In the Northern Lands, power was not merely a concept. It was life itself, woven into every breath, every bowed head, and every whispered prayer for survival.
The common folk spoke in hushed, reverent tones of the Great Houses, wielding strength through centuries of war and politics. Among them stood House Valerius, whose ancestors supposedly carved their names into history with enough force that the world never quite forgot them.
The future ruler of House Valerius, the thirteen-year-old heir to one of the most feared powers in the Northern Lands,
…was currently losing a psychological battle against several grains of salt.
To the outside world, Kael Valerius was a defect. A hollow shell who moved with the agonizing slowness of a rusted gear and spoke with a delay that suggested his thoughts were being delivered by a particularly unmotivated courier.
But Kael wasn't empty.
He was simply heavily occupied with a burden so great that he appeared dull, or so he likes to tell himself.
To experience his pain is to imagine that the entire world is screaming. Every creak of a floorboard, every flicker of a candle, every dishonest smile from a servant. It all arrived in Kael’s mind as a jagged, multi-colored static he keeps calling noise.
And now it was no longer just noise.
Ever since his thirteenth birthday, Kael had begun seeing things that did not agree with reality. At first, there had only been glimpses. A pale figure standing at the end of a hallway that was gone the moment he tried to focus on it. A stranger reflected in a mirror that vanished upon blinking. A voice muttering somewhere behind him when no one was there.
But now these things lingered.
And standing in the corner of his room was the source of his current headache, a man in rusted northern plate armor whose throat was a weeping red ruin of grey mist. Kael didn’t look up, but he saw the ghost in his peripheral vision, leaning against the bedpost and shedding flakes of his spectral dandruff.
But the ghost was not alone.
No. The room was crowded with inscrutable echoes of peculiar apparitions, much to Kael’s dismay. Unfortunately, this did not stop his brain from immediately conducting an internal inventory of the ghosts' collective nonsense.
Hmm. There's a man in a flowy dress trying to meditate under an imaginary waterfall. His sword looks cool, but it looks bent.
There’s a woman who looks like a mage but always likes making faces at a small rectangular slab. But why does she keep raising it above her head? Perhaps it was some manner of spellcasting, and those bizarre expressions were part of an esoteric ritual.
There's even a man with arm muscles the size of tree trunks. Can you even swing a sword with those over-leveraged meat-slabs?
But one of the especially weird ones was the ghost that stood on the far north side of the room. He always looks as though he had been drained of all color, wearing a strange, white tunic and a narrow, dark silk noose tied around his neck. He sat upon a chair that wasn't there, his fingers dancing across a glowing, flat rectangle of light.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
The man’s rhythmic clicking was even more precise than the Northern Ghost’s tapping. He wore large, transparent shells over his eyes and stared at the glowing light with a gaze that possessed soul-crushing vacancy.
Occasionally, the man would let out a sigh so heavy it felt like a mountain of heavy manuals of magic theories being dropped onto Kael’s chest.
What’s wrong with this ghost? Kael thought. He’s dressed like a prisoner, but the only thing holding him back is that dark strap around his neck. And he keeps staring at that glowing slab like he's infatuated with it.
The phantom man suddenly leaned back, rubbed his eyes, and muttered something about a "deadline" and "fucking AI shit”, whatever those mean.
To Kael’s ears, it sounded like a Forbidden Incantation of the Elder Void.
After a while, Kael finally gave up trying to make sense of it.
"I can’t take this anymore," Kael whispered, but the word felt like a droplet thrown into the ocean.