Chapter Two: The Edge of a Word
The days after the Aptitude Test moved with a strange, dual rhythm.
The sun rose and set. Zack's father worked the south field. His mother mended. Little Mira kneaded dough. Life in Zoe continued as usual, a stream flowing around a new, permanent stone. Him.
*Well, at least I'm memorable*, he thought. * "Remember, Zack? Turns out he was a rock. A very sad, useless rock."*[1]
Ever since that day, Zack and the Chief began doing temporary training. It started each dawn in the training yard with Chief Burrel.
There was no ceremony to it. Burrel would just be there as soon as the sky greyed, holding two wooden staves. He would toss one to Zack. *"Catch."* Zack usually fumbled it. *Okay, point made. Hands are for decoration.*
"Again."
They would go, leaving behind the noise of philosophy and the pretense of will. There was only the forward motion and the constant, gentle correction of the path. *Mostly just the correction part*, Zack mused, rubbing a new bruise on his ribs. *Lots and lots of corrections.*
They both knew it was all useless unless zack some how begins to accumulate aether one day, the difference caused by a single drop of ether is something that can't be attained with sheer physical power. but burell couldnt egnore zacks undying determination and stubbornness to defy his set fate.
Burrel's teaching was a language of impact. A tap on Zack's wrist meant his grip was weak. A light shove to his shoulder meant his stance was unbalanced. A blocked strike followed by an immediate, effortless counter showed the flaw in his attack. Zack saw Burell and tought*This old man communicates like a very angry dictionary.*
Zack learned to read the silence between blows. He learned that Burrel's left shoulder dipped a fraction before a feint. He learned the chief's breathing hitched when he was about to shift from defense to a disabling strike. These were the signals. But Zack was not experienced enough to know how to react to them and put this observation to good use*Good. So when I see the 'I'm-about-to-knock-you-flat' signal, I can have a whole philosophical debate about it before I hit the dirt. I wonder what would happen if he started using Aether; would I be able to predict his moves by analysing its flow?*
One morning, after a particularly brutal session that left Zack's forearms striped with bruises, Burrel did not immediately walk away.
"You are learning to read me," Burrel said. He rotated his practice knife in his hand. "That is step one. Now you must unlearn it."
"Unlearn it?" Zack thought. *Great. I finally memorized one page, and now he wants me to burn the book. This is why I never went to school.*
"My signals are my own. Kael's will be different. A Soul Path caster's tells are in their fingers, their breath. A Hybrid is a mess of both. If you only learn to fight me, you learn to fight one man."
Burrel's dark eyes held his. "You must learn to fight the idea of an opponent. People always make mistakes. You must find and fight the shape of those mistakes."
He gestured to the empty yard. "From now on, you do not fight me. You fight the errors. I will provide them. You find them."
The next day, Burrel changed. His style became fluid, unpredictable. He mimicked the wide, powerful swings of a brawler. Then the quick, probing jabs of a skirmisher. He shuffled his feet like a novice, then moved with the gliding grace of a veteran.
Zack spent the first week falling for every feint, walking into every trap. He ached everywhere. *Note to self: the 'shape of mistakes' looks a lot like the ground, up close.*
But he began to see. Not Burrel's patterns, but the categories of patterns. The overcommitment that followed a powerful lunge. The momentary blindness after a complex combination. *So everyone gets briefly stupid after doing something fancy. Good to know. I plan to never do anything fancy.*
One evening, he landed a strike. Not a lucky blow. A calculated one. He had baited Burrel into a low sweep, dodged, and placed the tip of his practice knife against the chief's kidney in the half-second of recovery.
Burrel froze. He looked down at the wooden point touching his side. He stepped back and lowered his knife.
A slow nod. "Good."
That single word was worth a month of bruises. *I'd frame it if I could. 'Certificate of Not Being Completely Hopeless.'*
Chief Burrel was stunned by Zack's progress, but kept it off his face. The last thing that cocky kid needed was more fuel for his attitude.
*A real shame,* Burrel thought. *With even a drop of Aether, he'd be unstoppable.*
...
The respect in the village was quieter and a little colder. It was not friendship but a wary recalculation. *Before I was 'that poor Husk.' Now I'm 'that weird Husk who might stab you.' ho ho Progress.*zack thought with an internal grin.
At the well, women still fell silent when he approached, but now their eyes held curiosity instead of pity. Old Man Kael, the smith, grunted one day as Zack passed and shoved a wrapped bundle at him.
