Kael woke up gasping.
Sweating.
He went outside and vomited.
Seret stood in the doorway, watching.
"I know that look," she said.
"What look?"
"The one people get before they burn themselves trying to hold onto something that's already ash."
He didn't answer.
Kael began stealing time like a thief.
He waited until Seret was asleep, deep sleep, the kind that came only after hours of training and the slow sip of her bitter herbal brews. Then he'd creep from his room, careful not to let the floorboards groan beneath his feet. He'd slip into the study, bar the door, and light only one lamp, low and flickering, then begin again.
Digging.
Reading.
Consuming words like they were rations in a siege.
The cult had sent them curated histories, filtered, sanitized. But not all knowledge had been erased. The old house still had a trapdoor under the rug of the study, rotted from mildew and time. Underneath: a crawlspace packed with mold-stained tomes and chipped stone tablets written in dead dialects. Some books trembled when touched. Others whispered when opened.
He read them anyway.
They held things the cult hadn't meant for him to see.
Uncensored genealogies of the Dyralon line. Diagrams of ancient blood rites. Obscure accounts of royal heirs born with strange marks, "blessing-scars" they were once called, relics from divine bloodlines long bred out or burned away. Kael found one passage, no author, no title, describing a child born during the Crimson Eclipse. A boy with gold in his eyes and a scar like a flame wrapping his arm from shoulder to wrist.
The description clawed at something deep.
He sat back, staring at his right arm.
The same arm.
Still wrapped.
Still untouched since the Devouring.
He unwrapped it slowly.
The linen stuck to dried skin, coming away with a soft hiss like an old wound whispering secrets. The last layer peeled back, and Kael finally saw it fully for the first time.
The scar was grotesque.
Winding from his shoulder to just above the wrist, it looked less like a burn and more like something bitten. The flesh had been warped, the color gone raw bronze with veins of blackened red spiraling like cracks in a dried riverbed. At the center of his forearm, a patch pulsed faintly. Not visibly. But he could feel it, a thrum like a second heartbeat.
Seret had said it had healed "clean."
She lied.
This wasn't healing.
It was branding.
He touched it and winced. The pain wasn't sharp, it was ancient. Like triggering an old memory that didn't belong to him. As if his arm remembered something his mind refused to carry.
He didn't know what the Devouring had truly done to him.
But this scar wasn't just from it.
It had shape.
Pattern.
Purpose.
And Kael knew, deep down in the marrow of him, it had something to do with what he used to be. Before the Hollow. Before the fire. Before the sword in his hand taught him to survive by forgetting everything else.
The next day, Seret noticed the change.
"You didn't sleep," she said.
Kael didn't answer.
She nodded like she expected that.
"You're chasing something."
He shrugged. "Aren't we all?"
"You're not chasing freedom. You're chasing a grave."
He looked at her. Eyes hollow. Scar hidden under a sleeve again.
"Maybe I'm just looking for what was buried in mine."
Seret stepped closer. Her voice was low, dangerous.
"If you go too deep, Kael, you'll find more than truth. You'll find chains. The kind you never break."
He didn't flinch.
"I'd rather die in chains knowing who I am than live free as someone I'm not."
She stared at him.
Then turned away.
"Just don't drag me under with you."
He said nothing.
But later that night, as she lay sleeping, Kael reopened the trapdoor.
And the books waited, hungry.
Kael began to dream again, not in images, but in sensations. It was like drowning in memories that had no edges, just waves of emotion crashing through the night. One dream bled into the next. Pain into laughter. Warmth into fear. He would wake gasping, sweat freezing to his skin, fists clenched around phantom objects. Some mornings he found blood beneath his nails, or strange symbols scratched into the wooden floor beside his bed, carved without a blade.
The scar on his arm itched constantly now. Not like healing. Like something beneath the skin wanted out.
He started logging the dreams, scratching them down in one of the blank cult notebooks. At first it was just scattered words. Fragments. "Gold eyes." "Blue fire." "Mother singing." "Burnt feathers." Then, one night, the image came so vividly he sat bolt upright, breathing hard.
A hall. Marble columns. Light pouring through stained glass shaped like wolves. He was running, barefoot, chased by shadows with hands. He reached a dais, and there was a woman in red, kneeling, holding a blade to her own throat. Her mouth moved, but no sound came. And then she looked at him.
He had seen that face before.
In one of the books.
Queen Vaelira.
Kael nearly dropped the notebook.
He hadn't even realized he was crying.
