Dawn over Luminast was a thief. It didn't bring light, merely stole the deepest shadows, replacing them with a pervasive, choking fog that writhed through the streets like a living thing. It muffled sound, distorted shapes, and carried the damp, metallic scent of the Veil's perpetual weeping. Above ground, the desperate commerce of survival began. Voices, sharp with hunger and fear, cut through the gloom – haggling over scraps of food, scavenged metal, promises of protection that would likely turn to ash. The fog swallowed figures whole only paces away, making every transaction a leap of faith, every alley mouth a potential maw.
Deep below, in the humming belly of the Veil-Touched refuge, the air was thick with a different kind of tension. It wasn't the frantic energy of the marketplace, but the low thrum of contained power and weary vigilance. In a small alcove curtained off by heavy, patched fabric, Kael sat cross-legged on a thin pallet. His eyes were closed, but not in sleep. He was chasing the echoes of violence: the cellar's damp terror, the Fleshspawn's gurgling hunger, the bone-deep cold of Vejis's power, the phantom weight of years paid and debts etched onto his skin. Six sigils. A constant, burning reminder on his forearm. Each one a step closer to becoming prey, yet also a shield he'd forged in desperation.
Aria watched him from her own pallet. The unnatural blue ice sealing the fissure on her collarbone seemed stable, but her form still flickered faintly at the edges, like a guttering candle flame. The memory of her mother's voice was a hollow ache, a missing tooth she kept probing with her tongue. The silence stretched, filled only by the distant murmur of the refuge and the frantic drumming of her own heart against her ribs. The weight of the unknown pressed down.
"Kael," she finally whispered, her voice thin in the quiet space.
He opened his eyes, the scholarly calm he sometimes wore completely absent. His face was drawn, etched with exhaustion and a deep, unsettling uncertainty. He looked older than his years.
"Where do we go from here?" Aria continued, her gaze fixed on the rough stone wall opposite. "I know Vejis is going to talk to you today. But... after that? What then? Are we just… meant to survive?" She turned her head, her eyes searching his, wide and vulnerable in the dim fungus-light. "Is there no goal? No… end to this running?"
Kael flinched as if struck. The question echoed his own gnawing dread. He'd been so focused on the next threat, the next step, the next desperate expenditure of life or memory to keep Aria breathing, that the vast, terrifying horizon of forever had been a blur. Survival wasn't a purpose; it was a grinding, endless state. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture shaky.
"I… I don't know, Aria," he admitted, the words scraping out. The scholarly mask was utterly gone, revealing the raw fear beneath. "Is there a greater cause? Something beyond just… not dying today?" He stared at his hands, calloused and stained with ash and old blood. "Or am I just… stuck? Surviving in this mess until something finally catches us?" The hopelessness in his own voice chilled him. He couldn't afford that. Not for her sake. He looked up, forcing himself to meet her eyes. "I'm sorr–"
The curtain rustled. Both of them tensed, hands instinctively moving towards hidden weapons. A figure stepped through – not Lira, as Kael half-expected, but the woman who had branded him with her gaze when they arrived. Arin. Her sharp grey eyes took in the scene: Kael's haunted expression, Aria's flickering form, the palpable despair hanging in the air. Her own face, beneath the lines of hardship, was unreadable.
"Vejis," she stated flatly, her voice low and rough like stones grating. "He calls for you, Bloodprice." Her gaze flickered to the Godclimb resting beside Kael's pallet. "Bring it."
Kael's jaw tightened. The moment of vulnerability snapped shut, replaced by wary tension. He nodded curtly, pushing himself to his feet. He picked up the heavy book, its leather binding cold and familiar against his palm, a constant reproach and promise. He glanced at Aria. "Stay here. Rest."
Her eyes held a silent plea – be careful – but she only nodded, pulling her thin blanket tighter around her shoulders. Kael followed Arin out of the alcove and into the cavern's main thoroughfare.
The refuge hummed around them. Figures moved with quiet purpose or huddled in exhausted groups. Kael saw the silver-black pulse of Blasphemy Marks on exposed skin, the faint crimson glow of Bloodprice sigils beneath sleeves, the subtle warping of light around Veil-Less ascenders. It was a tapestry of defiance and despair, woven underground. The air smelled of damp stone, unguent herbs, woodsmoke, and the faint, metallic tang of suppressed power.
