Kael Ashryn felt it before anything changed.
A sudden tightness gripped his chest, sharp enough to steal his breath. He slowed on the dirt road beyond Eldwyn's western gate, fingers tightening around the strap of the grain sack slung over his shoulder. The city behind him glowed with lantern light, warm and alive, but his heart was racing as if danger stood inches away.
He looked up.
One star trembled.
It didn't fall. It didn't fade. It hesitated, quivering against the dark as though the sky itself was unsure whether to release it.
Kael frowned. Stars didn't move.
The pressure in his chest deepened, spreading like heat beneath his ribs. Without knowing why, he turned away from the road and walked toward the Hill of Broken Stone. His feet moved on their own, guided by an instinct he had never learned to trust.
The hill rose jagged and silent ahead of him. Eldwyn's people avoided it, whispering of twisted mana and ancient scars. Kael had always been Unbound—no clan, no bloodline, no magic—so such warnings had never mattered.
The moment his boot touched the hill, the ground hummed.
Kael froze.
The vibration rolled up through his legs and settled into his bones. His breath caught. He took another step.
Pain exploded in his chest.
He gasped and dropped the grain sack, falling to one knee as heat and pressure surged through him at once. The stone beneath his palm cracked, thin lines of pale light bleeding through the fractures.
Runes ignited across the ground.
They were old—older than Eldwyn, older than the clans—and yet Kael knew them. Not from books. Not from lessons.
From memory.
"No," he whispered. "I'm Unbound. This shouldn't—"
The air screamed.
The sky tore open.
The sound was wrong, violent, like reality itself ripping apart. Crimson light poured through a裂 in the heavens, washing the hill in blood-red glow. Stars began to fall, streaking downward as arcs of pulsing energy that howled as they descended.
Kael collapsed fully onto the ground.
Agony tore through him, far worse than before. It felt as if his heart had been set ablaze, each beat sending fire through his veins. His vision fractured into red and white, the world blurring at the edges.
Images flooded his mind.
Cities burning beneath shattered skies.
Kings kneeling, crowns cracked at their feet.
Colossal beasts chained in light, roaring as stars died above them.
"No—!" Kael cried, fingers digging into the stone as the runes beneath him flared brighter. The hill shook violently, cracks racing outward from his body.
One of the falling stars struck.
The impact was deafening. Stone and dust erupted as Kael was thrown backward, his body slamming into a broken pillar. The breath was ripped from his lungs, leaving him gasping.
From the smoking crater at the center of the hill, something rose.
A blade.
Long and narrow, forged of black glass veined with crimson light. Heat rolled off it in waves, yet frost crept across the ground at its base. Symbols crawled across its surface, shifting and rewriting themselves until they settled into words that burned into Kael's sight.
COME HOME.
His heart thundered.
"I don't know you," he said hoarsely. "I don't want this."
The blade hummed softly, not in anger, but recognition.
The pressure in Kael's chest shifted—not crushing now, but pulling. Drawing him closer.
HEIR OF ASH AND LIGHT.
His arm moved before he could stop it.
The instant his fingers touched the blade, the world shattered.
He fell through memory and fire.
He saw battlefields of glass and ash. Thrones forged from broken crowns. Stars collapsing like dying suns. He saw himself standing at the end of it all, eyes burning with cold crimson light, the world kneeling or burning before him.
"No," he whispered. "That's not me."
A presence answered, vast and patient.
It will be.
Then he was back.
Kael slammed into his body with a cry as the blade dissolved into smoke and poured into his skin. Light flared beneath his flesh, branching across his arms and chest before fading into nothing.
The hill went silent.
The sky slowly stitched itself closed.
Footsteps crunched behind him.
"Impossible…"
Kael turned, breath ragged, to see Master Orin kneeling on the cracked stone, his blind eyes fixed unerringly on him.
"The Starborn bloodline was erased," Orin whispered. "Burned from history."
He bowed his head, shoulders trembling.
"The war," he said softly, "has chosen its king."
Kael looked up at the wounded sky.
"I don't want a throne."
Orin's voice shook.
"None of them ever do."