"For the whetstone you lent last winter." Inside was a strip of good leather, perfect for a knife grip. *A bribe for me not to die too quickly in front of his son? I'll take it.*
Mira was his barometer. Her sharp tongue softened into blunt commentary.
"You move differently. Less like a startled deer. More like… an annoyed cat."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment. Cats get killed by dogs."
*Always so supportive*, he thought. *My personal cheerleader, if cheers were warnings about imminent death.*
His mother watched him with a scientist's eye. She noted the new set of his shoulders, the economy of his movements at the dinner table. One night, she stopped him as he rose to clear his plate.
"This training. It is a fuel. But what is the fire? Is it revenge? A need to prove them wrong?"
Zack thought about the cold stone of the Ash Corps notice waiting in his future. He thought about the hollow grey of the crystal. *The fire is mostly 'I don't want to be monster bait.' Is that a proper life goal?*
"To not disappear," he said.
She held his gaze, her eyes softening as they searched his face. "That is a good fire, son. Just be careful it doesn't burn down the home you're trying to keep."
His father said little. But one afternoon, he found Zack repairing a fence post. He worked beside him for an hour, handing him nails, steadying the wood. As they finished, his father clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder.
"Your mother sees the fire. I see the work. The work is good." He squeezed once, then walked back to the field.
It was the most his father had ever said about it.
The Trial was a specter on the horizon. Talk filled the green. Speculation on matchups. Bets placed in hushed tones.
Zack listened. He learned that Kael, his likely opponent, favored a crushing right cross after a body shot. That Sera had a lateral movement speed that belied her solid frame. That Tomas could only manage three strong force-casts before his channels overheated.
He filed the data away. *Kael: hits hard, probably thinks hard too. Me: gets hit, thinks about not getting hit. This is a battle for the ages.*
Thirty days after the test, the first official conscription notice arrived in Zoe. Not for him, of course. For Hobin, a boy two years older who had tested as a weak Hybrid. He was to report to a craft-guild annex for manual labor.
Zack watched from the shadow of the smithy. The cold stone in his own gut grew heavier. His sixty days were half gone.
...
The last few days zack has been hearing what sounded like a call from the southern woods near the boundary of Sunspires territory[2].
The hum began as a low vibration in his sleep, like a single bass note from the earth. It started a month after the aptitude test. He woke with his teeth clenched, the taste of old copper on his tongue. He thought it was the aftermath of shame, a phantom ache from the grey crystal.
It returned the next night. Stronger. The hum was not in his ears. It felt as if it lived in the marrow of his bones, a patient, resonant call spoken from inside his brain. It pulled from the south, from the dense woods that bordered Sunspire territory. When he ignored it, the vibration sharpened into a persistent throb, a headache centered behind his eyes.
By the fifth night, the hum gained texture, a sensation like cold fingers plucking the tendons in his wrists. It offered no promises, only a blunt command to rise and follow. Lying beside Mira's steady breath, Zack felt the call solidify into a physical pressure against his sternum. A silent, repeating pattern etched itself into his thoughts, a geometric equation, a key hunting for its lock.
He could not avoid it any longer.
Zack moved through the sleeping village like a thief. The moon was a bone chip in the sky. He crossed the southern tree line, and the world changed.
The familiar sounds died. No crickets, no rustle of night birds. The silence was a held breath. Moonlight did not illuminate the path. It broke apart on the twisted canopy, scattering into sharp, silver fragments on the ground. The air grew cold enough to ache. The scent of pine and loam soured into the odor of wet stone and oxidized metal, the smell of a deep, forgotten wound.
The ground sloped downward. Roots grasped at his boots like skeletal hands. The pressure in his skull became a compass needle, pointing true.
He found the clearing.
The clearing formed a perfect circle of barren, black earth. No moss softened its edges, no weed pierced its surface, not even the pale lace of fungus. The soil had a glazed, vitrified sheen, like black glass frozen mid-pour. At its exact center stood the altar.
It was not built. It was a single, monstrous slab of stone that seemed to have erupted from the ground. Its surface was neither smooth nor rough. It was scarred, covered in grooves and channels that formed no sane pattern. They looked less like carvings and more like the wounds left by something clawing its way out from within. A dark substance, thicker than shadow, seeped from these channels and pooled at the altar's base, absorbing the fractured light.
