Seven winters passed, but the city of Oakhaven never truly forgot the night of the pale star.
The scars of the Great Purge still lingered in the architecture of the lower sectors—scorch marks on stone foundations where houses had been incinerated and a permanent garrison of House of Embers enforcers stationed at the city boundaries.
The silver star had vanished from the sky within hours of its arrival, leaving the ruling nobles paranoid, vigilant, and increasingly brutal.
For seven years, Thomas had lived as a ghost on the very fringes of civilization.
The family had long since abandoned the deep ruins beneath the city, realizing that the urban dragnets would eventually uncover them.
Instead of staying to blend into the textile mills, John and Martha had made a desperate choice: they fled the inner rings of Oakhaven entirely.
They took up residence in the lawless, soot-choked border-slums built right against the massive outer perimeter wall—a place where outcasts, failed cultivators, and low-born weavers lived in the literal shadow of the High Houses.
To the transient laborers of the border docks, Thomas was simply a blind, fragile seven-year-old child.
He wore a thick, opaque strip of stained linen over his eyes whenever he left their makeshift canvas shelter.
He navigated the muddy, crowded alleys by memory, touch, and the precise clacking of a small wooden walking cane.
It was a beautiful lie that had kept him alive for over two thousand days.
Thomas wasn’t blind.
In fact, he saw the world with terrifying, agonizing clarity.
Through the microscopic gaps in the woven linen blindfold, his vision didn’t just see the physical shapes of the world; he saw the ambient mana flowing through reality.
He could see the hot, aggressive crimson mana radiating from the passing perimeter guards and the heavy, sluggish brown mana humming inside the city wall’s reinforcing runes.
But deeper than that, Thomas saw a third thing.
A thing he had never spoken of to a single living soul.
Deep within his own chest, trapped beneath the physical layers of his heart, sat a tiny, spinning vortex of silver light.
For seven years, it had remained dormant, a cold, quiet ember that occasionally pulsed when the twin moons were high.
He had learned to suppress it, to push it down whenever it tried to rise, knowing instinctively that if that silver energy ever leaked past his skin, the entire Citadel garrison would descend upon his family like locusts.
Now seven years old, Thomas stood near the southern border checkpoint, holding his father’s rough hand.
The air here was a thick, humid fog of dust, alchemical waste from the inner mills, and the sharp scent of ozone.
Dozens of heavy iron transport carts rumbled past, their axles reinforced by cheap earth-runes leased from the nobility.
John was attempting to clear a cargo ledger with a low-ranking cousin of the House of Earth—Supervisor Kael.
Kael was a bulky man whose skin possessed the rough, greyish texture of unpolished granite, a trait of his minor elemental lineage.
In his hand, he casually twirled a heavy leather whip reinforced with copper wire.
“Your papers are short on the transit tax, weaver,” Kael barked, his angry, jagged spikes of brown mana swirling around his fists.
He stopped directly in front of John, his eyes sliding down to the small, blindfolded child at John’s side.
“And I don’t recall seeing this little leech on your regional permit.” “He is my son, Supervisor,” John said, keeping his head bowed low.
“He is blind.
He poses no threat to the cargo.” “A useless mouth,” Kael growled, his breath smelling of cheap alcohol.
He stepped closer, deliberately using his heavy boot to kick Thomas’s walking cane out of his hand.
The wooden stick skidded across the muddy cobblestones.
“In Oakhaven, even the broken must pay their share.
Look at me when I’m speaking to your father, boy.” Kael reached down, his heavy, stone-calloused hand grabbing Thomas by the small of his shoulder.
His grip tightened like an iron vice, deliberately applying crushing pressure to the young boy’s collarbone.
Thomas clenched his child-sized jaw, swallowing the sharp burst of pain.
His small fingers gripped Kael’s grey, rocky wrist until his own nails bled.
He kept his head down, but inside his chest, the seven-year-old seal on the silver vortex suddenly shattered.