The mist thickened as Vaelen stepped beyond the shattered clearing. It clung to him now like a living thing, curling around his limbs and threading through his pale hair. The Threnody of Broken Stars rested against his chest, its pulse faint but steady — a constant reminder of the ancient will it carried.
The trees twisted stranger the deeper he went. Their trunks bent at impossible angles, and their bark wept dark, sap-like tears that hissed where they struck the ground. The branches overhead knitted together into a canopy so dense it turned night into a deeper, suffocating black.
And yet Vaelen moved without fear.
His bare feet made no sound upon the earth, as if the world itself refused to mark his passage. The Path of Dread Sigils had begun to wake inside him — old instincts and inhuman awareness stirring in blood that was never meant to slumber.
A figure awaited him ahead.
A slender, feminine shape veiled in ragged, colorless silk, standing amidst a ring of ancient stones half-buried in moss and bone. Her face was hidden, her hands long and thin, each fingertip ending in a tapering nail stained black.
The air around her bent subtly, light refusing to settle.
Vaelen halted a few paces away.
"Vaelen Morghast," the figure spoke, her voice neither young nor old — a thousand voices layered into one.
"You have opened the First Gate. You have claimed the blood rite unbidden. In doing so, you have broken the old accords."
He studied her in silence, pale eyes unflinching. There was no fear in him. Only calculation.
"Who sent you?" he asked at last.
She raised one hand, and a single black feather drifted down between them, spinning as it fell. The mark of the Pale Ash.
A Choir agent.
"You should not yet bear the Threnody," she murmured, and the mist shivered at her words. "It was meant to pass to another. To the last Daughter of Velthenreach. But you…"
Vaelen's lips twitched into a cold, humorless smile.
"I took it."
A pause.
"And I will take more."
The figure sighed. Not in sorrow — but in inevitability. Then she lifted her arms, and the ground trembled.
From the earth rose six figures. Faceless, hollow-eyed things draped in flayed skin and iron masks, carrying rusted weapons etched with fading sigils.
Guardians of the Gate.
The Threnody's pages flipped open again of their own accord. Words Vaelen did not remember learning spilled from his lips — a litany of unmaking.
The mist surged.
A low, droning hum built in the air, thick with power, as the sigils from the shattered gate flared beneath the soil.
The creatures rushed him.
Vaelen did not retreat.
The first came close, blade raised, and Vaelen moved.
Faster than thought. The air cracked in his wake as he stepped past the creature, the mist shearing through its neck like a blade. Its head tumbled free, the body collapsing into brittle ash before it struck the ground.
The others hesitated.
Too late.
Vaelen whispered the final line of the litany.
The ground split.
Pale, tendril-like hands clawed up from the earth, seizing the Guardians and dragging them screaming into the soil. The earth closed after them as though they'd never existed.
When it was done, only Vaelen and the veiled woman remained.
She lowered her hands, watching him with something like grim admiration.
"You are no pawn," she said softly. "You will burn the world down to find your throne."
Vaelen stepped forward.
"I will," he promised.
And then — she was gone. Dissolving into mist and silence.
The forest seemed to exhale, and the path ahead cleared.
The next gate lay beyond.
And far away, in the capital of Averenth, the high warlocks convened beneath the Black Spire. The heir had moved.
The old gods began to wake.
Vaelen standing before the shattered gate as it split, reality screaming, and something beyond waiting for him.
The air itself seemed to rupture.
The stone monolith cracked cleanly down its heart, ancient sigils spilling liquid light that bled violet and black into the mist. A sound like a thousand shivering voices rose from beneath the earth, threading through the trees, making the night itself shudder.
Vaelen Morghast did not flinch.
The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed in his small hands, pages rippling though no wind touched them. Its surface was alive, symbols shifting and writhing in ways that hurt the eyes. And in its core, a pulse — like the beating of a second heart.
The boy's pale hair clung to his brow. His face, too young for cruelty, bore none of the softness of innocence. His pale irises shimmered, reflecting not moonlight, but something older, deeper.
The clearing felt wrong.
The grass leaned away from him.
Roots twisted beneath the soil.
The air grew heavier, as though the world itself knew what was stirring.
A voice rose, not from the monolith, but from the place beyond it.
"Child of the Womb Beneath All Stars... you are known."
The words crawled through the marrow of the earth, turning stone to powder, drinking the warmth from the night.
Vaelen felt no fear.
He hadn't for as long as he could remember. Perhaps it was the bloodline. Perhaps it was the book. Or perhaps… he had been hollowed out long before this night.
The world had always felt distant to him. People moved, spoke, clung to life as if it mattered. He saw it even at three years old — their desperation, their terror in the end. It was all so thin. Brittle things pretending to be real.
And now… the lie of it all peeled away.
The gate yawned open before him.
Not a portal of flame or stone, but a rent in the skin of the world — a wound that bled darkness like ink into water. Shapes moved within it, vast and slow, eyes the size of cities half-glimpsed behind the veil.
The Threnody in his hands grew heavier, its pages turning of their own accord. Symbols that spoke of hunger, of the endless cold between suns.
And then — something stepped through.
Or perhaps it was always there.
A figure of shifting smoke and antlers, its form impossible to hold in the mind, made of suggestions of flesh and endless void.
It knelt before the child.
"Your blood remembers," the thing said, though its mouth never moved.
A long, clawed hand extended, and Vaelen placed his tiny palm against it.
The connection seared through him — memories not his own flooding into his bones. Endless cities drowned beneath black seas. Armies of blind priests crying out to dead stars. The ancient name of his bloodline, whispered in a tongue that would one day crack the sky.
And with it… power.
His small frame quivered, eyes wide but unblinking.
This was what he had been made for.
And though he was still three years old, it no longer mattered.
The bloodline lived through him.
The pact was sealed.
In the capital, the High Oracle clutched her chest and dropped dead.
The rivers ran black for a moment.
And in the far west, a newborn screamed with the voice of an ancient thing.
Vaelen withdrew his hand.
The figure bowed, and was gone.
The gate closed — but not fully.
It left a mark.
A single line of darkness across the stone, a scar in the fabric of the world.
Vaelen turned and walked into the mist, the book hovering just behind him.
A child by form.
A predator by birthright.
And the world would learn to bleed.