The wind howled across the dead flats.
Kael kept walking.
Dust swirled around his boots. His coat flapped behind him, long and torn, the hem soaked in dried blood. Every step echoed on the cracked stone, the sound swallowed by the silence of a world that had stopped caring a long time ago.
Behind him, smoke curled into the sky. A village burned. Not his village. Not his people.
But his fault.
He didn't look back.
His left arm hung limp at his side. Dislocated. Probably worse. He'd popped it back into place once already during the fight, but that didn't last. Whatever was growing inside him—it didn't like being pushed. The black veins were spreading again, curling up his shoulder like ink under skin.
He had three days. Maybe four.
Then the Mark would take over.
Up ahead, jagged ruins rose out of the ground like the teeth of some dead god. Pillars of warped stone. Shattered towers leaning sideways, half-swallowed by time and sand. People used to call this place Old Hyaelar.
Now they just called it cursed.
Kael stopped at the edge of the drop, staring down into the crater below. Wind tore at his coat again, biting into the scars on his back. Down there, in the heart of the ruins, something waited. Something ancient. Something wrong.
And if the whispers were true… the first piece of the King's Heart.
Kael reached into his coat and pulled out a small leather-bound book. The cover was scorched. Pages missing. He flipped to the last note his father had written, scrawled in a shaking hand just before the curse took him:
"The King's Heart is not a relic. It's a wound. Do not seek it. It seeks you."
Too late for that.
Kael tore the page out and let it fly. The wind caught it instantly, dragging it over the edge and into the abyss.
His hand trembled.
Not from fear.
From the itch.
The Mark wanted blood. Always did, after a fight.
He closed his eyes, breathing in slow, trying to center himself like the old man taught him. Count the heartbeats. Hold the rage. Hold it. Hold—
A whisper, soft.
Not in his ears. In his head.
"Deeper."
Kael's eyes snapped open.
Something was watching.
He turned.
Nothing but wind and dust behind him.
He should've left. He should've waited until morning, until the stars rose. The old maps said the doors only opened under starlight, when the moon passed over the Crown Spire. That was when the seals weakened.
But Kael wasn't patient.
And time was running out.
He slid down the crater wall, boots skidding across loose rock, one hand clutching the hilt of his sword. Not steel. Not iron. Something older. Something his father had buried in a corpse's chest and told him never to draw unless he was ready to die.
Kael had drawn it three times.
Tonight might be the fourth.
He reached the bottom and landed hard, the impact jolting through his knees. The pain in his arm flared, white-hot, and the black veins pulsed, rippling like something alive.
Ahead, stone steps led down into the earth.
Each one carved with the same symbol burned into Kael's shoulder.
A spiral of jagged lines.
The Mark.
Kael stepped forward.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
The dark didn't feel like dark.
It felt like pressure.
Kael moved slow down the stone steps, one hand brushing the wall, the other near his sword. Each step sank a little deeper into cold, ancient silence. The kind of silence that screamed. That carried memory like rot under skin.
After twenty steps, the light vanished.
After fifty, the voices started.
Soft at first.
"You shouldn't have come."
"The Mark isn't a curse. It's a chain."
Kael ignored them. Shadows weren't new. The Mark whispered every night. Especially after killing. Especially after dreaming.
But these voices weren't inside him.
They were behind the walls.
He kept going. Breathing steady. Step after step. Until the stairs opened into a vast underground hall, high-ceilinged and cracked, lit by strange blue fungus growing between broken slabs of obsidian stone. The light shimmered across the walls like ghost-fire.
The place smelled like rust and salt. And old blood.
Kael stepped forward, boots echoing.
This was it. One of the King's Cradles—ancient sites buried across the old kingdom. Places touched by the Vortex, used by the mad king to feed his power. Kael had only found this one because of a name carved into a scavenger's spine.
The name matched the one in his father's journal.
Cradle of Teeth.
The Mark on Kael's shoulder flared as he stepped into the center of the chamber.
He fell to one knee, groaning. His arm spasmed. Black veins crawled past his collarbone.
Something was here.
A shape moved in the dark.
Kael's hand went to his sword.
It didn't move.
His fingers twitched, but the blade refused to come.
Locked.
Just like last time.
"Why now?" Kael growled, eyes scanning the hall.
Another shape. Tall. Cloaked. Walking out from behind a collapsed column.
Female.
No weapon drawn. No fear in her step.
"Don't bother," she said. Voice low. Controlled. "The Mark seals blades in places like this. It's a rule."
Kael didn't answer. Didn't move.
Her face was shadowed beneath the hood. But her eyes burned silver.
Marked. Like him.
"You're late," she said. "They already took it."
Kael tensed. "Took what?"
She tilted her head. "The fragment."
His jaw clenched. "Who?"
"The same people who took your father's soul."
Kael's eyes flared.
She nodded, like she'd been expecting that.
"I followed them here. Thought I'd get ahead of them. I didn't."
Kael stood. Pain crackling down his shoulder.
"You said they took a fragment," he said. "Where did they go?"
The woman shrugged.
"I was hoping you'd tell me. You're the wild card. The Fourth Brand. The Vortex King saw you in his dreams."
Kael stepped closer. "You know him?"
"I bled for him."
A pause.
"I escaped."
Kael watched her carefully. "Name?"
She turned, walking back toward the tunnel she came from.
"Veyra."
"You walk away, I follow," Kael said. "I don't have time for riddles."
She stopped.
Looked back.
"Then try to keep up, Fourth Brand."
And just like that, she vanished into the dark.
Kael stood there a moment longer, eyes fixed on the path ahead.
The Mark pulsed once more.
And then he moved.