The air in Oakhaven tasted of salt and failed prayers. It was a taste Kael had known his entire life—the sharp tang of the sea spray that crusted their huts, and the flat, metallic bitterness of silence from the heavens. Today, both were especially strong.
The entire village was gathered at the Offering Stone, a slab of granite worn smooth by the desperate hands of generations. At its center stood Elara, the village Seer, her face a mask of wrinkled concentration. Her authority, like the stone itself, was eroding with each passing season. Before her, a plume of smoke from burning sea-lavender rose into the windless sky. It was supposed to form the shape of a gull, or a whale, or at least a favorable current—a sign for the coming salt harvest.
The smoke did none of these things. It rose in a straight, defiant column before dissolving into an indifferent grey haze. It was a pillar of nothing.
A collective sigh, thin and reedy, rippled through the crowd. Borin, the village elder, shifted his weight, his heavy seal-fur cloak doing little to ward off the encroaching chill of despair. "The entrails, Elara," he prompted, his voice attempting a confidence he did not feel.
Elara's hands trembled as she took the ritual knife. Beside her, a freshly caught silver cod lay on a bed of kelp, its single, dead eye staring up at the empty sky. With a practiced but shaky motion, she sliced it open. The villagers leaned in, a wave of anxious bodies craning for a glimpse of destiny. They found none. The organs were a formless, bloody heap, signifying only that the fish was, indeed, dead. There was no spiral in the intestine, no auspicious shading of the liver. There was only anatomy.
"Nothing," she whispered, the word stolen by the breeze. "Again. It is all just… random."
The crowd did not grumble. They were past grumbling. The silence they offered back was heavier, more damning, than any complaint. This was the way of the world now. The gods, as the stories went, had looked upon their own sins and had been struck blind. In turn, they had left their children, humanity, to stumble through a world without cosmic witness, a world where hard work could be undone by a freak tide and a prayer was just a word a person spoke to themselves.
On the periphery of the gathering, away from the suffocating press of bodies, Kael watched none of it. He was ten years old, small for his age, with a thatch of black hair the wind seemed to perpetually wrestle. His gaze was fixed not on the Seer, but on a space just above the crowd's heads. To anyone else, it was empty air. To Kael, it was a river of shimmering light, a tapestry of what could be.
He didn't see the future. Not in the way the Seers of old claimed to. He saw everything. He saw the path of every dust mote in the sun, every possible trajectory of a stone kicked by a restless child—one path where it skittered harmlessly, another where it struck an ankle, a third where it startled a nesting gull. He saw the world as a storm of possibilities, a constant, overwhelming cascade of might-bes that made the single, solid reality he stood in feel thin and fragile.
Most of the time, he could push it to the back of his mind, a constant, humming pressure behind his eyes. But sometimes, a current grew too strong to ignore, a wave of possibility that began to blot out all the others. He felt one now. It wasn't in the smoke or the fish. It was building far out to sea, a dark, churning knot in the fabric of the world, a future so probable it was becoming a certainty.
Unconsciously, he tugged on the sleeve of his mother's tunic. "Mama," he murmured, his voice barely audible. "The rain will come from the west before three sunsets. A bad rain. Take the salt to the high caves."
Mara glanced down, her expression a familiar mix of love and weary concern. She brushed a stray strand of hair from his face. "Hush now, little mouse," she whispered, her fingers cool against his skin. "Elara is trying to see." She was used to his strange pronouncements, the odd non-sequiturs that seemed to bubble up from some deep, inaccessible part of him. She treated them like she treated a sudden fever—something to be soothed until it passed.
Kael fell silent, but his eyes remained fixed on the invisible tide. The villagers began to disperse, their shoulders slumped, their faces grim. They had their answer: they had no answer. The harvest would proceed on hope and muscle alone, the only two resources the blind gods had not yet taken from them. They did not know that the only true prophecy spoken that day had been by a child on the edge of the crowd, a prophecy that was already rolling towards them, as inevitable as the tide.
