The sword whispered when he drew it.
Not in words, not in a language—but in feeling. Like a scream buried beneath stone. Like shadows pulling at the edges of reality. Kael didn't need to hear it to understand. The blade was restless. It wanted blood.
It always does.
He stood alone in the Temple of Hollow Echoes, where no god had dared speak in centuries. The air here was thick with silence and old dust. Statues loomed—blindfolded, broken, forgotten.
Kael preferred it that way.
His enemies liked to call him warlock,curse-bearer,betrayer. They were not wrong. He had betrayed a king once. Then another. Then another. Every time, it got easier.
Every time, the shadows grew stronger.
He moved through the temple with a quiet grace—barefoot, blade in hand, shadows coiling around his fingers like ribbons of smoke. Not magic. Not exactly. Something older. Deeper. Something he didn't control so much as tolerate.
His eyes—one silver, one black—caught movement at the edge of the room.
"Still following me, are you?" he said without looking.
A shadow peeled itself from the wall. Not a person. Not quite. The shape of a man made of smoke and spite.
"She speaks your name, Shadowblade."
Kael frowned. "Who?"
"The girl born of fire and frost. The lost queen. Aryelle."
He had never heard that name before. Yet it echoed in his mind like something half-remembered.
"She's just another heir to a broken throne," Kael said. "Let her freeze like the rest of them."
"She seeks the Crown."
That made him pause.
His grip on the blade tightened. The shadows around him recoiled slightly, sensing the tension.
"The Crown of Thorns and Flames isn't real," he said quietly.
"It is."
A heartbeat of silence.
Then Kael turned, and the shadows scattered like ash.
"If she finds it," he said, more to himself than to the spirit, "then the frost dies… and the world begins to burn again."
The temple trembled faintly, a cold wind sneaking through stone that should not breathe.
Kael sighed, sheathing the blade. "Then I suppose I'll have to meet her."
Far away, in a forest where winter never slept, a fox froze mid-howl.The frost cracked beneath its feet. Something was coming. Something darker than the cold.
Back at the ruined chapel…
Aryelle stood alone, staring at the frost-covered horizon. Her breath fogged in the moonlight.
She felt it—a shift in the air, a tremor beneath the bones of the world. Somewhere out there, something had awakened. And for the first time in years, she felt the strange thrill of fate stirring.
He was coming.
She didn't know his name yet, but she'd soon learn it.
Kael. The Shadowblade.