The world had gone quiet.
Not the silence of peace, but the stillness of a grave. The kind of silence that comes after something has been lost. The air in the tunnel was thick with the scent of scorched stone and the taste of blood on the wind, like iron mourning its own forging.
Kael Thorn knelt on the cold ground, his hands pressed against the rough stone, breath coming in ragged, uneven gasps that echoed too loud in the aftermath. Dust clung to his skin, sweat beading along his spine, yet his body registered none of it. His fingers trembled—not from exhaustion, but from the absence. The hollow.
His fire was gone.
As if it had never existed at all.
As if the years he had spent mastering flame, taming it, shaping it, burning for it, had been nothing but smoke and memory.
His palms, once calloused from years of channeling searing heat, felt cold. Lifeless. The ember that had lived in his chest since childhood—the pulse of his magic, the rhythm of his very being—was simply... not there.
A phantom pain throbbed in his sternum. He clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms, desperate for a spark, a flicker, even pain that felt real. As if pain could summon back what had been stolen.
But nothing answered him.
The boy—no, the thing that had once been his son—shivered, his hands still half-raised, fingers twitching with residual energy.
Around Kael, the air throbbed with something darker than magic. The magic wasn't just gone. It had been devoured.
"Father..."
The word father felt like an insult now. A mockery. That boy had not merely stolen his magic. He had torn down a legacy older than the Academy itself—ripped the very flame from Kael's blood, from the Thorn name.
And worst of all, when Kael had looked into his son's eyes, he had seen not grief.
But hunger.
A sound echoed from the tunnel behind them—boots striking stone in a hurried cadence, the clatter of armor, the low murmur of voices and orders.
The Council had arrived.
Kael didn't turn. He knew what they would see.
A broken man.
A failed father.
A Thorn without fire.
Eryk flinched at the noise, his body recoiling like a wounded animal. The girl—Sera—snatched his arm, her grip sharp and urgent.
"Move," she hissed, voice low and wild with fear.
Eryk didn't resist. He let her pull him, stumbling backward as if sleepwalking. His eyes never left Kael.
And for a heartbeat, a brief, flickering moment, Kael thought he saw something in them.
But it vanished.
Like everything else.
Eryk turned and ran.
And Kael let him.
The sentinels found Kael minutes later. They moved through the tunnels like wraiths, silvered armor reflecting torchlight in cold halos, every footstep measured, deliberate.
Their leader—a woman with frost in her voice and judgment in her eyes—knelt beside Kael. Her gloved fingers pressed to his wrist with clinical precision.
"His core is drained," she said. "He's not broken yet. He was just empty."
The word empty landed like a blade.
The others murmured among themselves. One—tall, scarred, watchful—shifted uneasily.
"Like the others?" he asked.
The woman said nothing. Instead, she turned Kael's palm upward, studying it like a crime scene. Searching for proof of what no magic had ever left before.
There was nothing. No burn, no scar, no sign that power had ever surged beneath his skin.
Kael's fire had not died.
It had been erased.
"Bring him," the leader said at last. "The High Magister will want to see this."
Cold hands closed around Kael's arms. He didn't resist. There was no fight left in him, not even for pride.
As they dragged him from the tunnel, his gaze stayed fixed on the stone where Eryk had stood.
And the air still reeked of void.
~○~
The Grand Magnus Academy
Council Chambers
The chamber was a tomb—cold, reverent, and vast. Walls of veined marble loomed like gravestones, etched with the history of mages far greater than any seated within.
High Magister Elira Vann sat unmoving at the head of the obsidian table. Her golden hair coiled like a blade behind her, her eyes colder than the stone beneath her feet. Around her, the Council loomed with their faces ancient, proud, and deeply afraid.
Kael sat bound, wrists encased in mana-dampening cuffs that tingled against his skin. His magic wouldn't have worked even without them. But their presence was a humiliation and a statement.
"You're certain it was him?" Elira asked, voice clipped like a knife's edge.
