The darkness didn't feel so cold or empty; it was loud.
First came the screech—an unnatural wail, rising and falling like a dying beast. Wee-ooo. Wee-ooo! The sound drilled into the back of his skull, an alien and impossible noise.
Beneath it came the distinct, terrifying sensation of a tether fraying deep in his chest. It didn't hurt like it had hours before, when the agony felt as though every part of his body was giving up—that sickening rush of falling, only to strike something immovably hard. Now, it was just a slow, heavy sinking into black water.
He could feel the exact moment his body surrendered. The frantic, desperate rhythm of his heart staggered, skipped, and then flattened into a terrible, absolute stillness. The vital heat in his veins stopped trying to fight the creeping cold, draining away until the chaotic, messy hum of being alive simply evaporated, leaving nothing behind but a weightless, suffocating static.
Then, the voices followed, muffled and vibrating as if passing through a medium thicker than air.
"BP is crashing. Get the line in."
"He's gone. Call it."
"Time?"
"02:45."
The numbers meant nothing to him, and the language felt like the jagged, lingering memory of a tongue he had never spoken, yet somehow intrinsically understood. Panic fluttered in his chest—not the hardened fear of a warrior, but a small, pathetic terror. A phantom sensation gripped him: the press of cold tiles against his cheek, paired with the harsh stench of sharp medicinal spirits and blood. Then, the suffocating hum took him, a heavy distortion that tasted bitterly of copper. The wailing sirens warped, stretching outward into a long, singular tone until it finally snapped.
He gasped, sitting bolt upright in the dark.
His forehead cracked against the low wooden slat of the bunk above him with a hollow thud.
"Ow. Curses!"
He clamped a hand over his mouth, freezing in place. The room remained silent save for the rhythmic, congested breathing of twelve other children. He waited, listening to the rain drum heavily against the slate roof, letting the steady downpour wash away the phantom wails of his dream. Soon, it was gone. There was only the rain, the damp smell of mildew and drying wool, and the faint, sweet scent of rotted hay wafting from the floorboards.
He rubbed the knot already forming on his brow. His skin felt hot. It wasn't feverish, but rather buzzing with a strange energy, as though he had slept pressed against an open furnace. He exhaled slowly, watching his breath form a pale mist in the frigid air of the dormitory.
A floorboard creaked to his left.
He didn't bother to look. He simply reached out into the dark, his hand closing with flawless accuracy around a small, trembling wrist inching toward his nightstand.
"Drop it, Jory."
The boy froze instantly. "I wasn't stealing."
"You were stealing the dried apple slice I saved. I heard your stomach growling from across the room. It sounds like a drowning cat."
"I'm hungry, Elian."
"We're all hungry. Go back to sleep."
"Can't."
Elian sighed, the sound heavy and thick with sheer exhaustion. He released the boy's wrist and swung his legs over the side of the cot. The stone floor was like pure ice against his bare feet. He scrubbed his face, trying to physically wipe the sleep and the fading anxiety of the strange dream from his eyes.
"Why can't you sleep?" Elian whispered, keeping his voice pitched low to avoid waking the mound of blankets on the adjacent cot—Myra, who habitually slept with a sharpened spoon under her pillow.
"My leg hurts," Jory whispered back. The six-year-old hunched over and clutched his shin. "It's throbbing again. Since the rain started."
Elian squinted through the dark. "Come here."
Jory stepped closer. Elian didn't light a candle; candles cost copper, and copper was strictly reserved for bread. Instead, he relied on the faint, silvery moonlight filtering through the cracks in the shuttered window. He pulled Jory's pant leg up. Even in the dimness, he could easily trace the twisted scar tissue where a heavy cart wheel had crushed the bone two years prior. It wasn't inflamed, but the underlying muscle was tight and knotted with tension.
"It's the damp," Elian muttered softly. "Makes the bone ache."
"Make it stop?" Jory asked. It wasn't a question of Elian's ability; it was a child's request. The kid knew Elian had 'warm hands.' That was what the orphans called it. Not magic.
Just warm hands.
