Kael moved beneath cloaks of fog and borrowed names.
From the crumbling temples of Kathmandu to the salt-worn coves of Skagerrak, he had followed the ink-threaded trail of his father's journal like a condemned soul seeking absolution in fragments. He crossed borders on foot, by train, in smuggler carts, and once, strapped beneath a dead pilgrim's litter. The runes etched into his skin had to be constantly veiled. The pendant—his mother's final gift—was now bound in silk and sealed beneath layers of blessed iron to muffle its divine hum.
His enemies were not mortals.
And they no longer slept.
Each new village brought fresh whispers—of storms without wind, of shadows that bled upward, of travelers vanishing in glimmers of golden flame or ice-black mist. Kael never lingered. He grew lean, sharp, quiet. The half-god son of two forbidden worlds had become a fugitive in the realms his parents once served.
It was in the marshlands outside Caledon's Reach where the first of them found him.
The town was little more than a sprawl of rotted docks and wind-beaten shanties, swaying above a bog that smelled of old breath and broken pacts. Kael had taken shelter in the loft of a fishmonger's shed, hunched over his father's journal by guttering candlelight. His fingers traced an inked passage barely legible now:
"...should they hunt you, you must go where the gods have no eyes. There lies a shrine long drowned and long sealed beneath the mosswood roots. The stone shall split if blood is offered from both lines."
He didn't have time to decipher more.
A sudden chill coiled through the floorboards.
Then, a voice—low, melodic, cruel:
"Little wolf of war and ash. You should've stayed hidden."
Kael bolted upright. The shadows at the edge of the loft peeled back to reveal two figures—one stepped lightly as fog, the other glided with the menace of lightning before thunder.
Vaithra, daughter of Vayu, spirit of the wind. Her hair writhed like a living storm, and her eyes gleamed white with gale fury.Skorn, bastard whelp of a frost jotunn and a minor Valkyrie. His skin was blue-white marble, veined with ice and seething rage.
They were not gods. Not truly.
But they were divine enough to kill him.
Kael threw the journal into his satchel and leapt through the broken loft window, landing hard on the roof below. Shingles splintered. His shoulder screamed. He ran anyway.
Behind him, the world broke.
Wind howled, not from nature but from Vaithra's wrath, slicing through huts like scythes through wheat. Skorn followed, stomping through walls, his fists glowing with frostfire.
Kael sprinted toward the mosswood swamp, mud sucking at his boots. He muttered an invocation under his breath—a desperate string of Sanskrit and Old Norse, stitched together like a wounded prayer. His skin flared with runes as he activated the wards left by his mother.
A wall of fire erupted behind him.
It didn't slow them long.
Vaithra burst through the smoke, lightning curling from her fingers. She hurled a bolt. Kael ducked—too late. The blast grazed his ribs, sending agony shooting through him. He crashed into the water, breath torn from his lungs, blood thick in his mouth.
Beneath the swamp, it waited.
The shrine.
Half-buried, stone cracked and veined with age, a structure older than the pantheons themselves. He crawled to its face, pressing his palm to the ancient seal—a round depression flanked by runes.
Another bolt seared the sky.
Skorn roared, closing in. Vaithra hovered above, wind whirling around her like a cyclone given flesh.
Kael slashed open his palm. Blood fell.
The stone drank it.
The moment his blood touched the seal, the earth shuddered. Roots curled away from ancient carvings. The stone slid aside with a hiss like a sleeping beast stirring. A stairwell yawned into the earth, breathing chilled air that reeked of iron and incense.
Kael turned, one last look over his shoulder. Skorn lunged.
But as the half-giant crossed the threshold of the shrine's opening, a pulse of something—neither light nor shadow, but old law—struck him mid-charge.
He was hurled backward, crashing into the reeds with a scream that fractured the air. His body twisted, spasmed—and dissolved into snow.
Vaithra howled in fury, summoning the winds to sweep in and drag Kael from the tomb.
But the shrine's seal closed behind him, the stone swallowing the last of the light.
Darkness claimed him.
Inside, only the whisper of ancient breath remained.
Kael collapsed against the cool stone wall, gasping, bleeding, smiling through the pain. He had made it.
For now.
The darkness was absolute.
No flicker of starlight, no phosphorescent moss, not even the hum of distant spirits guided Kael as he descended the timeworn spiral stair. Only the whisper of his ragged breath and the squelch of blood in his boot marked his presence. Each footfall echoed upward as if the very stone were announcing his intrusion into a place long sealed from the world.
The journal was his only tether to reason, clutched tightly in his good hand, its leather binding now slick with swamp water and blood. He had memorized the next passage, over and over during the nights on the run:
"Descend in silence. Do not speak. Do not pray. If you hear a voice, run. If you hear your name, do not answer."
Kael did not know what the warning meant, only that it was not poetic.
The air grew colder with each step, not simply in temperature but in memory. He could feel it—time here did not pass in the same way. It was thick, ancient, coiled like roots and smoke. His heart beat slower. His breath lingered longer in his lungs. The pain in his side dulled. The runes on his arms stopped bleeding. The shrine was feeding on him, parsing his existence into something digestible.
Eventually, the stair gave way to a vast chamber. It opened not with a grand doorway but with a sudden absence, the way a cliff swallows the path of a wandering traveler. Kael stepped forward and his boot touched carved stone—ancient, smooth, and faintly warm.
A pale glow blossomed across the floor in his wake.
Runes—older than Norse or Sanskrit, older than the gods—lit beneath him, not reacting to his blood, but his birthright. The blood of two pantheons. A forbidden lineage. The chamber responded not with wrath, but recognition. Like a long-lost sentinel finally seeing the child of its makers returned.
The ceiling soared above, unseen, but Kael sensed it curved like the dome of the cosmos itself. Pillars loomed in the darkness—some cracked, some pristine, each wrapped in ivy that had never seen sunlight. Murals stretched along the walls, their pigments preserved in the cold breath of the shrine. He moved slowly, and the images emerged in sequence:
A god with six arms cradling a world in one hand and a sword in another. A tree strung with bodies that glowed like stars. A serpent coiled through fire and frost, biting its own tail.
The stories of creation. Of destruction. Of convergence.
But at the end of the hall was something that made Kael stop breathing.
A pedestal. Upon it, a relic: a blade with no hilt, forged from obsidian and meteorite, humming with a low, pulsing tone like the breath of a sleeping god. Etched into its length were the runes of both of his bloodlines—twisting and overlapping, rejecting one another and yet entwined like lovers in defiance.
It was not a weapon. It was a key.
As Kael approached, the runes on his skin ignited—not in flame, but in cold clarity. The pendant at his chest warmed again. He reached for the relic.
A sound. Not a sound. A voice.
Not spoken. Not outside him.
"You are not the first. But you may very well be the last."
Kael staggered. The journal fell. The chamber pulsed.
Something was awakening.
And it had been waiting for him.