Shenya shrank to a soft, dismissive glow behind Kai. He could almost hear the echo of the Head Celebrant's voice—Zero, Lumen-Null—chasing after him on the wind, growing smaller and meaner as it was swallowed up by the trees. He thought of Maya, and the look on her face as he'd pushed past her at the cathedral doors. He'd never seen her so helpless. The memory stung, but not enough to slow him.
The forest was different at this hour, stripped of its usual hush by the sharp edges of winter. The river that looped behind the school grounds had frozen over, every footstep ringing off the ice like a call for help. Black firs lined the path, and their needles shimmered with a dusting of hoarfrost, refracting what little light was left. Kai's vision blurred, and for a moment he saw double—one world in front of him, and another glitching behind it. The trees lost their texture and color entirely in places, leaving jagged holes in his perception, voids that swallowed the light and vibrancy around them. The Static pulsed, a reminder of the fragility of reality itself. He pressed forward, counting the breaths until his chest burned.
Finally, the ground dipped, and he tumbled into the hollow where the woods broke open—a small, muddy basin ringed by a throne of roots. Kai collapsed in the center, his back against the mossy trunk of a dead alder. Here, the earth remembered things. The smell was different—old campfire and wild garlic and the faint, root-sweet decay of last summer's leaves. His father's voice seemed to linger in the damp air: "First thing you learn, boy, is how to know what's safe to eat. Second thing is how to know what's not."
Kai stared at his hands. He'd cut them in the brambles; thin lines of red shone in the pale light, beading along his knuckles. He wiped them on his cloak and stared at the pendant, turning it over and over in his palm. It should have felt like an anchor. Instead, it was just a weight.
He looked up at the clearing—at the patch of sky framed by the tangled arms of the alder and the hush of pine all around. He remembered coming here with his father, remembered lying on his back in this very mud as Alaric Fischer pointed out the constellations, reciting the names of each one like a knight's oath: The Sword. The Bastion. The Cinder Queen. He remembered the way his father had shivered in the cold, but kept talking anyway, voice low and steady, as if the stars would vanish if he stopped.
He'd wanted to be like that—unshakable, even when everything else fell apart.
Now, he felt like a worm curled under a rock, waiting for the light to burn him away.
He tucked his knees to his chest and stared out at the darkening sky, letting the cold work its way in. He was hollow, all right. Hollow as a bone, hollow as the stories he'd told himself for years. The world had wanted nothing from him, and now it had proof.
Kai squeezed the pendant, hard enough to make the edges dig into his skin. He wished his father were here to tell him what to do, to explain why the universe made room for a Lumen-Null when even the sun seemed to have a place for every mote of dust.
But the woods were silent, and so was he.
For a while, there was only the cold and the sound of his own heartbeat, wild and arrhythmic, fluttering in his chest like a thing desperate to escape. Kai huddled deeper, trying to fold himself small enough that the air would forget him. He could have stayed that way all night—frozen and forgotten—but something inside him bucked at the thought.
He'd failed, but he wasn't gone. Not yet.
The fury hit without warning, a wave that caved him out even as it filled every nerve. He lurched to his feet, eyes burning, and let out a scream that started in his toes and tore its way up. It was ugly and uneven, the kind of sound that left the throat raw and sent birds scattering from the branches overhead. The woods seemed to flinch at it, the echo bouncing back off the trunks until it died, swallowed by the uncaring dark.
He screamed again, this time with words.
"Why?!" The syllable cracked and vanished. "Why give me his name if you're just going to rip it away?!"
He was shouting at the world, at the cold, at the moon that was nothing but a fading bruise behind the clouds. But mostly, he was shouting at the memory of his father—at the way he had promised things would be better here, that Kai could grow into something bigger than the sum of his failures. The weight of that hope pressed on his ribs until he thought they might break.
Blind with rage, he reached for the nearest object—a length of wood by his foot. It was his practice sword, forgotten in the run from the orphanage but somehow still here, battered and gouged from a thousand drills. He gripped it in both hands and hurled it as hard as he could into the trees. It crashed through the underbrush, splintering with an emptythud, and was gone.
Kai staggered forward, suddenly spent, and dropped to his knees. The pendant burned in his palm, and he yanked at it, meaning to break the cord, to fling it as far as the sword. But his fingers locked around the metal. He twisted, pulled, cursed it—but it refused to leave him.
"Let go," he whispered, voice wrecked. "Just let me go."
But it wouldn't. His hands shook, but he couldn't force them to open. The disc was warm now, despite the chill, as if his body's last heat had retreated there for safety.
Kai sat in the mud, shuddering, and let the tears come. He sobbed until he thought he'd vomit, until his vision swam and every muscle ached. The woods didn't care. The world didn't care. But the pendant was still there—cold and unyielding, just like the boy who'd once believed he could change anything if he just tried hard enough.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and pressed his forehead to the dirt, willing himself to vanish. But nothing vanished here—not the name, not the shame, not the hope that refused to die, no matter how much he wished it would.
