Chapter 6 Kael
SIX
KAEL
The path to Azrael isn’t marked.
It never has been. It’s part of why my father didn’t kill him, just banished him. Too dangerous to keep close. Too slippery to truly destroy.
The deeper into the Courts I go, the more the world strips itself bare.
Gone are the elegant facades and polished obsidian towers.
Down here, the stone walls bleed with the pain of those trapped here.
The air tastes of copper and acid. And the shadows don’t follow you, they cling to the walls like their pain is coming next.
I step through a crack in the old prayer wall—a wall more mockery than mercy, more curse than hope—and descend, boots silent on worn steps carved long before my birth.
It’s colder here, but not in a way you can measure.
The cold clings to thoughts. To memories.
To the part of me I usually keep locked away from even myself.
As if it’s trying to freeze me in place and trap me here.
It cools even more. Maybe a warning from my surroundings not to ask my question. To leave it buried. I already suspect I won’t like the answer.
Azrael waits in the hollow beneath the mountain. His back to me. His long coat stirs in the stale wind, lined with sigils stitched in thread older than most names. His old wings hang limp—ragged and broken, the edges frayed like burnt silk. He doesn’t turn when I arrive.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says softly.
“Yet here I am,” I reply. “I don’t need permission, old man.”
His shoulders shift, just slightly. “Then I assume you’ve finally come for truth. Or whatever’s left of it.”
I stop a few paces behind him. “The girl.”
At that, he goes still.
“Lindsay. She’s Veilburned and has a spell-scar,” I clarify. “There’s a prophecy about someone like her. You told me prophecy lies. You trained me for it. What do you know about it?”
He turns.
His eyes are darker than I remember. Not just with time—but with knowing. His face is lined with years I never saw pass.
“I’m sure you already know what it says, Kael.”
I grit my teeth. “I know the version they wanted me to believe. Kill the one who cracks the Veil from within. But that part wasn’t in the book I have—just fragments of a prophecy.”
“And you think the full version is better?” he asks. “That it’ll hold the answer you want?”
“I think I deserve to hear it.”
Silence stretches, thick and brittle.
Then Azrael steps closer, his voice low and deliberate. “There isn’t one prophecy, Kael. There are four. Four fractured futures, each tied to a different choice. And the girl?”
He pauses.
“She’s the catalyst for it all.”
My chest tightens, and I rub at the spot.
“She has to choose,” he continues. “And if she doesn’t—the Veil will choose for her.”
My breath catches.
“Which one comes true depends on who she chooses to become. And what path she travels down. And who she chooses to travel with.”
“And if she chooses wrong?” I ask.
He meets my gaze—unflinching, hollow.
“Then we all fall. Not just this realm, but all of them, collapsing in on themselves, becoming one.”
My jaw tightens.
“No more riddles,” I bite out. “Tell me what they are. The four paths. The possible future's.”
Azrael exhales slowly, as if the weight of the knowledge burns his lungs on the way out.
“They aren’t roads you can name,” he says. “Not clean ones. You know the Veil doesn’t deal in straight lines—it splits and coils and twists based on emotion, will, instinct. Her choices aren’t mapped. They’re felt.”
“Then speak in feelings,” I snap. “Paint it in blood and ruin if you have to. Just stop dancing around it.”
His gaze flickers, sharp as a blade, revealing the man I used to know. But he nods.
“Very well.”
He turns away, facing the dark wall that pulses faintly with viewing runes. They glow and clear, showing Lindsay in the middle, her actions matching his words as he speaks.
“The first path is fire. Rage. She chooses vengeance. The Veil breaks, but it breaks outward. The world burns—and she becomes something no one can control. Not even herself. If the school binds her powers, this is the path she’ll likely walk.”
A pulse of dread surges in my chest.
“The second,” he continues, “is silence. She retreats. Refuses her power. Denies herself. And the Veil…consumes her. She doesn’t break it. She becomes it. No action is action after all.”
