Kael Voidwalker's Arc

Chapter 5 of 10

The shard still pulsed warm against Kael's chest. His hands were clean, the death-marks gone, but the stone held more of him now than any stone should. Erasmus stood a pace away, syringe capped, violet eyes fixed on Kael. The scholar had led him across the root paths and out of the mud, and the price for that had never been named. Now the scholar meant to name it. "You owe me a truth," Erasmus said. He did not raise his voice. "You knew that when I pulled you off the soft ground. One question. Answered plainly." Kael's jaw tightened. He did not know what the man would ask. A truth could cost him more than coin. "Ask it," he said. "Then we're done." Erasmus watched him a long moment. "The child," he said. "Your eye showed you a death-mark on a child once. Before the fever showed. You saw it." His tone did not change. "Did you tell anyone, or did you walk on?" The cold in Kael's chest had nothing to do with the shard. He had told this to no one. He had barely told himself. He thought of lying. The scholar would know. He could feel it in the way those eyes held still, like a man reading a page. "I walked on," Kael said. "I saw the mark on his hands. I knew he was already gone. I didn't stop. I didn't say a word to his mother." His voice stayed flat, but his hand had closed to a fist. "He died four days later. That's the truth. That's the whole of it." Erasmus nodded once. He wrote nothing down. He simply held the answer, the way he held a blood sample to the light. "The eye doesn't lie to you," he said. "It shows you the end before the end. Most who carry that gift start to believe the end is already fixed. That nothing they do can move it." He paused. "You believed that with the boy. You'll believe it about yourself soon." "The debt's paid," Kael said. "That was the deal." "It's paid." The scholar closed the subject like a door. Then he stepped closer, lowered his eyes to the shard glowing under Kael's cloak. "But you should hear this for free. What you did back there, feeding your own aura into the stone to break the leash. The shard is holding you now. A piece of you lives in it." His mouth thinned. "Lose it, or let it crack, and you may find the missing piece is the part that keeps you deciding for yourself." He turned and walked toward the mist. "Guard the stone," he said, without looking back. "It answers to you until it doesn't." Kael stood alone on the rock. The debt was gone. But the warning had taken its place, and the thing against his chest felt heavier than before.