The air above the altar pulsed. It was not Aether. This light was bruised, a sickly violet shot through with threads of corroded gold. It moved in slow, agonized spirals, knotting and unknotting itself. The silence here was dense. It pressed against his eardrums.
The whispers came.
They bypassed his ears. They formed as pure understanding in the meat of his mind, three distinct impressions that felt older than language.
GOLD. UNBREAKING.
CRIMSON. CONSUMING.
BLACK. EMPTY.
The concepts hung in the air before him. The Gold was a vision of a towering, flawless citadel under a merciless sun, a will that could never bend. The Crimson was a sensation of ravenous heat, a mouth large enough to swallow stars, a hunger without end.
The Black offered no vision. It was the absence of one. It was the silence after a universe ended. It was negation. It was the void.
The Black recognized him. He felt its gaze like a physical touch, cold and intimate. It saw the hollow grey of the aptitude crystal inside him. It saw the space where his dantian should be. It did not call to him with promise. It is called with recognition. This was where he belonged.
From the seeping shadows at the altar's base, the light coalesced. It drew itself up into the shape of a man in armor so ancient its style was forgotten. The spectral Warden stood, a figure woven from bruised light and profound silence. Its helmet was featureless. Where its face should have been, there were only two pools of a deeper dark, holes torn in the fabric of the world.
"Heir."
The word formed inside Zack's skull. It sounded dry, the rustle of dead leaves in a sealed tomb. It carried a fatigue that spanned millennia. *Lovely. An inheritance from a corpse. Just what I always wanted.*
"The vessel is prepared. The remnants remain. Choose."
Zack's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic animal in a cage. His mouth was dust. *Okay, don't panic. It's just a life-altering choice from a ghost. No pressure.*
"What are they?"
"Fragments. Of the First Path. The truth before the Shattering. Broken. Corrupted. Power endures." The Warden's head tilted. The pools of dark seemed to drink the bruised light around them. "The Gold forges an unassailable self. The Crimson takes all for itself. The Black unmakes. It is the Empty Hand." *Unmakes. Sounds tidy. I could use a little unmaking in my life.*
"Why does that one seem more drawn to me?"
"You are empty. The Empty Hand requires a hollow to hold it. This one seeks a vessel of absence. In all my time as a warden, only one man chose this path and didn't have a good ending. I recommend you choose one of the others."
After staring at Zack for a minute, it suddenly shouted, "Now choose, or I fade. The chance passes for another age."
Zack thought of Joren's sneer in the green. The Guildsman's flat, bored tone. Husk. The cold, bureaucratic print of the Ash Corps notice was his future. He held those images. Then he let others surface. Burrel's grudging nod in the training yard. His mother's hands, rough from work, are resting on his shoulders. Mira's elbow in his ribs, her faith a sharp, stubborn thing.
He did not want to be a fortress. Walls were for hiding behind. *And I'm tired of hiding.*
He did not want to be a devourer. Hunger was its own prison. *Besides, I'd probably eat something that gave me heartburn.*
He wanted the power to unmake the verdict. To erase the word written over his life. He wanted the silence after the scream. *And maybe get a decent night's sleep.*
His arm lifted. The movement felt inevitable, as if the bones in his hand were iron filings pulled by a magnet. His index finger extended, pointing not at the altar, but at the void between the three concepts. At the heart of the emptiness. At the Black.
"That one." *Might as well. The other two sound like a lot of paperwork.*
The spectral Warden went utterly still. The corrupted light swirling around its form rippled, not with approval, but with a deep, solemn regret. A mourner at a funeral. It had guarded these broken remnants for epochs, and now it had to give the most terrible one away. *Sorry to disappoint, pal.*
"So be it."
The words were a sigh that stirred no air.
"May your heart remain your own, child of the Hollow. Those who seize the Forgotten Way walk alone." *Not exactly a ringing endorsement.*
Then the world dissolved.
