Nights in Drazh-Khar were colder than the chains around Kael's wrists.Above him, the sky hung heavy with soot, and the wind moaned through the iron bars like a dying thing. Behind Barrack Six, where the weak were discarded like scraps, Kael lay curled in the refuse pit, staring at the fading stars.
He didn't sleep often. Sleep brought dreams. Dreams brought memory.
He had been born in a village called Serrel's Hollow, where the wind always carried the scent of pine and peat. The hills rolled soft and green, the river meandered gently—shallow enough for children to wade barefoot. But those days belonged to another life. Another boy.
He remembered rising before dawn, not from fear or hunger, but to help his mother gather dew leaf near the woods. The leaves only grew in the shadow of dead trees, curled like tiny clenched fists.
"Always with two fingers," his mother told him. "Don't pull. Persuade."
"I'm not a persuader," Kael had grumbled, yanking one free.
She only laughed—light and easy—and pressed a smudge of morning earth to his cheek. "That's what the Hollow thinks too. One day, you'll surprise them."
He hadn't known what she meant.
At ten, Kael was small for his age—thin, pale, quiet. Other boys ran wild with sticks and slings, but he preferred the silence of wind through branches, the shape of clouds, the way shadows danced when sunlight blinked through leaves.
He remembered the Book. Though his mother rarely let him near it, he was drawn to it.
She kept it wrapped in cloth, hidden beneath the floorboards in a stone box. Black leather, worn and cracked. No title—just a single symbol etched into the cover: a curved eye within a triangle.
One evening, he'd asked about it. She had paused at the hearth, gaze distant.
"It was your father's," she said softly. "He called it the Old Tongue. Said it spoke to the bones of the world."
"Did it talk to you?"
Her smile faded. "Not in words."
The people of the Hollow hadn't feared Yrel—not at first. She'd healed fevers, set bones, delivered their children. She sang to crops, walked among sick cattle. Some whispered she had elf blood, though no one had seen an elf in generations. But lean years test old loyalties.
It started with the river. The water grew cloudy, tinged green. Fish floated belly-up. Then the barley failed. The goats gave stillbirths.
Superstition in Serrel's Hollow was dry grass—waiting for a spark.
When Joren's youngest daughter was born without eyes, the village priest declared it a curse.
"It's old magic," he told the crowd gathered before a bonfire. "The kind that sleeps in books and whispers in dreams."
Eyes turned to Yrel.
Neighbors stopped waving. The baker shorted their bread. One morning, a pig's head appeared at their doorstep—its tongue nailed to its snout.
"Why don't we leave?" Kael had whispered one night as they huddled close inside.
His mother ran her fingers through his hair. "Because this was your father's land. And because running doesn't always mean escaping."
He hadn't understood then. But he understood the next morning—when the men came.
They brought torches. Their eyes glinted with fear masked as purpose.
Joren stood at the front gate with two hunters flanking him, his voice shaking with barely-restrained rage. "Yrel... give us the book."
Kael stepped in front of her. "She hasn't done anything!"
"Quiet, boy," someone spat. "We've seen the signs. Stillbirths. Molded bread. You bring shadows."
Yrel stepped forward, calm. "I've only ever helped you. Healed your wounds. Buried your dead."
"And you've spoken with spirits," the priest growled, pushing forward. "And marked your son's brow with signs."
Kael's hand rose unconsciously to the faded mark still barely visible above his eyes.
It was already too late. The truth didn't matter anymore. Only fear did.
Joren raised his arm. A torch flew.
The hut went up like dry hay.
Yrel shoved Kael out the back as the flames reached the rafters. He screamed her name as smoke swallowed the sky. A blow struck him from behind. Darkness took him.
When he woke, the world had changed.
The hut was ash. His mother's body lay amid the wreckage, arms wrapped around the Book like it mattered more than breath.
Kael knelt beside her, throat hoarse, heart splintered into something jagged and sharp.
Then the ground began to shake.
The Dominors arrived with the dawn.
Six of them. Tall, hooded, masked in silver that caught the morning firelight. They asked no questions about the blaze. They didn't ask who the witch was.
They asked only one thing: "Who here carries the spark?"
They tested every villager. Some wept. Some begged. It didn't matter. If their blood sang with even a flicker of magic, they were killed.
Kael watched as Joren was lifted into the air and shattered like glass. The priest was torn apart, piece by piece. The men who had burned his mother were turned to ash with a single glance.
And Kael?
They looked at him for a long time.
"Too weak," one muttered. "Not worth the collar."
Another considered. "Salvageable. Small hands. Could mine."
And so, his chains were forged.
They dragged him to a caged wagon, the ashes of his home shrinking in the distance. No one had saved him—not the gods, not the villagers, not even the Book.
That day, Kael buried his heart.
And in its place, he planted something else—resolve.