The next six months blurred into a rhythm that Kael came to know as well as the beat of their own heart.
The Guild kept them moving, always to new towns, always with new groups. They never stayed with a single team longer than three missions, sometimes just two. It was an unspoken rule: no one got too used to them, and they didn't get too used to anyone else.
By the time the leaves began to redden, they had learned to recognize the looks they got on the first day with a new party. Surprise, curiosity, sometimes suspicion. And then, after the missions, a kind of reluctant respect.
---
Sera was different.
She joined their party for the first time when they were just shy of sixteen and a half. She was sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, a dual-wielding fighter whose skill made her stand out. Unlike most of their temporary companions, she didn't fall for the curse's illusion. She didn't flirt, didn't stare—she watched.
"You don't fight like someone your age," she said after their first mission together, wiping a smear of monster ichor off one of her blades.
Kael shrugged. "I've been practicing since I was small."
"Practicing and surviving aren't the same," she said, but there was no heat in it. Just observation.
---
They worked well together. She was fast, reckless in a way that made Kael keep their head clear. They found that they didn't mind the unpredictability; it was like being thrown into a constant test.
By the end of their third mission, she surprised them by asking, "Do you plan to take the exam to get into the Academy?"
Kael glanced at her as they walked the narrow dirt road back to the outpost. "Not until I'm twenty."
"You'll pass easily," she said, as if stating a fact about the weather.
Kael didn't answer.
---
The months after that were full of names and faces that came and went.
Jorin, the beastfolk tracker with ears like a hawk.
Farin, the healer who talked too much.
Mirek, the mage who couldn't stand being near Kael without trying to study them.
And Sera, who returned to their party every few weeks, just long enough for Kael to start recognizing the sound of her blades slicing the air before she reappeared.
---
Training filled every gap between missions.
Kael had learned caution with their new spellwork. When alone, they tested bigger constructs, shaped haikus with rhymes so clean the spells came out almost silent. They found that with enough control, they could form a barrier, hold it for a count of thirty, and end it with less strain than most mages spent on a light spell.
And the better their control became, the more they noticed their mana capacity growing.
It was like a muscle: the more they used it, the more it stretched. But they never forgot what happened when they overreached—how close they'd come, in one reckless test, to collapsing entirely.
---
By the time their seventeenth birthday was on the horizon, they'd visited five more nations.
Some were poor and hard, the kind of places where adventurers were treated as hired blades and nothing more. Others were cleaner, richer, with guild halls that gleamed and streets lined with magic lanterns.
Kael saw the way the same rank of adventurer could be treated like royalty in one country and like a criminal in another. It gave them a quiet, steady perspective: the badge on your chest meant nothing if the people around you didn't believe in it.
---
In the dark elf nation, they barely stayed three weeks. Long enough to take a couple of border missions, long enough to feel the watchful eyes of a people still protective of their independence. Sera had been there for that stretch, and for once, she was the one who seemed out of place.
"This place has long memories," she said one evening as they sat by a cold fire, waiting for the next assignment.
"So do I," Kael answered, without looking up from their notebook.
---
The notebook had become heavier with every passing week. Whole sections were now dedicated to rhyme patterns, spell variations, and careful notes about how long each spell drained their core.
They never cast the most dangerous experiments in front of others. When they were with a party, they fought like a normal caster—fast, efficient, but never too far beyond what was expected.
But alone, they built storms.
---
On the night of their seventeenth birthday, they were stationed in a coastal city with a Guild annex built on the pier. The smell of salt and fish clung to the wood.
Sera found them leaning against the rail at sunset, notebook open to a blank page.
"You've been writing in that thing since the day I met you," she said.
Kael glanced up. "It's safer than leaving it in my head."
"Anything worth teaching?"
Kael smiled faintly. "Not yet."
---
That night, as the waves whispered against the dock and the rest of the party slept, Kael closed their eyes and recited the new lines they had crafted just for this evening:
> "Rise, O ocean deep.
Carry dreams where none can sleep.
Hold the world and keep."
The water in the harbor rippled. Only for a moment. But they felt the connection, a soft hum in the air like a string pulled tight.
