The sky over Morwenhollow was the color of cold iron, layered in ash-gray clouds that never broke. Wind sang in long, mournful tones across the stone chimneys, and in the hearts of the villagers, warmth had long since died.
No one remembered when the village last laughed. Joy had no business there. It was a place of hunger, superstition, and resignation, and among its bitter bones wandered a boy with no family, no name worth speaking, and no hope in his eyes.
Kael.
That was all he was called. Just Kael. No father's line, no banner to claim, no kin to shelter him. His mother, Alira, had once been a healer of some skill before whispers named her a witch. They said she brought the pox that killed the lord's steward. They said her potions soured the wombs of women. They said her breath turned milk to dust. No one remembered if any of it was true. What mattered was that someone had to be blamed. And blame, like rot, always found the weakest flesh.
Kael had been six winters old when he saw her dragged from their hovel by torchlight. She screamed not for mercy, but for him.
"Run, Kael! Don't let them see you!"
He hadn't run fast enough.
He remembered the sound of her bones breaking more clearly than her voice. The flame that swallowed their home that night glowed brighter in his memory than the sun ever had.
She was gone. Burned. Buried in an unmarked pit outside the village walls. And Kael, left behind, forgotten, and blamed by silence, became one of the unwanted. He scavenged through the snow for crusts, drank from rain barrels, and slept in the crawl spaces of ruined mills. Children threw stones. Men spat near his feet. Women clutched their infants when he passed, as though shame were a sickness he might pass on.
And yet, he endured.
There was something in him not pride, not yet strength, but something stubborn. He watched. Listened. He learned which trees dropped their fruit early, which houses let their scraps fall behind them, and which doors never fully latched. He learned to move quietly, to speak only when spoken to, and to fight only when cornered.
At age nine, he was cornered often.
The baker's son, a thick-armed brute three years older, caught him once behind the stables. Kael had stolen a stale roll from the back shelf, a mistake. The beating was swift and efficient. The boy's fists pounded like hooves. Kael didn't cry. He simply lay still afterward, face pressed to the mud, eyes to the sky.
"I'll kill you next time," the boy sneered.
Kael believed him.
But it was not fear that filled him as he lay there bleeding; it was hunger. Not for bread, but for strength. For something more than this body that bent and broke so easily. He hated himself for being weak. He hated the world for letting him stay that way. And somewhere deep beneath that hate, like a coal under damp earth, a strange sensation stirred.
It was not rage. Nor sorrow.
It was something cold. Patient. Watching.
Years passed.
Kael grew like a weed through stone, crooked, unwanted, but alive. By twelve, he no longer begged. He took what he needed, ran faster than before, and fought when he had to. His body bore the marks of it: ribs that healed unevenly, a shoulder that popped when he raised it, and fingers that never quite closed straight.
But his eyes, his eyes had changed.
They no longer looked to the sky. They stared through it, waiting for something that had not yet come.
That winter, a wandering monk passed through Morwenhollow, preaching of light and mercy, of gods who watched even the lowest worm. Kael listened from the back of the crowd, silent and still.
Afterward, he approached the monk.
"Do the gods see me?" he asked.
The monk blinked. "Of course, child. They see all."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "Then they've watched me suffer. And done nothing."
The monk had no answer.
That night, Kael wandered into the woods, as he often did when the village pressed too tightly around his ribs. He walked deeper than before. Past the boundary stones. Past the old watchtower, crumbled with age.
There, in the clearing where lightning had once split a tree to blackened ruin, Kael dropped to his knees.
And screamed.
He screamed not from pain, but from the sheer pressure of everything inside him all the hate, fear, loneliness, and aching hunger for something more. He screamed until his throat cracked and his lungs burned.
And then, silence.
The wind stopped.
The air thickened.
And for the briefest of moments, Kael felt something pulse within him, not like a heartbeat, but deeper. A tremor beneath the skin, ancient and cold, as though the earth itself had acknowledged him.
He gasped.
Then it was gone.
The forest moved again. The wind returned. But Kael, though unchanged in flesh, knew something had shifted.
He didn't know what. Not yet.
But something inside him had answered.
And it was waiting.
Kael did not speak of what he felt that night. There was no one to tell, and even if there were, he would not have found the words. It was not a thing of language. It was a thing older than memory, older perhaps than blood.
He returned to the village at dawn, his face smeared with soot and his hands cold enough to burn. The butcher's wife saw him and crossed herself. A man mumbled something about curses. Kael kept walking.
