Kael woke to the sound of flies.
They buzzed thick in the air, swirling over the iron cage like a storm of filth. One landed on his cheek. He tried to brush it away, but his arms barely moved — held fast by iron shackles around his wrists and a chain bolted to his collar. The metal was cold. It smelled like old blood.
He was lying in mud. Cold, sour mud that stank of rot and something worse — something human. His breath caught. Something soft pressed against his side.
He turned slowly.
Two boys lay curled beside him. Small like him. One had vomit crusted around his chin. The other's skin had gone pale and still. Their eyes were open. Empty.
They weren't sleeping.
Kael didn't scream. He couldn't. His throat was raw from thirst, and his body felt like a forgotten tool, rusted and broken.
He sat up, his chain pulling tight with a metallic scrape. All around him, seven children were shackled to a central post like animals. Three were unmoving. Two others watched with hollow eyes. One whimpered quietly in the corner, rocking back and forth.
The last, a girl perhaps a year older than him, sat with her knees tucked to her chest. Her hair was dark and tangled, her face thin but alert. She looked at him like she was trying to remember something about him.
"You moved," she said flatly.
Kael blinked. His voice came out as a croak. "Yeah."
"Good," she muttered, then looked away.
He coughed, pain blooming in his ribs. Every breath made his side ache. He remembered the Dominor's boot, the whip, the flames.
Serrel's Hollow was gone.
A shadow passed over the pen's rusted bars. Heavy boots squelched through the mud, and a large man stepped into view. Not one of the masked Dominors — this one was different. Fleshy, brutal, with a coiled whip on his belt and a chain across his chest.
He looked down into the cage, nose wrinkling.
"You," the man barked, pointing at Kael with a gloved hand. "New one. Stand."
Kael hesitated.
The man grabbed a long iron pole and jabbed it between the bars. The tip cracked against Kael's ribs. He gasped and collapsed into the mud, coughing.
"Stand or I break the rest of your bones."
Kael forced himself up, legs trembling. The man eyed him, snorted, and spat.
"Too small for stone hauling. Maybe mushroom pits."
He moved on.
Kael stayed standing until he was gone.
They were in the Vale of Chains.
No one said the name aloud, but he'd heard it whispered in stories, warnings spoken by firelight. A cursed valley where the Dominors sent those not worth killing but too dangerous to leave free. Children. Survivors. Collateral.
It wasn't part of any kingdom. It didn't need to be.
The camp was vast. Dozens of pens, iron cages like the one Kael was in, lined the path. Watchtowers loomed above, manned by guards with crossbows and firelances. Beyond them were black tents, stone pits, and strange, jagged towers where the air shimmered with heatless fire.
They weren't there to be taught or reformed.
They were there to be forgotten.
Days passed like smoke — shapeless, choking. Food came once per day: stale bread, a bruised root, water that tasted of iron. Sometimes, they got nothing. Sometimes, someone didn't wake up.
Kael didn't speak much. He listened.
The girl beside him did speak. Her name was Mira.
"I was from Trennel," she told him one night, when the guards were far off. "My father was a brewer. My mother... sang to keep the storms away."
Kael blinked. "That's not real."
"It worked," she said, eyes distant. "Until it didn't."
They both stared up at the stars through the bars of the pen.
Kael began to watch everything. How the guards moved. When they changed shifts. Who carried the key rings. Where the fence had rusted. The girl, Mira, whispered the number of steps between posts. She'd counted them all.
"You're smart," she said once.
Kael shrugged. "No. Just trying to stay alive."
She smiled faintly. "Same thing."
One night, screams echoed from another pen. The entire camp froze. A boy had tried to escape. Kael didn't see it — only heard the sound of something being dragged, the crunch of boots, and the soft sobbing of a younger child in another cage.
The same handler returned. The one with the whip.
This time, he was dragging a body.
He tossed it into the cage like trash. The boy had fresh wounds across his back. His eyes were closed. Kael couldn't tell if he was alive.
"He ran," the guard said coldly. "You'll clean the blood, or you all go hungry."
He dropped a bucket of rags. Then left.
No one moved.
Kael did.
He took a rag and knelt beside the boy. His hands shook, but he wiped the blood slowly, methodically. The girl — Mira — knelt beside him and helped, her lips trembling.
They worked in silence.
By morning, the boy was gone again. So was the bucket.
That night, Kael stared at the mud floor. His fingers moved slowly. Drawing.
Curved lines. Spirals. Glyphs he barely remembered — from stories his mother told in the old days, scratched into wood or traced in ash.
"What are those?" Mira whispered.
"Shapes," he muttered. "From before."
"Before what?"
"Before I forgot who I was supposed to be."
She leaned in closer, eyes catching the faint starlight.
"Keep drawing," she said.
So he did.