The world was silent and blue.
Kaelen moved through the predawn forest like a ghost, his boots making no sound on the thick carpet of pine needles. The air was cold, sharp with the scent of damp earth and frost. In his hands, his father's bow felt like a living part of him, an extension of his own steady breath.
A movement ahead. A young buck, barely more than a yearling, stepped into a sliver of early light. It lowered its head to a patch of moss, utterly unaware.
Kaelen nocked an arrow. He drew the fletching back to his cheek. The familiar tension sang in his shoulders.
He held his aim. He watched the animal's ribs expand and contract.
Slowly, he let the tension off the string and lowered the bow. The buck lifted its head, large dark eyes scanning the trees, then bounded away into the deeper shadows.
A small smile touched Kaelen's lips. Meat was needed, but not that one. Let it grow.
By the time the true sun crested the mountains, painting the sky in shades of gold and rose, he had two fat hares tied to his belt. It was a good haul. Lyra would pretend to be disgusted, then beg their mother to cook them with rosemary.
The sight of Last Hope's wooden palisade always warmed him. It wasn't much—just thirty homes, a common hall, and the old stone shrine on the hill that nobody visited. But it was his.
"Ho, Kael!" a voice boomed. Garrick the blacksmith stood by his open forge, already sweating despite the chill. His massive arms were crossed over his barrel chest. "Catch the wind today, or just chasing it?"
"Caught enough for a pie, Garrick," Kaelen said, holding up a hare. "Maybe two."
"Your mother's pie?" Garrick's eyes lit up. "You tell Elara old Garrick says her crust is a gift from the sun itself. A trade? A pie for a new skinning knife?"
"I'll tell her." Kaelen's smile was easy. This was the rhythm of his life. It was a good rhythm.
At the inn, Maude was airing out bed linens. She was a small, bird-like woman with eyes that missed nothing. "Kaelen Morrow. You're back early. Those hares won't fill many bellies."
"They'll fill mine," he said, offering one. "For the stew pot."
She took it, her wrinkled face softening. "Your father was in earlier. Bought a jug of cider. Said it was for a quiet night in." She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a mock whisper. "I think he's sweet on your mother."
Kaelen laughed, the sound clear in the morning air. "I think he's been sweet on her since forever, Maude."
"Forever is a good long time," she said, nodding to herself. "A good long time."
The path to his home was a worn dirt track at the village edge. He saw the smoke from the chimney first, a thin grey line against the brightening blue. Then the house itself, wood and stone, sturdy and warm. His father, Kaelan, was at the far fence post, hammering a loose board back into place. His movements were strong, practiced.
His mother, Elara, was in her herb garden. She knelt in the dirt, her skirts tucked around her, carefully trimming sage. She looked up as he approached, and her whole face became a sunrise.
"My hunter returns," she said.
His sister Lyra exploded from behind the woodpile. "Did you get anything? Was it a giant boar? A wolf?" She was twelve, all knees and elbows and boundless energy, her braid coming undone.
"Just hares, sprout," he said, ruffling her hair. She swatted his hand away.
"Hares are boring."
"Hares are delicious," their father said, walking over. He clapped a heavy hand on Kaelen's shoulder. His eyes, the same grey as Kaelen's, crinkled at the corners. "Good clean shots?"
"Clean," Kaelen said.
The day unfolded in perfect, ordinary pieces. He helped his father finish the fence. He listened to his mother hum while she chopped vegetables. He let Lyra badger him into adjusting her bow grip for the hundredth time. The sun climbed, warm on their backs, and the world felt solid and kind.
It was only as the afternoon began to wane that Kaelen noticed it.
His father had stopped working. He was just standing, looking up the hill toward the old shrine. It was a crumbling thing of ancient, weathered stone, half-swallowed by ivy. No one went there. It was from a time before Last Hope, before any memory.
But his father was staring at it as if it had spoken.
"Dad?"
