"Gentlemen," came a voice. Smooth. Polished.
The room fell still.
The guard froze mid-swing. The others appeared from the corners, straightening like dogs awaiting orders.
What was happening? Why was one of their superiors visiting them? This was not how they operated. Never once during their time in the organization did a superior of Emilia's level visited them in the middle of a mission.
This was starting to sound like trouble.
She stepped inside, a breath of civilization in a place where it didn't belong. Tall, elegant, dressed in tailored burgundy. Not a thread out of place. Her hair was dark, pinned back with silver. She didn't walk so much as glide. Every gesture was clean. Controlled.
But her eyes were dangerous. Green, sharp, smiling at nothing.
"Emilia," one of the guards stammered.
"We weren't told—"
"You weren't meant to be," she replied, soft and dangerous. "But I'm here regardless."
Her gaze swept the room. Landed on Cale.
"Is that one broken?"
"Tripped," the guard muttered. "Stupid."
She gave a delicate smile. "Stupid children make dull gifts."
The color drained from the man's face.
"I bring word from our liege," Emilia said, as if discussing the weather. "He has taken a personal interest in your work. Consider this… elevated responsibility."
What did she mean by that? One of the guards thought, getting anxious.
Murmurs. Panic just under the surface.
"The King's birthday is approaching," she added. "And he expects something memorable. Something pure."
From the floor, Cale listened. Every word burned into his memory.
He shifted, barely, to glance through the cracked door. Call it a youth's curiosity, but something inside Cale wanted to see this woman who had come to bore news of him and the other children's fate.
His eyes looked around — the guards standing in rigid posture, then, the woman.
Emilia was already looking at him.
Their eyes locked.
She smiled wider.
It was not the kind of smile that makes a person filled with joy. No — this one was eerie, a goosebump inducing smile. Cale's stomach turned.
Then the heat in his wrist flared—sharp and sudden—and the world tilted sideways.
________________
When Cale opened his eyes, the world was wrong.
He stood in a corridor too grand to be real. Pillars stretched like bones toward an arched ceiling lost in shadows. Candles flickered in sconces carved from obsidian. The walls pulsed with the kind of silence that swallowed thoughts.
Outside the tall windows: blackness. No stars. No moon. Only void.
His heart pounded. He didn't know where he was—but it felt real. Far too real.
He took a step forward.
The click of his heel echoed forever.
Something in him screamed to turn around. To wake up. But another part—deeper, quieter—was drawn forward. The air here vibrated with power. Secrets.
He walked.
The staircase loomed ahead, its steps velvet and carved with strange runes. Cale ascended, hand brushing the cold rail.
On the second floor, a door stood slightly open. Voices murmured beyond it.
Two men having a conversation.
He moved closer, heartbeat loud in his ears.
He couldn't hear what they were saying. Their words danced just out of reach, like leaves caught in the wind. Familiar. Important.
He reached for the door—
"Cale."
He spun around.
Emis sat atop the railing, tail twitching, those impossible blue eyes glowing like embers.
"You shouldn't be here," the Yvelin said calmly.
"What is this place?" Cale asked, his voice shaky.
"A ripple," Emis said. "Of something that hasn't happened. Yet."
Cale looked back at the door.
"Why am I seeing this?"
"You brushed against something too heavy," Emis said. "Your mind let it in. It doesn't know how to carry it, so it shows you pieces."
The door creaked wider behind him.
Cale took half a step toward it.
"Don't," Emis warned.
"I need to know."
"You will. But not now."
Cale hesitated, torn between the voice of caution and the fire in his chest—the one that *needed* to understand.
Emis was suddenly beside him, gazing hard.
"Wake up."
The hallway cracked.
Light poured in from nowhere.
And the castle collapsed into nothing.
__________________
Cale woke with a jolt. The rotting ceiling above him swam into focus, familiar now. Same sagging beams. Same stale air. Same quiet misery pressing in from all sides.
But something was different.
