The voice came from nowhere and everywhere—calm, immense, neither kind nor cruel. It settled behind his eyes like heat behind glass.
Kyle stood, or thought he stood, in a sky that bled gold. Clouds seethed far below, stitched with silent lightning. Above them all, the ring hung—immense and unmoving, girdling the world like a crown hammered into the heavens. Lines of gold flickered across its surface, forming symbols too complex to hold in thought. Then the symbols began to move.
Something pulsed. A storm coiled at the ring’s edge—held back, watching.
Stone towers collapsed in reverse. Vines slithered up a sky made of metal ribs. Firelight curled through a forest of stars. None of it made sense. All of it felt real.
Kyle reached toward the ring.
And fell.
--
He jerked awake with dirt in his mouth and the taste of smoke curling down his throat. The breath he pulled in scraped like thorns. For a moment he couldn't remember how to breathe—then it clawed its way in, ragged and burning.
The canopy overhead filtered late-morning light through trembling leaves. The wind had stilled. Even the birds were silent.
He was lying in a shallow hollow—half-covered in needles and moss, tucked between roots like something buried and forgotten. Dried blood webbed his hands. Not his. His limbs ached. His throat was raw. A dull warmth beat steadily against his chest.
The pendant.
He pressed a shaking hand to it beneath his shirt. Still warm. Warmer than it had any right to be.
Who had spoken to him?
Then quieter: She said key. What key?
He shifted, slow and stiff, until he could lift his head above the rim of the hollow.
Smoke curled thick between blackened trees and collapsed roofs. The heart of the village was near—so near he could still smell the scorched wood, the charred meat.
Kyle didn’t need to see it to know what was left.
He remembered charging forward. Tina’s scream. His mother’s last stand. The scarred enforcer. The light.
Then—darkness. Not unconsciousness, not sleep. Something else. Something... pulled.
His hand clenched the pendant tighter.
The words returned, sharp as blades:
“You don’t know who his father is. But he’ll find out what you’ve done.”
“If he cared, he’d be here.”
He bit down against a sound that might’ve been a sob.
The wind shifted. It smelled of ash and something faintly metallic.
He wasn’t alone anymore.
--
Kyle froze at a sound—boots pressing into burnt grass, metal shifting. Not the erratic clatter of yesterday’s chaos. These steps were measured. Intentional.
He slipped lower behind the brush, breath caught in his throat.
Six figures emerged from the south, moving in a tight formation along the scorched boundary of the village. Five wore full armor—dull blue, matte, traced with faint glimmers of Dust that pulsed softly beneath the surface. Their helms enclosed their heads completely, no visors or eye-slits visible. Faceless. Unreadable. Like statues that had learned how to walk.
A jagged emblem—an eye split by flame—was etched across their left shoulders.
The sixth figure wore no armor. Instead, he was wrapped in long blue robes woven with silver thread that caught the sun like threads of ice. A cracked flaming eye was stitched across his chest, larger and brighter than the others. His build was solid, his brown hair tied back. His face was rough and angular, not young, not old—weathered by command more than time.
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He crouched by the blackened chapel, running a hand through the ash. He lifted something charred—too far for Kyle to see clearly—and turned it slowly in his fingers.
“Jorgen,” the robed man said flatly. “Confirmed. Burned too clean. No dispersal signature.”
One of the armored figures stepped forward and knelt beside him, brushing the ash with a gauntlet. Where metal touched earth, a faint shimmer of Dust flared and faded.
“No rupture marks,” the enforcer said. “Seal’s intact.”
The man rose, shaking his head.
“Then it wasn’t sabotage. Or he wasn’t the target.”
He looked out across the ruins of the ruins of the village. His eyes scanned the broken houses, the sagging fence line, the fields where nothing stirred.
“They were wiped out without sanction. No logged deployment this far west.”
He didn’t raise his voice, but it carried.
“Which means someone else ordered this, or no one did.”
Kyle’s stomach twisted. They didn’t even know. Whoever brought the fire and the lances had done it in secret—or worse, with permission no one wanted to claim.
The man lifted his hand.
“Fan out. Log the bodies. Note any irregularities. Captain—take two. Sweep the wood.”
