Darkness was no longer a place. It was a teacher.
Raelith opened his eyes and saw nothing. Not black. Not shadow. Just the void. His limbs ached, joints swollen, breath shallow. Somewhere far off, he could hear Kaelen breathing—ragged, barely alive.
They had been in the Pit of Silence for three days. No food. No water. No light. Their only companions were their snakes, coiled tightly around their necks, their hissing the only sound that tethered them to reality.
"Pain is a mirror," the Whisperer had said before locking them in. "Until you see your true face in it, you are blind."
It was only the beginning.
The Pit became routine. Then the Pit evolved. Deprivation turned to venom. Their own familiars began biting them—daily, methodically. The venom was priest-crafted, hallucinogenic. It stripped reality away, piece by piece. They lived years inside their own nightmares.
They saw their mother rise from her grave, skin rotting, whispering apologies. They saw each other as enemies, as strangers, as corpses. They watched the world burn and wake up screaming in silence.
But no matter what horrors the venom conjured, their knives remained steady. Eventually, even the visions lost their power.
When the twins could endure the Pit without emotion, without fear, they were dragged—barefoot and starving—to the Hall of Shadows.
Sight was stolen. Hearing sealed. Tongues cut. Their blades were dulled. They were told to fight.
Master Saar, called the Grey Vein, stood at the edge of their world, unseen, always present. He moved like mist and killed like truth. Rumor whispered that he'd once poisoned a nation's well and watched an entire city choke on its own blood.
"No emotion," he said, his voice dry as parchment. "No sound. No name. You are not human here. You are weapon."
They fought with nothing—just instinct, just breath. They learned the feel of air before a strike, the shift of pressure before a blade came. They began to predict movements not by sound or sight, but by the absence of both.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Their tongues healed. Their vision returned. They no longer flinched. The world was sharper now—too sharp.
Every scent was a warning. Every flicker of shadow, a threat.
When their physical senses were broken and reforged, they were introduced to venom trials again—this time, willingly. Daily doses of exotic poisons, measured to the drop. Cobra milk. viper ichor. Ghost serpent saliva. They vomited blood, lost feeling in limbs, blacked out mid-step. But they adapted. Slowly. Violently.
Raelith became silent, even in thought. Kaelen became more vicious, laughing during seizures, whispering riddles while blood dripped from his nose.
The years began to slip by unnoticed.
They trained in illusions next. The Priests injected toxins that twisted the mind and body into false realities. Sometimes, the twins believed they were burning in a town square. Other times, they were drowning beneath ice. In one illusion, they were forced to kill each other over and over—bleeding in sand, waking to do it again.
But they never hesitated.
Because hesitation was weakness, and weakness meant exile. Or worse—ritual sacrifice beneath the temple, to feed the serpent god's hunger.
At twelve, they learned the assassin's scriptures.
"To walk unseen is the highest praise.
To kill without noise is devotion.
To leave no corpse is divinity."
They memorized each line, bled each word into their skin with needle and ash. Their tribal tattoos deepened, shifting as their power grew. Black ink coiled across their torsos like serpents in motion.
By thirteen, they were introduced to assassin-magus techniques.
Shadow Veins—where they could temporarily vanish in flickers of still air.
Venom Threads—thin lines of poison woven from their own blood.
Mind Coil—a meditative state where they could slow perception, feel time drip like oil.
Master Saar taught them to break bones silently, to crush windpipes without leaving marks, to kill a sentry from twenty feet using only a poisoned hairpin and darkness.
Failures cost them flesh.
Kaelen once failed a silent kill test. His punishment was a two-inch cut beneath the eye—no healing allowed. The scar never faded.
Raelith disobeyed a command once—to protect Kaelen during a fire trial. For that, they shattered his wrist with a hammer, then made him finish the trial dragging a dead man's corpse through smoke.
But pain was a forge. And they were steel.
At fourteen, they entered the Echo Chamber.
A room designed to mimic the soundscape of madness. It whispered lies and memories in familiar voices—mother, father, each other, even the snake god himself.
Kaelen screamed the first time. Raelith didn't. But by the fourth visit, both had learned to breathe through the falsehoods, to hear only what mattered: the rhythm of life, the steps of prey.
Their emotions were no longer chained.
They were gone.
At fifteen, they were given their names—true assassin titles.
Raelith became Null Fang.
Kaelen was named Ash Coil.
Only killers of rank were named.
And still, they were not released.
Their final year was the most brutal.
One hundred missions within the compound. One hundred unseen kills. Each body had to vanish. Each soul had to die screaming.
They were pitted against older assassins. They fought in darkness, on rooftops, under ice. Sometimes against each other. Sometimes against prisoners. Sometimes against members of the clan who had failed and been condemned to death by blade.
They killed them all.
When they turned sixteen, they were summoned to the Temple of Fangs.
The entire clan was present—Grandmasters, executioners, archivists, priests. Hooded children. Masked shadows. And at the highest point, beneath the serpent idol, stood the Clan Head.
Sezhal of the Hollow Coil.
She was older now. Smaller. But her presence filled the chamber like blood in water.
Beside her stood the High Priest of Izzaruun, his staff coiled in living snakes. And behind them, arms crossed, stood Karn—the twins' father. No longer just a clan elite. Now one of the seven Grandmasters.
The twins walked forward. No fear. No sound.
They knelt.
The High Priest raised his hand.
"Before you kneel sons of venom. Birthed beneath the cold moon. Forged in madness. Sharpened by pain."
The snakes in the temple hissed in unison. A thousand hisses. Like a tide of death.
"They are sixteen," the Priest said. "They have known only poison. Only silence. They have killed in illusion. They have killed in truth."
He turned to Sezhal.
"What say you, Matron of the Hollow?"
Sezhal stepped forward. Her eyes were empty—yet somehow, she saw too much.
"They are no longer boys," she said. "They are not yet men. But they are death made flesh."
The room bowed their heads.
Karn stepped forward at last. He looked at his sons, at the coldness in their eyes, the stillness in their stance. He said only three words.
"You did well."
Raelith said nothing. Kaelen smiled faintly.
Then the Priest stepped forward again, voice rising like thunder.
"The world turns. And from its dark corners, power stirs. Chaos returns. And in that chaos…"
He looked directly at the twins.
"…our knives will sing."
And somewhere deep beneath the temple, the god stirred