Rain didn't fall in Emberhold often.
But that morning, the sky bled soot. The high towers of the Academy stood motionless beneath the dim haze, their heat veins glowing beneath the stone like buried roots. No sunlight reached the Ashbound barracks. The usual thrum of flame conduits and elemental channels was strangely absent, replaced by a silence that stretched too far.
Kael rose early.
The heatstones in Shack #6 had died sometime in the night. His blanket clung to him with the dampness of forgotten corners, and every breath he took came with the scent of iron and scorched clay. He didn't speak. He rarely did anymore.
The Academy bell tolled once.
It didn't call him to class.
He moved alone, navigating the back corridors behind the Furnace Grounds. No students walked there, not this early, not where ash clung to the walls and broken Brands lined the floors. He was expected at the slag pits by second bell, to re-bind containment glyphs burned through by another student's failed casting. They never fixed those places. They sent Ashbound instead.
He preferred it.
At least the silence didn't lie.
Kael's reflection followed him through puddles that shouldn't have existed. They didn't ripple. He noticed that now. His reflection never rippled.
The pit overseer—a red-robed mage with too many rings and too little soul—barely glanced up when Kael arrived. He handed Kael the sealing iron, motioned to the breach, and returned to his conversation with a water-Brand acolyte who hadn't scrubbed a stone in her life.
Kael descended into the ruins.
The glyph was shattered, deep at the base of the channel.
Something moved beyond the breach.
He didn't hesitate.
He stepped forward, iron rod raised—and then stopped. Not because of fear. Because something on the other side of the rupture was watching.
He knew it. Not in thought. In marrow.
Then it came.
A flicker of shape. Not fire, not form, but hunger made visible—twisting like smoke and dripping like oil. It burst through the broken seal and lunged for him. Kael raised the rod too slowly.
But the thing never struck.
Instead, it screamed.
Not aloud. In Kael's skull.
And then it disintegrated—veins of black light tearing through its form as if it had touched something it was forbidden to know. A wave of heat followed, but not the kind born of flame.
A heat that erased.
Kael fell backward, chest burning with pressure that hadn't come from the blow.
The pit was silent again.
No footsteps. No witnesses.
Only a deep hum, vibrating softly through the stone beneath him.
When he looked down, the sealing iron had melted in his hand.
He stared at the charred remnants.
Then at the glyphs on the wall—now repaired, not by his hand, but by something that remembered how they were drawn.
He didn't return to the overseer.
He climbed out the other way, through the drainage tunnels, silent and dripping with ashwater. His head pounded. His fingertips pulsed. And in the back of his mind, the same voice whispered again.
No words.
Just presence.
He reached the far end of the tunnels and pushed aside a broken grate. Light from the courtyard beyond painted strange patterns across his face. He stepped out and saw two figures ahead—noble students from the Fireblood line, both wearing the twin-crest of the Aurelion.
One turned.
"You're the Ashbound," she said, voice like razors wrapped in silk.
Kael didn't answer.
"You broke the Mirror," said the other. "But you weren't expelled."
His silence continued.
"Then let's test you."
She lifted her palm.
Flames bloomed, perfectly shaped.
Kael didn't move.
The fire launched forward.
Mid-air, it faltered.
Shuddered.
Died.
The wind carried its smoke away before it touched him.
The girl's eyes widened.
"That's not suppression," she whispered. "That's rejection."
Kael stepped past them.
They didn't follow.
He returned to Shack #6 after nightfall.
His clothes were burned. His hands trembled. But he knew something now he hadn't before.
He didn't reject the elements.
They rejected him.
Because something else had claimed him first.
That night, as he sat on the edge of his cot, shadows thickened in the corners of the room. They didn't behave like normal darkness. They gathered.
Coalesced.
A single thread of blackness stretched across the floor, curled toward his palm.
The moment it touched his skin, his breath hitched.
Not in pain.
In recognition.
Then it was gone.
Only the cold remained.
And something beneath his skin stirred once more.
Waiting.