Arin led him away from the more populated areas, down narrower tunnels lit by fewer fungi, the blue-green glow casting long, dancing shadows. The silence between them stretched, thick and uncomfortable. Kael's mind raced – Vejis's motives, the Heretic Hunter, the Thrice-Drowned King's attention, Aria's question echoing: Where do we go?
Arin broke the silence, her voice cutting through his thoughts. "So," she said, not looking back at him, "how did you become one? An Ascender."
The question was blunt, unexpected. Kael hesitated, the memories raw: Aria coughing blood in the cellar, the desperate scramble through forbidden texts, the terrifying plunge into the Bloodprice's fire. "Out of desperation," he answered, his voice tight. "To save my sister. The rot… it was taking her. Fast. The Godclimb… it seemed like the only option left." He didn't elaborate on the cost, the years bleeding away with every sigil.
Arin made a low sound in her throat, almost a grunt of understanding. Or contempt. "Desperation. A familiar tune." She walked a few more paces before continuing, her tone flatter, colder. "Me? I did it for revenge. And spite." She glanced back, her grey eyes like chips of flint. "I'm not from these stinking walls. Came from outside. A place called the Hollowed Wastes. My village…" Her voice hitched, just for a fraction of a second. "...was small. Poor. But we had the Church's protection. Or so we thought. Paid our tithes. Said our prayers. Built a little shrine to the Seven Pillars with our own hands." Bitterness dripped from her words. "Then one day, they just… pulled back. Retracted their garrison. Said resources were needed elsewhere. Closer to the Spire." She spat the word like poison. "Within a month, raiders hit. Not just thieves. Organised. Well-armed. Like they knew we were defenseless." Her hand clenched into a fist at her side. "They burned everything. Took everything. Killed… almost everyone." The pain was a physical thing radiating from her, sharp and cold. "Only a handful of us crawled out of the ashes. Children, mostly."
Kael listened, the horror of her story cutting through his own anxieties. He saw the phantom flames reflected in her hard eyes.
"We banded together," Arin continued, her voice regaining its rough edge. "Found others. Other villages the Church had abandoned when the Veilquakes got bad, when tithes dried up, when protecting them wasn't profitable anymore. We became the Ashborn Nomads. Scavenging the ruins of the Wastes. Living like rats." A grim, humourless smile touched her lips. "Then we found it. A ruin, older than the Church. Pre-Shattering, maybe. Crumbling walls covered in carvings… symbols that made your head ache if you looked too long. And texts. Fragments. Talking about paths. Power. Defiance against the laws that bind… or break. The Path of Ascenders." She stopped walking, turning fully to face Kael in the narrow tunnel. Her gaze was intense, challenging. "That's where I learned the price of defiance. Where I earned this." She tapped her chest, where the Mark of Blasphemy lay hidden beneath her tunic. "Not to save anyone. To make them pay. The Church. The ones who left us to die. Every Judicator, every pious hypocrite chanting in their gilded Spire while the world burns outside their walls." Her voice was a low, dangerous rasp. "Spite keeps you warm in the Wastes, Bloodprice. Remember that."
Kael met her gaze, the raw fury and grief in it a stark contrast to his own desperate, protective drive. He understood the shape of her pain, even if its source was different. He was about to speak – what, he wasn't sure – when Arin gestured abruptly ahead. "We're here."
They stood before an unremarkable section of tunnel wall. Arin placed her palm flat against the stone. "He's expecting you. Don't keep him waiting. He dislikes tardiness almost as much as he dislikes… well, breathing, sometimes." She gave him a final, inscrutable look, then turned and melted back into the gloom of the tunnel, leaving Kael alone before the cold rock.
Taking a deep breath, Kael pushed. Like before, the stone yielded like dark water, rippling around his hand and arm as he stepped through.
Vejis's cave was as cold and sharp as the man himself. The air hummed faintly with contained power, smelling of ozone, old parchment, and something metallic – blood or iron. Vejis sat at a rough-hewn stone table, bathed in the concentrated blue glow of several clustered fungus-lamps. He wasn't looking at Kael. His head was bent over a thick journal bound in cracked leather, his blood-filled pen moving swiftly across the page, inscribing jagged Thalassian glyphs that seemed to writhe under the light. The stone book lay open beside him, radiating a subtle, unsettling energy.