From that day, he began to change, not in body, not yet, but in manner. He no longer flinched when struck. No longer begged. When the older boys jeered, he stared back, silent and unblinking. When the baker's son tried to beat him again, Kael caught the blow and returned one of his own straight to the boy's nose. The blood poured freely, and Kael didn't smile, didn't run.
He simply stood there, breathing.
They didn't touch him again after that.
Fear is a thing that spreads quickly in the hearts of those who have grown fat on power. The villagers didn't understand Kael, and what cannot be understood is always feared. The whispers began anew.
"He has witch-blood."
"Alira cursed him before she died."
"I saw him in the woods at night speaking to the dead!"
It didn't matter that none of it was true. In Morwenhollow, truth bent to fear like reeds in wind.
By fourteen, Kael had become a shadow with a spine of steel. He had no friends, no teachers, and no warmth. But he had silence. He had focus. He began watching the hunters train their sons. He watched how they drew their bows, how they tracked game through snow, and how they skinned deer with quick, practiced hands. He asked for nothing. Spoke nothing.
But he remembered.
He carved his first blade from bone and stone, tied with thread from stolen cloth. Crude, yes. But balanced. Sharp enough to bleed.
He tested it on his own arm.
Not deep, just enough to know it would cut.
He bled in silence, watching the red slide over his skin. There was no power. No light. No sign. Only pain.
But Kael embraced it.
Pain was the one truth the world had given him freely.
That spring, a caravan came through the village merchants, guarded by hired blades. Kael watched the mercenaries as they drank and boasted in the tavern. They were not noble. Not righteous. But they were strong. And no one spat at their feet.
One of them, a wiry man with a scar across his scalp, caught Kael staring too long.
"You looking to polish boots, rat?"
Kael said nothing.
The man laughed, then tossed a coin at his feet. Kael didn't move. The coin sat there, gleaming in the mud.
The mercenary's grin faded. "Too proud for copper, eh?"
Still, Kael did not speak.
The man stepped forward, half-drawn blade in hand. The other guards watched with mild interest, like cats before a crippled mouse.
Kael's fingers tightened around the bone knife in his sleeve.
But before the man could strike, the caravan master barked a command. "Leave him. Boy's not worth blood."
Kael held his breath.
The mercenary sneered and turned away.
But Kael remembered the look in his eye. The moment of hesitation. Of wariness.
He saw something in me, Kael thought. Not weakness. Not just rage. Something else.
That night, Kael followed the caravan as far as the river bend, then watched from the trees as they disappeared into the east.
He wanted to go with them.
But he had nothing.
No armor. No sword. No skill that mattered to men like them.
Yet.
The next weeks were consumed by obsession. Kael trained in secret, lifting stones, running through the woods, and slashing at trees until his hands bled. He crafted makeshift weapons. Learned balance. Pain became routine. Hunger became a companion.
But still, no sign of power. No magic. No awakening.
He cursed himself.
"If I have power, where is it?!" he shouted into the night. "What must I do?!"
And the world, as always, answered with silence.
Until the night of the raid.
They came without banners, without warning. Five riders, cloaked in black, faces covered in masks of pale bone. They struck in the dead of night, setting fires and dragging villagers from their homes. The men who tried to fight were cut down like grass.
Kael woke to smoke and screams.
He saw the baker's shop aflame, the stables collapsing in red embers. A woman ran past him, clutching a baby, and fell, her back split by a raider's blade.
Kael didn't hesitate.
He ran toward the fire.
No one stopped him. No one noticed him.
He found a fallen axe in the mud and took it. The weight felt strange, but right.
Near the well, a raider was dragging a girl by the hair. Kael didn't know her name. Had never spoken to her. But as the raider raised his sword, something inside Kael snapped.
He moved.
Not with grace. Not like a warrior.
But fast. Brutal.
The axe struck the raider's side, glancing off armor but knocking him off balance. The man roared and turned.
Kael didn't stop. He swung again. And again.
The ax broke.
The raider struck him once hard across the face. Kael dropped. Stars burst behind his eyes.
Then came the boot.
Again.
And again.
Ribs cracked.
Vision blurred.
Pain like fire, like knives.
And then
Something inside him screamed.
Not Kael. Not his voice.
But something deeper.
The world slowed.
Kael's breath stilled.
And in the space between heartbeats, he felt it.
A presence. Cold. Massive. Coiled in his blood like a serpent of ice and shadow.
And it spoke without words.
