"Three hours in the Pit and still breathing. Guess the beasts down there don't like the taste of nothing."
Laughter followed the words as Kael stepped out into the courtyard, back in the sunlight that felt colder than the dark.
The other students barely spared him a glance. To them, he was still a footnote — a joke written in fading ink. The zero who wouldn't leave.
Kael didn't respond.
He moved slowly, ribs tight, clothes torn. But there was something different in his silence. Not the silence of shame.
The silence of listening.
Inside his chest, something pulsed.
It wasn't magic. Not the kind they taught in scrolls.
It was older. Wilder.
The shadow's whisper from the Pit still echoed in his veins. Not words now — just a pressure behind his heartbeat. Like something buried beneath years of humiliation had finally twitched.
And it was watching.
By midday, Kael was back in the classroom.
Rune Theory. He sat at the back as usual, hunched low, drawing patterns in the margins of his notebook — not the ones on the chalk wall, but ones he'd never seen before.
His hand moved without thinking.
A swirl here. A sharp angle. A blood-drop shape.
Professor Idar's voice droned at the front. "And so, star-based runecraft is tied directly to one's celestial affinity. A single-star user may generate—"
"Sir," a girl interrupted, "what if someone doesn't awaken a star at all?"
Silence.
Kael felt the heat of twenty eyes slide toward him.
Professor Idar adjusted his glasses. "That would indicate... a failure in bloodline purity. Or an unnatural interruption in fate. Such individuals are rare. And irrelevant."
Kael didn't flinch.
But he kept drawing.
The rune on his page now pulsed faintly — only once. A tiny shimmer, like heat above a candle.
His eyes widened.
No one else noticed.
That night, he returned to his room — a cold stone corner of the academy's oldest wing, too far from the dormitories to hear laughter, or footsteps, or kindness.
Kael lit a candle and stared at the rune he'd drawn in class.
Then he drew it again, slowly. Carefully.
As the last curve connected, the air in the room shifted — just slightly.
The flame of the candle bent sideways.
The room felt... heavier.
Kael touched the paper.
The rune burned.
Not destroyed. Just disappeared in light.
His breath caught in his throat.
Break their games. Shatter their crowns.
I will answer when you bleed.
He remembered the voice now — not just in his ears, but in his bones. A promise made in the Pit.
And now, even the smallest scratch of that thing's power was responding.
Kael didn't sleep that night.
He sat on the edge of his cot, staring at the cold wall, one thought circling through his mind like a predator learning to prowl:
I don't need stars.
I have something else now.
And this time… he didn't want to be accepted.
He wanted to be feared.