"Ah," Vejis murmured without looking up, his voice a dry rasp. "The Debtor arrives. And bearing the Ledger. Excellent." He finished a symbol with a sharp flourish and capped his pen with a precise click. Only then did he lift his head. His galaxy-pool eyes fixed on Kael, sharp and assessing, missing nothing – the tension in his shoulders, the guarded hope warring with dread, the Godclimb clutched tightly in his hand.
As Kael stepped fully into the cave, Vejis made a lazy, almost dismissive gesture with his free hand. Objects around the cave – a cluster of strangely shaped crystals, a set of delicate bone tools, a sealed vial containing swirling black smoke, even the heavy journal – gently lifted from their surfaces. They floated through the air with impossible grace, settling onto the table in front of Vejis with soft clicks and thuds. Kael watched, a scholar's fascination momentarily overriding his apprehension. He recognised some of the hand signals Vejis had used – subtle twists of fingers, palm orientations – echoes of Bloodprice manipulation, but twisted, refined, operating on a level far beyond his own desperate expenditures.
"Sit," Vejis commanded, gesturing to a stool opposite him. His tone brooked no argument.
Kael obeyed, placing the Godclimb carefully on the table. Its presence seemed to resonate with the stone book, a low thrum vibrating in Kael's bones. Vejis immediately reached for it, his long, ashen fingers tracing the worn leather binding almost reverently before flipping it open. He didn't browse. He went straight to specific pages, his blood-pen uncapped again.
"Good," Vejis repeated, his gaze scanning the dense, archaic script. "You brought the key. Now, let us unlock the cage." He began to write directly onto the Godclimb's pages, not adding notes, but inscribing complex Thalassian glyphs over the existing text. The blood ink sank into the parchment, glowing faintly crimson before fading to a deep, permanent black. As he wrote, his other hand moved in the air, tracing intricate patterns – somatic components that flowed with the guttural resonance of the Deep Speech spilling from his lips. Kael strained, catching fragments: "Kor'Ulos... Vorr'Ghaia... Nul'Theras..." Words for self, power, defiance, flesh, binding... the meanings swirled just out of reach, a complex formula he couldn't grasp.
"Pay attention, Kael," Vejis said, not looking up, his voice cutting through the ritual. "This book is more than a manual. More than a list of prices. It is a vessel. A crucible." He finished a particularly complex glyph and tapped it with his pen. The page pulsed with a soft, crimson light. "It can contain the energies you wield. Not just the Bloodprice you spend, but the Ulos – the raw, mystical power of defiance itself – that flows within you, however weakly."
Kael frowned. "Ulos?" The Thalassian word felt heavy on his tongue.
"The current," Vejis clarified, finally looking up. His eyes seemed to bore into Kael. "The force you channel when you scream 'Bloodprice!' or when your sister burns a memory. It's the fundamental energy of rebellion against the Laws. You feel it, yes? Thick. Sticky. Like tar in your veins when you try to shape it beyond the crude expenditures the Godclimb dictates."
Kael nodded slowly, recalling the agonizing resistance when he'd tried the storage ritual, the way the power fought him like a wild thing. "It fights me."
"Because your mortal flesh is a weak conduit," Vejis stated bluntly. "A clay cup trying to hold molten iron. It cracks. It leaks. It burns you from the inside out. To wield Ulos effectively, to truly ascend, you need a stronger vessel. That strength comes in two ways." He held up one finger. "External contracts. Bargains with forces like the Thrice-Drowned King, or deeper Void entities. They lend you power, reshape you according to their will, for a price that usually involves your soul or sanity." His lip curled in disdain. "The path of the desperate fool." He raised a second finger. "Or… internal reconstruction. Forging your own vessel from within, using the Ulos itself."
Kael's breath caught. "You can… rebuild yourself? With this power?"
"Painfully. Slowly. With immense focus and the right framework." Vejis tapped the Godclimb again, now adorned with his bloody sigils. "Which is what we are creating now. I am weaving containment fields into the Godclimb's structure, using it as an external scaffold. It will temporarily hold and stabilize the Ulos while you direct it inward, piece by agonizing piece, to rebuild the weak points in your own physical and metaphysical form." He leaned forward, his gaze intense. "Today, Kael, I begin teaching you the first forms of Ulos manipulation beyond screaming for more power. And the first, excruciating steps of reforging your flesh."
