was a brand, spoken with the kind of disgust reserved for insects and the unburied dead.
Kairo coughed, the taste of iron thick on his tongue.
Claine crouched beside him, eyes glittering with contempt. "Don't bother crawling to the Trials tomorrow. The guards will skin you before you touch the gates."
"I wasn't planning to," Kairo whispered.
It wasn't entirely a lie. He'd known for years he wouldn't be allowed. No lowborn ever awakened. Not in public. Not without a bloodline.
Claine grinned like he'd won something. "Good. Stay in the mud where you belong."
With that, they turned and left, their polished boots cracking through the dust. Laughter echoed behind them as if the city itself were mocking him.
Kairo stood slowly, one hand pressed to his side. He wasn't sure if his rib was cracked or if it only felt that way. Either way, pain was familiar. Expected. It reminded him he was still alive.
Still not welcome.
He limped down the street as the Academy gates loomed behind him, tall and golden and entirely closed. The banners above them danced on firelit wind: Awakening Trials – Glory to the Blooded.
Crowds filled the square ahead, shouting, cheering, swarming like flies. Dozens of families stood in ornate robes, their children flanked by guards and tutors. Bloodlines from every clan—Emberfangs, Frostvale, Stormborne—gathered for the annual rite of power.
A hush rippled through the crowd as a young girl stepped into the awakening circle. She couldn't have been more than thirteen, but already she held herself like royalty. Her hands lifted. Fire danced across her skin in golden arcs.
Gasps followed the spark. Applause followed the flame.
The girl laughed—carefree, arrogant—as fire bloomed from her palms and arced toward a nearby merchant stand. The wooden stall exploded in flames. Screams rang out.
But no one moved to stop her. No guard shouted. No enforcer appeared.
She had awakened.
And that meant she was untouchable.
Kairo stared as the merchant sobbed over burned goods, his hands blistered. The girl twirled in fire, her family smiling proudly.
He turned away.
The slums of Ironshade were quieter than the plaza, darker, colder. Smoke curled between alleyways like coiled serpents. The shadows stretched longer here. Narrow homes leaned into each other like dying men.
Kairo walked the path by memory. The bruises slowed him, but the silence worried him more.
He reached the low-stone orphan shelter where he had lived his whole life. The old iron door was hanging open, the lock shattered. Smoke clung to the edges of the doorway.
His heart lurched.
"Ena?" he called, voice cracking.
No answer.
He pushed inside.
The beds were overturned. Sheets torn. The wall beside the kitchen blackened by fire. Dried blood smeared the floor in long, jagged trails.
His chest tightened. He stumbled into the sleeping room, kicking aside broken wood.
"ENA!"
Still nothing.
Only the echo of his own voice in a place that had once been loud with laughter and hunger and sleepless whispers.
He stood in the center of the wreckage, surrounded by the absence of every child he'd ever called family.
And in that silence, he realized something else.
The world didn't care.
They were gone, and no one would come for them. No Highblood would weep for the orphaned or the marked or the poor. There were no trials for people like him. Only streets and hunger and fists and ash.
Kairo lowered to his knees, breath shivering in his chest.
A piece of parchment lay near the hearth. He reached for it, fingers trembling.
It was Ena's.
A small, crude drawing of the two of them—stick figures smiling under a crooked sun. She had written something beneath it.
"Don't be sad, Kai. We'll run away and become something bigger."
The ink was smudged. Half the words erased by blood.
He folded the paper. Carefully. Reverently.
She was all he had left. And now even she was gone.
But the fire that burned in the girl's hands… the way no one stopped her… the way people worshipped bloodlines…
That burned into him too.
Kairo stood slowly, eyes empty.
He looked at the soot-streaked walls. The broken beds. The blood on the floor.
And in that moment, he didn't cry.
He simply said, voice low and certain:
"If the blood decides who lives, then I'll find mine. And I'll burn this world back."