Now you break. Now you wake.
Kael's eyes snapped open.
And the world changed.
Kael rose.
Not fully by his own will, something pulled him up, something deeper than muscle or bone. The pain that had moments before been unbearable now rang like distant thunder, felt but muted. His vision, once blurred by tears and blood, sharpened into something unnatural. He saw every line in the raider's mask, every droplet of blood dripping from the man's curved sword, and the twitch in his left eye betraying hesitation.
The raider stepped back.
For the first time, he was afraid.
Kael's broken hand reached down, fingers curling around a splinter of the shattered axe handle. The wood was bloodied, rough, and useless by the measure of sane men, but Kael no longer moved with the thoughts of sanity.
He lunged.
The raider swung, aiming to finish it, but Kael bent lower than expected, too low, rolling beneath the arc, his shoulder slamming into the man's leg. The raider stumbled. Kael rose like a specter and drove the splintered handle into the gap beneath the man's helm.
The man choked.
Blood sprayed against Kael's cheek.
Then silence.
Kael stood there, chest heaving, hands slick with blood not his own. The girl behind him whimpered and scrambled away. She did not thank him. She fled in terror.
Kael did not follow.
He turned toward the flames.
Toward the others.
One by one, the raiders fell.
Not cleanly. Not quickly. Kael did not fight like a trained swordsman. He fought like a beast that had been caged too long, a shadow made flesh. He took many wounds but moved through them as though pain no longer mattered. His right arm hung loose from a shattered shoulder. His left eye swelled shut. He fought on.
By dawn, the village smoldered. Half the homes burned to skeletons. Many were dead. But the raiders were all gone save one.
Kael stood over the last of them, breathing raggedly. The man crawled backward in the mud, blood dripping from his side. His mask had cracked, revealing a face marked with strange runes burned into the skin.
"W-what are you?" he hissed.
Kael didn't answer.
The man's lips trembled. "You... it's you. The Hollow Flame."
Kael frowned. "What does that mean?"
The man laughed once, bitter and mad. "You don't know? God help us all..."
Kael stepped forward.
"Who sent you?" he demanded.
The man did not answer.
Kael's foot came down hard once on the man's wounded side.
He screamed.
"Who sent you?"
The man spat blood. "You're not ready. But they know now. They know you live."
Kael knelt.
He looked into the man's eyes, now wide with pain and awe, and something else: resignation.
"Then tell them," Kael whispered, "that I don't plan to hide."
He stood.
And ended it.
The villagers watched from afar. No one approached. No one thanked him. No one offered him food or a bandage.
They saw what he had become.
And they feared it.
Kael did not stay for words. He walked from the village gate, wounded and soaked in blood, past the shrine to gods he no longer believed in, and into the morning fog.
The wind carried whispers in his ears, voices that didn't belong to anyone nearby.
You are more than flesh now.
Born of pain. Forged init.
You are not alone.
Kael walked for two days.
He did not eat. He did not sleep.
He bled slowly, constantly, but something in him kept his body moving. Kept his mind sharp.
He reached the ruins of an old stone temple by twilight. There, at last, his body gave way. He collapsed beneath a shattered archway and let the dark take him.
When he woke, a fire was burning nearby.
And a man sat across from it.
Old, with skin like bark and hair of silver, the stranger stirred a pot of broth and looked at Kael without fear.
"You've awakened something terrible," the man said. "And it won't sleep again."
Kael tried to speak but coughed blood.
The old man stood, walked over, and held a ladle to his lips.
"Drink. You'll need it."
Kael drank.
It tasted of bitter herbs and smoke.
The man watched him carefully.
"I felt it when you broke," he said. "I've felt such things only twice in my life. The old powers, the deep ones, they stir in blood, not spells. Pain is their gate. And you... child, you've opened that gate wide."
Kael's voice was hoarse. "What are you?"
The man smiled. "A Watcher. A keeper of forgotten things. And now, perhaps, your teacher, if you'll let me."
Kael stared at him. "Why?"
"Because if you live without guidance, you'll become something worse than what they sent to kill you."
Kael was silent.
Then: "What am I?"
The old man's eyes gleamed in the firelight.
"You are the first in a thousand years. A vessel of the Hollow Flame. A child of the old pain. The world cast you aside, Kael. But the darkness took notice."
Kael's fists clenched.
"Then I'll use it," he said. "All of it."
The old man nodded.
"And so it begins."
The training began not with weapons, but with silence.
