They left Emberfall before the market bell could scold them awake. Dawn still pinned the sky to a thin, gray seam when Kael and Arin slipped past the hedges and followed the river's crooked back. The path they took was old and known only to boys who had learned to filch fruit, to men who hunted in seasons when meat was mercy. Today it felt like a secret throat down which they could breathe without being seen.
Arin moved with the easy confidence of someone who had never learned caution properly. He talked while they walked—small jokes and louder plans—because noise made him less likely to hear the worry that sometimes settled in Kael like cold rain. Kael answered in short lines and watched the scrub with the steady attention of someone learning a new language: every shift of grass, every bird-call, a possible sentence to be translated into threat.
They reached the river bend where the scrub grew thicker and older. The reeds hunched like conspirators and the trees leaned inward, their roots gnarled as old hands. Here the world smelled of raw water and damp earth and the sharp metallic tang of something that had bled recently. Arin stopped and flattened his palm against the mud, reading prints like a child reading a scrap of paper.
"Fresh," he said. "Not from last night. From hours. Big ones walked here."
Kael felt the shadow under his skin stir as if in recognition. The space behind his ribs tightened into a small, coiling readiness. He breathed and named the feeling to himself—focus—and it settled the thing inside him into a patient line.
They pressed deeper. The reed gave way to small hollows and the light went thin. It wasn't long before they saw them: marks on bark, torn strips of cloth snagged in thorns, a smear of dark that was not mud. The scrub kept secrets, but secrets left traces.
Arin found the first sign of the thing—tufts of coarse hair clinging to a rock, matted and black as soot. He walked a circle and whistled soft. "We're not alone. Not by far."
They advanced, slow and low. Kael felt the shadow respond like a listening animal, crawling along his limbs in fine, curious threads. He let it taste the air: not with smell, but with a sense that was older than language, a map of pressure and absence. The scrub answered with a sudden, sharp silence. Birds stopped. Even the river seemed to hold its breath.
The creature came without warning. It burst from a thicket with the violence of a summer storm—four-armed, shoulders roped with muscle, the skin a slick of slate and scar, a maw that opened into too many teeth. Its eyes were not bright embers this time but pits of dull hunger. It moved like a thing made to kill: swift, patient, terrible.
Arin flicked a spark into the air and threw it like a meat-flag. The ember winked and hovered, a bait. The creature's head snapped toward the light, nostrils flaring. That small distraction bought Kael the space he needed. He drew breath and reached for the shadow as if it were a cord thrown to him.
This time he did not try to command with a jagged, anxious will. He let the thought be simple: form. The shadow answered, not with a whip but with an arm—a black, braided limb of dense dusk that uncoiled from his wrist and lunged like a tendril grown to purpose. It struck the creature across the flank and wrapped, not around its limbs but around the place where the beast's bulk met its motion: a harness of pure absence that roped tendon to tendon.
The creature roared in a sound that shook the reeds. It twisted, tried to tear the binding, and its claws shattered a patch of earth. Kael felt the pull back along his arm, like a rope drawing a bell. The shadow strained as if the world itself were resisting. Sweat ran sharp down his spine.
Arin advanced, staff ready, and stoked his ember into a thin, hot blade that cut the wet air. He aimed at the creature's exposed neck and let a flicker of flame crack. The fire did not burn the shadow; it coiled around it like a ribbon of light, not to destroy but to fix. Where the flame kissed the darkness the binding hardened into something that felt like cured leather—still dark, still hushful, but with a tensile certainty Kael had not expected.
The two of them moved as if rehearsed: shadow anchoring a flank, ember lancing a joint, hand and hand of a makeshift dance. Each time the creature tried to break free, Kael found the sequence of thought that held: form, tether, steady. Doubt unmade the braid; clarity made it act. When he faltered and pictured instead the faces of the village—Maren, the boys, the old woman who cried—his mind blurred and the shadow loosened. He cursed under his breath and forced his attention back into a single, deliberate line.
They did not kill it quickly. The thing was large and angry and had been made cunning by hunger. It fought them through reed and root, turning flank and arc into a cruel geometry of attack. Once it slammed into Kael and his shoulder rang like a bell struck by a stone. Pain lanced white and the world tilted. The shadow shuddered and tightened anyway, and Kael felt something inside him answer that pull with a violent, raw sound—a cry that was his and not his.
Arin shouted then, a single, ragged order that snapped through the stillness. Kael felt the sound like a cord and obeyed with motion: a shadow hook that snagged a thigh; Arin's ember slid into the hook like a wedge; the creature tripped and folded against its own weight. Kael pushed the braid like a hand and the thing's momentum broke. It lay heaving and dangerous.
They did not look like heroes; they looked like two boys panting behind a fallen animal. Arin laughed once, high and between breaths, and punched Kael's shoulder with a practiced affection. "Not bad for a ledger-boy," he said, grinning.
Kael's ribs burned where the creature had struck. He tasted blood at the back of his throat. Yet under the ache there was a warmth that had nothing to do with Arin's ember: the satisfaction of the shadow obeying not as a stranger forced to comply, but as an ally learning the rhythm of a new partner. The thought came too fast—dangerous, bright: the shadow could do things with practice; it could become a tool.
When the creature finally stilled, something odd happened. From its flank, beneath a ragged fold of hide, a small disk lay embedded like a coin pressed into flesh. It was not metal as Kael first supposed, but a thin plate of something that hummed faintly to his touch with a low, cold note. On it were marks—tiny runes that crawled along the edge like ants.
He pulled back and the shadow recoiled in reflexive wariness. The disk was older than Emberfall. It wore the language of ruins, of the kind of things Liora might someday read. Kael wrapped his fingers around it and felt the cold whisper through his bones. For a breath he saw shapes that were not here: arches of light, a gate half-open, the silhouette of something immense walking a sky.
"Keep it," Arin said abruptly, eyes bright with the greedy curiosity that kept him well-fed on impossible plans. "We'll show it to someone who knows things. Maybe it's worth coin—maybe it's worth learning."
Kael nearly handed it to him, then clutched it back. He felt the plate's hum like a promise and a threat braided together. He had learned, in the course of the fight, that some things answered when called; some things answered only when they chose to. The disk had not called him. It had been bound to a beast. It had a history that might not be kind to a boy who opened doors he did not yet understand.
They carried the heavy creature back toward Emberfall with a mix of brute strength and shy pride. Villagers who saw them paused midway through chores and stared, then rushed to help; hands that had never lifted more than a basket found traction on a flank; voices rose in a human chorus of relief and exultation. Old Maren wept and cursed and laughed in one breath. The boys who had knelt now puffed out their chests as if they had always planned to follow.
That night Kael sat with the coin-disk on his lap and wrote in his notebook: Shadow answers when you speak simply. Do not think of faces. Do not pray. The markings make a sound like a bell inside the chest. He drew the rune again and again until the lines were worn into the paper.
He slept badly and woke with a scab where he'd been struck, with the shadow lying against his arm like a patient animal, and with a new, sharper hunger coiled in his chest: not for bread or for praise, but for understanding. The runes—those cold, tiny ants—waited under the fold of his cloak like a secretive coin. Outside, the river hummed its same small sermon. The village breathed and did its accounting.
Kael closed his eyes and listened. The shadow under his skin answered with a small, steady pulse. He did not know all the words it would yet teach him. But he had found one truth on the riverbank among the reeds: when fear receded and thought took a single clear shape, the dark would answer.