Time did what time always does: it pushed forward and polished nothing. Two years became three. Three became five. The world around Cain settled into patterns he memorized like the routes of enemy patrols: the times the market bells rang, which nobles rode down the main road on gilded horses, when the church's prayer bell woke the town. Each repetition fed him — information, comfort, leverage.
By five his voice fit around words. By five he could walk the lane without an adult's hand. By five, the ritual he'd been told about since he first learned the word MARKED was waiting like a blade at his throat.
"Marked." The word tasted of light and law.
In this world, marks were everything.
They split the children of the realm into two kinds: the blessed, who carried the Order's sigil on their backs and emitted a faint, holy glow when they touched a consecrated Ord; and the common, who did not. The marked could apprentice with priests and become conduits of divine power. They could stand in courts and be recognized; they could be chosen by nobles for offices and favors. The unmarked lived under a different sky — smaller, quieter, often hungry.
Discrimination was the architecture of the world. Noble houses stitched themselves to marks like precious thread. Guilds only accepted those who bore the sign. Farms and shops collected whispers about families with unmarked children as if superstition were currency. The law itself bent around sacred light.
Cain had learned this not from books — he had not yet been taken to the academy — but from the way strangers glanced at Seraphina when she carried him through the market, from the coldness in a merchant's voice when Leon mentioned a marriage dowry, from the way the priest's boys trained in the square with ord-blessed staffs while other children fetched water.
He learned the word ORD before he learned how to tie his shoes.
Ord was the term priests used for the crystalline relic that tested a child on their fifth year. When the Ord was placed against a child's chest, the blessed would glow. A sigil would press, briefly, into skin showing their divine patron. The light was like truth, and truth bent law.
For months leading up to the day, Cain watched the old priest, Master Varr, bless other children in private — small ceremonies that left children smiling and parents weeping with pride. He watched Master Varr's hands, the way they trembled when a new sigil bloomed. Cain memorized the sequence of moves, the phrases whispered like recipes, the pause when the relic met flesh and the priest held his breath.
He practiced the ceremony in his head as a soldier practices a march: steps, phrasing, timing. He catalogued reactions — what a proud father looked like, what a priest's trembling meant, how a crowd exhaled when light appeared. He stored the memory as if it were a map of the world.
On the morning the Arkwrights brought him to the chapel, the town smelled like wet stone and burning oil. Flags hung from windows — blue and gold for the season of blessings. Neighbors peered out. Mothers tightened cloaks around their children. Even the dogs were quieter than normal.
Leon walked with Cain at his side, a protective shadow. Seraphina's fingers were white around his hand. They all wore the practiced faces of people who want the world to be kind to something they love.
The chapel was smaller than Cain had imagined in his studies — stony, low-beamed, carved with saints whose faces had long ago been softened by centuries of smoke. Master Varr stood before the altar: stooped, hair like frost, eyes sharp as a blade in a sheath. He greeted the family as if each voice had weight.
"We do not force gods," he told them quietly, but his palms were steady. "The Ord is the test. It shows us what is already there."
They stepped forward, one by one. Other families had come too: five-year-olds wobbling in new shoes, mothers smoothing hems like armor. The air hummed with hope and fear.
Cain sat on the small stool with his feet not quite touching the flagstones. He felt every eye on him, cataloged each of them for threats and for kindness. He tasted his mother's fear like copper.
Master Varr took the Ord from its velvet bed. The relic was a polished shard that seemed to drink in the dim light and then hold it, like a trapped star. When he raised it, people leaned forward. The priest's voice was a low chant — words old as the law. He placed the Ord on the arm of the first child. Light bloomed like a sunrise in miniature. The child gave a sob of laughter; parents kissed foreheads. The sigil seared a pattern for a heartbeat on the child's skin, then sank in, leaving a faint afterglow.
A cheer flickered through the room. Cain watched the way the air changed — how some faces tilted toward that light like moths. He saw a woman wipe her eyes and a man straighten his back as if he himself had been blessed.
Then it was his turn.
Master Varr's hand was steady when he took Cain in. He smelled of incense and old paper. The Ord looked up at Cain as if expecting honesty.
"Do not be afraid," Seraphina whispered. Her voice was a net, catching him.
He was not afraid in the way others meant. He was not small; his fear was a soldier's recognition that a trap might be waiting. He let them place the Ord against the soft part of his chest.
The relic touched his skin.
Master Varr intoned the invocation.
The chapel held its breath.
The Ord looked for the light it always found.
NOTHING HAPPENED.
At first, Master Varr frowned and blinked. The Ord's polished face caught the candlelight and threw it back, but there was no bloom, no halo, no sigil burning into flesh. The priest shifted, as if the relic had slipped on soap, and he whispered a corrective phrase. The Ord touched Cain again, lower now, over his shoulder blade — an old place where marks are said to anchor.
Silence.
Seraphina's fingers tightened into a fist. Leon's jaw was a hard line. Whispers began like a scratch at the back of a door.
