Chapter 2: The Thorn of Kael'thara
Ash still drifted like snow.
Gray flakes settled on Kael's shoulders, in his hair, coating everything in the remnants of what had been breathing an hour ago. He stood at the crater's edge, bare feet sunk into warm soot, heart beating wrong rhythms. Too fast. Too desperate. Something else lived behind his ribs now.
The village was gone.
Not shattered. Erased.
Reality carved away with surgical precision. No screams. No bodies. Just fragments that shouldn't exist:
A doorway, half-turned to stone. Someone had been walking through it.
The prayer pole's top half, melted into glass. The blessings were still readable in the twisted reflections.
Scorched shadows where the children danced yesterday.
The baker's oven, split clean down the middle—one half crumbling brick, the other crystallized into something that rang when the wind touched it.
At the center, the crater pulsed.
Shallow, but it felt endless. A wound in the earth that pulled at more than just matter.
At its heart: a single obsidian thorn.
Long as a man's forearm, wide as his fist. Perfect black glass veined with bleeding light—not blood, but the memory of it. It hummed a frequency he felt in the hollow spaces of his chest, in the gaps between thoughts.
He stepped closer.
Each step slowed the world.
His breath came ragged. Not from fear—he was past fear now—but from something deeper. His name felt loose. His memories kept slipping.
The closer he came, the more things fell away.
Faces became sketches.
His mother's lullaby dissolved into fragments that wouldn't fit together anymore.
His father's laugh.
The weight of his best friend's hand on his shoulder.
All bleeding away.
The Thorn pulsed. The whispers came.
Not words. Almost-words. Half-truths reshaping themselves:
They never loved you. Not really.
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The gods see only what they want.
There's truth beneath truth... if you dare bleed for it.
His hand reached out. He didn't mean to. Fingers trembling, hovering inches from shadow-light.
The whispers grew urgent:
Touch. Just touch.
It wants touching.
The world breaks anyway
He shouldn't. Every instinct screamed against it. But his palm opened anyway, aided by a thought it stretched forward.
Skin brushed impossible surface.
Contact.
Pain of meaning unmade.
His scream stayed trapped in his throat. Eyes burned white. Skin dissolved into memory. The world fell away in layers—sound, color, the concept of away itself.
He stood in a bleeding sky.
Continents floated overhead, spinning slowly around a spiral wound in the heavens. Cities clung to their edges, caught in the moment before falling toward ground that would never come. Lightning lashed upward. The air tasted of copper and regret.
Something stirred in the distance.
A divine figure made of fractures. It size incomprehensible, a titan of broken geometry that bent reality just by existing. In its shifting hands, is what looked like a large spear—not matter, but concept given shape.
From it poured rivers that flowed upward:
Rivers of time carrying moments that never happened.
Rivers of stories writing themselves into reality.
Rivers of untold truths, too heavy to fall.
Visions cut loose from time seared into his mind:
A knight shattering a mirror of stars. Each broken piece showed different possibilities, became real as they fell.
A child speaking backward tongues, every lie becoming truth as it left her lips.
A god hurling the Thorn into the firmament, carving wounds in existence itself.
A world folding around the impact, reality crimped into terrible new shapes.
Himself—but not himself. Older, scarred, standing in the same burning sky. Shadow-light moved across his skin. His eyes held something alien yet familiar.
The Thorn in one hand. Cold flame in the other.
Before him, a being of endless mouths, each whispering different truths that somehow harmonized.
Vision-Kael stepped forward,
The vision shattered.
He gasped awake.
Wind howled across the crater. The sky wept ash in patterns that almost looked like words. The crater breathed below, matching the new pulse behind his ribs.
The Thorn was gone.
His palm bore a mark.
Not a wound. Not a burn. A sigil etched in scorched light, pulsing with inhuman rhythm. Beautiful the way dangerous things were beautiful—shifting meaning depending on how he looked at it. Sometimes thorns. Sometimes light. Sometimes the spaces between stars.
Then he heard something.
Dragging feet. Wheezing breath.
Through the haze, the old seer stumbled forward. Far-Touched, who read omens in bird flight. Her robes burned away in sections, skin blistered black. But her eyes burned with unnatural light —that illumination from staring too long between things.
She collapsed at his feet.
One rattling breath. One whisper:
"You touched it."
Wind through empty houses.
"Gods help you... you heard it singing."
"You've taken the Thorn into your Piercing..."
"It will bleed you until truth becomes weapon, until lies become the only mercy."
"The spiral turns, child. You are the point it pivots on."
Her head slumped. Eyes stayed open, still glinting Hollowlight in death.
Kael didn't cry.
Something ancient had wrapped around his soul—not crushing, but growing through it. Roots through stone. Grief felt distant now, filtered through new understanding he didn't want but couldn't reject.
He stood. The sigil shimmered. When he flexed his fingers, light traced between them.
A breeze carried foreign scents—ozone, distant rain, the metallic tang of magic being born.
On the horizon: a skyship.
Sailing toward the ruins with solar sails catching light from no visible sun. Figures on deck. Their attention fixed on the crater. On him.
Kael turned to meet them.
He was no longer the boy who patched hulls or chased sparhawks from rooftops. That boy died when he touched the Thorn.
He was marked.
Bound to something larger than choice.
Fractured along lines of light that would reshape him into something unknown to the world.
The skyship grew larger.
His old life—quiet, simple, safe—was as gone as the village.