The next two days were a blur of back-breaking labor. Life in Oakhaven was dictated by the salt. They lived on a stubborn peninsula of rock and marsh, where the sea was their only field. At high tide, the shallow flats filled with brine; under the heat of the sun, the water evaporated, leaving behind a crust of white crystals, their only currency for trade, the key to preserving their fish through the long, dark winters.
The failure of the ritual had left a pall over the work. Without the assurance of fate, every action felt like a gamble. A family to the north of the flats found their pans drying with miraculous speed, a localized pocket of dry air and intense sun blessing their plot while, fifty feet away, their neighbors cursed a persistent sea mist that kept their own brine stubbornly liquid. There was no fairness to it. A man could work twice as hard as another and have his entire effort washed away by a single, errant wave.
Kael worked alongside his father, Fendrel, a man whose silence had deepened with each passing year. Fendrel's hands were thick with callouses, his back permanently stooped. He loved his son, but he did not understand him. He saw Kael's oddness as a weakness in a world that demanded strength.
For Kael, the salt flats were a special kind of hell. The vast, reflective white surfaces amplified the shimmering possibilities, turning the air into a blinding, chaotic glare. He saw a thousand ways his father's scraping tool could slip, a million fractures that could form in the drying crust. The pressure behind his eyes was immense, and the dark current he'd seen gathering in the west was now a palpable weight, a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in his bones. It was a headache that had a geography.
On the afternoon of the second day, he couldn't bear it any longer. The image of the wave—not a vision, but a heavy, undeniable presence in the sea of what-could-be—was pressing in on him, suffocating all other possibilities. He dropped his wooden rake.
"I have to move it," he said, his voice tight.
Fendrel paused, wiping a sheen of sweat from his brow with the back of a salty forearm. "Move what? Boy, there's work to be done. The sun is high."
"The salt," Kael said, already heading for the woven sacks they used for transport. "To the high caves. It has to be in the caves."
"The caves?" Fendrel's voice was sharp with frustration. "That's half a morning's walk! And for what? A whim? Elara saw no storm."
"Elara didn't look in the right place," Kael insisted, his small hands struggling to tie the top of a half-filled sack. The urgency was a physical thing, a hook in his gut pulling him towards the cliffs.
"Enough of this nonsense!" Fendrel boomed, taking a step towards him.
"Fendrel, stop." Mara's voice cut through the tension. She had been working nearby, her own face etched with fatigue, but her eyes were soft as she looked at Kael. She placed a hand on her husband's arm. "Look at him. What harm can it do? It is not much, our share. If it keeps his mind at ease, let him." She looked at Kael. "It will be a long walk, my love."
Kael just nodded, his eyes wide. He didn't have the words to explain the crushing certainty he felt. He just knew it had to be done.
Fendrel grunted, a sound of reluctant concession. He turned back to his work, his movements jerky and angry. He was a man who believed in what he could see and touch, and the sight of his son hauling their precious salt away on the command of a phantom was an affront to the very nature of labor.
For the rest of the afternoon, Kael became a solitary, determined figure. He dragged the heavy sacks, one by one, away from the flats and up the winding, rocky path that led to the limestone caves high in the cliffs. It was grueling work. His muscles screamed, his lungs burned, but with every sack he safely stowed in the dry, cool dark, the roaring pressure in his head subsided, just a little.
His lonely pilgrimage did not go entirely unnoticed. A man named Joric, a traveling merchant with a warm smile and eyes that missed nothing, was making his seasonal rounds. He was a welcome sight in Oakhaven, a link to the outside world, trading iron needles and colorful threads for their salt. He sat with Elder Borin on the porch of the main longhouse, sharing a pipe and watching the village toil.
He had been there during the failed ritual, and he had seen the Seer's public humiliation. Now, his gaze followed the small boy making his arduous journey up the cliff face.
"The Fendrel boy is strong," Joric commented, his tone casual. "But why does he haul his salt away from the sun?"
Borin sighed, smoke leaking from his nostrils. "The boy is… touched. His mind walks a different path. His mother indulges his fancies."
