Life is cheap.
Kael found that out the first time, when some stranger’s silver bought his death and nobody bothered asking what he thought his life was worth.
The second lesson was worse.
Revenge isn’t cheap at all.
It’s the single most expensive thing a man can buy, and there’s no such thing as a refund.
It took his eye.
It took his hand, wrist down to nothing, and more than once he tried to negotiate a discount that never came.
Every soft thing about him got peeled off in some Hall or other, until the boy who wanted nothing more than a badge and a drink with a friend was just gone.
Kael doesn’t spend much time missing him.
Maybe on bad nights.
Not tonight.
The forest is on fire where he’s walking, though he never touched a flame to it.
Space bends wrong around his boots.
The trees lean in like something’s watching him through the bark.
Where his left eye should be, there’s a faint cold light instead — the kind that comes off a star that already died a thousand years ago and hasn’t gotten around to telling anyone.
His right sleeve hangs empty past the elbow.
The arm underneath moves anyway.
Wherever it swings, the air comes apart into something black and starless, then stitches shut again like it never happened.
Ahead of him a man is running.
Badly.
Tripping over roots that keep showing up exactly where his foot’s about to land.
He’s soaked in blood that isn’t his yet.
He throws a spell back over his shoulder without even looking — bright, panicked, useless — and Kael doesn’t block it so much as take it apart mid-air, folding the light sideways into nothing.
“Wait.” The man’s voice cracks on the word.
“Wait, we can talk about this, this wasn’t my call, I was just following orders, I swear on my—”
Kael doesn’t slow down.
He doesn’t need to.
“Funny how you people always want to talk,” he says, “once the silver’s spent.”
The man screams something — a name, a prayer, hard to say which.
The forest keeps bending.
Somewhere behind that ruined, star-lit face, a boy who once thought a badge made him strong is still falling through grey nothing, hasn’t hit the ground yet.
This is where he lands.
Eventually.
First, years earlier, he has to die.
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