The morning Kael first tasted blood, the forest was so still it seemed the world itself had paused, holding its breath.
The mist hung low between the trees, veiling the earth in a pale, trembling hush. Frost rimmed every branch, every stone. Even the crows, usually bickering in the canopy, had fallen silent.
Kael was thirteen winters old. His hands were steady now, calloused by sword and scroll alike. He moved through the woods with the easy grace of someone born not merely into the wild, but of it.
He was hunting alone — Jorren had sent him.
A test, the knight had said. Not of the hand. Of the heart.
Kael had thought it strange at the time.
Now, as he crept through the frozen brush, bow strung across his back, he caught sight of something that made him freeze mid-step.
Tracks.
But not deer. Not boar.
Boots.
Heavy. Ragged. Blood-speckled.
A trail weaving drunkenly between the trees, as if the wearer staggered, barely clinging to life.
Kael's heart kicked against his ribs.
Intruder.
A threat — or prey.
Jorren's lessons whispered in his mind:
"Strike before you are struck. Mercy is a blade turned against your own throat."
But another voice — quieter, older, unbidden — stirred in him, too.
"Not all battles are won with steel."
Kael followed.
He found the stranger slumped against a pine, half-covered in frost.
A man — or what was left of one.
Leather armor torn to ribbons. One leg clearly broken, twisted wrong beneath him. Blood soaked the earth around him, a black pool steaming faintly in the cold air.
He was young — no more than twenty — but hollowed by pain and fear, aged by it.
His sword, a shattered thing, lay forgotten at his side.
Kael stepped forward, bow half-raised, every muscle tensed.
The man's head snapped up. Eyes — wild, feral, desperate — locked onto Kael.
"Please," he rasped. His voice was cracked and raw, barely human. "Don't—"
Kael hesitated.
He could end this. One arrow. Clean. Silent.
No risk of being followed. No risk of the kingdoms learning that the boy prophesied beneath a blood moon lived and breathed.
Jorren would expect it. Maerin would understand.
But Kael looked at the man — really looked — and saw not a soldier, not a spy, but a dying creature clinging stubbornly to the last thread of life.
And something inside him — something stubborn, something that no sword could sever — refused.
"No," Kael muttered under his breath. He slung the bow back over his shoulder. Stepped closer.
The man flinched. Weakly raised a trembling hand as if to fend off a blow that never came.
Kael knelt.
Without a word, he tore a strip of cloth from his own cloak, binding the worst of the bleeding. It was messy, clumsy, but it slowed the death-creep in the man's limbs.
The man stared at him, disbelief wide in his hollow eyes.
"Why?" he croaked.
Kael didn't answer.
He didn't know the words for it yet — didn't know that this moment, this choice, would echo louder than a thousand battles, would mark the beginning of the man he would become.
All he knew was this:
He would not be like the kings who betrayed their blood for crowns.
He would not be like the gods who demanded worship and offered nothing in return.
He would not kill for fear.
He would build something else.
By the time Kael half-carried, half-dragged the wounded man back to the hollow, Jorren stood waiting, arms crossed, face like carved stone.
Maerin emerged from the hut, his ink-stained hands fluttering uselessly at his sides, eyes wide.
"You brought him," Jorren said. Not a question. A verdict.
Kael straightened his spine, though his arms ached and his breath burned.
"I did."
A long silence.
"You may have doomed us all," Jorren said.
"Maybe," Kael replied, voice quiet but steady. "But I won't let fear be the first stone I lay."
For the first time, Jorren's hard gaze cracked — just slightly — and something like pride flickered through the ruin of his face.
Maerin only smiled, sad and proud all at once.
That night, after the stranger was fed, bandaged, and asleep by the fire, Kael sat beneath the skeletal branches of the pines, staring into the stars.
He wondered what future he had just rewritten.
Wondered if the gods were watching.
Wondered if he had made the right choice.
The stars gave no answer.
Only the slow, ancient breathing of the forest.
Only the whisper of the blood moon, distant but inevitable, still humming in his veins.
Soon, others would come.
Soon, the world would knock on his door, not with open hands, but with swords.
But for tonight, Kael sat alone beneath the heavens, a boy who had chosen mercy.
A boy who would, one day, teach even gods to blink.