Elian hesitated. He was deeply tired, and his own ribs still ached from a sparring match three days ago that he hadn't bothered to heal properly to conserve energy. But Jory was shivering in the cold.
"Fine. Give me your hand."
"My leg hurts, not my hand."
"Give me your hand, idiot. I need to grasp something."
Jory placed his small, grimy hand in Elian's. Elian closed his eyes. He didn't murmur a chant or focus on some mystical spiritual wellspring as any stereotypical protagonist would. He just 'pushed'. He located the dense knot of pain in the boy's shin—a sharp, jagged dissonance in his mind's eye—and visualized it turning into fluid.
Shift.
The sensation was swift. A dull, sickening throb erupted directly in Elian's own left shin. It felt precisely like someone had kicked him hard with a steel-toed boot. He bit the inside of his cheek to swallow a hiss, his grip on Jory's hand tightening involuntarily against the pain.
The relief on Jory's face was instant. The boy's hunched shoulders dropped.
"Better?" Elian rasped, his voice tight with the transferred ache.
"Yeah. It's warm."
"Good. Now go back to sleep before I feed your breakfast to the rats."
Jory happily scurried quietly back to his pile of straw and blankets.
Elian sat there for a moment in the dark, gently massaging his own leg. The pain was sharp, throbbing in perfect time with his heartbeat. He waited patiently for it to settle into a dull, familiar ache—the kind he could easily ignore. Stupid, he thought to himself. "Now I have a limp for the morning run." He stood up, testing his weight on the leg. It held. Reaching down, he grabbed his tunic from the floor, shaking it out vigorously to dislodge any resting spiders.
"You spoil him," a voice croaked from the opposite side of the room.
Elian paused, pulling the rough tunic over his head. "Go back to sleep, Myra."
"You took his hurt again, didn't you?" Myra sat up. At 29, she was sharp-featured and sharp-tongued, serving as the unofficial matron of their little pack of strays. "I saw you wince."
"I stubbed my toe."
"Liar."
"I bumped my head on the bunk. You heard it."
"You're going to burn out," she whispered, the fierce accusation slicing through the darkness. "You walk around looking like a corpse half the week. One of these days you're just going to drop, and then who's going to stop Miller from selling us to the dye factories?"
Elian walked over to the window, peering cautiously through the wooden slats. The Graygate district was quiet, save for the distant, rhythmic patrol of the city guard pacing the upper walls. Far above their squalor, the white stone of Demacia proper gleamed in the far distance—untouchable, elevated, and pristine. Down here, life was nothing but mud and rotting timber.
"I eat enough," Elian said, his tone deliberately dismissive. "I'm fine."
"You eat like a horse and look like a scarecrow."
"Never met a meal I couldn't finish, and never gained a pound. It's a gift."
"It's unnatural."
Elian turned, leaning his back flat against the cold, damp wall. "Careful with that word, Myra. 'Unnatural' gets people put in chains around here."
The silence that followed was heavy and fraught. They both knew the kingdom's brutal rules. In Demacia, magic was a disease. A rot. If you had it, you hid it; otherwise, the Mageseekers dragged you to the holding cells to drink Petricite until you were hollowed out.
"I didn't mean it like that," she muttered, her tone softening. "Just... stop doing it for every little ache. Jory can handle a sore leg."
"If he doesn't sleep, he's cranky. If he's cranky, he slows us down. If we're slow, we miss the morning market shipments. It's logistics, Myra. Purely practical."
"Right. Practical." She snorted softly, lying back down on her thin mattress. "You're a terrible liar, Elian. You just can't stand the noise."
"What noise?"
"Exactly, that's the problem with you—always thinking too much and feeling too little when it counts."
Elian didn't offer an answer. He simply turned back to gaze out the window. She wasn't entirely wrong. It wasn't empathy driving him, exactly. It was an overwhelming annoyance. Pain was incredibly loud to him. It was discordant—a wrong, screeching note in a song, and his brain would endlessly itch until he fixed the tuning. Selfish? Probably. But a man can only take so much wailing before he fixes the problem just to shut it up.
"Go to sleep," he said again, his voice flat. "I'm headin' out for patrol."