His chest still throbbed from where he'd slammed into the wall days ago. His ribs ached. But it wasn't the pain that unsettled him—it was the silence.
Inside his head.
He sat up slowly, ignoring the sharp tug in his side, and looked around. The children were sleeping or staring or doing what they always did: nothing. The guards hadn't come in yet. Morning light barely reached the corners of the room.
Cale pressed his hand to the spiral on his wrist.
"Emis," he whispered. Nothing.
He shut his eyes and tried again—not aloud this time, but inwardly, like he was thinking the name into the void.
Emis.
Still nothing.
He didn't know what he was expecting. A flash of light? A voice? That strange pressure behind the eyes that had come before the vision?
What he got was silence.
Not rejection. Not even absence. Just... nothing.
Cale opened his eyes. His heart sank under the weight of it.
Was it all just a dream? A hallucination from whatever drug they'd used on him? Had his mind, under stress, invented the whole thing—the castle, the voices, the cat with the blue-fire eyes?
He stood, wobbled, and sat again. His legs didn't trust the floor anymore.
He looked at the children. Some of them were so young they couldn't have known why they were here. They didn't cry anymore. That scared him most.
He pressed his hand to his face, breathing through his fingers. "Was that… the power?" he whispered into his palm. "That vision?"
But if that was the power the Veyrathi were hunted for—if that was what the world feared—why did it feel like it had been meant for him?
___________________
Two days passed.
Cale waited for the silence to crack, but it never did. He started to think maybe he had made it up. Maybe the mark was just that—a trick. A curse. A slow madness crawling into his thoughts.
That night, he didn't sleep. A guard had mentioned a new "selection" coming soon. The word chilled him. He didn't ask. He didn't need to.
One of the girls near the wall hadn't woken that morning.
No one had said anything.As much as it hurt Cale to admit it, this was becoming a norm for him. After all, there were around twenty of them when he first woke up inside that shithole. But as he looked around, that number seemed to have gone down by half.
Cale's chest felt too tight. His thoughts were too loud. He curled in on himself, arms wrapped tight, knees pulled to his chest, and squeezed his eyes shut.
He whispered the name one more time. Not as a command.
As a plea.
"Emis… please."
The silence held.
Then it broke.
"You are loud when you're desperate."
Cale's head snapped up. His eyes scanned the room, wild and wide. But no one had moved. No one else had heard.
It hadn't come from outside.
It had come through him.
"Emis," he breathed. "You're here?"
"I never left. You just don't know how to listen yet."
Cale's heart stuttered. The voice was calm, polished, the same melodic purr he remembered. But there was something else beneath it this time—something older. Like echoing stone and distant thunder, hidden in its undertone.
"What happened to me... that vision—was that your power?"
"You touched it, yes. But not properly. You leaked into a future that doesn't belong to you yet."
"I saw a castle. I heard voices. One of them—"
"You weren't ready to understand them. That knowledge would have shattered you."
Cale's breath caught. "So what am I now?"
There was a pause, not quite silence, but as if Emis were watching him from a long hallway of thought.
"You are a vessel that has not yet hardened. You are bleeding into things you should not. But..."
Another pause.
"You are more compatible than I expected."
Cale looked down at the mark on his wrist. It pulsed, faintly. Not with heat or light—but with something deeper. A sense of connection. Of awareness.
He didn't feel stronger.
He felt... changed.
"I thought the Yvelari only showed visions when they wanted to."
"We do."
"But you didn't show me that vision."
"No. You took it. Or it took you. Either way, something is waking up in you."
Cale swallowed hard. His voice came out smaller than he liked. "Should I be scared?"
"You already are."
A beat passed. Then Emis added, softer:
"And that is good. You should be."
For the first time since he woke in that house, Cale didn't feel entirely alone.
Terrified, yes.
But not alone.
He leaned back against the wall, his fingers curled protectively around the mark.
He didn't know what was coming.
But something in him had already started to change—and there was no turning back now.