Kael Ashford had seen stars fall before.
But never like this. Never burning with that sickly green fire that made his bones ache just to look at it. Never screaming as they descended.
He stood frozen at the edge of Millbrook's wheat field, the sickle still clutched in his calloused hand. The harvest moon hung swollen and red above him, but its light was nothing compared to the seven green stars tearing through the sky like wounds in reality itself.
"Kael!" His sister's voice cut through the distant screaming. "Kael, get inside!"
Thirteen-year-old Mira was already running toward him, her dark hair streaming behind her. The fear in her eyes—that primal, animal terror—finally broke his paralysis. He dropped the sickle and grabbed her hand.
"The village—" he started.
"Father went to get Mother from the square," Mira gasped as they ran. "He said to meet at the root cellar. He said don't look at the stars when they land."
But Kael had already looked. He'd been looking since the first star fell twenty minutes ago, landing somewhere beyond the eastern woods. And with each impact, he'd felt something change inside him, like a door slowly creaking open in a house he'd lived in all his life, revealing rooms he never knew existed.
The green light intensified as another star fell, this one so close that Kael could see it wasn't a star at all. It was a tear—a rip in the fabric of the sky itself—and through that tear, something was pushing through.
Something that had too many limbs.
Something that had no face, only hunger.
"Don't stop!" Kael yanked Mira forward as the creature hit the ground three hundred yards behind them. The impact shook the earth, and the wheat field erupted in green flames that didn't burn like normal fire. They consumed. They unmade. Where the flames touched, the wheat didn't just burn—it ceased to have ever existed.
The Ashford house appeared ahead, its familiar stone walls suddenly looking as fragile as paper. Their father, Marcus, stood in the doorway, his weathered face pale but determined.
"Inside. Now." He pulled them both through and slammed the door. Through the window, Kael saw three more tears opening in the sky. Three more creatures beginning their descent.
And beneath his skin, that door inside him opened wider.
"Father," Kael whispered, staring at his hands. Beneath his flesh, green light pulsed like a second heartbeat. Like an infection. Like recognition. "What's happening to me?"
Marcus Ashford's face crumbled, years of careful lies finally breaking under the weight of truth. He reached for his son's shoulder, but his hand trembled.
"You weren't supposed to see them fall," his father said, and his voice carried the weight of a secret held too long. "You weren't supposed to be Called until your eighteenth year. The Seventh Realm... it's not supposed to remember you yet."
"The what?" Mira asked, but her question was drowned out by a sound that no human throat should make—a sound of tearing reality and ancient hunger.
The window exploded inward.
Kael threw himself in front of Mira as the creature lunged—all shadow and silver teeth and too many eyes that saw not just into him but through him, into every timeline he might have lived, every choice he might have made.
He raised his hands to shield his sister, and something inside him answered.
The green light erupted from his palms, not as fire but as rejection—as if reality itself was saying no to the creature's existence. The shadow-thing shrieked and recoiled, its form flickering like a bad memory.
But it didn't die. It couldn't die, Kael understood with horrible certainty. Because it had never truly been alive.
"Run!" His father grabbed them both. "The root cellar—there are wards—"
But they never made it to the cellar.
Because standing in their kitchen, between them and escape, stood a woman who definitely hadn't been there a moment before. She wore robes that seemed stitched from smoke and starlight, and her eyes were the same terrible green as the falling stars.
When she spoke, her voice echoed with the weight of centuries: "Kael Ashford, son of Marcus, heir to the Broken Pact. The Seventh Realm claims what was promised. You can surrender now, or we can take you from the ashes of everyone you love."
His father stepped forward, and Kael saw tears streaming down the older man's face. "He's just a boy. He doesn't know anything about—"
"He knows enough." The woman's smile was cold mercy. "I can see the Calling in his blood. It's already begun. He saw the stars fall. He answered their song." Her gaze fixed on Kael, and he felt stripped bare. "You felt it, didn't you? The moment the veil tore. The moment you remembered."
And the terrible thing was, she was right. Kael did remember. Not clearly, not yet—but the memories were there, pressing against the inside of his skull like prisoners demanding release. Memories that weren't his. Memories of a realm where shadows had weight and nightmares walked in flesh. Memories of a pact, a promise, a price unpaid.
Memories of who he really was.
"No," he whispered. But his hands still glowed green. But the power still sang in his veins. But the truth still waited, patient and inevitable.
"Yes," the woman said. And behind her, the walls began to dissolve, revealing not the village beyond but something else entirely—a landscape of perpetual twilight where seven dark towers rose against a purple sky.
The Seventh Realm.
And Kael felt it reaching for him, felt its hunger and its memory and its absolute conviction that he belonged there.
That he had always belonged there.
His father's hand tightened on his shoulder. "Son," Marcus said, his voice breaking. "I'm sorry. I thought I could change fate. I thought if I hid you here, in the furthest corner of the world, they'd never find you. I thought—"
"You thought wrong," the woman said. "Fate isn't changed, Marcus Ashford. It's only delayed. And delays always come due."
She raised her hand, and the last of the walls crumbled away.
Kael had one moment—one desperate, impossible moment—to make a choice. He could fight. He could run. He could let them take him and spare his family.
Or he could do something no one expected.
He could choose neither.
"You want me?" Kael said, his voice stronger than he felt. The green light in his hands pulsed brighter. "Then you'll have to catch me in your own realm. Because I'm not going as your prisoner. I'm going as your hunter."
And before his father could stop him, before Mira could scream his name, before the woman could react, Kael Ashford did the one thing everyone had spent sixteen years trying to prevent.
He stepped through the veil.
He stepped into the Seventh Realm.
And behind him, he heard his father's anguished cry: "You fool! You've started the war!"
But Kael was already gone, swallowed by twilight and shadow.
And in the darkness, something laughed.
Something old.
Something that had been waiting a very, very long time for this exact moment.