So I did what I ought to do, for in that instant I knew I could never keep myself from Evangelina Corvo.
I told her to stay away from me.
Chapter 11
Kael — Past
The second wave wounded the land like never before. The fragile hope that the kingdom might soon breathe again was burned to ash with the corpses piled outside city walls. Every sniff, every cough, every bead of sweat struck fear into the heart and awoke the instinct to save one’s own skin before another’s.
People took matters into their own trembling hands, burning the diseased, dead or alive, in a desperate attempt to purge the plague.
It became a war against the Breath of Death, where the only victor was Death herself.
Cities went dark. Houses burned like stars in the night. Despite the efforts of clerics, apothecaries, even the magi, none truly understood the sickness that had corrupted the land.
Theories sprouted like weeds.Rosemary and thyme soothe the symptoms. Windy hills are safer. Alcohol cleanses. Stand an arm’s length apart and you will be spared.
All were proven and disproven in the same breath. No matter how faithfully the realm obeyed its newest edicts, people fell like pieces across a tainted chessboard.
And from that ruin, the darker theories from the year before spread like wildfire.
The plague isn’t real.
The king lies.
The magi caused it. By accident, or by design.
But tell that to the people who died. Look into their families’ eyes and say it. Tell them it was a lie and feel the blade you’ve earned pierce through your heart.
Because in the end, what if it was true? What if it was an experiment gone wrong? What if it was incompetence that doomed us all?
People were dying. Families were torn. Homes turned to cages.
And Kael knew exactly how many had died, for he had turned them to ash himself and counted them all.
One star-strewn night, he rode by horse to the harbor city of Shelb, answering Selena’s desperate plea. The road wound upward to the mansion atop the Hill of Hopes, where within its walls lay a mother gasping for mercy, her breath already half stolen, blood spilling from her dried lips.
Selena’s magic could not ease her pain.
So Kael did what she could not. One strike—swift, merciful—and it was done.
Selena’s sobs broke against his chest, her tears soaking through his robes, and he held her through the long hours until dawn, until there were no more tears left in her to give.
The Magi Academy of Hauviarose at the northwest edge of the city, encircled by geometric gardens and open courtyards. Its walls were built of dark gray stone, its three spires reaching toward the heavens. At night, those spires lit like magical beacons, and the crystals set within them refracted light into silent fireworks of color without smoke or sound.
The halls of the academy, where once the shouts and laughter of hurried students had echoed, now stood like a silent, dull gray prisonof stone. Kael, as Court Wizard, still held leave to come and go, yet the halls once bright with hearthlight and dancing flames now felt hollow and forsaken.
He paused in the entrance hall, beneath a ceiling painted with stars, dark-blue tapestries draping the walls like a night sky. His academy years felt distant, blurred by time and blood. Still, returning here was a little like greeting an old friend, if he had ever truly known what friendship was.
Kael had spent nearly a decade within these walls, beneath the tutelage of Dean Henrich Eisenberg, who had taught him to master the storm, to weave control from chaos, to clutch that fragile leash still gripped tight in his fists, even now. Within these quiet halls, there lingered the faintest echo of peace.
Years upon years of discipline, meditation, restraint, to learn the art of tempering power, of turning the storm inward until the wisdom of the old wizards of legends replaced the tempest. Henrich had become his most trusted mentor and, if Kael dared to name it, the father he never had. The old man had called him Stormborn, orSturmgeboren, as he said it in the Hauvian tongue.
Henrich descended the dark oak staircase to meet him, teal and gold robes pooling at his feet. Kael wondered how the man never tripped. They stopped an arm’s length apart, black shawls veiling their mouths so their words came soft and blurred.
The sound of speech itself had changed.
People even dreamed in muffled voices now.