That day, he didn't eat. He sat in the study with the door locked and spread out every record he had found. Pinned dates to a charcoal map he'd drawn across the floorboards. Compared timelines. Found discrepancies. Repetitions. And finally, something hidden between the lines.
There was a pattern in the disappearances of royal children throughout Bastivar's history. At least five instances, spaced roughly sixty years apart, in which heirs vanished under suspicious circumstances. In each case, their names were scrubbed from public record, their likenesses destroyed, and a substitute child presented to the court. None of the official documents ever mentioned the switch. Only obscure religious texts and condemned occult histories dared speak of it. They called it the "Searing," a ritual of political purification, used to remove threats not by assassination, but by exile and memory erasure.
Kael's blood ran cold.
The ritual required a child of royal blood. A "spirit of fire and wrath." The subjects would be taken, memory shattered through pain and binding magic, and then buried in obscurity until they either died or became useful.
His fingers trembled as he turned the page. The last known account of a Searing had been one hundred and twenty years ago. Until the new eclipse, twelve years past.
The timing was perfect.
It lined up with his age.
His disappearance.
His nightmares.
And the scar that burned now even in silence.
He rolled down his sleeve again, but it felt useless, like trying to hide a brand with shadow. The air in the study felt colder than it had an hour ago. Or maybe it was just him. The fire had died. He hadn't noticed.
That night, he left the lamp burning.
He didn't dream.
But when he woke, there were words carved into the ceiling above his bed.
Just five of them.
"I will find you again."
Kael didn't know if he had written them.
Or if someone else had.
But he didn't show Seret.
He simply stared at the ceiling until dawn broke.
Then he went back to the study, and kept reading.
He had to know. He had to be sure. He had to see it all before the Academy began, before they were surrounded by enemies in masks pretending to be friends, before it was too late to figure out whether he had been born a prince, or forged into a weapon.
Maybe both.
The cult's silence didn't last forever. On the twenty-second day of their downtime, a black crate arrived at the front gate, dragged by a blindfolded beast that resembled a horse only in the vaguest sense, too many joints, no eyes, a tongue that hung like a chain of dead flowers from its maw. Seret killed it the moment it groaned. Kael didn't even blink. They left its carcass to rot.
The crate contained new instructions. A thin parcel of parchment, sealed with red wax depicting the Twin Masks, one in agony, the other in rapture. No words accompanied it, only sigils in patterns Kael hadn't seen since the trials. Blood-bonded runes. Magic that stank of submission and command. The message was clear.
Final preparation had begun.
Seret read the parchment aloud by the fire. Her face hardened with every line.
"They're sending us into the city in three days. Posing as refugees. We're to take up residence at the Eastern Wall Seminary under assumed identities."
She tossed the parchment into the fire.
"Our names will be Arya and Kalen Halreth. Orphan siblings. Our handler is already embedded as a professor."
Kael didn't respond immediately. He was staring at the fire, as if the flames might whisper something the paper hadn't. Seret frowned and leaned forward.
"You've been different since the Devouring."
He met her eyes, slowly.
"I am different."
"That wasn't a compliment."
He didn't answer.
Seret exhaled through her nose and tossed him a folded set of academy clothes. Grey wool, stitched with silver thread. The uniform of nobility, despite their false station. Another cruelty, irony disguised as anonymity.
"They say we're to blend in. But look at this. We'll stand out like gold in mud."
Kael finally unfolded the uniform. His hand brushed the fabric. Something in him twisted.
"They want us seen."
She nodded. "Exactly."
The next three days passed in a slow, creeping dread. Kael continued his research in secret, but the trapdoor was starting to rot through, and the crawlspace stank of mold and something worse, salt and char. The books whispered louder now, even unopened. Seret noticed his absence more and more. Her tone sharpened. The word reckless came up again.
Kael avoided confrontation.
But on the night before their departure, she confronted him in the old training room. He was seated cross-legged in the center, surrounded by candles, no flame, just wick and smoke. His eyes were closed. He didn't open them when she entered.
"You've been slipping," she said.
Silence.
"You used to tell me things."
Still nothing.
She stepped into the circle of unlit candles and crouched in front of him.
"I thought we were in this together."
He opened his eyes.
There was something old in them. Something cracked.
"We are," he said softly. "But I have to know."
"Know what?"
"If they stole my soul, or just my life."
Her throat tightened. She didn't answer.
Instead, she pulled a knife from her belt and slashed across her own palm. Blood welled up. She offered it to him.
"You want truth? Swear to me. On blood. You'll stay you."
