The warning came wrapped in kindness. That was what made it dangerous. Kael knew it the moment his mother requested his presence—not through servants, not through formal summons, but with a handwritten note delivered quietly at dawn. Come to the garden alone, no seal, no crest, and no divine interference just ink, paper, and a mother’s hand. Kael folded the note carefully and slipped it into his coat. The seal at his core throbbed faintly, uneasy—not in alarm, but in recognition. This mattered. The garden had always been her domain. Even before Kael’s rebirth, before titles and bloodlines and the slow rot of divine oversight, Lady Elowen Varyn had cultivated this place herself. No enchanted soil, no blessed fountains just patience, time, and stubborn refusal to let anything else decide what should live. Morning mist curled low around rose bushes and tall hedges, dew clinging to leaves like glass. She stood near the old fig tree, pruning shears in hand, dressed simply in dark gre

The sky did not like being contradicted.Kael felt it the moment his boots touched the cracked stone of the training yard—felt the pressure recoil, then tighten, as if the heavens themselves had drawn a slow, offended breath.Eron was on his knees where Kael had left him, blood soaking into the white stone, holy light still crackling weakly around his hands. Knights stood frozen at the edges of the yard, weapons half-raised, uncertain whether they were witnessing heresy… or prophecy.Kael ignored them all.He dropped to one knee in front of Eron and took his injured hand carefully, turning it palm-up.Steel had cut deep. Too deep for a training accident.“Does it hurt?” Kael asked quietly.Eron laughed weakly. “I think I’m past pretending it doesn’t.”Kael closed his eyes briefly—and then did something reckless.He let the seal breathe. Not break, not crack further. Just… loosen. Enough for the old knowledge to surface and enough to do what the gods would never anticipate.Kael presse

The first sign was the silence.Kael noticed it before anything else—before the cold prickle along his spine, before the faint distortion in the air, before the uneasy shift in Eron’s breathing. The night around the estate had gone unnaturally quiet, as if the world itself were holding its breath.No insects, no wind. Even the distant bells of the city had fallen mute.Kael stopped walking.Eron, half a step behind him, nearly bumped into his back. “Kael?”“Stay close,” Kael said softly.His senses stretched outward, brushing against the familiar lattice of wards surrounding the estate. They were intact. Untouched. And yet… something had slipped between them.That was the problem. Whatever was here hadn’t broken in. It had been invited.They were crossing the old lower courtyard, the one the family rarely used anymore. Cracked flagstones lay uneven beneath their feet, and ivy crept along the stone walls like grasping fingers. Moonlight pooled faintly at the center, illuminating a shal

Rumors did not begin with screams. They began with hesitation.A merchant pausing mid-sentence in a tavern, a priest faltering during morning prayer, and a guard forgetting the next line of a report he had recited a hundred times before.Something had gone wrong with the world’s memory. And the world felt it.The first rumor surfaced in the lower city before dawn.A dockworker swore he’d seen shadows bow to a man standing alone on the quay—shadows that vanished the moment he looked twice. Another claimed the bells rang by themselves at midnight, tolling not warning, but recognition.By noon, the rumor had a name. The Demon King’s echo and by nightfall, it had a shape.Kael felt it before he heard it.The estate was too quiet again but this time not from intrusion but from a distance.People avoided the gates. Servants moved softly, eyes lowered, prayers muttered under their breath. Even the air seemed to recoil from him, as if afraid to linger too close.Eron noticed too.“They’re whi

Belief was a weapon and Kael had learned that lesson the hard way.Empires were not built on steel alone, and gods did not rule by power alone. Wars did not begin because blades were drawn but because someone, somewhere, decided what was right.And Eron was beginning to decide. That terrified Kael more than any cult, any god, any throne ever had.The bells faded by morning.Not abruptly—nothing so merciful but gradually, like a memory the world was forcing itself to forget. The estate woke under a pale, uncertain sky. Servants moved quietly. Guards spoke in murmurs. Even the birds seemed hesitant to sing.Eron sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his hands. They looked the same, that was the worst part, no glow, no shadow, and no mark.Yet last night, the world had listened to him. A soft knock came at the door.“Get dressed,” Kael said through the wood. “We’re leaving.”Eron blinked. “Leaving where?”“Somewhere you can think without the city whispering in your ear.”They traveled b