The blade felt wrong in his hands.
Kael stared at the rusted sword, its edge dulled by decades of neglect, and felt the weight of his father's dying words press against his chest like a physical wound. Three days. Three days since the old man had whispered the truth with his final breath, three days since Kael's entire world had shattered like glass beneath a war hammer.
"You are the last of the Aethermoor line," his father had rasped, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. "The true heir to a kingdom that died screaming."
Kael had thought him delirious. Mad with fever. But then the soldiers had come.
Now, hidden in the rotting cellar of an abandoned farmhouse twenty miles from the village he'd called home, Kael couldn't stop his hands from shaking. Above him, through the gaps in the floorboards, he could hear them. The Shadowbound. Their armor clinked with each methodical step, a rhythm that spoke of patience and certainty. They knew he was close. They always knew.
"Your bloodline was supposed to be erased," one of them said, his voice carrying the hollow rasp of someone who'd traded their soul for dark magic. "Lord Malkor will be pleased when we bring him your head."
Kael pressed himself further into the corner, the sword clutched against his chest. The mark on his wrist burned—the same mark his father had revealed only in death, hidden beneath decades of carefully maintained illusions. A crown of silver flames, the sigil of House Aethermoor. The mark of kings.
The mark of the hunted.
A board creaked above him. Dust rained down through the cracks. Kael's heart hammered so hard he thought it might tear free from his ribs. He was no warrior. He'd spent his life tending sheep and mending fences, not training with weapons or studying the arts of war. The sword in his hands might as well have been a farming implement for all the good it would do him.
But when the trap door exploded open and the first Shadowbound soldier dropped through, when the man's corrupted eyes locked onto Kael with the cold certainty of death, something inside him broke.
Or perhaps it awakened.
Kael didn't remember lunging forward. Didn't remember driving the rusted blade up into the gap beneath the soldier's helmet. But he felt the impact, felt the wet resistance of flesh, felt the spray of hot blood across his face. The soldier's eyes widened in shock, then dulled to nothing as his body crumpled.
The mark on Kael's wrist blazed with sudden, agonizing heat. Silver flames erupted along his arm, wreathing the blade in otherworldly fire. Power surged through him—ancient, terrible, intoxicating. The cellar filled with light.
"Impossible!" Another soldier's voice from above, edged with fear. "The bloodline magic was sealed! It can't—"
The house erupted in chaos. Shouts. Running footsteps. The clash of steel.
Kael stood frozen, staring at his hands, at the silver flames that danced across his skin without burning, at the dead man at his feet. His father's words echoed in his mind, but now they carried a different weight.
"The kingdom may have fallen, boy. But its power sleeps in your blood. When the darkness comes for you—and it will come—you must decide whether to run from your destiny or embrace it."
Above him, more soldiers gathered. Kael could hear their numbers growing, could feel the darkness they brought with them pressing down like a physical weight. He thought of his village, of the ashes he'd left behind. Of his mother's grave, desecrated by the Shadowbound in their search for him. Of every innocent life that would be destroyed if he continued to run.
The silver flames burned brighter.
Kael took a breath and started climbing the ladder toward the trap door. Toward the soldiers. Toward whatever destiny awaited him in blood and fire.
He was done running.
As he emerged into the ruined farmhouse, surrounded by a dozen black-armored warriors whose weapons gleamed with corrupted magic, Kael raised his burning blade and felt something shift in the very air around him. The soldiers hesitated, and in that hesitation, he saw it—fear.
They were afraid of him.
They were afraid of what he represented. Of what he could become.
The last heir of Aethermoor. The one who could reignite the flames that Lord Malkor had spent a lifetime trying to extinguish.
"Come on then," Kael heard himself say, his voice steady despite the terror clawing at his insides. "Let's see if you can finish what you started twenty years ago."
The first soldier lunged, and the world erupted in silver fire and screaming steel. Kael moved on instinct, the power of his bloodline guiding his movements, teaching him through centuries of ancestral memory. Each strike felt both foreign and familiar, as though he'd trained for this his entire life without knowing it.
But even as he fought, even as the bodies began to fall around him, Kael knew this was only the beginning. The Shadowbound would keep coming. Lord Malkor would never stop hunting him. And somewhere, hidden in the fragments of his father's final words, lay a terrible truth about why his bloodline was worth murdering an entire kingdom to erase.
The last soldier fell, and Kael stood alone in the ruined farmhouse, chest heaving, covered in blood that wasn't his own. The silver flames had faded, but he could still feel them coiled beneath his skin, waiting. Hungry.
He looked down at his hands—a farmer's hands that had now taken a dozen lives—and felt something inside him break and reform into something harder. Something necessary.
If they wanted to hunt him, so be it. But he wouldn't die cowering in cellars and running through the night. He would find out why they feared his bloodline. He would uncover what secrets had died with his kingdom. And if the darkness wanted him so badly, he would become something even the shadows would learn to fear.
Kael sheathed his sword and walked out into the night, leaving the dead behind him.
Above the farmhouse, unseen in the darkness, a raven with eyes like burning coals watched his departure. Then it spread its wings and flew north, toward the obsidian fortress where Lord Malkor waited on his throne of bones.
The heir had awakened.
And the realm would bleed for it.