AETHORIA:The hollow king

The sky above Veldrath had not been blue in eleven years.

Kael Dun remembered blue  barely, the way you remember the face of someone you loved before grief dulled it to a shape. He had been six years old when the Solmere Empire crossed the Ashridge Mountains and painted the horizon in gold fire. Now the sky was the colour of old iron. The occupation had a colour, and that colour was grey.

He carried two buckets of water up the hill from the well, the rope biting into his palms, the mud sucking at his boots. The village of Durnholt sat in the bowl of a valley like a wound in the earth  low stone houses, a market square with half its stalls empty, and at every corner, soldiers in Solmere amber. They were always watching. That was the point of them.

Kael kept his eyes down. Eyes down was the first lesson his mother had taught him before she died. The second lesson was: never let them see you bleed.

"Oi. Durnholt rat."

He stopped. The voice came from a soldier leaning against the wall of the miller's house  a man with a red sash across his breastplate, a Sear, one of Solmere's fire-bound officers. His name was Calder. Kael knew his name because Calder had made it his business to be known in Durnholt, the way a storm makes itself known before it breaks.

"Where are you going with those?"

"The tanner's," Karl said. He kept his voice flat. Flat voices did not invite further conversation.

Calder pushed off the wall and walked toward him slowly, the way a man walks when he knows nothing will stop him. He was broad in the shoulders and had the kind of face that had never once been told no.

"The tanner owes three months of Aeth-tithe. You know what that means?"

"It means the tanner is behind on his tithe," Kael said.

"It means," Calder said, leaning close enough that Kael could smell the char of his breath  all Sears smelled faintly of burning, as though the fire-Aeth inside them never fully slept  "that anything going to the tanner's house is subject to Imperial inspection."

He knocked one of the buckets from Kael's hand. Water crashed into the mud. Kael watched it go. He felt the familiar heat rise in his chest  not magic, just anger, the ordinary kind — and pressed it down hard.

Eyes down. Never let them see you bleed.

"I'll go back to the well," Kael said.

"Yes," Calder agreed pleasantly. "You will."

Kael retrieved the bucket. As he walked back down the hill, he heard the soldier laugh, and he counted his breaths the way his mother had taught him when the world became too heavy to hold  one, two, three, four  until the laughter was swallowed by the grey wind.

— — —

The burning started at dusk.

Kael was in the tanner's yard when he saw the glow on the south end of the village  a warm amber light that had no business being warm. He heard screaming half a breath later. Then the bell in the square: three sharp clangs, which in Durnholt meant only one thing.

Imperial action.

He ran. He did not think. The south quarter was three streets of residential houses, old families, people who had been in Durnholt longer than the Empire had been in Veldrath. They were burning.

Not the houses. The people.

"Aeth-tithe delinquents," a Sear announced from horseback, his voice carrying across the screams with practiced calm. "By decree of Governor Hallen, quarter-burn is authorised for villages that fail three consecutive collections. This is the third consecutive failure of Durnholt."

Kael stood at the mouth of the street and watched fire consume his world. There were perhaps twenty soldiers in amber and six Sears on horseback with fire blooming at their palms  controlled, deliberate, almost beautiful in the horrible way that power is always almost beautiful when it belongs to someone else. A woman he recognised  Maren, who sold bread, who had once given him a half-loaf when he was twelve and starving  was on her knees in the street, her hands folded, saying something that might have been a prayer.

Calder rode past her without looking down.

Kael moved before he knew he was moving. He did not have a weapon. He had no Aeth-bond, no magic, nothing  he had been tested at six, tested again at twelve, and both times the readers had given the same verdict: hollow. Aethless. A word people said the way they said worthless, because in Aethoria they were the same word.

But he moved anyway, because Maren was on her knees and no one else was moving.

He grabbed a soldier's arm. They went down together in the mud. He felt something close around his wrist  a hand, too hot, scorching even through his sleeve and then the world went white.

— — —

It was not pain, exactly. It was more like drinking fire.

It flooded into him from the point of contact  the Sear's grip  and he felt it roar through his blood like a river finding a channel it did not know it had. It burned. It sang. It was enormous and his body should have rejected it, but instead something inside him opened wide and drank.

He lay in the mud, trembling. Above him, Calder stared down from his horse with an expression Kael had never seen on a Solmere soldier's face. He had seen contempt. He had seen boredom. He had seen casual cruelty worn like a second uniform.

He had never seen fear.

"What are you?" Calder said.

Kael looked at his own hands. They were glowing. Dim, amber the exact colour of Solmere fire  but unmistakably his, burning under his skin like coals buried in snow.

He did not have an answer. He had been told his whole life exactly what he was: nothing. Hollow. Aethless.

But his hands were on fire, and the Sear above him was afraid, and Maren was still on her knees in the street, and Karl Dun made a decision the first real decision of his life, the kind you cannot unmake and he stood up.