Chapter 11
Kael — Past
The second wave wounded the land like never before.
The fragile hope that the kingdom might soon breathe again was burned to ash with the corpses piled outside city walls.
Every sniff, every cough, every bead of sweat struck fear into the heart and awoke the instinct to save one’s own skin before another’s.
People took matters into their own trembling hands, burning the diseased, dead or alive, in a desperate attempt to purge the plague.
It became a war against the Breath of Death, where the only victor was Death herself.
Cities went dark. Houses burned like stars in the night. Despite the efforts of clerics, apothecaries, even the magi, none truly understood the sickness that had corrupted the land.
Theories sprouted like weeds. Rosemary and thyme soothe the symptoms. Windy hills are safer. Alcohol cleanses. Stand an arm’s length apart and you will be spared.
All were proven and disproven in the same breath. No matter how faithfully the realm obeyed its newest edicts, people fell like pieces across a tainted chessboard.
And from that ruin, the darker theories from the year before spread like wildfire.
The plague isn’t real.
The king lies.
The magi caused it. By accident, or by design.
But tell that to the people who died. Look into their families’ eyes and say it. Tell them it was a lie and feel the blade you’ve earned pierce through your heart.
Because in the end, what if it was true? What if it was an experiment gone wrong? What if it was incompetence that doomed us all?
People were dying. Families were torn. Homes turned to cages.
And Kael knew exactly how many had died, for he had turned them to ash himself and counted them all.
One star-strewn night, he rode by horse to the harbor city of Shelb, answering Selena’s desperate plea. The road wound upward to the mansion atop the Hill of Hopes, where within its walls lay a mother gasping for mercy, her breath already half stolen, blood spilling from her dried lips.
Selena’s magic could not ease her pain.
So Kael did what she could not. One strike—swift, merciful—and it was done.
Selena’s sobs broke against his chest, her tears soaking through his robes, and he held her through the long hours until dawn, until there were no more tears left in her to give.
The Magi Academy of Hauvia rose at the northwest edge of the city, encircled by geometric gardens and open courtyards.
Its walls were built of dark gray stone, its three spires reaching toward the heavens.
At night, those spires lit like magical beacons, and the crystals set within them refracted light into silent fireworks of color without smoke or sound.
The halls of the academy, where once the shouts and laughter of hurried students had echoed, now stood like a silent, dull gray prison of stone. Kael, as Court Wizard, still held leave to come and go, yet the halls once bright with hearthlight and dancing flames now felt hollow and forsaken.
He paused in the entrance hall, beneath a ceiling painted with stars, dark-blue tapestries draping the walls like a night sky. His academy years felt distant, blurred by time and blood. Still, returning here was a little like greeting an old friend, if he had ever truly known what friendship was.
Kael had spent nearly a decade within these walls, beneath the tutelage of Dean Henrich Eisenberg, who had taught him to master the storm, to weave control from chaos, to clutch that fragile leash still gripped tight in his fists, even now.
Within these quiet halls, there lingered the faintest echo of peace.
Years upon years of discipline, meditation, restraint, to learn the art of tempering power, of turning the storm inward until the wisdom of the old wizards of legends replaced the tempest. Henrich had become his most trusted mentor and, if Kael dared to name it, the father he never had.
The old man had called him Stormborn, or Sturmgeboren, as he said it in the Hauvian tongue.
Henrich descended the dark oak staircase to meet him, teal and gold robes pooling at his feet. Kael wondered how the man never tripped. They stopped an arm’s length apart, black shawls veiling their mouths so their words came soft and blurred.
The sound of speech itself had changed.
People even dreamed in muffled voices now.
Kael wasn’t sure why he had come. Perhaps after the night in Shelb, he needed to see Henrich, to speak, to breathe the same air, to reassure himself the old man still lived.
For Henrich, with his snow-white hair and the deep valleys carved by age across his face, was considered at risk.
And since that night, Kael had not stopped thinking of him.
“I am fine,” Henrich said with a faint smile. “Just a cough. It is the end of winter, after all. You know how I am before spring.”
They spoke of mundane things. New students, new teachers.
Henrich mentioned a gifted half-elf named Loren Vey, an arcane bender whose telekinetic powers were already the talk of the academy.
The young man wished to serve the Court someday.
Henrich asked Kael if, once the sickness passed, he might have a word with him.
Then came silence. A long, fragile quiet in which a single question seemed to hang between them.
When will all this finally be over?
They drank tea together. They did not speak of Kael’s work. They did not speak of the dead.
Instead, they spoke of rumors, those surrounding the Earl of Perlgate.
Dereck Thorne, who seduced the desperate with promises of freedom and riches, naming the Crown their common enemy. Some said he was raising militias across Bretannia, men armed not only with blades, but with grief ripened into rage.
Kael told Henrich that Alaric and Thalen of the Council of War were gathering troops and battlemages, preparing for the worst, if there was such a thing as worse than the Breath of Death.
If Dereck Thorne wanted blood, then he would be met with it.
Henrich’s disapproval was immediate, palpable even behind the cloth over his mouth. If the Crown crushed Thorne’s followers now, he warned, they would make him a martyr, and nothing good ever rose from the ashes of false martyrs.