Kael's throat was dry. Each breath burned like cinders in his lungs.
When he finally answered, his voice was hollow, stripped of fire.
"Y-Yes."
A ripple passed through the Council. One of them—a hollow-eyed man with parchment skin—leaned forward.
"The Null Grimoire," he whispered, reverent and horrified all at once. "It's real, then."
Elira's gaze didn't waver.
"And it has chosen its bearer."
The words settled over them like a death knell.
Kael's heart twisted. The Null Grimoire—long whispered of in myth, a relic of the Spell-Eater Uprising, a weapon of void and ruin. It had been bedtime stories for the unwary. A curse told to children.
But now it pulsed in the hands of his son.
He had felt it.
Elira's breath misted in the air. "Eryk Thorn is hereby declared a Class-Red threat. All assets are to be diverted to his capture—" her voice dropped "—or elimination."
Kael's head snapped up, eyes burning with disbelief. "Elimination?"
Elira's gaze locked with his, cold and ruthless. "You saw what he did to you, Thorn. Imagine that power unleashed in a city. Imagine it turned on the Academy."
He wanted to shout. To protest. Eryk was still his son. Still the boy who had once fallen asleep on his shoulder, dreaming of flame and light.
But when Kael reached for that old fire in his chest, there was nothing there. Just cold.
Eryk was no longer just a boy.
He was a Spellbreaker.
And the world would hunt him for it.
~○~
"Why did you go back here?"
Narliya's tavern had never felt so small. So exposed.
Eryk sat hunched in a dark corner, shadows curling around him like protection or prison. His hands wrapped around a mug of steamwine he couldn't taste. The warmth had long faded, leaving behind only bitter swirls of alchemical residue and memory.
Sera sat across from him, her knife glinting as she sharpened it in rhythmic strokes. Metal against whetstone—the sound was comforting, almost grounding.
Narliya leaned behind the bar, arms folded, eyes hard.
"You can't stay here," she said.
Eryk didn't lift his gaze. "I know."
"Your father raged here earlier," Narliya told Eryk. "He was looking for you."
Eryk averted his gaze, and didn't have the chance to explain what happened. He felt too ashamed. What could he possibly say? That he fought with his own father and he accidentally drained all of his magic?
The city had turned overnight. The Ashen District, now whispered his name like a curse. Spell-Eater. Hollowborn. Destroyer. Loyalty wilted beneath the weight of a Council bounty.
Kael's face wouldn't leave his mind. The expression of a man undone. The eyes of a father turned stranger.
Eryk's gut writhed. He hadn't meant to take it.
But he had.
Sera sheathed her knife with a decisive click. "So where do we go?"
Narliya answered before Eryk could. "East. The Whispering Wastes. The Council's reach weakens beyond the Scorched Expanse."
Eryk finally looked up. "We?"
"I said we're going to go find you a teacher. Together." Sera's eyes were fierce. "You really think I'm letting you wander into that madness alone?"
A thin thread of warmth laced through the ice in his chest.
She was still here.
She wasn't running.
Narliya tossed a satchel on the table.
"Supplies. Coin." A pause. Then, more carefully. "Find Riven."
Eryk tensed. "A Spellbreaker?"
Narliya's smile was razor-thin. "Worse. He's the one the Council never found."
Eryk stood, the satchel slung over his shoulder. The Grimoire pulsed faintly against his ribs, like a second heartbeat.
It was still hungry.
And now, so was he.
~○~
The gates of the Ashen District loomed behind them, rusted and broken, like the jagged maw of a dead god.
Eryk didn't look back.
The wind carried rain on its breath, and thunder, and the scent of distant magic long buried beneath dust.
Sera adjusted her pack. Her knife gleamed like a secret at her hip.
"Ready, Stray Dog?"
Eryk exhaled.
The void stirred in his chest. But for the first time, it didn't feel like an ending.
It felt like a beginning.
A different kind of fire.
He stepped forward.
"Let's go."