Joric nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing slightly. He had heard whispers on his travels, tales passed in shadowed taverns and merchant camps. The Acolytes of the Dawn, a zealous sect sworn to reawaken the gods, were searching for something. Or someone. They spoke of a prophecy of their own—that in the age of divine silence, a child would be born with the God's Eyes, capable of seeing the lost paths of destiny. A new prophet to guide them. Joric, whose pockets were lined with coin from many sources, had always considered it a fanatic's fairytale.
But watching Kael—a boy acting with absolute certainty in defiance of all logic, on the very day the village Seer had been proven impotent—Joric felt a flicker of professional curiosity flare into genuine suspicion. He tucked the image away, another piece of valuable information in the vast inventory he carried in his head.
The storm broke on the third day, just as the sun began its descent. It did not come from the east, where Oakhaven's weather was born. It came, as Kael had said, from the west. It was a fist of a storm, punching its way over the coastal mountains, a direction so unnatural that the village's centuries of experience were rendered useless.
The sky turned from bruised purple to a sickly black in a matter of minutes. The wind shrieked, a high, keening sound that tore at the thatched roofs. And then the sea, their provider and their captor, rose up against them. A surge of slate-grey water, monstrous and immediate, scoured the salt flats. It did not just flood them; it clawed them clean, dragging months of hard labor, the village's entire wealth and winter security, back into its churning gut.
The villagers scrambled in a panic, a futile dance against the raw power of the ocean. Sacks were torn from hands, drying racks splintered into kindling, and the precious white crystals dissolved into the maelstrom. It was over almost as soon as it began. The storm raged for less than an hour, and then, as unnaturally as it had arrived, it receded, leaving behind a sky weeping a gentle drizzle and a village in stunned silence.
The flats were gone. Bare rock and brackish puddles were all that remained. A collective moan of utter ruin rose from the people as they stood on the shore, their forms slumped in the twilight. It was a death sentence for the coming winter.
Then, a single finger pointed. A woman named Greda, her face streaked with tears and rain, was staring up at the high cliffs. "The boy," she breathed. "The Fendrel boy."
All eyes followed hers. Up towards the dark mouths of the caves. It was Elder Borin who remembered the words spoken so quietly at the ritual. "He said… rain from the west. Before three sunsets."
A slow, creeping realization moved through the villagers, colder than the rain. It was a feeling that started as wonder and quickly curdled into something else: fear. In a world where nothing could be known, Kael had known.
A small party, led by Borin and a grim-faced Fendrel, made their way up the treacherous path. When they reached the caves, they found them. A small but significant pile of sacks, perhaps two dozen in all, stacked neatly in the dry dark. The only salt left in Oakhaven.
The villagers who had followed looked at Kael, who stood shivering beside his mother, with a new and terrifying light in their eyes. He was no longer "odd Kael." He was an anomaly, a miracle, a monster. He was a sign in a world that had none. Elara, the old Seer, glared at him from across the clearing, her face a mask of pure venom. He had not just predicted a storm; he had exposed her own hollow faith.
Fendrel stared at the salt, then at his son, his pragmatic world completely upended. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. What could he say? He had nearly stopped a miracle.
Mara pulled Kael close, her arms a protective barrier. She could feel the tremors running through his small body, and she saw the looks on the faces of her neighbors. It was not gratitude she saw. It was the fearful awe one reserves for a wolf that walks on two legs or a fire that burns on water. It was the look of people confronted with a power they could not comprehend.
From the edge of the village, hidden in a thicket of gorse, Joric the merchant watched the entire drama unfold. He saw the devastation, heard the whispers, and saw the looks of fearful reverence directed at the small boy. This was no longer a curiosity. This was confirmation. He pulled his cloak tighter around himself, his mind already calculating the worth of this information. The Acolytes of the Dawn would pay a king's ransom for this. With a last glance at the broken village, he slipped away into the deepening woods, his stride filled with a new and predatory purpose.
Night fell on a changed Oakhaven. The usual sounds of evening—the mending of nets, the laughter of children, the low murmur of stories told by the fireside—were replaced by a heavy, watchful quiet. Every family was locked in their hut, contemplating the ruin of their livelihood and the unsettling miracle of the boy who had saved a fraction of it.