“And where will you stand?” Henrich asked, his tone a quiet test.
Kael only shrugged. Lionel had ordered him not to intervene. He already had enough ash on his hands.
“I’ll be in the castle.”
Henrich released a frail breath. The wolf would remain caged. The storm would stay within.
For now.
When the first acacia trees bloomed, Dereck Thorne had already gathered an army and raided the home of the Duchess of Bretannia. She became his prisoner, and he crowned himself leader of Bretannia, crying for the state’s independence.
Bretannia plunged into an age of darkness.
Thorne never kept his promises. The poor starved or died choking on their own blood, while the rich, those whose wealth spanned across the lands, were invited within his castle walls to feast and drink until they forgot the screams outside.
And still, despite it all, the survivors followed Dereck Thorne blindly. They raided royal buildings, stormed magi keeps, and fell beneath the blades of guards loyal to the king, each death feeding Thorne’s cause all the more.
Then, his armies crossed into Hauvia. He called for rallies, for militias to march upon Befest and take the academy. The Trivale became a battlefield. Lutessian forces splintered, some joining one side, some the other. The kingdom fractured in a single spring.
In every village, in every city, people chose sides. Even in the capital, while war raged beyond the walls, Thorne’s influence festered in the gutters. Like mad beasts, his followers surged upon magi houses, upon the markets, and at last upon the academy itself.
Kael, who had held his distance with every shred of restraint he possessed, had endured enough. When they came in the hundreds, charging battlemages with teeth and rusted blades, the wolf stepped from his cage.
And the storm he unleashed upon the city did not cease for weeks.
When it was finally over, ash still fell from the sky, covering the streets in a silver snow that was almost beautiful. All Kael felt was a strange elation. The storm had been released, and for a fleeting moment, he understood what it was to be normal.
He hurried to the academy, his boots stamping a dark trail through the pale dust. The magi were already at work, rebuilding the western wall and reviving the scorched gardens.
Henrich was nowhere to be found. Kael caught the arm of the first teacher he saw, a man with jet-black hair wearing the teal robes of the teachers.
“He was by the entrance, last I saw him,” the man said in a thick Sud accent. The words steadied Kael’s pulse.
Then the man’s eyes widened in recognition, but before Kael could react, movement caught the corner of his vision.
A woman stood nearby, her back turned. She wore the same teal robes, her long dark curls tied low at the nape of her neck. He could not see her face, and that fact disappointed him more than it should have. A faint breeze stirred the air between them, carrying her scent.
Roses.
Kael found Henrich by the academy doors, alive and smiling faintly through the dust. He exhaled, yet the air still tasted of thunder.
The next day, he joined in the restorations. The academy rose again within weeks, its walls mended and its gardens in bloom once more. And even after the work was done, Kael couldn't quite get the woman who smelled of roses out of his thoughts.
It was quieter now in the city of Befest. But silence did not mean peace. The Battle of the Trivale had ended in bloodshed, yet it had ended. Dereck Thorne retreated to his mansion in Perlgate and released the Duchess of Bretannia. There would be a trial. He would be judged.
All the nobles pressed for execution, but the king refused. As Henrich had said so well, nothing good ever rose from the ashes of false martyrs.
Many called it mercy. Kael knew it was strategy.
He returned to the academy to visit Henrich.
The office was empty, so he went to the one other place his mentor might be—the council chamber.
It lay at the heart of the academy, a circular hall with walls painted deep blue and scattered with silver stars.
A round table of dark oak stood at its center, a crystal sphere upon it for scrying with other academies.
Kael paused at the threshold. He had clearly interrupted something.
Henrich, Isolde, Elwin, and Selena stood beside the table, not seated.
None wore shawls over their faces. Another mage was with them, clad in dark green robes.
His skin was warm brown, his hair a mass of dark curls streaked with a single white lock, and his smile revealed a line of broken teeth.
Kael did not know him. Perhaps he was an old friend of Henrich’s.
“What is this?” Kael asked, the words coming sharper than intended. He felt as though he had stepped into a secret meeting.
Henrich was not the kind to keep secrets.
“I was going to have someone fetch you now that Bashir is here,” Henrich said. Or lied. “Let’s sit down.”
They all took a seat.
Kael hesitated. Grief hung in the air, veiled and heavy, yet something else moved beneath it, something colder. Doubt crawled under his skin, whispering that nothing good would come of this.
But Henrich was his mentor, his old friend. Whatever took place behind these doors would be under his hand. It would not be vile.
Definitely not vile.
Kael took the last empty chair. The wood felt colder than it should, as if the room itself braced for what would follow.
No one spoke at first. Eyes shifted toward him, then toward the scrying sphere, its surface trembling with a faint, unsteady light.
Bashir folded his hands, the broken teeth in his smile gone entirely.
Selena would not meet his gaze. Isolde’s fingers tightened around the arm of her chair.
Henrich drew a breath meant to steady the room.
“Kael,” he said quietly. “There is something you must hear.”
And Elwin covered the scrying sphere with a thick black shawl.