The air was too quiet.
Unnaturally so.
Kael Verdan stirred, consciousness crawling back to him like a wounded animal. His body felt broken numb, cold, heavy. Chains dug into his wrists, raw iron biting through skin and sinew as his arms hung suspended from the ceiling. His bare feet, cut and swollen, barely brushed the ground. Blood had dried where the stone floor had scraped him raw.
But he wasn't dead. Not yet.
The silence wasn't normal. It wasn't the silence of an empty room or a forgotten tomb it was absolute. No distant drip of water. No skitter of rats. No wind. Not even the sound of his own heartbeat. It was as though the world itself was holding its breath, watching.
And waiting.
His throat burned. A cough tried to escape, but it didn't come. Even his breath felt stolen, stolen by something beneath this place.
He blinked, forcing his eyes open against the weight of exhaustion. Darkness. Not the kind you adjusted to but the kind that pressed against your skull. There was no light. No horizon. No sense of up or down.
Where am I?
Memories blurred like smoke in his mind. The attack. The fire. Running through the streets with blood on his hands. Soldiers. Screams. A child crying. The sting of betrayal. And then
Iron doors.
Then nothing.
He tried to speak, but the first attempt cracked his lips and came out as a gasp. He swallowed, coughed dryly, and rasped, "Hello?"
The word died. No echo followed. Just a void.
Kael gritted his teeth. Panic threatened to crawl its way up his throat. He had grown up in silence on the streets, hiding in sewers and ruined houses, listening to the world from the shadows. But this wasn't that kind of silence.
This silence was alive.
And then, it spoke.
"Ah… another little flame, flickering alone in the dark."
Kael jerked, eyes wide. The voice was not heard it was felt, like a whisper pressed directly against his mind.
"You are not the first to fall this far… but perhaps you'll be the first to rise."
The shadows rippled. No it was deeper than that. The darkness around him twisted, peeled, curled in on itself like burnt paper. It wasn't that something moved within the dark it was that the darkness itself moved.
Kael's body went rigid. His hands clenched despite the cuffs.
"Who are you?" he croaked.
Silence again. Then
"I am the crack in the glass. The breath beneath the world. I am the voice that waits."
Kael's eyes flicked around, trying to find a source. There was nothing.
"What do you want?"
"Not want. Offer."
The shadows began crawling down the walls now, forming lines sigils? like veins pulsing with dull light. Shapes twisted across the stone floor beneath him. Symbols in languages he didn't recognize, yet felt eerily familiar.
"You bleed like them. Break like them. But you are not like them… are you?"
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't.
He knew this was a trick. A hallucination. A fever dream born of blood loss and starvation.
And yet…
His heart beat once. Then again. Faster. Louder.
"Will you listen, little Vessel? Will you burn?"
The pain hit without warning.
Kael's entire chest ignited in white-hot agony. It wasn't physical it was worse. It was inside, beneath his ribs, in his blood, in his soul. His spine arched, muscles seizing. Black fire erupted through his veins, boiling ink beneath his skin. He screamed, or tried to but there was no sound. Only lightless heat.
Visions slammed into his mind.
A throne of obsidian, standing beneath a sunless sky.
A tower of broken time, its summit lost beyond the clouds.
A mirror that wept, containing a boundless shadow crying behind glass.
A name, carved into the cosmos, burning across the constellations.
And then like thunder from beneath the earth
"KAEL VERDAN," the voice roared.
Chains shattered.
Iron exploded outward as though rejected by the very air. Kael collapsed to the ground, breath heaving. Smoke poured from his body, but it wasn't smoke. It was shadow, thick and alive, wrapping around his limbs like a cloak returning to its master.
He looked down at his right arm black veins glowed beneath his skin like smoldering coal. His right eye flared open. Light surged through it bright, unnatural, electric blue, piercing through the dark like a blade.
And in that moment, Kael felt it.
Not power. Not exactly. Something older. Hungrier. Waiting. Watching.
Something that had chosen him.
"You've heard the first Whisper," the voice whispered, no longer loud, but deep and cold as the sea. "The Cycle has begun."
Kael coughed, crawling to one knee. His skin steamed with residual power, like his body was still burning on the inside. The chains around his wrists had melted. The stone beneath him cracked.
He opened his mouth but couldn't speak. There were no words that could describe what he felt.
He wasn't alone.
He wasn't even entirely himself anymore.
The silence finally broke with a distant clank.
Footsteps.
From beyond the door.
Torches sputtered to death in the hall outside. Their last flames were snuffed out in a synchronized hush. Voices followed.
Panicked.
"He's awake"
"That room was sealed"
"the chains, they"
Keys jangled. Boots scuffled. More voices. More fear.
Kael stood, slowly.
Not like a man rising. But like a shadow unfolding.
His back cracked as the last of the black smoke coiled upward around his neck and shoulders. His fingers twitched with unfamiliar energy. The sigils on the ground pulsed one last time before fading back into the stone, as though they had never been.
Kael turned his head toward the iron door.
It was thick. Locked. Reinforced.
But it would not stop him.
Not anymore.
He took one step.
And the door rippled.
Stone groaned. Screws bent. Something beyond metal began to resist.
The guards' muffled voices rose in pitch.
"He's doing it again!"
"Back away BACK AW"
BOOM.
The iron door exploded outward, torn from its hinges. Kael stepped through the dust and ruin, barefoot, silent. The hallway beyond flickered with unnatural blue light from his eye. Guards stumbled back, weapons raised. They looked at him not like they saw a prisoner.
But a storm.
"Don't move!" one of them shouted, voice trembling. "By order of the Inquisition, you are to be"
Kael raised his hand.
The shadow followed.
A pulse radiated from him like a shockwave. Stone cracked. Torches died. The guards dropped their weapons, falling to their knees as an unseen pressure crushed the air around them.
Not gravity. Not magic.
Presence.
He had awakened.
And something else had awakened with him.
Kael didn't speak. He didn't need to.
Behind his silence, there was a whisper a voice only he could hear.
"One has heard. The Cycle turns. More shall follow."
Kael looked down at the trembling guards, then back at the darkness behind him. The dungeon had bled him. Broken him. Burned him.
But in doing so, it had opened something that could never be closed.
He turned, walking into the halls above. Where light was dim. Where eyes watched from shadows. Where names were written in hidden books and burned from history.
A new name would be written now.
His.
Not as a prisoner.
Not even as a man.
But as a Vessel.
Of what, he did not yet know.
But the world would.
Soon.