The Stormborn
The first thing Kael knew was the taste of dust.
It coated his tongue as he wailed into the world, swaddled in rags and cradled against his mother's chest. Mira, her face etched with sun and scars, named him with a word that took no breath to scream. "Kael," she whispered, her voice rasping like sand on stone. "A driftling's name. Short. Easy to bury."
She didn't know he'd been born before.
He arrived with memories tangled in his skull—sterile rooms, beeping machines, a pendant glowing with a color that didn't exist. Liam, he thought, testing the name. It felt foreign now, a relic from a world of softness and laws. Here, there was only the Ashen Wastes, a desert that stretched endless and angry under a sun that scorched the sky white.
Mira kept them moving. Driftlings who stayed too long in one place attracted slavers or Hollowed. Their home was a patched tent, their wealth a rusted dagger and a obsidian pendant she tucked beneath his cradle. "Bad luck charm," she called it. "But bad luck's better than none."
Kael grew beneath that pendant's shadow. By the time he could walk, he understood the rules:
- Water was measured in drops, stolen from thornroot cacti or siphoned from the air with sun-bleached cloth.
- Trust was a currency spent only once.
- Veil-Thread was death unless you knew how to cheat it.
The Thread fascinated him. It shimmered in fissures that split the earth like wounds, warping the air with amber light. Mira warned him to avoid it, but his left eye saw patterns in its glow—*fractals*, his past-life mind supplied. Equations. The pendant's symbols mirrored them, though Mira couldn't read the jagged script.
"What's this mean?" he asked once, tracing a symbol.
She slapped his hand. "Questions get you caged."
He learned to ask silently.
When he was five, House Voryn's soldiers raided their camp. Kael hid inside a hollowed-out wagon axle, clutching the pendant, as they dragged off a boy he'd shared scraps with days before. The boy screamed for his mother until a soldier gagged him with a strip of Voidsteel cloth.
"Why?" Kael asked later, voice trembling.
Mira spat into the fire. "Bloodmarked think the wastes belong to them. We're just rats in their walls."
That night, the pendant glowed, and memories of Liam's death flooded Kael's dreams—the hospice bed, the pills, the light that wasn't a color. He woke with a word lodged in his throat: "Unfair."
Mira heard it. She gripped his shoulders, her nails biting flesh. "Fair's a lie the strong tell the weak. You want to live? Become a lie."
He tried.
By seven, he could pick a Voidsteel lock with a bent nail and spot a Veil-Thread fissure from a mile away. By nine, he'd memorized the slavers' patrol routes and the Hollowed's hunting grounds. But knowledge made him reckless.
One afternoon, while Mira bartered scavenged metal in Ironreach—a festering slum outside House Voryn's walls—he crept to a Thread fissure. Its energy hummed, resonating with the pendant at his chest. For a moment, he understood it that the way threads of light bent like magnetic fields, the way heat pooled in fractal spirals.
He reached out.
The Thread lashed his arm, searing skin to blackened meat. Pain blinded him, but beneath it, a voice hissed: "Anchor… remember…"
Mira found him convulsing, the pendant pulsing like a dying star. She didn't ask questions. She pressed a red-hot knife to his wound, sealing it with a sizzle of flesh. "You want death? It's easy here. Living's the fight."
He fought.
A year later, a wandering scholar stumbled into their camp. Eldrin, his robes stained with Thread-burns, stared at the pendant with widening eyes. "Oathbound script," he muttered. "This symbol Ilthara's Chain binds soul to purpose. And this… Kyrion's Shadow. The Hollow King's mark."
"What's it mean?" Kael asked.
Eldrin paled. "It means you're a key. And keys get turned."
That night, the pendant showed Kael visions:
- A woman in white robes (Ilthara) weaving Thread into a crown.
- A man (Kyrion) screaming as the crown devoured him, leaving only the Hollow King.
- A light Ilthara's Light that burned a color Verkath had never seen.
Mira shook him awake. "You were screaming," she said, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
"I don't want to be a key," he whispered.
She handed him a dagger. "Then be a knife."
The Veil-Storm came when he was fifteen. It wasn't a natural storm but a living thing, a hurricane of sand and Thread that devoured the horizon. Their tent collapsed, snapping Mira's leg beneath a metal beam. Kael dragged her to a buried Oathbound ruin, its walls carved with murals of a world he didn't recognize—trees taller than citadels, rivers that sparkled blue, skies unbroken by acid clouds.
The Hollowed came at dusk. Three of them, their jaws unhinged, claws dripping with Thread. Kael stood over Mira, dagger raised, as the pendant pulsed.
"Anchor," the voice urged.
He obeyed.
Thread surged from the ruin's walls, slicing the Hollowed into ash. Mira stared at him, fear and pride warring in her gaze. "You're Threadsick now. They'll hunt you for it."
"Let them," he said.
Mira died two years later. Not to slavers or Hollowed, but to a fever that cooked her from within. Her final gift was a journal filled with sketches of Veil-Thread patterns and a single entry:
"The Houses say we're nothing. They're wrong. We're the sand that wears down their stone. Be relentless, Kael. Be a storm."
That night, the Hollow King's voice slithered into his dreams:
"You cheated death twice. Let me teach you to own it."
Kael packed the journal, his dagger, and the pendant.
He walked into the wastes, the sand biting his face.
The storm welcomed him.