CHAPTER 2: THE BUTCHER'S KNIFE**
The blade found Kael's hand the way lightning finds a tree—sudden, inevitable, without permission. One moment he stood frozen in the butcher's shop doorway, the next his fingers curled around the bone handle of Garrik's skinning knife. He didn't remember taking it. The whispers in his blood didn't bother with explanations.
Garrik looked up from his work, his cleaver buried in the ribs of a stag carcass. Three rings glinted on his left hand—two bronze, one tarnished silver. The village called him a Ringbearer, though the power in those bands was weak as piss.
"Well if it ain't the storm-orphan." Garrik's grin showed missing teeth. "Come to beg, boy? Or just stare with them freak eyes of yours?"
Kael's vision pulsed. Four pupils now, slit like a viper's. The whispers coiled tighter around his ribs.
*He sold Liss rotten meat the day before the tide.*
The memory hit like a cleaver between the eyes—Liss retching behind their shack, the black veins standing out against her pale throat as she tried to smile through the pain.
*"Please, Kae, don't be mad at him..."*
Garrik's smile faltered as Kael stepped forward. The knife trembled—no, not trembled. *Vibrated.* Like a hound straining at its leash.
"You gave my sister spoiled meat." Kael's voice came out wrong. Layered. As if something else spoke through him.
The butcher yanked his cleaver free. "That so? And here I thought the little bitch died choking on noble steel."
The world went red at the edges.
Kael moved without thought. The knife left his hand in a silver blur, embedding itself in Garrik's shoulder with a wet crunch. The butcher howled, swinging his cleaver in a wild arc that should have taken Kael's head off.
Should have.
Kael's body bent like reeds in the wind, the blade passing so close it stirred his matted hair. His fist connected with Garrik's jaw—bone cracked, teeth flew. The butcher staggered back into his table, sending organs slithering to the sawdust-covered floor.
"Please—" Garrik spat blood, his rings flaring weakly. "I didn't mean—"
Kael's hands found his throat. Squeezed.
The whispers roared in his skull, a chorus of locusts, of cracking ice, of a little girl's dying laughter. Garrik's skin blackened where Kael touched him, veins rising like cracks in dried mud. His rings darkened, crumbled, rained down as ash between them.
When the butcher's body hit the ground, it sounded like a sack of wet flour.
Kael stared at his hands. No burns. No blisters. Just blood—thick and dark and wrong.
*"Good,"* the whispers sighed.
Far to the west, in the storm-lashed heights of Veydrasil, Eryndor Veyl's head snapped up from his war table. The stormglass orb at its center—a prison for the last breath of Vaeltrix himself—shivered in its stand. A single hairline fracture split its surface.
"My lord?" His general hesitated.
Eryndor closed his fist around the orb. The fracture sealed. "Nothing." The lie tasted like ozone. "Send word to the border watches. I want reports of any... disturbances."
He didn't explain the sudden tightness in his chest. The way his Ring of Storms pulsed like a fresh wound.
The village burned behind Kael as he walked into the jungle. Not by his hand—though the whispers had begged him to strike the first torch. No, this was the work of frightened peasants with pitchforks and superstition. The flames licked at the night sky, painting the canopy in flickering shadows as vines slithered away from his footsteps.
He didn't look back.
The deeper he pushed into the green hell, the louder the whispers grew. The jungle knew him now. Knew what he carried in his blood.
*"Closer,"* the voice urged as thorns parted before him. *"Deeper."*
Kael's shadow stretched long behind him—too long, its edges wavering like smoke. When he blinked, sometimes it moved without him.
On the seventh day, he found the first corpse. A Ringbearer—or what remained of one. The skeleton hung suspended in a web of glowing vines, its three rusted rings still fused to finger bones. The skull was split clean down the middle, as if by a single, perfect strike.
*"He was weak,"* the whisper mused. *"You are not."*
Kael reached for the nearest ring.
The jungle held its breath.
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