Chapter 10: Veil Over the Flame
The stillness after the rain brought no comfort.
The sky had cleared, but the scent of damp earth and smoke still clung to the ridgelands like a warning. Kael stood on the edge of a crag above the Earth Sect's trade basin, shadows wrapped tightly around his figure like a second skin. The city glowed below — a thousand lights from stalls, soul fires, and open furnaces casting flickering gold across stone walls.
But his eyes were closed.
His breath came slow. Deliberate.
In his core, something pulsed.
That foreign presence… the one that had lingered since the day of his fall… no longer lay dormant. It had grown more active — its movements subtle, slippery, like a serpent coiled around his soul.
And yet now…
He was no longer afraid of it.
Kael had learned enough.
It wasn't simply a brand.
It wasn't a curse.
It was a tether. A spiritual thread — rooted in the mark left by the Seer — one that let them feel where he moved, how far he ran, even if they couldn't see him with their eyes. It wasn't perfect. But close enough to always keep them one step ahead.
Until now.
"If it's a tether… then a thread can be cut."
But Kael didn't intend to cut it.
No.
He would twist it. Knot it. Bury it under layers so black and cold they'd mistake his movements for phantoms.
He sat cross-legged beneath the dead tree near the canyon's edge — the same place where he first began sensing the foreign power's pulse. The moon hung low and heavy, casting pale light across the uneven rock.
Kael reached inward again.
But this time, he did not push the presence away.
He let it rise.
Let it taste his soul.
And when it tried to latch onto his essence like it always did — subtly, hungrily — he moved.
He let the shadows flood inward.
Not just around his body.
Into his soul.
He opened the gateway — the one that had only cracked once during his last desperate fight. And as the darkness poured in, something within him shifted.
The pain came first — a searing burn behind the eyes, as though ice and fire collided inside his skull. But he held it. Bit down. Endured.
Then came silence.
Deafening. Unnatural.
Even the sound of the wind stopped.
And in that silence, Kael saw it — a thread of flame, weaving through his spirit like a worm burrowed in living stone. At its other end, distant but clear, a presence waited.
Watching. Always.
The Seer.
Kael's lip curled. Not in fear.
In satisfaction.
"You've been watching me," he whispered. "Let me return the favor."
With precise focus, Kael wove the shadows tighter around the flame-thread. Like wrapping smoke around a beacon — he did not break the link, but he distorted it.
Bent it.
Shrouded it beneath a storm of false images.
A hundred Kaels — each in a different direction. Each false.
Some running through the woods.
Some lying wounded in abandoned camps.
Some plunging into the ocean.
He fed them into the thread like mirrored echoes — a hall of illusion for the watcher. The tether twisted violently. Kael could feel the Seer's attention pulling back and forth, searching for clarity.
There would be none.
And deeper still… Kael reversed the flow.
Not fully. Not enough to alert them.
But just enough to let him taste their location. A flicker of landscape. Heat. Stone.
A cavern buried beneath an obsidian mountain… and blood. So much blood.
He pulled away before the Seer noticed.
Eyes snapping open.
He staggered up, breath ragged, but a fire gleamed behind his exhaustion.
The connection had worked. Not only had he scrambled their tracking, but he had also gained a direction — a trail he could follow through spirit, not land.
"You followed me too long. Now I follow you."
But Kael was no fool.
The Seer would not be alone. Nor would the general. They would have guards, rituals, traps buried in shadow and light.
He'd need to prepare.
He pulled his hood up and stepped away from the tree, his footsteps now so soft they made no sound — a side effect of the shrouding process still lingering.
The wind shifted.
And with it, came a faint voice. Familiar.
"Kael…"
He turned sharply.
No one there.
Just the edge of the cliff, and below, the path to the eastern reaches — where the Obsidian Mountains waited.
But he knew that voice.
Alira.
Why had he heard it now?
Suddenly — the tether he'd left inside himself pulled tight, like a fishing line yanked from the other end.
Hard.
Kael dropped to one knee, a scream caught in his throat as the phantom flame surged through the cord — not from him, but toward him.
No. Not the Seer… Someone else is trying to access it.
But only one person could manipulate the thread like that besides its creator.
Alira.
She had seen it. Followed it. Or worse —
She had inherited the Seer's sight.
The shadows around Kael trembled. He tried to sever the flow — but not before he felt something crash into his consciousness:
A memory… not his own.
A cold chamber. A silver dagger. Alira screaming. A masked man whispering: "He must not remember."
The image shattered.
Kael staggered backward, nearly falling off the cliff.
His hands trembled.
His memories were being watched too.
And the most terrifying thing?
Someone else had been trying to protect him — from something worse.