Chapter Seven: The Heir of Nothing
The world broke apart, and Zack broke with it.
No transition. No warning. A scouring wind of frozen needles ripped through him from the inside. Not pain. Something worse. An unraveling. Every nerve in his body lit up and then went dark, then lit again in a different configuration. His dormant channels, the pathways where Aether should have flowed and never did, were being bypassed entirely. New routes burned themselves onto his bones, carved into tissue that had never been asked to carry power before.
Redecorating my insides without permission. Rude.
The hollow at his core, the empty space where a dantian should have existed, did not fill. Instead, the void anchored itself around the emptiness. It wrapped the hole in something cold and deliberate, a second architecture laid over his skeleton. A knot of freezing, hungry darkness settled behind his sternum and pulsed once. Twice.
It was alive.
He dropped to his knees in the black earth. His fingers dug into the vitrified soil. His mouth opened but no sound came out. The transformation was stripping him down to components and reassembling the pieces in a different order.
So this is what a cosmic parasite feels like. Chilly. Very chilly. Zero stars.
Then it stopped.
Zack knelt in the clearing, gasping. The bruised light above the altar had gone dark. The Warden's spectral form was a fading smear against the night air, dissolving into nothing.
His sight had changed.
He blinked. Blinked again. The forest was the same, and it was completely different.
The Aether was still visible, but now it had layers. He could see the currents as before, green and gold, flowing through root and bark and soil. But beneath them, threaded through the gaps, ran veins of something else. Anti-light. Channels of deep, corrupted violet that pulsed with a slow, sick rhythm. Raw Nox, visible for the first time.
I've been watching half the picture my entire life. The other half is ugly.
The Warden's dissolving form caught his new sight. What had appeared solid was actually a frayed knot of Aether and Nox coming undone. Threads pulling loose. A rope unwinding after millennia of holding taut. The ancient guardian was not fading. It was falling apart.
"Learn control." The voice was a whisper now, thin as smoke. "Or the emptiness will consume you. Then it will consume all you touch."
The specter dissolved.
Helpful last words. "Don't eat the world." I'll keep that in mind.
Zack stood. His legs shook. His hands shook. Everything shook. But the new cold thing behind his sternum was steady, a fixed point that his trembling body orbited.
He looked at his hands. They appeared the same. Callused. Scarred. But now he could see the faint heat signature of his own blood moving beneath the skin. Living things carried warmth, pockets of stolen heat against the immense cold void of everything else. He was one of those pockets. Small. Fragile.
A fern grew at the clearing's edge. One green shoot curling from the black soil, brave and stupid.
Zack looked at it. The void behind his sternum stirred. A thread of vivid green light connected the fern to the soil, to the air, to the Aether current flowing through the earth. Life. Plain and simple.
He reached toward it. Not with his hand. With the cold place. A single hungry thought, shapeless and instinctive.
A thread of green peeled away from the fern and flowed into him.
The sensation was electric. Sweet. A jolt of warmth flooding into the frozen hollow, filling a fraction of the emptiness with stolen heat. His muscles stopped trembling. His breath steadied. For one perfect second, the cold receded.
The fern's tip greyed. The green drained from the curl of its leaf, moving downward. The tissue dried. Cracked. Crumbled to fine ash that scattered in no wind at all.
Zack yanked back.
I killed it.
The ash settled on the black earth. The thread of stolen warmth still buzzed in his chest, fading.
One thought. One second. I pulled the life out of a plant with a stray thought. It didn't resist. It couldn't resist. I reached in and took what made it alive, and now it's dust.
His stomach turned.
What if that had been a person? What if I'd been standing next to Mira and the void decided it was hungry?
Horror flooded his chest. Cold, precise horror. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that comes from understanding what you are and what you can do and knowing those two things might not be compatible with the people you love.
New priorities. Number one: hide the void. Number two: learn its limits before it kills someone who isn't a fern. Number three: remember how to look human. Number four: do not, under any circumstances, touch my sister while thinking hungry thoughts.
Actually, number four should be number one. Let's rearrange.
He ran.
Branches whipped his face. Roots snagged his boots. He crashed through the underbrush with zero grace and maximum speed, putting distance between himself and the clearing. The wholesome moonlight filtering through the normal canopy felt wrong now. He could see the Nox threading through it. The corruption in the soil. The faint, sick pulse beneath the healthy green.
The south field came into view as he broke the tree line.
He stopped.
In his new sight, the blight was visible for the first time. Not dead crops. Something active. A slow, hungry drain threading through the root systems, pulling vitality downward into channels that ran beneath the topsoil. The pattern was familiar. Horribly familiar.
It drains. The blight drains. The same way I drain. The same pull. The same direction. From life into nothing.
His father's field was being eaten from below by something that worked the same way he did.
That's not a coincidence. That's a message. And I don't like what it says.
He tore his gaze away and kept moving.
The training yard materialized in the pre-dawn grey. The sky had begun to lighten while he ran, and the familiar packed dirt and worn posts grounded him. Normal things. Simple things.
Burrel sat on the fence rail.
Of course he's here. The man sleeps less than a guilty conscience.
The Chief's eyes tracked Zack as he entered the yard. His gaze moved from the scratches on Zack's face to the dirt on his knees to the leaves tangled in his hair. He didn't stand.
"The south woods."
Zack stopped. His breathing was still ragged.
"I could not sleep."
Burrel studied him the way a carpenter studies a beam that just cracked under a load it shouldn't have been carrying.
"You look different."
"I went for a walk."
"People who go for walks come back relaxed. You came back fractured."
Fractured. Good word. Accurate word. The old man has a vocabulary when he wants one.
Burrel's jaw worked. He was chewing on a question he didn't want to ask. The scar on his temple caught the grey light.
"What did you find?"
Zack met his eyes. The void pulsed cold behind his sternum. The stolen warmth from the fern had faded entirely, and the emptiness was back, wider now. Deeper. Awake.
"I found a choice."
Burrel held his gaze for a long time. Then he gave a single, slow nod. The kind of nod a man gives when he hears an answer he expected and wished he hadn't.
"Choices have consequences. You carry the weight of yours now." He slid off the fence rail. His boots hit the dirt without sound. "Your trial opponent is set. The council approved it this morning."
"Who?"
"Kael."
The name landed. Kael. Body Path. Medium-high affinity. The strongest fighter in Zack's age group by a margin wide enough to park a cart in. Arms built for breaking things. A right cross that had put Dren flat on his back last harvest festival, and Dren outweighed him by thirty pounds.
Kael. The one person in Zoe who could crack a stone by looking at it wrong. Perfect. Ideal matchup for a boy whose greatest combat achievement is murdering a houseplant.
"Be ready."
Burrel walked into the grey morning. Gone.
Zack stood alone in the training yard. The cold knot behind his sternum pulsed with a steady rhythm. The sky brightened by slow degrees. Birds woke in the canopy.
He flexed his hand. The fingers that had drained a fern to dust closed into a fist.
Kael hits like a wagon full of rocks. I can kill a small plant. This is going to be a spectacle.