Looking around me to see if the others in the room react, none of them seem to have heard the voice that spoke as the gathered towns folk look at me quizzically. Turning back to the stone I take a deep breath and press my hand harder against the stone accepting the fate that has been chosen for me by the gods. The moment my palm sealed against the Stone of Fate, the world seemed to still.
Then came the heat—not like fire, but like breath against bare skin on a winter morning. Alive. Intentional. It surged through my arm, threading into bone, muscle, and thought. I gasped as lines of glowing script erupted across my forearm, burning into being with a sudden, blinding light.
Runes. Mage runes.
They wrapped around my skin like ivy climbing a ruin—familiar in shape, but... wrong. Or maybe too right. I'd seen these markings before, etched into spellweavers and arcanists who trained in towers far from home. The crowd would see them and believe I had been chosen to wield the arcane. So would my father.
But I could feel it—this wasn't just magic.
The light didn't settle. It shifted. The runes pulsed once, then began to twist, unwriting themselves, lines bending and reforming into something deeper, more intricate. Symbols I didn't recognize slithered under my skin like a second heartbeat. One mark stayed constant in the center of it all: an open eye, surrounded by four circles, each slowly rotating like tiny moons caught in an unseen tide.
This wasn't Mage work. This wasn't any of the paths I'd been told were mine to choose.
This was all of them—and none of them.
My heart pounded as I curled my fingers closed over the glowing marks, willing them to dim, to hide. They obeyed. To the watching eyes, I had taken the path of a Mage. The lie was perfect.
But inside me, deeper than blood, something else had awakened.
Warden. The word wasn't spoken, but it echoed in my chest like a forgotten name remembered.
I didn't know what came next. Only that my path no longer belonged to the Fate my father had chosen—or the Stone.
It was mine now.
As I pull my hand off the stone I hear the doors slammed open. Spinning around to face the doors I see my father in his hand, the broken shaft of the gardening tool and rage in his eyes.I didn't have to look to know he saw them.
The breath behind me caught sharp, like a blade drawn too quickly. For a moment, the world was only the hush of the chamber and the distant crackle of the ceremonial fire.
Then—
"Mage," my father spat, as if the word burned his tongue.
His boots struck the stone floor, closing the distance with purpose. I stood still, my arm still glowing faintly with the aftermath of the Stone's touch, the arcane tattoos curling like smoke along my skin.
His hand seized my wrist. Hard.
He turned my arm roughly, forcing it into the light. "Look at this," he growled, voice thick with something between rage and disbelief. "Glowing like a damned beacon. A Mage. You disgrace me."
I kept my face still. I'd learned early not to flinch. But inside, my heart thundered.
"You'll burn this out of you," he hissed. "No son of mine casts spells and cowers behind books. You were meant to carry a blade." His fingers dug deeper into my flesh, as if he could peel the markings away by force. "We trained for a warrior. I gave you discipline. And this is how you repay me?"
He released me with a shove, like touching me sickened him. I stumbled back, not from the force of it—but because I felt the truth in his voice:
He didn't care what the Stone chose. Only what he had already decided I would be.
But I said nothing. Let him believe the markings.
Let him believe I had been shaped by fate into something he hated.
Only I knew the truth.
And one day, he would too.
Before I could respond—before the bile rising in my throat could shape itself into words—a gentle voice cut through the tension like balm on a blade.
"Please, Lord Carran," came the voice of High Priest Alarin, his ceremonial robes whispering as he stepped between us, palm raised. "The Stone has chosen Eiran's path. We must not question the divine will."
My father rounded on him. "The Stone made a mistake."
Alarin's eyes were calm, his voice steady, but I saw it—the flicker of fear behind the serenity. He had witnessed my father's wrath before.
I clenched my fists, the skin of my marked arm still tingling from his grip. My jaw ached from holding back all the things I wanted to say—all the things I never could say.
He had humiliated me again, in front of the gods, the priests, the people.
I felt it then—not just anger, but something deeper. Older.
A pulse, like a second heartbeat beneath the first.
The tattoos on my arm shimmered. The delicate Mage runes bent, twisting, reshaping with each breath I took. Curved sigils gave way to sharp lines and jagged marks, arcane script becoming runes of war. I watched, stunned, as the light beneath my skin turned from cool silver to burning bronze. I felt power surge up through my legs, into my chest—weight, not lightness. Strength, not subtlety.
Not just magic. Now, muscle.
A hush fell over the chamber.
Alarin stared at my arm, his lips parting slightly. "That's... impossible," he whispered.