Kai lost track of how long he sat there, just breathing and not breathing, waiting for the ground to open and take him down where things didn't hurt so much.
The world around him began to shift. The vibrant colors of the forest dulled, the edges of leaves blurring into indistinct shapes. The familiar sounds of wind and birds faded, replaced by a low hum, like the static of a broken radio. It was as if the magic that had once cradled his childhood home was slipping away, leaving behind a low-resolution echo of existence.
Then came a sudden, jagged snap of a branch just beyond the clearing.
It was too sharp to be wind. Too heavy to be a fox or a stoat. Kai's head jerked up, ears straining for any follow-up, but for a moment there was only the hush.
Then—another crack. Quicker this time. The unmistakable sound of something big moving clumsily, followed by a short, high gasp that bit off as soon as it started. Not an animal. A person.
Kai was on his feet before he knew it, every sense stretching outward. The clearing felt smaller now, vulnerable, as if the trees could close in and trap him with whatever else was out there. He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, heart galloping, and listened.
The footsteps came again—a clumsy scuffling, not the careful tread of a hunter, not the charging speed of a predator. More like someone trying very hard not to be found, and failing. There was a rhythm to it: shuffle, drag, pause. Shuffle, drag, pause.
Kai's mind clicked into old patterns—training, drills, the things Instructor Vantis had hammered into him when he thought the world might still make use of boys like Kai. Assess. Observe. Move.
He crouched low, pressing himself against the alder's broad trunk, and peered into the dark where the sound had last come from. He could just make out the outline of a form—smaller than a grown man, but moving with desperation. It wove between the trees, never once looking back.
Something in the figure's gait told Kai it was injured. That, more than the fear in the air, caught his attention. Even now, even here, he couldn't turn away from someone in trouble.
He watched for a heartbeat longer, then wiped his nose and set off after the sound. The forest closed around him, but at least he was moving toward something instead of away.
For the first time all day, Kai felt his mind clear.
Kai crept between the trees, boots barely making a sound on the frozen duff. He used every trick Vantis had ever taught him—move when the wind moves, keep to the shadows, let your breath ride low and slow. Even so, every snapped twig sounded like a signal flare.
The stuttered running had gone quiet. Kai kept moving, pausing after every step, scanning the undergrowth for the glint of a blade or the gleam of eyes. What would a Lumen-Null do if it came to a fight? The question hovered at the edge of panic, but Kai pushed it away. He wasn't here to win anything. He was here to see, to know.
A hundred paces further on, the ground sloped down into a dense pocket of ferns and bramble. In the center, half-collapsed and gasping, was the figure he'd heard: a girl, maybe his age, curled behind a fallen log thick with velvet moss. Even from a distance, he could see her trembling, one hand clutching her leg just above the ankle. She wore a cloak darker than the night around them, and under that, a shirt or dress cut in angles and patterns Kai had never seen in Shenya—sharp lines, tight stitches, cloth that drank the dim light instead of reflecting it.
Her hair was a wild curtain, white as moonlit snow, and her skin had the translucence of candle wax. But it was her eyes that made Kai freeze: deep violet, wide as coin-edges, swirling with a kind of sick brightness that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with something he'd never named before.
She saw him, and for an instant her face twisted in pure, animal panic. He raised his hands, trying to show he was no threat, but she snapped her other hand up and pressed a finger to her lips with a ferocity that stopped him cold. The meaning was unmistakable: Don't move. Don't speak.
He nodded, then crouched low behind a sapling, letting the cold bite into his knees. He kept his eyes on her, but tried not to stare. She was watching something behind him, over his left shoulder, and her jaw was clenched so tight the skin around it had gone white.
Kai risked a glance back.
At first, there was only the primeval gloom of the deepwood, shadows clotting between the ancient boles, and a creeping sensation along his spine that held a inevitability than any winter's chill. Then, a flicker—not of light, but of void. A place where the world simply ceased.
It was a hole stitched into the tapestry of the forest. Where it passed, the ferns did not bend; they were unmade, vanishing into perfect absence until the emptiness moved on, leaving them grey and brittle, the color and 'weight' of them stolen by the passage. Kai squinted, his mind rebelling. The thing had no form, only a terrible margin where reality ended, as though some unseen hand had taken shears to the very weave of creation.
The girl's gaze was a brand upon him, a silent plea etched into her pale features. When he turned, her lips shaped a soundless word. She pointed a trembling finger to her own heart, the gesture making her flinch and curl inward, as if the very air between them might be dissolved by the touch. What pursued her was no mere phantom. It was an anti-presence, a negation that un-wrote all it touched.
Kai's heart hammered against his ribs, the pendant at his throat burning like a sliver of fallen star, its pulse a drumbeat of warning against his skin.