Kaelan didn't move for a long moment. Then he blinked, turning to look at Kaelen. The easy warmth was gone from his eyes, replaced by something deep and heavy. Something like fear.
"Kael," he said. His voice was low, serious in a way that made the pleasant afternoon air feel thin. "Come here."
They walked a few paces away from the house, toward the tree line. His father put his hands on Kaelen's shoulders, his grip firm.
"Listen to me," Kaelan said. His gaze was intense, locking onto Kaelen's. "If anything ever happens… you hear me? Anything. You run. You take Lyra, and you run. You don't look back for me or your mother. You don't try to be a hero. You just run. You get as far away from here as you can."
Kaelen stared at him. A cold trickle, like melted snow, traced down his spine. "What are you talking about? What's going to happen?"
"Promise me, Kael."
"Dad, you're scaring me."
"Promise me!"
The force in his father's voice was a physical thing. Kaelen nodded, bewildered. "I… I promise."
The fear in his father's eyes didn't fade. It just receded, buried under a layer of grim resolve. He pulled Kaelen into a quick, hard hug. "Good," he muttered into his son's hair. "That's good."
He walked back to the house, leaving Kaelen standing alone in the gathering dusk, confused and suddenly cold.
Dinner was quiet. The hare stew was rich and flavorful, but the taste was ashes in Kaelen's mouth. He watched his father. The man smiled at Elara, teased Lyra, but his eyes kept drifting to the window. To the dark outline of the hill.
That night, sleep was a restless sea. Kaelen tossed in his bed, his father's words echoing in the dark.
Run.
He was drifting into a deeper, dreamless sleep when a new sound pierced the night.
It wasn't a sound he knew. It was a high, keening wail, like metal being torn. It was followed by a thump that shook the very floorboards.
He sat bolt upright in bed.
Then the screaming started.
Not shouts of alarm. Not calls for help. These were raw, animal screams of pure terror. They were cut short, one by one.
He smelled it then—acrid and thick. Smoke.
He was at his window in two heartbeats. The view of the village square was a scene from a nightmare.
Orange. Everything was orange. The common hall was a towering pillar of fire. Flames danced on rooftops, spreading with impossible, hungry speed. And in the square, figures moved.
Not villagers. Silhouettes wreathed in flame. One of them raised an arm, and a whip of pure fire lashed out, wrapping around old man Cerric as he fled. Cerric's scream became a bubbling, final sound before he fell as a blackened husk.
Kaelen's blood turned to ice. His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs.
Lyra.
He spun from the window and threw open his bedroom door. The main room of the house was full of swirling smoke. Embers floated in the air like deadly fireflies.
"LYRA! MOM! DAD!"
A shape stumbled through the smoke. His father. He was clutching his left arm, which was curled and blackened, the skin cracked and glowing with embers. His face was a mask of pain and utter desperation.
"Kael!" he choked. "The back door! Now!"
"Where's Mom? Where's Lyra?"
"ELARA!" his father bellowed, turning back toward the bedrooms. A section of the ceiling directly above him groaned, splintered, and erupted in flame. Burning timber crashed down.
"DAD!"
Kaelen lunged forward, through the heat and smoke, grabbing his father's good arm and pulling him back. They staggered toward the kitchen, toward the back door. The world was reduced to crackling flame, crashing wood, and the deafening roar of his own pulse.
They burst out into the small backyard garden. The cold night air hit Kaelen's smoke-stung lungs like a knife. He dragged his father behind the stone well.
"Your arm…"
"Forget it," his father gasped, his face pale. He seized Kaelen's tunic with his good hand. His eyes burned with a fierce, final light. "Listen. The shrine. The stone at the base, the one with the… the spiral mark. Push it. It's a door."
"What? Dad, what are you—"
"Take Lyra. Go there. Don't stop. Don't look back." His father's voice was failing, his breath coming in wet, ragged pulls. The smell of burned flesh was overwhelming.
"I'm not leaving you!"
