Kael Voidwalker's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

On the open rock, Kael caught his breath and looked down at his own hands. His Void eye stung. Dark marks bloomed across his knuckles, the same shapes the eye showed on the dying. He had seen those marks on a fevered child once, days before the boy died. Now they crawled up his own wrist. He wiped his palm hard against his cloak. The marks stayed. He could not tell if the corruption was eating him from inside, or if something out here had already chosen him as prey. "Your eye," Erasmus said. The scholar had stopped beside him. His own violet eyes fixed on Kael's hands. "You see them on yourself now." "I don't know what they mean," Kael said. "Sickness or a hunter. I need to know which." Erasmus unhooked the metal-capped syringe from his belt. "Then we test it. Hold still." He pressed the tip to the black vein on Kael's wrist and drew a thread of dark violet from the skin. He held the tube to the fading light. The fluid inside did not settle. Its edges blurred and shifted, refusing to hold shape. "Corruption spreads outward from a wound," Erasmus said. "Steady. Slow. This isn't spreading." He tilted the tube. "It's being pulled. Something is drawing your aura through you." Kael's stomach turned cold. "The shard should hide me." "The shard muffles what leaks out. It doesn't stop something already latched on." Erasmus capped the syringe. "The marks aren't your death. They're a leash. A creature marked you back in the forest, when you ran." A small shape drifted out of the mist above the rock. It had no wings of feathers, only living shadow, and at its center hung a black sphere veined with violet. Light bent toward it and vanished. The death-marks on Kael's hands flared bright in answer. The thing drank his aura even now, and the eye had only been showing him where the pull ran. Kael understood the marks at last. They were a path, and the path ended in his own chest. He reached for the Void inside him. The cold seized his arm like a live wire he could not drop. A black aura formed around him, smoke curling off his shoulders. He aimed the pull the other way. Instead of leaking aura outward, he yanked it back, hard, down into himself and past himself, into the stone shard on his chest. The creature lurched, starved of its thread. It dove. Kael slammed the drained aura into the shard all at once. The pull snapped. The dark sphere shuddered, tumbled, and dropped into the mist below the rock. His hands were bare again. The marks were gone. But the shard against his chest now pulsed warm, almost alive, holding more of him than before. "You fed it your own aura to break the leash," Erasmus said. He watched the glowing shard. "You should not have been able to do that." He paused. "I have a new question for you now."