Kael Voidwalker's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

The scholar's warning stayed with Kael for two days of walking. Guard the stone. Lose it, and you lose the part that decides for yourself. Kael pressed the shard against his chest under his cloak. Sleep was the problem. A thief could cut his strap. A beast could pin him and pull the stone free. The shard held a piece of his soul now, and he had no wall to put between it and the world. He needed help, and he knew where to look. He found the caravan camped in the dead forest, among skeletal trees whose bark ran black. Violet cracks split the trunks and drank the light. The travelers moved in slow, careful lines, hooded and masked. These were Voidwalkers like him, gathered in numbers he had never seen. He had heard they kept old knowledge. He had heard they took in the newly touched. He walked toward them with the shard burning against his ribs. The adults stepped aside. All of them, at once, without a word. Down the gap they made walked a small child in a patched black cloak. Bare feet on cold ground. When the child spoke, the voice was old, cracked with years no child could hold. "You came back," Rook said. "With more of yourself in the stone than before. I can smell it." Kael remembered the pool, the shard, the warning to leave before dark. "You gave me this stone," he said. "Now I can't keep it safe. Anyone could take it. And a scholar told me what that would cost me." Rook held out one small hand. Kael hesitated, then set the shard in the child's palm. Rook did not look at it. He looked at Kael. "A stone can be stolen," Rook said. "A wound cannot." He drew a second object from his cloak. A rune-carved iron frame, round, empty at its center. "This binds the stone to the flesh. It cannot be cut away. It cannot be pulled loose by any hand but yours." "And the price?" "Pain. Now. Every day after." Rook fitted the shard into the frame. The runes flared. "Decide." Kael thought of the child he had let die, of endings he had called fixed. He would not call this one fixed. "Do it." Rook pressed the frame flat against Kael's chest. The iron bit in. The shard sank under his skin, cold as a live wire, and would not let go. Kael's knees hit the dirt. A black aura rose off him, smoke curling from his shoulders. The runes cooled and went still. When he stood, the shard was gone from sight. It sat inside him now, behind the bone, beating slow with violet light. No thief could take it. No beast could tear it free. "It's part of you now," Rook said, and turned away. "So is everything that hunts it."