"You promised!" His father's grip was iron. "You… are my son. My hope. Now… RUN!"
A shadow fell over them.
Heat, immense and terrible, washed across Kaelen's back. He turned.
A man stood at the edge of the garden. His clothes were tattered, smoldering rags. His skin was a map of blisters and raw, weeping flesh. And from his eyes, from the permanent, glistening tear-tracks etched down his cheeks, flowed not tears, but a slow, viscous drip of molten light.
The man smiled. It was the most horrible thing Kaelen had ever seen.
"The last ones," the man whispered, his voice the sound of a burning log. "The keeper's blood."
Kaelen's father shoved him away with all his remaining strength. "KAEL, GO!"
The burning man raised a hand. A sphere of swirling, white-hot fire bloomed above his palm.
Kaelen didn't think. He moved. He threw himself in front of his fallen father, arms spread, as if his body could be a shield.
The sphere of fire shot forward.
It struck Kaelen in the chest.
A pain beyond anything he could have imagined exploded through him. It was not just the burning. It was a despair so profound it felt like his soul was being scoured. The memory of being trapped, of screaming as flames ate flesh, of betrayal and agony—it wasn't his memory, but it flooded into him, violent and foreign.
And something inside him… resonated.
The pain hit a wall within him and echoed.
A silent, invisible force erupted from Kaelen's own body. It wasn't fire. It was sheer, concussive agony given physical form.
The sphere of fire vanished. The burning man's smile disappeared. He was lifted off his feet and thrown backwards through the wall of the neighbor's barn as if slapped by a giant's hand. Wood and stone shattered.
The backlash left Kaelen on his knees, vomiting into the dirt. His chest felt hollow, seared. He could still smell his own singed clothes, his own burned skin.
He crawled to his father.
Kaelan Morrow lay on his side, his breath shallow. The brutal injury on his arm was nothing now. His eyes were fixed on his son, wide with shock, with a dawning, impossible understanding.
"You… you resonated…" he breathed. A trickle of blood traced from his lips. "Oh, my boy… I'm so sorry…"
"Don't talk. I'll get help—"
"No." His father's voice was faint but clear. He lifted his good hand, trembling, and cupped Kaelen's cheek. His thumb brushed away a streak of soot. "The shrine. The spiral stone. Tell them… tell them the 'Last Hope'… is found."
His hand fell.
His eyes, still fixed on Kaelen's, did not close. But the light in them—the fierce, loving, worried light—went out.
Kaelen knelt there, his father's head cradled in his lap, in the hellish orange glow of his burning home. The screams in the village were dying down, replaced by the triumphant roar of flames and a strange, distorted laughter that came from multiple throats.
He did not cry. The shock was too vast, a glacier moving through his insides, freezing everything in its path.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a glint. A single, perfect, crystalline tear. It had fallen from the eye of the burning man when he was struck. It had landed on a scorched leaf, and now, as the leaf curled in the heat, the crystal droplet rolled.
It landed on the back of Kaelen's trembling hand.
It was cold. Unnaturally cold. It did not roll off. It melted, sinking into his skin like water into parched earth.
A new chill, deep and cellular, spread from that point up his arm. It met the hollow, scorched feeling in his chest where the fire had struck. The two sensations swirled together, a storm of heat and ice, and settled into a dull, permanent ache right behind his sternum.
On his cheeks, he felt two sudden, sharp lines of cold, like the touch of twin icicles.
He looked down at his father's still face.
He made a sound then. Not a sob. Not a scream. It was the low, broken exhale of a world ending.
Somewhere in the inferno, a child wept. It might have been Lyra. It might have been his own heart.
He did not run.
He stood up. He left his father lying in the garden. He turned and looked at the heart of the flames, at the shapes dancing in the firelight.
The gentle hunter was gone.
Something harder, something colder, was left standing in the ashes.
And on his cheeks, two faint, bioluminescent lines began to glow with a sickly, pale blue light.