The implications were staggering. Terrifying. Hope, cold and sharp, warred with visceral fear in Kael's chest. This was power beyond mere survival. This was the path Vejis had hinted at – the path to becoming something more than prey. But the cost… the image of his veins crystallizing, expelling molten slag, flashed in his mind.
"Why?" The question burst from Kael, raw and desperate. He met Vejis's unnerving gaze. "Why are you doing this? Why me? What do I have that hundreds of other desperate, branded people down here lack?" He gestured vaguely towards the cave entrance, towards the refuge. "Arin burns with revenge. Others fight for survival, for community. What makes me worth this… this investment?"
Vejis didn't react with anger or amusement. His expression remained unchanged, a mask of ashen calm. He studied Kael for a long moment, the only sound the faint hum of the activated Godclimb and the distant thrum of the refuge.
"Your will, Kael," Vejis said finally, his voice low and devoid of its usual sardonic edge. It held a terrible gravity. "Your absolute, unwavering commitment to sacrifice anything for that girl. Not out of greed for power. Not for vengeance. Not for some abstract ideal." He pointed the blood-pen at Kael, not accusingly, but like a scholar indicating a crucial specimen. "You would tear out your own beating heart if you thought it would buy her another breath. You would burn every memory, pay every year, defy every god and demon, not for dominion, but for her." He leaned back slightly. "That… that utter, self-annihilating commitment… that is the pure essence the Path of Ascendance demands. The others?" He gave a minute shake of his head. "They sacrifice for gain. For loss. For anger. They cling to something. You? You are prepared to become nothing, if it means she becomes something." A flicker of something like… respect?… touched his alien eyes. "That makes you different. That makes you… potentially extraordinary. And that, Debtor, is why I bother."
Kael stared at him, Vejis's words echoing in the silent cave. Become nothing. The cold truth of it resonated deep within him, a chilling confirmation of the abyss he'd already been staring into. It wasn't noble. It was terrifying. But it was true. For Aria, he would walk into the deepest dark. He opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, perhaps to ask another question, but the words died.
A sudden, overwhelming fullness exploded inside his skull. It wasn't pain, but a pressure, a saturation of light and sound and sensation that obliterated thought. The cave, Vejis, the Godclimb – it all vanished, swallowed by a blinding white radiance. He felt himself falling, not through space, but through layers of perception.
Then, darkness. Not the comforting dark of the cave, but an absolute, suffocating void. Cold seeped into his bones, deeper than Vejis's ice. Panic clawed at his throat. He tried to move, to call out, but he had no body, no voice. He was consciousness adrift in an endless, silent sea of nothing.
"KAEL!!"
The voice shattered the silence, a desperate roar that vibrated through the fabric of the void itself. It was raw, ragged, filled with a terror and love so profound it was a physical force.
"KAEL! WAKE UP! SON, PLEASE!"
Kael's consciousness recoiled. That voice… It was impossible. Buried deep beneath years of grief and survival, a sound he'd locked away because the pain of remembering was too great. A sound from before the cellar, before the rot, before the world ended.
"OPEN YOUR EYES! KAEL!"
Driven by a compulsion deeper than thought, Kael willed himself to see. The absolute darkness fractured.
He was lying on hard, packed earth. Rough wooden beams crossed a low ceiling above him. The air smelled of damp soil, woodsmoke, and… home. Not the refuge, not Luminast. Home. His childhood home in the small village near the Whispering Woods. Dust motes danced in a shaft of warm, golden sunlight slanting through a small, high window.
And leaning over him, his face etched with lines of fear and exhaustion Kael didn't remember, his eyes wide and desperate, was his father.
Alive.
The shock was a physical blow, stealing the void's breath he didn't have. His father's face – older, harder than in Kael's fading memories, but undeniably him – was inches away. Calloused hands gripped Kael's shoulders, shaking him gently but urgently.
"Kael! Thank the Spire, you're awake! You gave us such a scare, lad!" His father's voice was thick with relief, the familiar timbre resonating in Kael's very soul. "Fell clean off old Man Harlow's hayloft, you did! Knocked yourself out cold. How many fingers am I holding up?" He held up a hand, three fingers extended. The gesture, so mundane, so achingly familiar, shattered Kael's last defenses.