The old man, who called himself Thalen, did not speak for two full days after Kael awoke. He left Kael to his wounds, his thoughts, and the firelight. The only sounds were the wind moving through cracked stone and the occasional call of crows.
On the third morning, Thalen handed Kael a stick of charcoal and gestured toward the shattered wall of the ruin.
"Draw what you saw in the flames," he said.
Kael frowned. "What flames?"
Thalen shrugged. "The ones you saw before you killed. Or the ones that lived behind your eyes. It doesn't matter. Draw."
Kael obeyed. Not because he trusted the man, but because some part of him still trembled with questions he could not put into words. He drew a jagged spiral, surrounded by flickering arcs, like wings made of ash. He did not know why.
When he finished, Thalen stood beside him, nodding slowly.
"I've seen that mark once before. In the ruins of Kael'morath. Burned into the bones of priests who died screaming."
Kael turned. "What does it mean?"
"That death has memory," Thalen said. "And some powers feed on it."
From that moment, Thalen began teaching him not just how to fight, but how to listen. How to listen to his body, to the wind, to the threads of silence between all things. The training was brutal. Thalen woke him before dawn, made him run until he vomited, and then meditate until the sun set. He was taught to wield a staff before a sword, to balance on one foot in flowing water, and to write runes with a blade of grass.
"Why does this matter?" Kael asked one night, shivering in the cold, his arms blistered from sparring.
"Because you're not meant to be a soldier," Thalen said. "You're meant to be a weapon."
And still, Kael's power, the strange force that had awakened during the raid, did not return.
He bled. He suffered. But it remained dormant.
Until the cave.
Three months into their time together, Thalen led Kael deep into the cliffs beyond the river. There, hidden behind a waterfall, lay a cave with walls of glassy black stone. Carvings lined the walls old, terrible runes that shimmered when Kael approached.
Thalen handed him a torch and said, "Inside is an echo. Of what you are. You'll face it alone."
Kael entered.
The cave narrowed until it forced him to crawl. Then it opened into a chamber as wide as a cathedral, yet utterly empty. No idols. No altars.
Just a mirror.
Tall, ancient, framed in jagged obsidian.
And in it, Kael did not see himself.
He saw a version of him twisted in shadow. The same face but older, crueler, eyes glowing with hollow fire. Armor of bone and smoke cloaked his reflection, and in its hand was a blade that wept ash.
Kael stared.
The figure moved.
Spoke.
"You are me."
Kael stepped back. "No."
"You will be."
Kael drew the training dagger from his belt.
"You cannot kill what lives in you," the echo said.
But Kael lunged anyway.
What followed was not a duel. It was a reckoning. Every blow Kael struck was turned aside. Every step mirrored. The echo struck not with steel, but with visions of his mother burning, of the villagers mocking, of every wound and scream and scar.
Kael fell to his knees.
"Then take me," he whispered. "If you must."
The echo raised its blade.
But did not strike.
Instead, it leaned forward and pressed its cold forehead to Kael's.
And whispered one word:
"Remember."
Kael gasped.
And the cave burned with silent flame.
Not fire.
Memory.
He saw flashes of visions of another life. A battlefield of blackened trees. A tower broken in the clouds. A man screaming as power poured from his eyes. Chains forged in voidlight. And always, always, the spiral burning on stone, on sky, on soul.
Kael collapsed.
When he awoke, Thalen was waiting.
He said nothing.
But in his eyes was fear.
They traveled south.
Thalen said little of why, only that "eyes are opening" and that Kael's presence would draw attention if they lingered. They avoided roads, passed through dense pinewoods and forgotten ruins, and slept beneath crumbled arches and stars.
Kael changed.
The weight he carried no longer showed just in the hollow of his cheeks or the set of his jaw; it was in how he watched the horizon. How he did not flinch from wolves. How his hands no longer trembled when lightning struck the mountain peaks.
Yet he was still a boy.
One night, they passed a caravan camped by the old bridge of Vaerlin. Kael paused at the edge of the trees, watching the firelight and listening to the music, laughter, soft song, and the ring of cups.
A girl danced.
Not older than him. Her feet traced circles in the dust, her arms raised to the sky. She wore bells on her wrists and light in her eyes.
Kael stared.
"You miss it," Thalen said, appearing beside him.
Kael didn't answer.
"The world before pain."
Kael looked down. "It never existed."
"For some, it did."
Kael turned. "Did it for you?"
Thalen smiled sadly. "Once. Then the fire came."
