The field was a graveyard.
Crows circled above, calling out the names of the fallen in voices like cracking bones.Ash drifted on the wind — from burning wagons, broken roofs, and pyres hastily built for the bodies no one could name.
Kael staggered through it all, sword dragging a black trail behind him in the dirt.
His left arm hung useless at his side.His tunic was torn.Blood — some his own, most not — soaked his boots.
He had stood.They had stood.And they had paid.
Yet still he lived.
Around him, what remained of the village began to gather, hollow-eyed, wordless.
They had fought back Blackthorn's men.Barely.At terrible cost.
Maerin leaned heavily against Jorren, coughing blood into a rag.The boy Corren was nowhere to be seen.Too many faces were missing.
Kael lifted his sword, meaning to speak — but the words caught in his throat.
What could he say?Victory?No.This was not victory.This was survival.
Thin, cracked survival.
The wind shifted.
The smoke parted.
And there — standing beyond the farthest pyres — were three figures.
They wore no armor.Carried no banners.
They were clothed in cloaks woven from stormclouds, and their faces...
Their faces were not right.
Not wrong — but not human.
Their eyes were deep wells of light.Their movements left afterimages in the air, like ripples across still water.
Kael's sword vibrated against his palm, whispering warnings in a tongue older than mountains.
The villagers did not see the newcomers.
Only Kael saw.
Only Kael heard the low, thrumming voice that followed:
"You have drawn their gaze."
The central figure stepped forward.
It was tall, slender, neither man nor woman — or perhaps both.Its voice spoke without breath, carried on thought:
"Mortal boy. Child of clay and flame. You have torn the weave. You have stolen the attention of higher things."
Kael staggered back.
"Who... what are you?" he croaked.
The figure smiled — not kindly.
"We are the Silent Court.We are the ones who do not intervene.We are the ones who now must."
Behind it, the two others moved — their cloaks stirring reality like curtains before a storm.
"By standing when you should have knelt, you have shifted the Pattern.You have lit a flame not meant to burn."
Kael gripped the sword tighter.
"I didn't do this for gods or patterns," he said."I did it because no one else would."
A murmur passed between the three — a sound like ice cracking underfoot.
The central figure regarded Kael for a long moment.
Then it said:
"So be it.Walk forward, Kael of the Valley.Cross the threshold.Meet what waits."
The world around him twisted.
The smoking fields, the ruined village, the broken dead — all peeled away like mist at sunrise.
Kael was falling.
No — rising.
No — both.
Weightless.
Breathless.
Ageless.
Until suddenly he landed, hard, on a floor of black glass.
Above him, a sky of burning stars wheeled in endless, silent patterns.
Before him, a gate — vast beyond measure — stood closed.
Its surface was etched with runes that shifted as he looked, forming and reforming.
A voice — not from the Court, not from any place he knew — boomed:
"You who would bear the Mortal Crown...Prove yourself."
Kael rose to his feet.
The sword in his hand pulsed once, steady and warm.
He faced the gate.
Alone.
But unbroken.