Inside Kael's home, the tension was a physical presence. Fendrel sat by the door, staring at the wood-axe propped against the wall as if seeing it for the first time. Mara tended to the fire, her movements brisk and agitated. Kael sat on his sleeping pallet, wrapped in a dry blanket, staring into the flames.
He didn't feel like a prophet. He felt hollowed out. The storm had passed, but the roaring in his head had not entirely faded. Now, it was being replaced by something new. The currents of possibility around him, usually a gentle, shimmering sea, were becoming turbulent. They churned and eddied around the fear and awe of the villagers, all of it focused, like a lens, directly on him.
He stared deeper into the hearth fire, and the flames began to dance in a way that had nothing to do with the draft. The threads of what-could-be ignited. They were no longer shimmering lines of light but violent, clashing waves of fire and shadow. He saw a new current, powerful and terrifying, surging towards Oakhaven. It was a current of polished steel, of white robes that seemed to burn in the dark, and of a cleansing, merciless fire.
He saw the thatched roof of his own hut ignite, the flames roaring into the night sky. He saw Elder Borin, his face pale with fear, pointing a trembling finger directly at their door. He saw a man step through the flames, a man whose face was all sharp angles and whose eyes were like chips of ice. He heard a voice that sounded like stone cracking under immense pressure.
"They're coming," Kael gasped, scrambling backward from the hearth, his eyes wide with a terror that dwarfed the fear of any storm. The blanket fell from his shoulders. "With fire."
Mara rushed to his side. "Kael, what is it? You're safe."
"No," he whispered, shaking his head, his gaze locked on the door. "No, we're not."
As if his words were the cue, a horn blast, clear and cold, shattered the night. It was a sound no one in Oakhaven had ever heard. It was not a hunting horn or a fishing horn. It was a call to war.
Fendrel was on his feet in an instant, grabbing the axe. He peered through a crack in the wooden door. Torches were moving at the edge of the woods, descending upon the village not with the chaos of a raiding party, but with the disciplined, inexorable advance of an army.
The door of the main longhouse burst open and Borin stumbled out, flanked by two figures in immaculate white cloaks. In the center of the village square, a man dismounted from a black horse. He was tall and severe, the man from Kael's vision, his white robes trimmed with silver thread that gleamed in the torchlight. He surveyed the pathetic collection of huts with an air of absolute authority.
"People of Oakhaven!" His voice, amplified by some unseen force, washed over the village, each word perfectly clear and sharp. It was the voice of cracking stone. "The heavens are silent, but we have heard a new echo! A prophet is among you, a child who carries the divine spark!"
The Inquisitor, Malakor, raised a gauntleted hand. "Surrender the God's Eye, and your village shall know an era of prosperity under our protection. You will be the cradle of a new dawn!" He paused, letting the offer hang in the air before his tone hardened, dropping into a register of chilling threat. "Resist, and you shall be purified. We will burn the rot of disbelief from this soil, and we will take the child from the ashes."
A collective gasp went through the watching villagers. Terrified, broken, and desperate for salvation or a scapegoat, they turned as one, their faces illuminated by the flickering torchlight, and stared directly at the hut of Fendrel, son of Jorn.
Inside, the world had shrunk to the space of a few heartbeats. Mara grabbed Kael's arm, her knuckles white. Fendrel stood frozen by the door, the simple wood-axe in his hands looking like a child's toy against the coming storm.
Kael's eyes, his accursed eyes, saw it all. He saw the path of staying: the door splintering, the Inquisitor's icy gaze falling upon him, the smell of burning thatch, his father's futile charge, his mother's scream. It was a vortex of fire and pain, a future so powerful it felt like a memory.
Then, he saw another path. A thin, treacherous thread that led out the small back window, into the darkness of the whispering woods. It was a path of thorns and fear, of being hunted, of leaving everything he had ever known behind. But it was a path where his mother and father might live a little longer.
His choice would be his confession. To stay was to be captured. To run was to prove them right.
The Inquisitor took a single, resonant step forward. "We are waiting."
Kael looked at his mother's terrified face, his father's doomed courage, and the storm of fire that awaited them. The choice was no choice at all. He had to run. He had to write his own story, one terrifying step at a time.