They moved on.
Weeks passed.
Kael's power did not return.
He bled again. He fell. He starved.
But whatever lived in him remained silent.
It gnawed at him.
He began to wonder if the echo had taken something rather than given it.
"Pain awakens it," he said once.
Thalen nodded. "But not all pain is the same. You've been forged. What woke the flame before may not do so again."
"So I need to suffer worse?"
Thalen did not reply.
But Kael saw the answer in his eyes.
Their journey ended at a city of stone and fog, Nerathen, once called the Last Bastion of the Old Light.
Now, it was a shadow of its name.
The outer walls were cracked. The gatehouse was manned by mercenaries instead of soldiers. Fires burned low. Hunger lined the faces of children, and smoke curled from chimneys with no warmth beneath them.
Thalen had come for a book.
He found it in the ruined library, deep beneath the rubble.
While he studied the text, Kael walked the streets.
A boy of ten tried to rob him. Kael disarmed him and gave him bread instead.
A woman offered herself for coin. Kael looked into her eyes and saw not desire but despair. He gave her nothing. Not even words.
He walked past the temple of Mornas, where the priest read prayers with a voice devoid of meaning.
And then, in the square, he saw the gallows.
Five men. Two women. All rebels are accused of "speaking the old names."
Kael watched as the crowd booed.
The rope dropped.
Kael didn't look away.
That night, the power stirred.
Not fully.
But in dreams.
He saw himself hanging beside them. Saw the spiral burn across the sky. Saw the city in flames.
He woke choking on smoke that wasn't there.
Thalen noticed.
"It's coming back," Kael said.
Thalen only nodded.
But the fear returned to his eyes.
It happened on the twelfth night in Nerathen.
Kael had returned to the inn late, his cloak soaked with rain, his boots heavy with the filth of alleys. Thalen was gone, likely still buried in dust and forgotten scrolls. The fire had died, and the tavern keeper had long since barred the door.
Kael lay on the floorboards, eyes half-closed, the scent of wet stone and rot clinging to the air.
Then came the scream.
Not close, but loud enough to shatter silence.
He rose without thought. Sword in hand, he pushed the window open and dropped to the street.
The scream came again near the old chapel, at the edge of the district.
Kael ran.
He found them in the square.
A child, no more than six, was cornered by three men, one armed with a jagged pike, another with chains, and the third wore a cloak of iron-gray. Their faces were marked not like the raiders before, but with something worse: tattoos etched in ink that glowed faintly even in darkness.
They weren't thieves.
They were seekers.
One of them spoke in a tongue Kael didn't know, but he understood the intention. The child backed into the wall, hands out, trembling.
"Stop," Kael said.
The men turned.
The one with the chain grinned. "Another rat."
"You'll leave him."
The pikeman moved first.
Kael met him.
The first clash was awkward. Kael hadn't fought with steel in weeks. But his training screamed in his bones. He sidestepped, turned the momentum, and slammed the flat of his blade across the man's throat. The pike dropped.
But the chain coiled around Kael's leg and yanked.
He fell hard.
The last man, the cloaked one, stepped forward, speaking strange syllables.
Pain ignited.
Kael gasped.
His body convulsed. Blood ran from his nose. His limbs seized.
He saw shadows dance.
He heard the laughter of something ancient.
"You are not ready," the voice whispered.
"But we are."
Then fire exploded behind his eyes.
The spiral burned again.
Not in vision in reality.
It seared itself into the ground around him, lines of pure white, carving the stone as if the world itself recoiled from what lived in him.
The three men screamed.
Kael rose.
The chains snapped.
The pike twisted and turned red-hot.
The cloaked one tried to flee, but Kael moved faster than thought.
He grabbed the man's head, and the spiral flared again.
There was no scream.
Only silence.
When the light faded, the man was gone.
Nobody.
Only ash.
Kael stood in the middle of the square, panting and bloodied, the spiral still glowing faintly beneath his feet.
The child ran.
Kael did not follow.
Thalen found him an hour later, still standing there.
"You saw them?" Kael asked. "The marks?"
Thalen's face was pale. "I saw. They were with the Pale Order. They've hunted flameborn before."
"Then they'll come again."
Thalen nodded. "And you must be ready."
Kael looked to the sky.
Storm clouds gathered.
But for the first time, he didn't feel the cold.
The next morning, they left Nerathen.
South. Always south.
Kael no longer walked as a boy.
And the Hollow Flame walked with him.