Kael was nine years old when his village burned.
He remembered the screams first—not the battle-cries of warriors, but the wet, gurgling shrieks of Old Man Gerran as something dragged him through his own doorway. The sound was wrong, too deep for a man of Gerran's years, as if his throat had been split and reshaped mid-scream. Then came the smell: iron and rot, like butchered meat left in the sun. It clung to the back of Kael's tongue, thick as porridge, and he knew, even then, that nothing would ever taste clean again.
His father, Harlen, had been a hunter, a man who spoke little but carried a blade as naturally as breath. He could track a stag by the bend of a single blade of grass, could read the forest's whispers like scripture. That night, his hands shook for the first time.
"Into the cellar. Now."
Kael had begged to fight. He was small, but he knew the weight of a knife, had practiced with sticks in the dirt while his father skinned their kills. His father backhanded him—the only time he'd ever struck him—and shoved him into the root cellar beneath their hut. The last thing Kael saw before the door slammed shut was his father gripping his skinning knife, his jaw set like flint.
"Do not come out. No matter what you hear."
He heard everything.
The Sounds of the Dying
The laughter came first—high and hollow, like wind through dead branches. Then the wet tearing, the crunch of bone. Something heavy thudded against the cellar door.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Blood seeped through the cracks, black in the dim light, pooling between the warped floorboards. He pressed his hands to his ears, but the sounds burrowed into his skull. A woman—maybe Jeyne the weaver—wailed, then choked mid-breath. Something scraped against the outside of the hut, slow, deliberate, like a blade being dragged along wood.
Then came the whispers.
The laughter outside wasn't human. It was the sound of a throat learning to mimic joy. "Little rabbit," a voice crooned, "we'll dig you out. Then we'll remake you. Stronger."
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Blood… it was black as tar.
Kael bit his tongue until he tasted copper. He didn't scream. He didn't whimper. He counted his breaths like his father had taught him when tracking deer—slow, silent, invisible.
When silence finally fell, Kael stayed curled in the dark for three days, choking on the stench of death. He pissed in the corner, vomited bile onto his own knees. The hunger gnawed at him, but worse was the knowing—the certainty that if he opened that door, he would find nothing left.
The Scar and the Message
The scar on his eyebrow? That came when he finally pried the door open and a rusted nail tore into him. The pain was nothing compared to what he saw next.
His father's body hung from the rafters, gutted like a stag, his ribs splayed wide. The Vein-Touched had left him as a message. Carved into his chest in jagged, deliberate strokes:
"The strong join us. The weak feed us."
Beneath the words, his father's heart was missing.
Kael didn't cry. He didn't scream. He took his father's skinning knife from the dirt, wiped the blood on his trousers, and walked out into the ruins of his world.
The Orphan Years
The survivors—mostly children and the elderly—fled to Black Briar, a town squatting in the shadow of the Iron vein Mountains. Kael was taken in by Old Thom, a one-legged woodsman who smelled of pine resin and sour ale. Thom was no father, but he taught Kael two things:
How to swing an axe.
"For trees, not demons," Thom grunted, adjusting Kael's grip. "Aim for the grain, boy. Life's hard enough without fighting the wood." Thom's hands were gnarled, but his strikes never wavered. Kael learned to split logs clean down the middle, to read the rings of a stump like a story.
How to hate in silence.
"They'll come again," Thom muttered one night, staring into the fire. "They always do. And when they do, you don't scream. You don't fight. You run. Or you join the corpses."
Kael grew up hard and quiet, his grief a stone in his throat. The other orphans whispered that he'd gone half-mad from the cellar. Sometimes, in his dreams, he still heard the dripping.
The Family He Built (And Lost)
At sixteen, Kael met Lira.
She was the daughter of a fletcher, with fire in her fists and a laugh that could shame the dawn. Sharp-tongued and unbroken, even after the raids. She called him "Stone-face" until he smiled.
They built a life.
A daughter, Elsie, came two years later—a wild thing with her mother's grin and her father's stubbornness. For a time, the nightmares faded.
Then the Vein-Touched returned.
The Night He Fought Back
This time, Kael didn't hide.
He buried his axe in a nobleman's skull, black blood spraying like ink. The man didn't die—just grinned with shattered teeth and kept coming.
Lira shoved Elsie into his arms, her last words a snarl:
"Run. Keep her alive."
He'd tried.
Oh, how he'd tried.
But hunger and cold care little for a father's love. Elsie died in his arms three weeks later.
Elsie died with her tiny fists clenched in his shirt. The village called it the lung-withering. Kael knew the truth: the Vein-Touched had breathed their corruption into the wind. That night, he buried her beside Lira and carved a promise into his arm with his father's knife:
"No more running."
The Promise in the Dark
Now, ten years later, the map burned against his chest.
The Vein-Touched were coming.
And this time, Kael would meet them with steel in his hands and a dagger's name on his lips.