"It's raining."
"Mud hides tracks. Best time to see if anyone's been scouting the alley."
He grabbed his sword belt from the rusted hook by the door. The leather was worn thin, the brass buckle tarnished dull. The sword itself was an old estoc he had scavenged from a dead soldier three years prior—meticulously cleaned, polished, and sharpened until the edge could split a hair. It was far too nice a weapon for a slum rat, so he kept the scabbard wrapped in coarse burlap whenever he ventured out. He strapped it on, feeling the familiar, grounding weight settle securely onto his hips. Reaching over, he grabbed his heater shield, sliding his left arm smoothly through the leather straps. The wood was heavily battered and painted a nondescript, muddy brown to obscure the solid iron reinforcement beneath.
"Eli?" Myra's voice was barely a whisper now.
"What."
"Don't die."
"The way I see it, I'd rather face a sword than you with a full laundry basket."
He slipped out the heavy wooden door, closing it softly to reduce the noise. The rain hit him instantly, freezing and biting at his skin. The Graygate streets smelled intensely of wet ash and open sewage. Elian pulled his hood up over his head, hunching his shoulders against the creeping chill. His left leg throbbed with the fresh ghost of Jory's pain. He started walking, his boots squelching rhythmically in the deep mud. He moved with a peculiar, rolling gait—weight shifted forward, knees slightly bent, his eyes continually scanning the deep shadows for subtle disturbances in the air.
He reached the end of the narrow alley and paused.
His neck prickled. The hair on his arms stood straight up.
The air tasted like sparks.
It was faint, barely there, but it distinctly smelled like a violent thunderstorm trapped tightly in a bottle. Elian stopped entirely, his right hand drifting instinctively to the hilt of his burlap-wrapped sword. He sniffed the damp air again. Although there was the usual and natural smell of a downpour. What worried him was the sharp, metallic scent of unleashed magic.
And it was close.
"Great," he whispered to the empty, rain-slicked street, his voice utterly devoid of enthusiasm. "Just great. Mageseekers or a rogue? Let's flip a coin."
Though of course he didn't do it literally, but instead adjusted his shield, rolled his neck until the vertebrae popped, and stepped out of the safety of the alley. He walked straight toward the smell of trouble with the weary resignation of a man heading to a job he despised.
"If I miss breakfast for this," he muttered, "someone's definitely getting it."
The smell grew sharper, settling like old copper on the back of his tongue. Elian followed it, stepping over a puddle of questionable slurry without bothering to look down. He kept his left arm loose, the shield shifting slightly with his stride. The alley narrowed, choked by rotting crates and the skeletal remains of an abandoned cart. The rain here was less a downpour and more a persistent, freezing mist that clung to everything it touched.
He stopped.
His Thread-Hum—that nagging, dissonant vibration at the base of his skull—spiked. It was a low, wobbly note. Someone wasn't dying, but they were certainly getting close to that point.
"You're loud," Elian said to the darkness.
A stack of crates ten feet away rattled. A figure uncurled from the shadows, frantic and fast. A hand shot out, palm facing forward. A sudden flare of violet light cracked the gloom, illuminating a desperate, dirt-streaked face.
"Stay back!" the stranger hissed. The voice was young, male, and cracking with panic. "I'll kill you! I swear it!"
Elian didn't draw his sword. He didn't even raise his shield. He just sighed, wiping the freezing mist from his eyes with his free hand.
"Keep your voice down," Elian said, his tone perfectly flat. "Mrs. Gable lives in the flat above you. She throws chamber pots at noise. Trust me, you don't want that."
"I said back off!" The violet light in the boy's hand flared brighter, sizzling aggressively against the damp air. It was unstable, flickering like a torch caught in a gale.
Elian tilted his head, squinting at the harsh light. "You're burning through it fast. You'll be on the ground before I finish this sentence if you keep going."
"I'm warning you—"
"You're not warning me. You're drawing an audience." Elian took an intentional step forward.
