Chapter 7: The Old Blood Sings

The word came to him like breathing.

*Tharazin.*

Kaelen's eyes snapped open to gray morning light filtering through frost-etched glass. The syllables sat heavy on his tongue—not foreign but forgotten, like a song he'd known before birth. They tasted of smoke and something deeper. Older.

He pushed upright in bed, the word still echoing in the hollow of his skull. No dream had brought it. No voice had whispered it. It had simply *arrived*, settling into his thoughts like embers finding kindling.

"Tharazin," he murmured, testing how it felt in the cold air.

Heat flared behind his ribs. The word wanted to be spoken—demanded it, pulled at something in his chest until he gave it voice.

"Kaelen?" His mother's call drifted up from below. "Who are you talking to?"

He froze, one hand pressed to his throat where the syllables still burned. How long had he been speaking? What else had he said in that tongue that felt more natural than the one he'd learned?

"No one," he called back.

But that was a lie. Someone had taught him that word. Someone who lived in the space between his heartbeats, who spoke in the language of fire and bone.

Kaelen slipped from bed and knelt beside the wall where chimney soot stained the wood. His finger moved without conscious direction, tracing shapes in the black residue. Three parallel lines. A spiral that turned inward on itself. Symbols that felt *right* in ways he couldn't explain.

Below, his mother's humming started—anxious, discordant. She'd heard something in his voice that she recognized. Something that made her afraid.

*Good. She should be.*

The thought came unbidden, cruel as winter wind. Kaelen jerked his hand back from the wall, but the symbols remained, etched in soot and certainty.

---

Snow crunched beneath his boots as he walked the logging path, but each step took him farther from cut wood and human plans.

The forest breathed around him—not wind through branches, but something deeper. A pulse that matched the rhythm in his chest, drawing him forward like a lodestone pulls iron. His feet found the way without guidance, avoiding deadfalls and hidden roots as if he'd walked this route a thousand times.

*Which way?*

The question formed in his mind, and an answer came—not in words but in warmth. Heat bloomed to his left where the path curved around a massive oak, its trunk scarred by lightning strikes from decades past.

Kaelen turned toward the warmth and left the path behind.

Branches caught at his cloak, but he pushed through without feeling the thorns. His breathing had gone deep and regular, each exhale visible in the cold air. But the vapor didn't dissipate—it hung around his face like a personal fog, moving with purpose.

*"Beneath ash, the old fire waits."*

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere—not heard but *felt*, vibrating through his bones like the echo of some vast bell. It spoke the same tongue as the word that had woken him, syllables that tasted of copper and endings.

"Where?" Kaelen whispered back.

Heat pulsed beneath his feet. He looked down and saw the snow above a fallen oak melting in perfect circles, dark earth showing through like wounds. Steam rose from the spots, carrying scents that belonged to no honest fire.

His pulse quickened. The voice was real. The heat was real.

And it knew him.

---

The clearing opened before him like a mouth.

No trees grew here—hadn't for years, maybe decades. Black snow covered ground that refused to nurture anything green. In the center, a massive stump rose from the earth like a gravestone, its surface scarred by fire that had burned too hot and too long.

Kaelen approached slowly, but his caution felt borrowed—something his mind insisted on while his body moved with growing certainty. This place knew him. Had been waiting for him.

The stump was enormous, easily ten feet across. Charred bark hung in strips like peeling skin, revealing wood beneath that gleamed silver-white in the dim light. Its roots stretched outward like grasping fingers, some as thick as a man's waist, all of them burned black as coal.

*But not dead. Not dead at all.*

He knelt beside it and placed his palm against the scarred wood.

Fire exploded up his arm.

Not pain—*welcome*. Like slipping into a bath heated to perfect temperature, like coming home after years of wandering in cold places. The wood was warm, *alive*, pulsing with a heartbeat that synced with his own.

The clearing vanished.

Sky opened above him—not gray winter clouds but *fire*. Crimson and gold cascaded across the heavens like burning oil, and through it came wings. Vast beyond comprehension, membrane stretched between bones that could have been hewn from mountains. A shape moved behind the flames—serpentine, ancient, *magnificent*.

Not the torn-winged creature that circled Veldermere. This was something else. Something that had ruled skies before men learned to make fire.

*"Child of coals."*

The voice boomed through him, not entering his ears but filling every hollow space in his body. His bones sang with it, his blood heated until it felt like molten metal in his veins.

*"Listen."*

The world shifted. He saw chains—silver links thick as tree trunks, binding wings that could have blotted out the sun. Saw the great shape brought low, dragged from sky to earth by creatures too small to matter. Saw fire dimmed to ember, then ember buried in ash.

But not extinguished. Never extinguished.

*"The blood remembers what the mind forgets."*

Heat surged through him, building like pressure in a forge. His vision blurred, and for a moment he saw himself as if from above—a small figure kneeling beside a burned stump, light flowing between his hands and the ancient wood.

*"Soon you will choose. Fire or ash. Flight or chains."*

The clearing spun around him. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, drowning out everything but that vast voice and the certainty that he was no longer entirely human.

Then darkness swallowed him whole.

---

Cold snow against his cheek brought him back.

Kaelen pushed himself upright, spitting dirt and blood. His nose had been bleeding—was still bleeding, dark drops spattering the white ground like ink on parchment. His hands shook as he wiped his face, leaving red smears across his knuckles.

The stump sat silent beside him, just charred wood and ancient scars. But warmth still pulsed from its surface, and when he looked closely, he could see veins of light running through the silver-white grain like captured lightning.

*What am I becoming?*

The question should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like recognition—like finally asking the right thing after years of fumbling with the wrong words.

He stood on unsteady legs and turned toward home. The forest watched him go, but its attention felt different now. Not predatory—*approving*. As if he'd passed some test he hadn't known he was taking.

Behind him, the stump pulsed once more, and in that pulse he heard his name spoken in the old tongue.

Not Kaelen.

Something else. Something that tasted of fire and felt like coming home.

---

Gerun found him at the forest's edge as purple dusk painted the snow.

"Where the hell have you been?" His brother's hands shook as he grabbed Kaelen's shoulders, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "You've been gone all day. Ma's been—" He stopped, studying Kaelen's face in the failing light. "What happened to your nose?"

"Nothing." Kaelen tried to pull away, but Gerun's grip tightened.

"Nothing doesn't make you bleed like a butchered pig."

"I fell."

"Liar." Gerun's voice went flat, dangerous. "You were in the deep woods. I can smell it on you—ash and something else. Something wrong."

Kaelen met his brother's eyes, and in the space between heartbeats, golden light flickered in his amber gaze. Just for an instant—no longer than a candle flame in wind—but Gerun saw it.

His brother's face went pale. "Kaelen?"

"I was listening," Kaelen said quietly.

"To what?"

The words came from somewhere deeper than thought, older than the boy who'd woken that morning with a strange word on his tongue.

"To me. But older."

Gerun stared at him for a long moment, bow hanging forgotten in his free hand. When he spoke, his voice barely rose above a whisper.

"That's not you anymore, is it?"

Kaelen pulled free of his brother's grip and started toward the village. Behind him, the forest whispered in languages older than kingdoms, and in its murmur he heard the promise of flames yet to come.

"It's more me than I've ever been."