Kael looked at her hand. Then at her face. The shadows on the wall seemed to lean closer. He raised his own hand, hesitated, then drew his blade across his skin.
Their blood met.
It hissed as it touched. Sparks danced across the surface like fire meeting oil.
A blood pact.
A forgotten magic. Forbidden.
Seret's eyes widened. "You, what did you do?"
Kael stood.
"I made a promise."
She stared at their mingled blood, now forming a glyph on the floor between them. It shimmered with heat and light, then sank into the stone.
He looked out the window, toward the city skyline.
"Tomorrow, we stop being ghosts."
Seret remained crouched beside the dying candles, watching the blood dry on her palm.
Something had changed.
Not just in Kael.
In everything.
They left the compound at dawn. Not a word spoken between them. The wards collapsed behind them, sealing the cult's home with a final breath of frost, as if the land itself was relieved to see them go. Kael walked with his hood drawn low. Seret kept one hand inside her cloak, gripping the knife she'd sworn on.
They traveled by foot along the eastern ridgeline, through pine-stained wind and silence. Roads were barely more than muddy paths, carved by peasants and refugees alike. They passed broken signposts, toppled shrines, and a few abandoned carts, wheels shattered or scorched by fire. Signs of recent conflict. The war hadn't yet reached the capital's heart, but its smoke crawled ahead of it like prophecy.
Three days passed in a blur of gray. The land grew more populated as they neared the walls. Farmers stared with hollow eyes. One village they passed had cages instead of windows, and priests painting glyphs over doorways in dried ash. Not one building had glass. No magical streetlamps. No sigils of protection on the roads. The kingdom's outer veins were bleeding dry.
Seret pulled Kael aside on the fourth morning, crouching behind a moss-covered slab of stone carved with faded scripture.
"They're hiding their spellcasters," she said quietly.
Kael nodded. "Afraid of conscription."
"Or cults."
He gave her a look, and for a moment, there was a flicker of their old humor, dark, wry, and gone before it could root.
That evening, they saw the city.
Capital Bastivar. A sprawling monster of iron and stone, encircled by jagged walls that rose like a dead god's crown. No spires. No banners. The old towers of House Bastivar had been scorched in the last uprising, and no replacements had been raised. Instead, the skyline shimmered with magical haze, a dome of soft light that hovered over the rooftops, anti-siege enchantments. Sustained not by the will of the people, but by ancient stones pulled from the royal crypts.
Kael and Seret arrived at the Eastern Wall checkpoint just before nightfall. A queue of refugees waited in silence, clutching forged documents and meager belongings. Seret adjusted her shawl, shifted her voice to something softer, less commanding. Kael hunched forward, hiding the stiffness in his posture that only cult training bred.
Their documents passed inspection.
The guard who checked them had frostbite scars and dead eyes. He barely looked up.
"Seminary's that way," he muttered, pointing westward without any real direction.
They didn't respond. Just moved.
The Seminary was a weathered stone building embedded into the wall itself. Three stories, no windows on the lowest floor, and a single bell tower that leaned as if too exhausted to stand straight. Its courtyard was empty, save for a statue of a faceless scholar with one hand raised and the other buried in its own chest. A metaphor, Seret muttered, for learning and sacrifice.
Their room was small. Two cots, one shared desk, and a window that overlooked the inner slums. A wax candle flickered in a rusted sconce. No magical amenities. No privacy wards. Just brick, dust, and the creaking of age-old boards.
Seret dropped her satchel and exhaled. "Home sweet home."
Kael stared out the window. The capital smelled like rot and perfume. Power and sickness. Magic clung to the air like heat after a storm. He could feel the ley lines, pulsing beneath the streets like veins under skin. Everything here hummed with enchantment. Not for convenience, but for control.
The academy was three blocks west.
They would start in the morning.
Their watcher, a history professor named Vellan Mor, was not yet aware of who or what he'd been assigned. Just another obligation. Another coin for his loyalty.
Kael knew the type.
Men who sold curiosity for tenure.
Seret peeled off her boots and slumped onto the cot, rubbing her face.
"You gonna sleep?"
Kael didn't answer.
He opened the desk drawer and pulled out the parchment he'd hidden since they left the cult. A rough sketch of the royal family, rendered in charcoal and guesswork. His eyes lingered on the queen's face. Then shifted down. To the boy with dark hair. Eyes scrubbed out. Labeled "Prince Presumed Deceased."
He folded it again.
Slid it under his pillow.
Tomorrow, he'd see the Academy. Walk its halls. Hear the lies they told in public.
And start learning the truth in secret.
End of Prologue