The boy panicked. He thrust his hand out fruther, releasing a jagged bolt of arcane energy. It was a sloppy cast, aimed wide out of sheer terror. Elian didn't dodge; simply twisting his torso a few inches to the left. The bolt hissed past his ear, clipping a few stray hairs, and slapped harmlessly into the wet brick wall behind him with a sharp pop.
"Missed," Elian noted.
"I—I slipped."
"You have a concussion. Your pupils are two different sizes." Elian kept walking at an infuriating pace. "And you're favoring your right side. Ribs?"
The boy scrambled backward, his shoulders hitting the dead end of the alley. He looked like a cornered rat—eyes wide, chest heaving. He tried to summon the violent light again, but it sputtered out into a few weak, pathetic sparks. He clutched his side with a wet groan.
"Please," the boy wheezed, the aggression rapidly draining out of him as the pain took over. "I didn't... I didn't mean to start the fire. It just happened."
Elian stopped three feet away, looking down. Up close, the kid looked barely fourteen. He wore a tunic that had once been fine wool, now shredded and stained heavy with mud and dried blood.
"Start what fire?" Elian asked.
"The... the bakery. Two streets over."
Elian rubbed his temples, a headache already blooming. "That was you? Damn it, I buy bread there. The sourdough was decent."
"I was just... I was hungry. The owner yelled at me and it just... came out." The boy slid down the rough brick wall, collapsing into the mud. "Are you a Seeker?"
"Do I look like I'm wearing a half-mask and a white cloak?"
"You have a sword."
"It's a dangerous neighborhood."
Elian knelt down, forcing himself to ignore the sharp ache flaring in his own shin. "Let me see."
"Don't touch me."
"Look, if I wanted to hurt you, I'd have let you pass out in the mud and waited for the rats to start nibbling. Lift the tunic."
The boy hesitated, shivering violently in the cold mist, but ultimately obeyed. He pulled up the sodden wool.
Elian winced sympathetically. The bruising was a deep, ugly purple, blossoming violently across the ribcage. In the center of the swelling was the distinct imprint of a boot.
"Someone kicked you hard," Elian muttered. He hovered his hand over the injury, intentionally keeping a hair's breadth from the skin.
He could hear the hum of the fracture—a sharp, grinding dissonance in the boy's life-song. Two ribs cracked. One minor strain. Nothing punctured, luckily.
"The baker," the boy whispered, his teeth chattering. "He... he had steel toes."
"What'd you expect? Flour doesn't turn to loaves on its own." Elian murmured, his mind already drifting. He was weighing the cost. He could fix this. A quick shove of vitality to knit the bone and disperse the pooling blood. It would cost him... maybe a skipped meal and a blinding headache. But if he used his magic out here in the open, and the Mageseekers tracked the arcane scent...
"Is it bad?" the boy asked.
"It's not good. You can't run on this." Elian stood up, his decision made. No magic. Not here. It was too exposed.
"Are you going to turn me in?"
"For what? Burning a bakery? That's a civil matter. Being a mage? That's a death sentence." Elian unclasped his cloak—a rough, patchy garment made of stitched-together wool blankets—and tossed it at the boy. "Wrap that around you. It smells like a wet dog, but it's warm."
The boy caught it, clutching it to his chest in confusion. "Why?"
"Because if you freeze to death on my patrol route, I'm not dragging dead weight halfway across town just because you couldn't find a fire." Elian offered a bare hand. "Get up."
The boy stared at the hand, then up at Elian's face, desperately searching for the trap. Finding none, he reached out.
Elian pulled him up. The boy stumbled forward, gasping sharply as his broken ribs protested the sudden shift in gravity. Elian caught him, effortlessly adjusting his own stance to absorb the boy's dead weight.
"Easy. Don't breathe so deep."
"Who are you?"
"Nobody important. Name's Elian."
"I'm... Kal."
"Great. Kal. Now, we're going to walk. Very slowly. You're going to keep your mouth shut, and you are absolutely not going to do that sparkly hand thing again. Understand?"
"Where are we headed?"
"Somewhere you're not going to bleed out. Hopefully." Elian adjusted his grip, pulling Kal's arm over his shoulder to let the boy lean heavily on his uninjured side. "Can you walk?"
"I think so."
