Three nights later, Kael stood in the silence of the tunnel's forgotten end, bone chalk in hand, knees pressed to the cold stone. The others—Mira, Brenn, and Renn—watched with wary curiosity as he drew slow lines on the dirt-slick floor, each stroke trembling, not from weakness but focus. Above him, the ceiling was carved with faded shapes—ancient, indecipherable—and their faint light pulsed like a dying star.
"It's wrong to be here," Mira muttered, arms folded. Her dark eyes scanned the corridor behind them, listening for guards. "We'll hang if they find us."
"They won't," Kael murmured. "They never patrol this deep. The earth speaks here. No one wants to hear it scream."
Renn chuckled, then realized Kael wasn't joking.
The last stroke of chalk curved into place.
A glyph—crude, rough, but pulsing with something that wasn't light or warmth. It looked like a broken wheel split by a crescent moon, encircled by thorny spirals.
🜂⟁☉Ϟ⟴
Mira stepped back. "What is that?"
Kael didn't answer right away. His fingers hovered over it, feeling a kind of… hum in the air, like tension in a drawn bowstring. "It came to me in a dream. Or maybe… memory. I don't know. But I think it's called Eidon's Vein."
The others looked confused.
"It's a memory glyph," Kael explained, quietly. "It reacts to pain. To what we carry and can't release."
Brenn scoffed. "You drew a cursed doodle and now you think you're some kind of mind-priest?"
Kael just looked at him. "Touch it."
The big boy hesitated. Then, grunting, he pressed two fingers to the symbol.
His body jolted. His breath caught. And then he fell back, shaking. His face was pale as wax. "I… I saw my mother."
"She's dead," Mira said, suspicious.
"She was… singing. In the hut. Before the raid."
The tunnel went silent.
"I didn't remember that," Brenn whispered.
Kael wiped sweat from his brow. "It doesn't give memories. It finds what you buried. Pain leaves trails. Glyphs follow them."
"How do you know this?" Mira asked.
"I don't." He stared at his hands. "But it's there. In me. Like I've always known it."
They snuck back to the main holding pens by dawn. None of them spoke. Something had changed.
Kael, in particular, was no longer walking like a shadow between tormentors. His gaze had changed—he studied everything. The way the Overseer limped. The rhythm of guard rotations. The way Nask the dog-handler twitched before he turned.
Patterns. Flaws. Cracks to be widened.
That afternoon, a guard named Korr grabbed Kael by the collar and dragged him toward the pit. "Time for the Overseer's pet project."
They threw him into a chamber of stone and sweat, lit by fire-braziers. Shackles hung like butcher's hooks. Blood pooled in the corners. It smelled of rust and rot.
The Overseer stepped forward, face slick with oil and confidence. "You've been busy, wretch."
Kael didn't respond.
"You sneak. You whisper. You draw filth on walls."
Still, Kael said nothing.
The Overseer nodded, and a lash tore across Kael's back. He bit down, refusing to scream. Again. Again. Blood soaked his shirt.
"Tell me what you do in the tunnels."
Kael let the pain in. Not to suffer it—but to study it.
He whispered the glyph in his mind.
🜂⟁☉Ϟ⟴
And in that moment, the pain became something else. Not dulled—but transformed. His mind sharpened. The Overseer's stance, his breathing, the guards' eye movements—all of it snapped into focus.
He was learning from pain.
Not surviving it. Growing from it.
Eventually, they tired of beating him.
They tossed him into the pit.
Hours passed.
A hatch slid open above him. A rope dropped down. Mira's face appeared, etched with worry. "Kael?"
He groaned. "Mostly alive."
With her help, and Renn's, they dragged him out and staggered to the brotherhood's corner.
"You look like a rag used to scrub blades," Renn said, wincing.
Kael sat upright with effort. "I need chalk."
"For what?"
"To write the next one."
He dragged a piece across the wall, carving carefully. A new symbol. One that had been whispering at the edge of his mind since the pain etched itself into him.
☿↯⟆⟁
"What's it do?" Brenn asked.
"Let's me see… not just with eyes. With insight."
They called it Veilcut.
That night, Kael used it on the slave-lock binding their cage.
He whispered the glyph, and the metal flickered in his mind—not just as iron, but as structure. He understood the lock. Every pin, every gap.
He didn't need a key.
Just a memory of how it moved.
Click.
The shackle opened.
Mira stared, stunned. "We're going to die."
Kael smiled. "We're going to choose how."