The wind over Thareth had a particular way of cutting through silence — not loud, not fierce, but aware. It listened. It remembered.
Kaelen walked through the abandoned field near their makeshift camp, where once an old manor had stood — swallowed long ago by root and ruin. His fingers brushed against a jagged pillar, its face marked with inscriptions long worn away. Not quite glyphs, not quite language.
He had seen these shapes before — in dreams, in blood.
And once, in the flames that took his home.
When Kaelen had first arrived at the Order's citadel, they had tested him like they would any new aspirant: measured his skill with sword and spell, tested his loyalty with riddles and oaths.
But he had failed something deeper — a test they did not speak of.
The Seer called Armathen had whispered it to him during a midnight lesson:
"You do not draw magic from the Veil like the others. You are part of it. That is why it recoils from you. That is why it obeys in bursts — and bleeds in others."
Kaelen had denied it. Had willed himself to become a soldier of discipline, not inheritance.
But the truth was harder to carve away than flesh.
He remembered the first time it truly awakened.
A sickness had struck the citadel — some curse or poison twisted by dead gods. He had watched them die one by one. Seralyn had nearly perished.
And in the fevered dark, he had called something.
The rot reversed. The shadows wept. And from his hand, a pale light unlike any spell in their libraries had bloomed — colorless, endless, old.
That light had not come from him.
It had come through him.
Now, walking alone through the echo of his past, Kaelen began to question whether he had ever truly left the place that had birthed him.
The field was overgrown, but beneath the dirt his foot struck stone — a sigil carved into a buried altar.
His blood ran cold.
The same sigil had appeared in his dreams. In the visions of fire. In the chamber where Vorath once stood crowned by skulls.
The line of power he came from… it was not a new magic.
It was a magic lost — or hidden.
Perhaps deliberately.
A breeze stirred. Kaelen swore he heard someone whisper his name.
Not from the camp.
Not from any direction he could point to.
From within.
And it was not the voice of his mother. Nor his teachers. Nor the gods.
It was his own, older than memory, buried beneath centuries of silence.
A voice that said only:
"You were not made for their wars."