I flinch. She curls in on herself in the vision, and I want to reach for her. To protect her from herself.
“The third is sacrifice. She gives too much. Of herself. Of the bond she’s created.” His gaze flicks knowingly to my palm. “The Veil heals, but only through her death. She’ll die to protect those she loves.”
My stomach turns. I feel sick. Shadowy figures gather around her, their features obscure, as she crumbles in their arms.
Azrael’s voice lowers for the last one.
“And the fourth…is balance. A path not written yet. One she can only find if she stops trying to carry it alone. If the ties that bind her set her free.”
I stare at him as the wall slowly releases the vision of her.
“That one sounds like the lie. How can she not carry it alone if the ties are set free?”
He almost smiles. Almost. “It’s the one I used to believe in. The one that has the most hope for the future. And not all ties are good ties, you know that, some bind a person tighter than they can handle. If she’s set free, it will free all of us from a very painful future.”
I let the silence drag between us. “You’re forgetting something.”
He looks up.
“Me,” I say.
Azrael nods slowly, like he was waiting for that.
“You were never meant to save her, Kael,” he says. “You were trained to end her, before any of the prophecies had a chance to form. Now that you haven’t, you will end her when she fails.”
The words slide like a knife between my ribs.
“No.” I shake my head, refusing his words.
“Yes,” he says simply. “Because you didn't do what you should have…in every version of the prophecy, there is a blade. A shadow tethered to the girl. That blade only wakes if she starts to fall. A protection for us all.”
I step back, breath catching. “You trained me to kill her either way.”
“I trained you to stop what she could become. If the wrong path begins to take hold—you are the failsafe. Prophecy’s lie and twist and ruin with their riddles.”
My hands curl into fists. “You should have told me.”
“You were told. I have always told you they lie.”
“I’m not ready to lose her.” The words fall from my lips before I can stop them. My heart clenches at the idea of losing her.
His gaze softens—barely a flicker. “Then pray she never makes the wrong choice.”
I look down at my palm, where her mark still pulses a quiet reminder that we are connected. Azrael watches me too closely now, as if he can see every crack forming beneath my skin.
“You are the failsafe, you always have been,” he says again, quieter this time.
I exhale through my teeth, trying to lock everything down—every thought, every feeling threatening to fracture through my voice. But he doesn’t look away.
“If you want to protect her, Kael…” he pauses. “You need to keep your distance.”
I freeze. Then shake my head to clear it.
“What?”
“You’re already bound to her. Marked by her.
You’re inside the storm whether you want to be or not.
But if you get closer—if you fall into her the way I see you wanting to—then you become part of the problem.
The prophecy stops being about her. It becomes about both of you. And that ends badly. Every time.”
His words ice over in my chest.
I want to deny it. To shove the warning back down his throat.
But I can’t. Because somewhere inside me…I know he’s right.
“You want her to survive?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for my response. “Then don’t be the reason she doesn’t.”
He turns, moves to the stone wall behind him, and presses his palm to a carved sigil. A section of the rock shudders, then shifts inward, revealing a small box carved of bone and onyx.
Azrael lifts the lid.
Inside, resting on deep black velvet, is a circular shard of glass rimmed in iron and humming with something ancient and wrong. Shadows curl within it, moving even when the light does not.
“What is that?” I ask, voice low.
“A shadow-glass,” Azrael says. “A Veil artifact. Rare. Illegal. Dangerous in the wrong hands.”
“And in mine?”
“Necessary,” he replies. “It’s attuned to her magic. When the bond pulses, this will show you what you’re not supposed to see. What she might be hiding. Or what’s trying to find her.”
He holds it out.
“But you don’t use it near her,” he warns. “You use it from afar. You want to protect her? Then learn to watch without touching. To fight for her without being by her side.”
My hand hesitates over the glass. This is the opposite of what everything inside me is screaming is the truth. But I take it anyway.
Because I don’t know how else to keep her alive.