It began with a dream.
Not the kind that fades in the morning like smoke, but the kind that leaves behind embers—glowing, smoldering, waiting to burn.
Kael stood in a room of mirrors. Not real mirrors—glass hadn't existed in Serrel's Hollow, and certainly not in the slave pens—but something reflective, something alive. Each pane showed a different version of himself.
One was him as a boy before the chains.
One was older, wrapped in strange armor, with a crown of black steel hovering above his brow.
One had no eyes, only glowing marks along his temples, like ink carved into flesh.
And one… wasn't him at all.
That version whispered. The words were like wind scraping over stone, but Kael heard them.
"The mind is a maze, Kael. And some doors open only in pain."
He woke gasping, heart pounding in the mud. Mira was still asleep beside him, curled like a cat for warmth. The others stirred restlessly, murmuring in their dreams or weeping in silence.
Kael lay still, watching the stars through the cage bars. The dream clung to him like damp cloth.
His hands twitched.
He scratched a symbol into the dirt beside him with one trembling finger. The first glyph. From the tunnel wall. He didn't know what it meant, but it felt right.
Then another.
And another.
The pattern formed like instinct.
The next day, they were taken not to the mushroom pits, but to the Ash Fields.
The Dominors rotated the slaves through different labors. It kept them weak, unfocused. Today, it was sifting through piles of black sand and slag to recover old bones and metal.
Kael had never seen a field so grey.
The ash clung to everything—skin, breath, eyes. Fires burned low in distant trenches, and dark plumes coiled toward the sky. The air stank of burnt stone and grief.
"Keep moving," barked a handler, lashing his whip against the earth.
Kael knelt beside Mira, digging with a rusted spade. "What is this place?"
She didn't answer right away. "Battlefield. Long time ago. Maybe before the War of Crowns."
Kael looked around. "There are too many bones for just soldiers."
Mira's eyes flicked toward a trench. "Not everyone who dies in war carries a blade."
Kael swallowed hard. His fingers closed around something cold in the ash. He pulled it free.
A shard of metal, but not like the rusted nails and broken tools they usually found. This was curved, polished, and engraved—like a blade fragment. Faint glyphs were etched into the surface.
He turned it in his hand. It pulsed faintly.
Just a trick of the light, he told himself.
But it felt warm.
That night, he traced the glyphs again—this time with the metal shard, carving into the packed dirt beside his sleeping mat.
He didn't know what he was writing. Only that it was important.
"They'll see," Mira warned from the shadows.
Kael glanced up. "Not if I cover it."
"You sound like a madman."
He held up the shard. "Then why does this make sense?"
She hesitated, then crossed the pen and knelt beside him, staring at the lines.
"That one," she said, pointing to a curling hook-like rune. "I saw it on a crate in the Dominors' tower. Lit up when they opened it."
Kael's breath caught. "You're sure?"
She nodded.
They're afraid of it.
Then maybe I should stop being afraid of it too.
Two days later, something changed.
The overseers arrived early, their boots loud against the frozen ground. But they weren't shouting. No whips. No commands.
Someone else was with them.
A figure in deep violet robes, faceless, draped in shadow like cloth. The guards flanked him like dogs around a master.
Kael froze. Everyone did.
The robed man passed the pens slowly, as if smelling with something other than a nose. He didn't look. He felt.
He stopped at Kael's cage.
Then turned his head, eyes hidden beneath a cowl stitched with golden thread. He stared at Kael in silence for a long moment.
Then… moved on.
Kael's chest heaved. Sweat soaked his back.
"Who was that?" Mira whispered.
Kael didn't answer. But he remembered stories his mother had whispered in fear, late at night, about the Mindflensers.
Not Dominors.
Worse.
Later that night, Kael sat awake while the others slept. The glyphs he had carved were still there beneath a pile of straw, pulsing faintly in the dark.
He traced them again with the shard.
This time, something responded.
A pulse in the air. A flicker in his thoughts.
Then a word—not spoken, not heard, but felt.
"Recall."
His breath caught. Something rushed through him—images, voices, knowledge not his own. His head throbbed. His fingers twitched.
He understood one glyph now.
Just one.
It meant sight beyond sight.
He looked up.
In the dirt, Mira's sleeping form was surrounded by faint threads of silver. Not real threads. Not physical. But there.
Magic?
No.
Mindlight.
Kael didn't sleep.
The next day, they asked again.
The Dominors stood before the cage, with two masked guards behind them. Their faces were still, but Kael felt the danger like heat before a fire.
They pointed to the cage.
"Who here carries the spark?"
Kael's hand clenched.
No one moved.
The guards stepped forward.
One boy was yanked out screaming.
Another child—silent—was dragged behind.
Mira reached for Kael's hand. He let her.
Don't speak, he told himself. Don't reveal. Not yet.
But deep inside his mind, where the glyphs now moved like thoughts given shape, Kael began to remember.
They missed one.
And he had already started waking up.