Chapter 2: The Misfit's Barracks
The Obsidian Guard's headquarters wasn't a gleaming spire or a fortified keep. It was a repurposed, soot-stained watchtower on the crumbling outer rim of the capital, leaning against the city's colossal defensive wall like a drunk against a lamppost. It smelled of damp stone, cheap coal, and simmering resentment.
Inspector Vale pushed open the iron-banded door without knocking. "Home sweet home, recruit. Try not to die before we can document you."
The interior was a single, cavernous room serving as armory, mess, and barracks all in one. Cots were shoved against rough-hewn stone walls. A single, perpetually boiling kettle hissed over a firepit in the center. And in the dim light, three figures turned to look at the newcomer.
"Another one?" grunted a mountain of a man. He was easily seven feet tall, his skin the color and texture of granite. A single, thick stone slab of a grimoire—Bronze-Grade, Kaelen noted—was chained to his belt. "He's smaller than the last. He'll break faster."
A young woman with hair dyed a violent shade of crimson and more knives on her person than in a butcher's shop snorted. Her eyes, sharp and amber, scanned Kaelen with predatory interest. Her grimoire, Silver-Grade with a jagged red slash on the cover, pulsed faintly with heat. "Look at his book, Brick. That's not a color you see every day."
The third occupant was leaning in a shadowed corner, almost invisible. He was slender, with pale hair and eyes that glinted like chips of frost in the gloom. A Silver-Grade grimoire with a complex snowflake design sat closed on his lap. He didn't speak, just stared.
"Kaelen, meet your new squad," Vale said, sounding amused. "The brick wall is Garrison. The walking armory is Riven. The quiet one is Silas. They are the Obsidian Guard. You are now their problem."
"What's his deal?" Riven asked, jerking her chin at Kaelen. "Mana so low I can barely taste it. And that book… it feels wrong. Like a hole."
"Precisely," Vale said, his scholarly enthusiasm returning. "An Unclassified grimoire. It doesn't amplify mana in any measurable way. It may not use mana at all. My task is to discover its properties, its rules, and its… utility."
"Utility," Garrison repeated, the word a low rumble. "You mean, can we weaponize the freak."
Kaelen flinched. The cold weight of the grimoire against his chest felt heavier.
"You have one week to attempt a basic manifestation," Vale said to Kaelen, his tone turning clinical. "Open it. Command it. Even the weakest Bronze grimoire yields a spark or a gust. Show me anything. If you cannot…" He didn't finish. He didn't need to. The Exit of the Unbound awaited those the empire had no use for.
Vale left, the door closing with a final thud that echoed in the sudden silence.
Riven was in front of Kaelen in a blur of motion. She didn't touch him, but leaned in, her nose almost to the cover of his book. "It's hungry," she stated, a strange certainty in her voice. "I can feel it. My blood magic senses hunger."
"Leave the runt alone, Riven," Garrison said, turning back to polishing a massive, blunt-edged sword. "He'll be gone in a week. They always are."
"Not all of them," Silas said from his corner, his voice soft and cold. It was the first time he'd spoken. "Remember Torin?"
A heavier silence fell. Garrison's polishing stopped.
Riven's smirk faded. She straightened up, giving Kaelen a last, unreadable look before walking away. "Don't go poking at your book in the middle of the night. Bad things happen to people who poke at things they don't understand."
Alone, Kaelen was pointed to a bare cot in the draftiest corner. He sat, placing the Unclassified grimoire on his knees. The squad ignored him, a skill they'd clearly mastered.
He took a steadying breath and tried to open it.
He pushed with his hands. He focused his will. He whispered a plea. He poured every drop of his pathetic dwarf-core mana into the seam of the cover.
Nothing.
The book remained sealed, as immovable as a mountain. It was less a book and more a solid, cold block of the unknown.
Hours passed. The squad's muttered conversations, their easy use of magic—Garrison causing a small stone to rise and reshape, Riven making a drop of blood hover and spin into a needle, Silas frosting the rim of his cup—were a constant, painful reminder of what he lacked.
This is it, he thought, despair clawing at his throat. I wasn't a late bloomer. I was a dead seed. The Selection gave me a stone, not a grimoire.
That night, as the others slept (Garrison's snores sounding like rockslides), Kaelen crept from his cot. He couldn't sleep with the cold, silent judgment of the book beside him. He slipped out the tower's side door into a small, walled courtyard filled with junk and weeds.