---
When they opened their eyes, Sera was there again, watching quietly from the corner of the dock. She didn't ask. They didn't offer.
But they knew she had seen.
---
The middle stretch of those six months carried them inland, away from the coastal winds and into a patchwork of plains and old roads. The jobs changed with the landscape: fewer couriers, more hunts and escorts, sometimes long patrols through dangerous countryside.
Kael learned to balance the exhaustion of mission work with the hours they carved out for study. Wherever there was a quiet clearing or a streambank out of sight, they trained. Not just with magic but with their body—running drills, practicing weapons, climbing and swimming until every muscle in their frame burned.
Sera noticed.
---
"You don't sit still," she said one late afternoon, while they were eating salted meat and hard bread beneath the shade of a stunted tree.
"I don't like feeling slow," Kael said simply.
She glanced sideways at them, lips quirking faintly. "You're the fastest one in the party. Including me, and I hate that."
Kael shrugged, taking another bite. "Fast now doesn't mean fast enough later."
---
Sera's habit of watching was different from Torren's. Torren had been measuring them, like a man sizing up a puzzle. Sera was assessing them the way a fighter sizes up someone they might cross blades with: watching the flow of their movements, the ease in their reflexes.
When they practiced with the others, she always kept her distance, but Kael could feel her eyes tracking every shift in their stance.
---
Their second rotation together took them near an area thick with forest. By the third evening, after the rest of the party was asleep, Sera wandered off from camp and found Kael in a clearing. They weren't doing drills this time; they were kneeling on the packed dirt, murmuring spells under their breath.
They didn't hear her at first. Their eyes were half-lidded, their fingers sketching short arcs in the air as if tracing invisible lines of script. Around them, faint shapes flickered: light globes, a shimmering veil of air, a pulse of water that gathered and fell back into the soil.
---
She said nothing for a long time. She wasn't close enough to hear the words, but the way they spoke—low, precise—made her realize something: Kael wasn't reciting the same thing every time. Each spell was different.
Finally she stepped into the edge of the clearing. "You make up new words for the same spell."
Kael opened their eyes, looking back at her calmly. "Do I?"
"I've seen mages before. They always sound the same."
"Maybe they don't have a reason to change."
"And you do?"
Their mouth tilted slightly. "I like to test boundaries."
---
For a moment, Sera's expression shifted—curiosity mixed with something sharper. Then she shook her head and sat down on a rock at the edge of the clearing.
"You're going to get noticed," she said. "Sooner or later, someone's going to realize you aren't just repeating what you've been taught."
"They already have," Kael said, quiet but steady. "And so far, they leave me alone."
---
In the weeks that followed, she began joining them at the edges of camp. She never interrupted—just trained alongside them with her twin blades, pushing herself in silence while they worked through their patterns of haikus and footwork.
It became an unspoken pact: she didn't ask what they were doing, and they didn't tell her. They simply trained, their rhythms different but complementary.
---
By midwinter, a new tension began to thread through the missions. In several towns, Kael noticed the stares lingering a little too long. Guild clerks who glanced from them to their ledgers and then back again. Adventurers from other parties who looked at them as if trying to figure out something they couldn't quite name.
They thought of Torren's warning often.
---
During a rest stop in a mountain pass, Sera broke the silence while sharpening her blades. "They're watching you."
Kael looked up. "Who?"
"Everyone. Maybe they don't know what they're looking at, but they know it's there. You hide it better than most people hide a knife, but that's the thing about knives. Even hidden, you can feel when someone has one."
---
Kael went quiet, then asked, "Do you think I should stop?"
Sera blew a slow breath out between her teeth. "No. But if you plan to keep doing it, you need to be ready for what comes with being noticed."
"What do you think comes with it?"
Her gaze met theirs, unwavering. "The Guild isn't the only one who pays attention. There are nobles who think they own anything powerful. And there are other adventurers who wouldn't mind cutting you down just to figure out why you're different."
---
Her words lingered with them long after the conversation ended.
Kael had spent their entire life standing out whether they wanted to or not—because of the curse, because of the race no one else could see. Now, their magic made that even sharper.