"F-Father?" Kael choked out, the word a broken whisper. He tried to sit up, his hand – his real hand, not a phantom – reaching out, trembling. He touched his father's stubbled cheek. It was warm. Solid. Tears, hot and uncontrollable, blurred his vision. "But… you… the plague… the fire…"
His father's expression softened, confusion replacing fear. "Plague? Fire? Kael, lad, you must have hit your head harder than we thought. There's no plague. No fire." He squeezed Kael's shoulder, the grip reassuringly strong. "You just took a tumble. You're home. Safe." He smiled, a weary, loving smile that Kael had dreamt of a thousand times in the cold dark. "Aria's fetching water. She's been worried sick."
Aria. Home. Safe. Father. The impossible reality washed over him, a tidal wave of warmth and relief so profound it threatened to drown him in its sweetness. The years of terror, the sigils, the rot, the Veil – it all felt like a fading, fevered nightmare. This was real. The sunlight was warm. His father's hand was calloused and real. He was home.
He started to smile, a sob catching in his throat. He opened his mouth to speak, to tell his father everything, to ask how…
Everything stopped.
The sunlight froze. The dust motes hung suspended. His father's loving smile became a fixed, waxen mask. The warmth vanished, replaced by an instantaneous, absolute cold that penetrated to the core of his being. The comforting smells of home were snuffed out, replaced by nothing. A void. A perfect, silent, suffocating absence.
The world didn't fade. It shattered. Like glass hit by a hammer. The image of his father, the room, the sunlight – it fragmented into a million shards of meaningless light and color, then winked out.
Only darkness remained. Deeper than the cave. Deeper than the Void he'd drifted in before. An utter negation.
Then, a voice. It wasn't heard. It was imposed. A screeching, tearing sound that bypassed the ears and scraped directly against the raw nerves of Kael's consciousness. It vibrated with an age and power that made the Thrice-Drowned King's presence feel like a minnow in an ocean.
"You miss him. Don't you."
It wasn't a question. It was an observation of infinite, chilling certainty. The voice held no emotion – not cruelty, not amusement. Only the vast, indifferent weight of absolute truth, and the terrifying power to weaponize it.
Kael tried to recoil, but he had no form. He was pure awareness trapped in infinite night. Terror, primal and absolute, consumed him.
A presence manifested. Not a shape, but a focus of the darkness. A point of absolute density, of pure, devouring negation that drew Kael's awareness towards it like a moth to an event horizon. The terrifying aura radiating from it was the silence after the universe ends, the cold before the last star dies.
Kael's consciousness screamed soundlessly. He knew this presence. He recognized it. The chilling void that brushed his mind in the fleeting moment of a Veilwalker's death. The shadow behind the shadow. The source of the cold dread that lingered after every expenditure of life. It wasn't a figment. It was here.
The focus of darkness pulsed. The voice, the screeching tear in reality, spoke again, resonating through the infinite void that was its body and its domain.
"Hello, Kael. Look upon me."
Resistance was impossible. Kael's awareness was wrenched towards the dark focal point. He didn't see, he experienced it. An entity of primordial void. The absence given terrible, sentient form.
"I am Kha'rothan."
The name echoed with the weight of collapsing stars, the birth-scream of black holes.
"You may know me as the Endless Dark. The Primordial Void. The Silence Before the First Word."
The presence intensified, crushing Kael's awareness, not with malice, but with the sheer, indifferent mass of its existence.
"I am one of the Seven Pillars. The foundation upon which your frail Church of Light and Law so precariously rests."
The revelation struck Kael with the force of a planet colliding. The God of Darkness. Not an enemy. A Pillar. A fundamental part of the divine structure the Church worshipped, the very structure Ascenders defied. And it was here. Inside his mind. Seeing him. Knowing him. Knowing his deepest, most agonizing pain.
The void pulsed once more, a wave of pure, annihilating cold washing over Kael's trapped consciousness. The screeching voice filled the infinite blackness, the final words resonating with terrifying finality before the darkness swallowed everything whole:
"And you, little spark of defiance... you have drawn my gaze."
Kael's silent scream ripped through the void, unheard, as the primordial dark closed in.