Master Varr's face drained of color, the frost of his hair seeming to sharpen into a blade. He repeated the sequence. He closed his eyes, murmured the prayer with more force, pressed the Ord with the practiced weight of one who had seen sigils bloom a thousand times.
Still nothing.
For a heartbeat that felt like an hour the chapel existed in a different gravity. The other children looked down at their small knees, the parents too stunned to clap with the joy they'd rehearsed. The priest's hands trembled now; age or the strain of something unnameable. He set the Ord down as if it were suddenly a dangerous thing.
"Master?" a voice — thin, the voice of a priest's apprentice — asked.
Master Varr's eyes snapped open. They were not quite human in that moment; they were priest and scholar, and something else: raw, terrified curiosity. He peered at Cain as if the child were a map with no north.
"Check his back," he said to the apprentice. His voice had the edge of command laced with the surprise of a man whose religion had just been asked to explain the impossible.
Hands moved to lift Cain's shirt. The room seemed to inhale collectively. Fingers brushed skin and then paused over the hollow of Cain's shoulder blades where the mark should have nested. The apprentice's hand shook.
"There's no—" he started.
"No?" Seraphina said, voice small.
"No mark," the apprentice finished.
Master Varr's expression split — professionalism cracking into something like fear. He did not yet say the word aloud that everyone in that vaulted room knew but dared not name: UNMARKED. Instead he walked the ceremony a second time, thrice, a dozen times if it would break whatever error he suspected. He repeated prayers faster, louder. The Ord remained a silent stone.
It was not a technical fault. People who had watched from childhood recognized the difference between a pale relic and a dead one. The Ord sang for others. It did not sing for him.
A low murmur rose, curling into whispers that smelled of gossip and prophecy. In one corner a woman with two marked sons pressed fingers to her lips as if the sound might carry danger. A child stared at Cain with the greedy interest of someone seeing a prize he did not yet understand.
Leon's hand closed over Cain's tiny shoulder with the force of a man who did not trust the world to be gentle. Seraphina's face had gone an odd shade — paler than before, but not the sick of fever: the pale of someone whose map had been erased.
Master Varr bent low, so his breath brushed Cain's ear. His voice was no longer the calm cadence of scripture. It had the thin edge of a man who had seen a door he thought closed swing open again.
"THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN," he whispered. "Unmarked children do not — there is no recorded case in five centuries. Our laws have no provision. The Ord has never been silent."
Seraphina's hand fluttered to her mouth. Leon's knuckles whitened.
The chapel's warmth curdled into cold.
Outside, the town's bells kept their steady, indifferent rhythm. Inside the chapel, a different clock had begun: a clock that would count the hours until rumor became law and law became threat.
Cain felt the change like a pressure shifting in his chest. People's eyes slid over him now with a new, calculating hunger. He catalogued the reactions — who looked afraid, who looked curious, who looked like a predator measuring the size of its prey.
He had known marginalization in another life, but never so literal: to be the thing that did not exist. To be a void in the world's ledger.
Master Varr lifted his head, his face a mask of learned dread. He addressed the family with an evenness that was effort, not peace.
"We must take him to the Council," he said. "There are procedures — old ones — and I will write. For now — no one must speak of this outside these walls. Not yet."
Leon's laugh was a sound that tried to be small but broke on the air. "Old ones? He's a child." There was steel underneath, a soldier's barrier rising.
"You do not understand," Master Varr said. "If he truly is unmarked… the consequences are—"
"We will protect him," Seraphina said quickly. The words were a shield and a promise. She did not yet know the price that shield would demand.
But the room had already shifted. Whispers that had been coiled now began to spread like small flames under dry straw. A mother crossed herself as if shielding her children. A man selling ord-blessed trinkets averted his eyes as if profit might be stained by proximity.
Cain felt small hands — two, four, ten — reaching with attitudes between pity, curiosity, reverence, and dread. His internal map updated instantly. Where there had been warmth, there was now calculation.
Master Varr avoided his gaze as the family gathered their belongings. The apprentice muttered the forbidden word at last, voice barely a breath:
"Unmarked."
The word hit Cain's ears like a bell that did not belong to this world.
He was five years old.
He watched his parents' faces: Leon's jaw tight, Seraphina's trembling hand. For the first time, fear bloomed not for himself — but for THEM, the people who loved him. The town, the nobles, the laws — all of it would turn toward them.
Outside the chapel, banners stirred lazily in the wind. The world went on, unaware.
Inside, a child had become an anomaly the world had no language to explain.
Cain thought of the pack he once lost on the battlefield. He thought of Jae-Ho's laugh fading under collapsing stone. He tasted old resolve rising like smoke.
IF THE WORLD HAS NO PROVISION FOR ME, he thought, THEN I WILL BE MY OWN.
Master Varr shut the chapel doors, voice tight and urgent as he prepared reports and messengers. Whispers would become rumors. Rumors would become laws. Laws would bring consequences.
Cain let them scramble. He watched. He catalogued.
Outside, the bells rang the hour.
Inside, a child sat with the weight of a name the world had forgotten existed:
UNMARKED.