Kael Voidwalker's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

Five dawns passed, and each one took something. Kael fed the shard every morning to open his hands. Every morning the cold went deeper. By the sixth day his legs shook when he stood. He could not keep giving what he had no way to replace. So he tried the only thing left. He would pull his aura back out of the shard instead of feeding more in. He sat on a fallen tree at the forest's edge, where the black trunks leaned like broken teeth and violet cracks split the ground. He pressed his palm to his chest, over the iron frame. He reached for the cold place inside the stone and pulled. It came. Not a thread. A flood. Dark energy poured out of the shard and up his arm. It clung and flowed like water finding cracks. His veins burned. The smoke off his hands turned to thick tendrils that wrapped his wrists and would not shake loose. His vision doubled. The eyeless sockets of nearby shadows turned toward the light he was leaking. He tried to push it back. It would not go. He had opened a door he could not close. "Stop pulling." The voice came flat and old from the small shape in the patched black cloak. Rook. The ancient thing wearing a child's body, the one who had sunk the shard into his flesh. Rook stood in the violet mist, unhurried, while the dark tore at Kael. "I can't," Kael said through his teeth. "It won't close." Rook crouched and set two small fingers on Kael's chest, beside his hand. "You pulled against the frame. It only pulls one way. You fought it and it broke." A pause. "Feed a little back. Not all. Make it turn." Kael did not understand, but he obeyed. He stopped hauling the flood upward. Instead he let a thin stream slide back down into the shard, even as more rose up. The two currents met. They caught each other and began to circle. The flood slowed. The tendrils loosened from his wrists. The energy ran in a loop now, out of the shard and back into it, feeding both ways at once. Kael breathed. His hands were his own. The cold was gone. "A current," Rook said, standing. "Give and take in one turn. The shard feeds you as you feed it. You lose nothing. But hear this." The old eyes did not blink. "Keep the loop and you keep the power. Feed it only, the way you were, and the dark drains out. In time you become nothing but a man the Void once touched. No magic. Ordinary." Kael looked at the loop still turning under his skin. Ordinary. Safe. A way out he had bled for two years to find. He held the current steady and did not let it fade. "Show me how to hold it," he said. Rook nodded once and sat down beside him.