The Black Within

That Night

The room was silent. No wind. No footsteps. Just the low creak of old wood and the distant whisper of night.

Kael stood at the center of his room, the lantern behind him casting long shadows that spilled across the floor. He'd locked the door. Closed the shutters. Pushed the small table aside.

And now he waited.

He looked down at the floor where his shadow stretched beneath him.

"Come out," he said quietly. "You answered once. Do it again."

Nothing moved.

He narrowed his stance and focused. The memory of the summoning still lived in his body, the weight of the void, the breathless moment before the knight had risen. The cold. The stillness.

"Come out, you knight," he said again, louder this time.

Still nothing.

Kael gritted his teeth. His hands curled into fists.

"Do it," he growled. "I know you're there."

He tried everything he could think of, meditation, visualizing the void, even cutting his palm and letting a drop of blood fall onto the wood floor. Still nothing came.

Whatever answered him before, it wasn't responding now.

He dropped to one knee, breath shallow. The same question echoed in his mind.

Was it ever mine to summon?

The Next Morning

The sky was pale with dawn.

Kael stood once more in the field behind the house, practice sword gripped tightly in his hands. Lira circled him with her usual lightfooted grace, twin daggers drawn and gleaming in the morning light.

"You're distracted," she said, darting forward.

Their weapons met with a sharp crack.

"Focus."

Kael gritted his teeth, countering her strikes one by one. His breath was even, but something inside him felt tight. Unsettled. The memory of failure still clung to him.

Why wouldn't the knight come?

Was it a onetime gift? A curse? A lie?

Then, it happened.

As Kael raised his sword for a downward strike, a pulse surged from deep within him.

Cold. Weightless. Black.

It rushed from his chest down through his arm, and in an instant, his forearm was wrapped in a shifting veil of dark aura. Black Aura. It clung to his skin, then spilled into the wooden blade in his hand.

The sword darkened.

Thin tendrils of shadow crawled along the grain of the wood. The air around it pulsed, still, heavy, unnatural.

Lira stopped mid-step, eyes locked on the blade.

"Kael"

The sword cracked.

Not loud, not sharp. A deep, hollow sound, like something giving way under ancient pressure. The wood splintered from within, bursting into shards. The hilt broke apart in Kael's grip, crumbling like something that had never truly belonged to this world.

He staggered back, breath catching.

Lira didn't move.

Kael looked at his hand. Fragments of the sword were scattered around him, faint trails of smoke curling upward where the aura had touched them.

Then the aura faded.

Gone. As if it had never been.

"…It covered the sword," Lira said softly, still watching him.

Kael nodded slowly. "I didn't mean to. It just… moved."

She glanced at the ruined weapon, then back at him.

"That wasn't aura. Not like anything I've ever seen."

Kael's fingers trembled as he opened and closed his hand. The chill remained in his skin, buried just beneath the surface.

"It was Black Aura," he said, barely above a whisper.

Lira tensed. "That's"

"From….," Kael cut in. "From the one inside me."

He turned his eyes toward the horizon, where the mountains of the north waited.