There was no transition. One moment, he stood on the glassy earth. The next, a scouring wind of frozen needles and shattered glass tore through him. It was not pain as he knew it. It was an unraveling. *This is fine. This is a normal Tuesday.*
It bypassed the dormant channels where Aether should flow. It ripped new pathways, mapping them directly onto his nerves, etching them into his bones, claiming the very space his body occupied. *Redecorating my insides without permission. Rude.*
It sought the hollow at his core and did not fill it. Instead, it anchored around the emptiness. A knot of freezing, hungry darkness spun into being there, a silent, gravitational heart. The void became a living thing inside him. *So this is what a cosmic parasite feels like. Chilly.*
He convulsed on the black earth. His back arched. His muscles locked. His vision flooded with white static, then collapsed into a pinpoint of dark. *Yep. Dying. Called it.*
When sight returned, it was a new sense entirely. *Oh, good, my eyes are broken in a new way.*
He saw the world laid bare. The twisted, bruised Aether above the altar pulsed like a sick heart. But now he saw the other half. Thin, whispering veins of anti-light threaded through the stone of the altar, a negative image of energy. The raw Nox. He saw the Warden not as a ghost, but as a complex, frayed knot of both Aether and Nox, a pattern holding together through unimaginable will, now coming undone. He saw the life in the distant trees not as green mist, but as pockets of vibrant, stolen heat glowing against the immense, cold void of the world. *Great. Now everything looks like a depressing painting.*
The pain receded. A deep, resonant calm flooded the spaces it left behind. The calm was so absolute it felt like a new kind of terror. In his center, where there had been nothing, a silent negation now spun. The Empty Hand. It did not live in a dantian. It lived in the hollow where a dantian was not. It was a void that fed on the current of the world itself. *My personal black hole. Handy for tidying up.*
He pushed himself onto his elbows, then to his feet. He swayed. He felt lighter, as if his density had changed. Hollowed out, yet dense with a quiet, awful potential. A cup that was also a drain. *New me. Same old mess.*
The Warden was transparent now, a fading sketch on the air.
"The inheritance is violence. The power is theft. It leaves a blight. It uses not the core, but the current itself. Learn control. Or the emptiness will consume you. Then it will consume all you touch." *Standard warranty disclaimer. Noted.*
The specter dissolved. Its form became motes of faint light that drifted toward the altar, only to be swallowed by the seeping black substance at its base. Then there was nothing. *Well. That happened.*
Zack stood alone in the ringing silence. He looked at his hands in the fractured moonlight. They were the same. Scarred. Calloused. Ordinary.
He turned. A fern grew at the edge of the dead circle, its fronds glowing with soft, ignorant life energy. With Aether.
He focused on the cold knot in his chest. He did not push. He did not command. He simply allowed the want. A single, hungry thought, directed at the fern's vibrant, leaking energy.
A thread of vivid green light peeled away from the fern's edge. It was not magic. It was the essence of the thing itself, its potential, its future. The thread streaked through the cold air, a captive comet, and vanished into the center of his raised palm.
A jolt buzzed up his arm. It was vitality. It felt sweet, and electric, and profoundly wrong.
The very tip of the fern's frond lost its color. It turned the grey of a long-dead fire. Then it turned black. It crumbled, dissolving into a fine powder of ash that dusted the glassy earth.
He stared at his palm. He stared at the dead spot on the fern.
He had stolen. He had unmade a fragment of life. He had drunk from the world's open stream using a cup with a hole.
He was no longer a Husk.
He was an heir to a broken, forbidden truth.
He turned and ran. He crashed through the undergrowth, blind. He burst onto the path through the southern village. The wholesome moonlight felt like a lie. He stopped, doubled over, gripping his knees. The weight of the line he had crossed was a physical pressure on his shoulders.
The Trial in seven days was a children's game. New priorities rearranged themselves in his skull. Hide the void. Learn its use without turning his sister to ash. Remember how to look human.
Chief Burrel waited at the edge of the training yard. He was a statue carved from shadow and judgment.
"The south woods."
Zack straightened. He met the Chief's eyes. "I could not sleep."
Burrel stepped closer. His gaze scanned Zack's face, reading the changes in the set of his jaw, the new depth in his eyes. He saw the fracture.
"Those woods hold old wounds. Some of them are still open. What did you find?"
Zack held the iron gaze. He saw no trap there, only a demand for a truth. He chose a fragment.
"I found a choice."
Burrel held his stare for a long count of heartbeats. He gave a slow, final nod.
"Choices have consequences. You carry the weight of yours now." He turned to leave. "Your trial opponent is set. Kael. Be ready."
Burrel walked away, his form swallowed by the pre-dawn gloom.
Zack stood alone under the fading stars. The hungry silence in his chest was the loudest thing in the world.
Kael hits like a falling tree. I can murder a houseplant.
This will be a spectacle.
[1] The texts wrapped in asterisks (**) are inner thoughts and dialogues of the main character
[2] one of the 3 nations on the continent