And yet, they didn't stop.
---
The work of those months left them stronger, faster, more disciplined. And by the time the 17th year of their life came to a close, they had come to understand something else: there was no way to stop being noticed. The only choice they had was how to use that attention.
---
The last weeks before their seventeenth birthday pushed Kael harder than the months before. The Guild sent their party to guard a trade caravan through the jagged ridges that separated two poor nations—a route where monsters were plentiful and roads were barely roads at all.
The caravan master, a broad-shouldered woman with a scar across her cheek, warned them the first night. "Bandits here don't fear adventurers. They'll try your patience if they think you'll break formation."
Sera simply said, "Then we don't break."
---
Three days into the journey, on a slope so narrow the wagons had to move in single file, they came.
A roar first—low and guttural—and then the rocks above the caravan shifted. Shadows poured out of the treeline: long-limbed creatures with mottled hides, talons digging into stone. Ambush.
Kael's staff was in their hands before the first claw hit the wagon covers.
---
It was the kind of fight that stripped away the gap between training and instinct.
Sera's blades flashed in front of them, cutting down anything that got too close. She was quick, brutal, never wasting a strike.
Kael stayed just behind her, their spells sliding out in sharp rhythm. Shields formed and dissolved like breath. Blades of air tore through the narrow pass, clearing space for the caravan guards to regroup.
---
And when the second wave came, larger and stronger, Kael felt that familiar pull inside them.
Rhyme the flow. The world listens.
They whispered the spell, the magic language rolling off their tongue like a song they had always known:
> "Fall, O raging claw.
Meet the wind that bends no law.
Break before its draw."
The pass itself seemed to answer. Wind surged in a sudden wall, slamming into the creatures and knocking them from the ridge. Screams echoed as they tumbled down the rocky slope.
---
By the time the air cleared, the path ahead was littered with broken forms. The caravan stood intact.
Kael steadied their breathing, careful not to let the shaking in their arms show. Their mana had dipped lower than they liked, but they had kept it balanced.
Sera's eyes flicked toward them briefly. She didn't say anything—not then. She just turned back to the remaining creatures and finished the work.
---
That night, when the camp was quiet, she found them sitting alone by the dying embers.
"You pulled that wind out of nowhere," she said, crouching across from them.
"I've been practicing," Kael said.
"I know," she replied. There was a pause, then: "You hid how much that took from you."
Kael smiled faintly. "Was it obvious?"
"To me." She tipped her head to one side. "That kind of casting… You could skip half the ladder in the Guild if you wanted."
"Skipping isn't learning," Kael said. "I'd rather do both."
---
Sera studied them across the firelight. "Then remember this: if you're going to keep secrets that big, be sure they're worth keeping. The day you reveal them, it will change everything."
Kael's gaze stayed on the flame. "I know."
---
Two days later, they reached the city walls and the caravan was handed off to local guild officials. Payment was signed, recorded, and distributed. Just like that, the rotation ended.
Standing at the courtyard gates, Sera swung her blades up into their sheaths and turned to face them.
"This is where we split, Listener," she said, using the nickname Torren had given them. It had followed them, somehow, like smoke in the wind.
"Until the next mission," Kael replied.
"Until then."
---
She hesitated then, something unspoken in the pause. Kael saw it, but neither of them reached for words. There was no need.
Instead, she tapped her knuckles lightly against their staff before turning away, heading down a separate street. The sound of her steps faded, leaving Kael in the bustle of the courtyard.
---
They stood there for a moment, the noise of the city folding around them like waves. Then they lifted their eyes to the sky, where the late winter sun broke through clouds.
Six months. Another chapter closed.
They pulled their notebook out as they walked, flipping to a blank page. At the top they wrote:
> Strength grows in rhythm. Watchers grow in silence.
---
By the time they reached their lodging that evening, they were already thinking of the next mission. The next spells. The next way to sharpen themself before the next rotation put them in another team, another city, another fight.
There was no pause. The road didn't leave room for it.
---
And so, at seventeen years old, Kael's life as a transient adventurer continued, marked by two truths:
They were getting stronger.
And the world was starting to notice.