Scene Shift: Same Day – Fangport Slave House
While destinies twisted in the heart of the kingdom, the rain in Fangport fell cold and merciless. Stormwater beat the docks where new slaves—broken and weary—lined up beneath iron lanterns, watched by hard-eyed guards.
One among them stood different.
His name was Kael—though none here knew his name. Shackles ringed his wrists, the iron links glinting as he stepped from the ship. His hair, soaked black and tangled, framed a face set and proud despite the rags on his back. Beneath the mud and bruises, a faded mark lingered on his skin—resembling the memory of a crest, but no one looked close enough to see it.
Kael's hands remained steady even as the sea wind howled. When guards barked orders, he gave no answer. He stared ahead, eyes pale and distant, as though seeing ruins only he remembered. Bound to silence, his bearing held a kind of grace out-of-place among the lost.
The slaver captain eyed him warily. "Sword arm, that one," she muttered, noticing the way Kael's callused fingers flexed—not the scars of a fisherman, but an old fighter's grip. "Take him to the furthest cell. Mind you keep his hands tied tight—he looks like he's fought before."
Kael did not protest as the key twisted in his chains. He made no sound when shoved into the stone corridor, only lifting his chin—dignity clinging to him like a shadow.
Others whimpered or hid their faces. Kael looked into the darkness and did not blink. Somewhere within, beneath fierce silence and locked memory, something sharper than iron waited—like a sword drawn but unseen.
A dockhand whispered, nervous, "That one he is different. Feels like he's waiting for something…or someone."
So Kael was cast into the deep cell, rain and fate thundering above. As the door slammed shut and the world remembered him as nothing.
The rain had dulled by nightfall, but the stink of the docks clung to the air below. Deep beneath Fangport's slave house, in a stone cell barely wide enough for a sleeping mat, Kael sat with his back to the wall, his knees drawn in and his wrists still bound by iron.
The cell was shadowed, cold, and silent.
He had not spoken since they dragged him in.
Above, the footsteps of guards faded into the distance. Nearby, other captives whispered, cried, or snored—some dreaming of lives they once had, others just whimpering in their sleep. Kael did none of those things.
His breathing was slow. Steady. Almost unnervingly calm.
His fingers flexed now and then, brushing the edge of old scars—on his knuckles, across his palms. They weren't the marks of a field slave. These were cleaner, healed with time, earned in ways few here would recognize.
He closed his eyes.
And for a brief moment, the flood floor beneath him seemed to dissolve. The stones, slick with moss and seawater, sank away into warmth. Not warmth of fire—but of light. Candlelight, golden and suffocating. He saw vague figures, tall and robed, moving past silver pillars inside a wide room washed in sun or smoke—he couldn't tell.
There was music, maybe faint drums. Or bells.
And voices, echoing like a memory speaking through water:
"...Kael... come back..."
He jerked upright.
The cold struck back with blunt force, the stone-hard reality of the cell pulling him into the now. The torchlight beyond the bars flickered weakly. His chest rose and fell once, quietly. The dream—or whatever it had been—was already sinking from him. Out of reach.
He didn't know who he'd seen.
He didn't know who had spoken.
But he knew the feeling that followed: a hollow ache in the center of his chest he could never name. He shoved it down. Again.
Across the corridor, a limp voice muttered from a second cell, "That one doesn't flinch. Not even when he sleeps. It's like... he's holding something in, and gods help us when it breaks loose."
The slaver guards had said similar things. They didn't look him in the eye unless they had to.
Kael rested his wrists on his knees. Around the iron shackles, his fingers moved slightly—muscle memory, or habit. A rhythm, a grip. A knowledge of what a sword handle once felt like, even if he didn't know where he'd learned it.
Silence returned.
He sat there until the torches burned down and shadows spilled fully through the corridor. No words passed his lips. No names crossed his mind.
Whatever came before—whatever was taken from him—was buried deep, out of reach.
But it stirred. It always stirred.
And so beneath the kingdom, where no one remembered his name, Kael waited—alone, unbroken, and unknowingly bound to a storm rising far above.
And so, in the storm and shadow, two lives moved apart and together:
One who lost his crown,
and one who lost something more.