Under the pale light of the twin moons, he held the grimoire aloft. Anger, hot and sudden, replaced his despair.
"They threw me away!" he hissed at the book, his voice trembling. "My parents saved for years for my academy fees! I trained until I collapsed! For what? To be given a paperweight? To be a scholar's guinea pig before I'm tossed out with the trash?"
He wasn't talking to the book. He was raging at the world, at the system, at his own soul's poverty.
"If you're really bound to me," he whispered, raw and honest, "then you're as much a failure as I am. We're stuck with each other. So either help me, or let's just both stop pretending."
He didn't try to pour mana this time. There was none left. He poured his frustration, his shame, his stubborn, unkillable will to prove them wrong. It wasn't magic. It was emotion, pure and desperate.
The grimoire twitched.
A shock, subtle and deep, traveled up his arms. Not pain, but acknowledgment.
With a soft, dry sound like a gasp, the cover creaked open by a hair's breadth.
Heart hammering against his ribs, Kaelen looked down.
The first page was not blank.
But it didn't hold a spell diagram, or runes, or words.
It held a mirror. The page was a perfect, silvery reflective surface. And in it, he didn't see his own face.
He saw a vast, starless void. An endless, hungry dark. And deep within that dark, two points of light ignited—cold, intelligent, and focused entirely on him.
A voice, not in his ears but etched directly into his mind, dry as forgotten tombs and ancient as bedrock, spoke.
"FINALLY. A WILL, NOT A WHISPER. THE KEY TURNS. SHOW ME WHAT YOU ARE MADE OF, LITTLE SPARK."
Before Kaelen could react, the mirror-page rippled. The void swirled, and an image formed—not of stars, but of the courtyard around him. He saw the pile of broken masonry, the rusted training dummy, the weed-choked cracks in the flagstones. The image zoomed in, focusing on a single, jagged fragment of stone about the size of his fist.
The voice echoed again, a command and a question fused into one.
"CONCEPTUALIZE. NOT WITH MANA. WITH WILL. DESCRIBE ITS TRUTH. DEFINE ITS END."
Kaelen, mind reeling, stared at the stone in the reflection. He didn't know what to do. He thought of what it was. Broken. Discarded. Useless. A piece of something that once was whole.
In the reflection, the image of the stone frayed. Its edges became blurry, indistinct.
In the real world, Kaelen glanced at the actual stone fragment in the courtyard. Its edges… softened. It didn't glow. It didn't vibrate. It just began to look less real, like a memory struggling to be recalled.
A jolt of panic and wonder shot through him. He wasn't casting a spell. He was… defining something. And the world was listening.
He focused harder, pushing his will through the page. He defined the stone further. Unconnected. Powder. Dust.
In the reflection, the stone dissolved into a smear of grey.
In the courtyard, with a sound like a sigh, the solid rock fragment crumbled into a small, neat pile of fine sand.
No light show. No mana surge. Just silent, effortless erasure.
Kaelen stared at his hands, then at the grimoire, then at the pile of sand that had once been stone. His blood ran cold, then hot. This wasn't amplification. This was something else entirely. This was re-writing.
The voice in his mind hummed, a sound of deep, unsettling satisfaction.
"THE FIRST LESSON: ALL THINGS ARE STORIES. SOME ARE JUST MORE EASILY… EDITED."
The grimoire snapped shut, the connection severing. The cold weight returned. But now, Kaelen understood. The book wasn't empty. It was a prison for something that didn't play by the world's rules. And it had just offered him a taste of the key.
From the tower's high window, unseen by Kaelen, two people watched.
Inspector Vale scribbled furiously on a notepad, his eyes wide. "Fascinating! No mana fluctuation. Direct ontological alteration. He didn't break it… he defined it into another state."
Beside him, Riven leaned on the windowsill, her earlier flippancy gone. She watched the boy stare in shock at the sand he'd created from stone. A slow, sharp smile touched her lips.
"Well," she murmured, her eyes glowing faintly in the dark. "Looks like the freak can bite after all."
In the silent courtyard, Kaelen looked from the sand to his Unclassified grimoire, the first flicker of a dangerous, forbidden hope igniting in his chest. He had a power no one understood. And in a world that judged by known grades, an unknown power was either a death sentence…
…or a weapon waiting to be forged.