The flame danced between Cael's fingers—flickering, fragile, and faint.
But it obeyed him.
That alone felt like a miracle.
He sat beneath the ruins of a half-buried tower, wind howling above as his breath curled like smoke. His eyes were sunken, his lips chapped, but his hands… his hands were steady. Controlled.
He'd learned to draw Essentia from the environment. The air here was cold, brittle, but filled with something raw—like potential waiting to be shaped.
The shard, still faintly pulsing within his awareness, had grown quieter—but more present.
Like it was no longer whispering to him, but through him.
He could feel it.
A weight behind every symbol he traced.
A rhythm beneath every incantation he dared speak.
Pattern and Instinct
He spent days practicing—scratching new runes into ice with burnt bone or brittle wood.
Some created light.
Some warmed the air.
One, etched in a spiral, had caused a strange distortion in his vision. Just for a moment.
But he remembered the feeling.
A pull.
A bending of space.
As if something beneath the surface of this world had twitched.
Something Watches
It started small. A flicker of movement on the edge of his vision. A second shadow in the fog.
He dismissed it as paranoia—until the first howl came.
Low. Guttural. Alien.
He froze.
Then came the second howl. Closer.
He turned, slowly, heart pounding, and caught a glimpse—only a glimpse—of movement. Four limbs. A hunched back. And eyes like carved obsidian, glowing faintly purple.
It wasn't a creature of flesh.
It was… a wound.
Like reality had bled and formed teeth.
The First Fight
It lunged.
Cael barely rolled aside, his half-dead body scraping across frost-bitten stone. The creature slammed into the ground where he'd stood, the impact cracking the ice like glass.
Cael screamed, instinctively throwing both hands forward.
"Vael!"
The flame burst—larger this time. The creature hissed, retching backward as fire caught its shoulder. But it didn't scream. It didn't bleed.
It simply stared.
And then it glitched—disappearing for half a second in a static shimmer, then reappearing inches from him.
Cael's mind reeled.
It's not a beast. It's a manifestation. A fracture-born echo.
A leftover. From whatever shattered this place.
He had no time to think.
He reached for Essentia again—not fire this time. Something deeper.
The shard pulsed.
And Cael whispered a new symbol. One he hadn't written.
"Tseron."
Void's Touch
The air around him dropped in temperature instantly. Ice crystals formed along his outstretched arm.
And then: silence.
Reality around him bent inward. The creature stopped moving—frozen mid-lunge, like the world had forgotten it existed.
And then it crumbled—not into ash or blood, but into dust-like static, unraveling before his eyes.
The rune he had drawn beneath his palm glowed black, then vanished.
Cael stared at his hand, stunned.
What had he just done?
-
He didn't sleep that night.
Not because he couldn't, but because he didn't want to.
The Void spell—Tseron—hadn't just come to him. It had been given. Offered.
And he had accepted.
He now knew what kind of magic would answer him first.
Not flame. Not light.
Void.
And the world around him… was full of it.
-
He looked up into the endless night sky of the Glacien Wastes.
Above him, the stars did not twinkle.
They watched.
And somewhere deep beneath the ice, the whispers returned.
"Good. Learn. Become."
And Cael, still shaking, still bleeding, still afraid—
Smiled again.