The one called Captain turned and moved toward the trees, two others falling in behind.
As they passed, Kyle heard one speak—soft but clear, voice metallic through the helm:
“Should’ve sent a Dawnbearer, not a Voice. Too much Dust corruption.”
No response from the Captain. Just silence.
Dawnbearer.
The word lodged in Kyle’s mind like a splinter. He had never heard it in Jorgen’s sermons. Never once.
Voice, then—was that the robed man? A title? A warning?
He couldn’t move. Every part of him screamed to run. To vanish.
But something deeper held him still.
The pendant warmed. Once.
The brush stirred ten paces away. The Captain paused.
Kyle didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.
And they passed him by.
--
Kyle stayed frozen long after the sound of boots faded into the smoke.
His muscles screamed. His lungs ached from holding breath too long. The pendant pulsed slow and steady against his chest, hotter than before.
He didn’t dare move.
Not yet.
The hollow around him felt wrong now—too silent, too still. The air seemed thicker somehow, like the moment had warped itself. He remembered the way the Captain had paused—turned—and then walked past as if Kyle wasn’t even there.
It hadn’t been luck.
He was sure of it now.
The pendant's heat throbbed again, gentle but insistent, like a second heartbeat under his skin. It hadn't just kept him from running. It had hidden him. Shielded him.
A shimmer, not light, not sound—something deeper, like the world had blurred around him for a breath, and no one else had noticed.
Kyle’s hands trembled. He dug them into the dirt to keep still.
Then, soft as a sigh against the inside of his skull, he heard it:
Not yet.
The same weight he'd felt in the dream—vast and patient—brushed against him again.
The voice wasn’t his.
It wasn’t even a voice exactly—more a shape, a weight, an idea pressed into his mind.
He clenched his jaw until it hurt. He wanted to rip the pendant from his neck and throw it into the ash.
He wanted to keep it closer than his own skin.
Slowly, painfully, he forced his body to move.
His fingers first, then his arms, muscles straining against the hollow’s grip.
He eased back, inch by inch, until the roots swallowed him again and the ruined village slipped behind the rise.
Kyle didn’t look back.
He slipped deeper into the northern woods, moving without thought, only away.
--
By the time the sun began to fall, Kyle had left the ruins far behind.
The woods thickened around him—silent, now unfamiliar. Gnarled roots clawed at his boots. Branches snatched at his sleeves. Every breath of wind sounded like pursuit.
He moved without thought, without direction. Only away.
The pendant hung heavy against his chest, its warmth faded to an ember. Still there. Still waiting.
Kyle kept moving until his legs buckled and he dropped to a crouch beneath a tangle of deadfall.
His hands scraped raw against bark and dirt. His chest heaved, pulling smoke-laced air into torn lungs.
The world tilted as he pressed his forehead against the earth, grit grinding into his skin. His mouth tasted of ash and old blood. His tongue felt thick, clumsy. Hunger gnawed at the edges of his awareness, but thirst came first—slicing, sharp, a need louder than the hammering of his heart.
He had nothing. No water. No food. No fire-striker. Only the pendant, hot against his skin like a brand.
He pressed himself low, ears straining for any sound that didn’t belong.
Nothing but the slow murmur of leaves. And somewhere far behind, the memory of smoke.
Time blurred.
The shaking in his hands slowed.
His mind began to clear.
He couldn’t stay here.
The forest felt too confining. Too dangerous. Every shadow felt like eyes. Every gust of wind sounded like footfalls closing in.
His muscles ached with the strain of standing. His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat—a slow, heavy drumbeat pressing him down.
The enforcers would sweep wider once they realized someone might have survived. And even if they didn’t—starvation would find him before they did.
Kyle pushed himself upright, ribs flaring with pain.
South. East.
Those words surfaced like stones thrown into a pond—distant, barely remembered from half-heard directions and Jorgen’s half-mumbled prayers.
South was civilization. Towns. Roads.
East was the way the pilgrims marched when they left, headed for places Kyle’s village had only whispered about.
He had no map. No certainty.
Just the pull of gravity and the fading light.
Kyle set his jaw and turned, picking a line through the trees, angling southeast where the sky bled into darker colors.
Not a path. Not yet.
Just movement.