"Good. Because carrying you looks suspicious."
They started moving back toward the alley entrance. The rain was picking up, drumming a heavy, unforgiving rhythm against the paved road. Elian scanned the street ahead, his senses stretched painfully thin. The sharp scent of Kal's magic was fading, washed down into the gutters by the rain, but it was still there if you knew exactly what to sniff for.
"Elian?"
"What."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Elian grunted, steering them carefully around a deep, muddy pothole. "You haven't tasted my cooking."
They turned the corner, and Elian stopped dead.
At the far end of the street, two figures stood beneath the sputtering halo of a streetlamp. They wore heavy white cloaks that seemed to repel the rain, their faces entirely obscured by half-masks of pale, polished gray stone.
Mageseekers.
They weren't looking at Elian. Their masked heads were bowed, entirely focused on a heavy brass mechanism held between them. A seeker compass. Its needle glowed with a faint, agitated light, twitching erratically.
Elian felt Kal stiffen against his side. The boy's breathing hitched, his panic spiking instantly into a sharp, terrifying hum.
"Easy," Elian whispered, his voice barely a breath. He didn't flinch. He didn't attempt to turn around. He just tightened his grip on Kal's shoulder in a vice-like warning.
"They're looking for me," Kael squeaked.
"Shut up," Elian murmured. "Slouch. Look drunk."
"What?"
"You heard me. Slouch."
Elian suddenly slumped his own posture, his efficient, balanced gait instantly devolving into a sloppy shamble. He let out a loud, hacking cough that sounded wet and thoroughly miserable.
"Come on, you useless lump!" Elian shouted—loudly, slurring the consonants together as he shoved Kal slightly, forcing the boy to stumble off-balance. "I told you the ale was bad! I told you!"
The Mageseekers snapped their heads up. The one holding the compass turned the heavy brass device directly toward them. The needle wavered, unsure.
Elian dragged Kal forward, stepping right into the pool of light. It was the absolute last thing a fugitive would ever do. It was the only thing a drunk idiot would do.
"Oi, Mageseeker!" Elian called out, waving his free hand in a wide, uncoordinated arc. "Hey! Seeker! This idiot... he threw up on my boots! Is that a crime? Tell me that's a crime!"
The Mageseeker on the left stepped forward, his gloved hand resting casually on the hilt of a steel truncheon. "Identify yourself, citizen."
Elian stopped, swaying noticeably on his feet. He patted his own chest, then slapped Kal's chest with a clumsy hand, looking entirely bewildered. "I'm... I'm Elijah. This is... my cousin. From the... the farm. He can't hold his liquor. Look at him!"
He grabbed Kal's chin and forced the boy's face up toward the light. Kal looked appropriately terrified, pale, and slick with cold sweat.
"He looks ill," the Mageseeker noted, his voice flat and muffled behind the stone.
"He's wasted!" Elian insisted loudly. "And likely has the flux. Don't breathe too deep, sir. It's catchy."
The compass in the other Mageseeker's hand twitched. The needle pointed vaguely at Kal, drifted back toward Elian, and then began to spin in a slow, confused circle.
Elian didn't breathe. Not for lack of air, but for lack of wanting to disturb whatever this definitely bright idea this was.
He clamped down brutally on his own internal 'hum'. He seized the warm, circulating vitality in his chest and buried it deep into his gut, forcing his core temperature to plummet until his skin felt like cold clay. Nothing to see here. Just a tired, sickly, non-magical nobody.
The Mageseeker stared at them in silence. The rain hissed against their featureless stone masks.
"Get him off the street," the Mageseeker finally said, disgust dripping from the muffled words. "Curfew is around the corner."
"Yes, sir. Absolutely. Right away." Elian grabbed Kal roughly by the scruff of the neck, hauling him forward. "Move it, you disgrace. Auntie Martha is going to kill you."
They shambled past the patrol. Elian could feel the heavy, judgmental gaze of the masked men drilling into the space between his shoulder blades. He didn't speed up. He didn't look back. He maintained the drunken, uneven stumble until they finally turned the corner and vanished into the shadows of the next alley.