He awoke in a cage of roots.
Not wood.
Not stone.
Roots.
Alive.
Breathing.
Twisting gently with each inhale like the lungs of some unseen beast. The air stank of mildew, sweat, and magic, the kind that buzzed in your teeth and made your fingernails itch. A low hum vibrated through the floor beneath him, pulsing like a heartbeat, echoing in the marrow of his bones.
Kael didn't scream.
Not yet.
His throat was raw. His limbs ached. His knees were scraped and bloody, and his tunic had been torn somewhere in the struggle. He remembered flashes, Keira falling, the man with silver eyes, and the burning glyph.
Mama.
He sat up too fast and hit his head on the low ceiling. A whimper escaped his lips, the first sound he'd made since blacking out. It echoed off the root walls like a confession.
Then came a voice.
High. Cold. Male.
"You're awake."
Kael turned.
A figure crouched beyond the bars. Not a man. A boy. Maybe two or three years older, pale as salt, black hair shaved on the sides and knotted in the back. He wore leathers stitched from ash-colored hide and a necklace of knuckle bones. His eyes… his eyes were dead.
Not angry.
Not sad.
Empty.
Kael tried to speak and failed.
The boy tilted his head. "Your name is Kael. You were the Queen's son. Now you are ours."
Kael shook his head, backing into the far corner of the cell.
The boy stood. "You'll learn quickly. Or you'll die. Either way, the forest will feed."
Then he was gone.
No door opened. No footsteps. One moment he was there, the next, nothing. Just roots and silence.
Kael curled into himself.
And then, finally, he cried.
Not loudly. Not in rage. Just soft sobs that wracked his small body like a storm breaking against a broken dock.
He cried for Keira. For his mother. For the guards who died screaming. For the cart. For the gifts. For the bright light of the birthday festival that had turned, so quickly, into this hole in the world.
He didn't know how long he wept.
Time didn't pass here. Not properly. No sun. No moon. Just the constant throb of that thing beneath the earth, like some god's buried heart, pumping slow poison into the veins of the world.
He wasn't alone.
Others came.
They didn't speak at first. They just watched. Sometimes from the other side of the bars, sometimes through holes in the walls that shouldn't have been there. Children. Dozens of them. None older than sixteen. Most younger than ten. All of them dressed the same: leathers, scars, bones, and eyes like broken glass.
The girl came on the third day.
He was curled on the floor, weak from thirst, when her shadow darkened his cell. She squatted beside him, pushing something between the roots, bread. Real bread. Hard, stale, but real.
"Eat."
Kael looked up.
She was maybe nine. Skin dark like storm-soaked bark. Eyes red. Not painted, natural. Her arms were wrapped in linen, her fingers stained with black ink. She smelled like ash and metal. There was a knife at her belt. She didn't look afraid of him.
He didn't take the bread.
So she shoved it into his hands and stood. "You don't eat, you die. I'm not giving you another one."
Then she turned and vanished into the darkness, boots making no sound at all.
Kael stared at the food.
His stomach twisted, a war between pride and hunger. The smell won.
He devoured it.
That night, he dreamed.
Not of his mother, not of the castle. Of the man with silver eyes. Of a stone table. Of chanting. Of needles. So many needles.
And of fire.
Burning not around him, but inside him.
As if something had been poured into his soul. A seed. A brand. A curse.
He woke screaming, hands covered in green flame.
The fire clung to his skin like it belonged there.
Green and silent, it danced up his forearms, licking across his fingers, devouring nothing, but burning everything. The light pulsed with his heartbeat. He cried out, scraping at his arms, trying to smother it with dirt and spit, but it refused to go out. It wasn't heatless. It was hungry.
It wanted out.
"Don't fight it."
The silver-eyed man stood outside the cage again.
He wasn't smiling. He never smiled.
"You're manifesting early. That's good. Most of the others needed the bloodroot serum. You… you're already remembering what we gave you."
Kael was on the floor, shaking, teeth clenched to keep from screaming. His hands twitched. The fire wasn't just light, it was thought. It whispered things in tongues he shouldn't understand but somehow did. Names. Symbols. Death.
"What is this?" he gasped. "What did you do to me?"
The man crouched, close enough to touch. "We're giving you a gift. A purpose. A reason to exist beyond a title and a birthmark. One day, you'll thank us. One day, you'll understand."
Kael lunged at the bars.
The fire surged.
But the moment his hands hit the roots, they convulsed with black veins and spat him backward like spoiled meat. He landed hard. Something in his wrist popped. He didn't cry. Not this time.
The man nodded. "Pain is a teacher. You'll have many."
Then he walked away.
This time, Kael noticed the mark on the back of his neck as he turned, a symbol carved into the skin. A triangle of eyes surrounded by teeth.
It burned itself into Kael's memory.
They called it The Hollow.
That was the name of the compound. Or the pit. Or the temple. No one really knew. It changed, depending on who you asked. Some said it was buried beneath the roots of the oldest tree in the world, the one that had watched the gods die. Others claimed it existed between places, never fully in one realm or another. It didn't matter.
All that mattered was what it did.
Each child was chosen. Taken. Broken. Rebuilt.
Kael wasn't the only one. He was just the newest.
The red-eyed girl, her name was Seret. She was the closest thing he had to an ally, and she hated him. But she fed him again. And again. And when a pale-skinned boy named Bram tried to cut Kael's throat while he slept, it was Seret who stabbed Bram first.
No thanks. No words. Just a glance.
"Watch your back," she said. "There's no such thing as allies here."
And then she was gone.
The first week was survival.
The second was pain.
The third was training.
There were no lessons. No classrooms. No soft words.
There was the Pit.
It wasn't metaphorical. It was literally a pit. Deep. Circular. Walls slick with moss and blood. Every morning, they were shoved into it by masked overseers in cloaks of stitched bark and iron thread. The children were ordered to fight. Not to first blood. To surrender. No. To the breaking point.
"Only broken stone becomes sharp," the instructors said.
Kael bled every day.
He lost most fights. At first. But each time, the fire came easier. Not controlled, never that. But closer. Like it recognized the violence. Like it fed on it.
He set a boy on fire during week four.
The fire didn't stop even when Kael screamed for it to. The boy's screams were louder. Then they stopped altogether.
No one punished him.
Instead, they gave him a new cell. Bigger. Cleaner. With a cot.
That's when Kael began to understand.
They didn't want obedience.
They wanted results.
There was no bedtime. No comfort. No reward for kindness. But the more brutal you were, the more violently your magic manifested, the more they noticed you. And they watched everything. Scribes with ink running from their eyes took notes constantly. Mages hovered in the shadows. Blood priests conducted rituals on the stronger ones. Whispered things into their ears at night.
Kael heard one say, "You'll eat the sun one day, boy. Just wait."
He never saw that one again.
In time, Kael stopped asking for his mother.
It wasn't sudden. It was a slow erosion. A dulling. The memory of her became too painful to hold onto. Her voice faded. Her face blurred. Her scent, lavender and parchment, was the last to go.
When it did, something in him died.
And something else took its place.