The first thing Kael noticed was the stillness.
Not silence — silence implies something to break it.No. This was different.It was the kind of quiet that unbuilt sound. Like the world had forgotten how to breathe.
He lay on a cracked metal floor, half-buried beneath a thin sheet of ash. The walls around him curved upward, part tunnel, part machine — remnants of something ancient, imperial but older than Vandral. Pale green light pulsed weakly from crystalline veins embedded in the walls.
A soft hum buzzed in the background, like a memory of electricity.
"This… is not the city anymore."
He sat up. Every joint ached. His skin was cold, like the air had drained the warmth from him by design, not by temperature.
Above him, the tunnel arched into blackness. Behind him: nothing but a solid slab of steel, sealed. The gate that had opened for him… had vanished.
He was somewhere beneath the Veil.
The Veil was a myth, officially.
A scorched no-man's-land beyond Vandral's outer ring, created during the final years of the Empire's last great purge. No records. No maps.Just rumors of what lay underneath: ghost cities, memory-eating winds, ancient tech relics — and worse, unbound Aith.
Kael stood, his breath fogging faintly.
As he moved, he noticed something. His body felt… wrong. Not weaker — more resistant.The ash on the floor clung to his boots, but not his skin.Even his heartbeat felt delayed, like his pulse was waiting for permission to continue.
"Aith flow is warped here," he murmured.
Not cut off — but bent. Like a river forced to flow in a spiral.
As he walked, light shifted subtly along the tunnel walls — pulsing in time with his steps. Some part of the environment was responding to him. Not intelligently. Reflexively.
After some time — maybe minutes, maybe hours — he reached a fork.
Two passages. One descending into shadow; the other lit faintly by flickering green glyphs, shaped like broken eyes.
Kael hesitated.
His instincts — the ones taught to him in the South District by the Silent Blade — urged him to take the darker path. Stay hidden. Avoid light. Light means being seen.
But something deeper — something older — pulled him toward the glyphs.
"Forme das, was in dir lebt."
The phrase came unbidden. He'd heard it once, whispered by Merné in her final weeks.A reference to Myra — one of the Five Paths.
But Kael had never been tested. Never chosen a path. And yet… the words felt branded into his thoughts.
He stepped toward the light.
As he crossed into the glyph-chamber, something shifted.
The air solidified.
Not physically — spiritually.
Like stepping into a room where someone had died violently, and the walls hadn't forgotten.
The glyphs pulsed. Then glowed.
Kael froze.
The chamber began to react — lines of energy racing across the walls, connecting, syncing with his presence. And then — without warning — the ash beneath his feet rose.
It curled upward like fingers, then twisted into a humanoid figure, standing opposite him.
A mimic — crude, eyeless, but unmistakably shaped like him.
A test.
Kael raised his hands, backing away.
The ash-figure charged.
He dodged on reflex — enhanced by years of street survival — and narrowly avoided a sweeping blow. The mimic was fast. Fluid. But unstable. Its form shimmered at the edges, held together by will, not matter.
He struck back. A low kick, fast elbow — but they passed through the mimic like smoke.
Kael gritted his teeth.
You can't fight it like a person. It's Aith-made. It's reacting to you.
And then, something inside him shifted.
Not a thought. A permission.
Suddenly, Kael's right arm pulsed — not with heat, but concept. His skin cracked with faint lines of green light, and for a moment, his fingers were outlined by something sharp, like obsidian claws.
He struck again — this time through the mimic.
Ash exploded.
The chamber dimmed.
The glyphs vanished.
And the voice — not real, not spoken — echoed in his mind.
"You are not unbound. But you are… unstilled."
Then silence again.
Kael collapsed to his knees, panting. His hand returned to normal. The cracks on his skin vanished. But inside him — something had opened.
A flicker of Exsor — the Path of Embodiment.Or was it Myra — shaping his Aith into claws?
He didn't know.
But it had happened without training. Without meditation.It had happened because his will had answered the room.
And the room had answered back.