LEFT FOR DEAD, REBORN TO UNMAKE GODS

The Nullborn Quarter

Dawn found Kael three streets from the manor, sitting in the shadow of a boarded up bakery in the part of the city nobody with a real Tier bothered to walk through after dark.

The Nullborn Quarter. He’d grown up two streets from its edge and had never once been allowed to set foot in it. House Ashvane didn’t let its heirs, even disgraced ones, mix with the ranked nothing crowd. Funny, now, that it was the only place in the city where nobody would look twice at his face.

His wrist still ached where the construct had broken it. He flexed it experimentally and found the pain had dulled to something manageable, which the System confirmed with a line he hadn’t asked for.

[Minor structural repair: 40% complete. Voidforge stability accelerates natural healing.]

Small mercies. He’d take them.

“You look like you slept in a ditch.” The voice came from an old woman sweeping the bakery’s front step, sharp eyed despite the early hour, sizing him up without a hint of fear. That alone told him where he was. Nobody in the Quarter had the luxury of being afraid of strangers. Everyone here had already lost whatever the House families were afraid of losing.

“Close enough,” Kael said.

“Trial reject?” She nodded at the tattered remains of his climbing gear, still marked faintly with the Academy’s crest. “Half the boys who wash out end up down here eventually. Better company than up there, if you ask me.”

He almost laughed. “Nobody’s asked me anything in years.”

She studied him a beat longer than was comfortable, then shrugged and went back to her sweeping, the way people in the Quarter had learned to mind their business fast and thoroughly. “There’s a room over the tannery, three doors down. Old man died last winter, nobody’s claimed it. Rent’s whatever you can spare, which I’m guessing is nothing.”

She finally looked up at him then, sweeping forgotten for a moment. “Whatever trouble you’re carrying, boy, leave it outside my street. I’ve buried enough neighbors who thought their trouble would stay quiet if they just kept their heads down. It never does.”

“I’ll try,” Kael said, and meant it, even though some distant part of him already suspected it wasn’t a promise he’d manage to keep.

“Why help me?”

“Didn’t say I was helping.” She didn’t look up. “Said there’s a room. What you do with that information is your business.”

Kael sat with that small, gruff kindness longer than it deserved, turning it over like something rare.

It had been a long time since anyone offered him anything without wanting something back for it. He wasn’t sure yet what to do with that, other than accept it and keep moving before the feeling had time to complicate things.

The room over the tannery was small, smelled worse than the street outside, and had exactly one window that let in a thin blade of morning light. Kael sat against the wall beneath it and let the System’s silence fill the space where his thoughts should have been.

He needed a plan. Not the reckless kind that had gotten him this far, walk in, extract a name, extract a Core, walk out, but something that could survive contact with a House that would soon realize its Nullborn embarrassment hadn’t died quietly after all.

[New Notification: Title Progress. “The Unmade” (Tier 1 to Tier 2 available)]

[Requirement: Absorb 3 additional Attunement Cores of Grade C or higher.]

Three more. Three more people he’d need to find, corner, and unmake, just to unlock whatever came next. He thought of Varic curled on his study floor and felt, to his own quiet surprise, no guilt at all. Only a kind of grim arithmetic. Three more names, three more steps toward staying alive.

The Grand Audit was in eleven days. Every ranked heir in the House would be there, publicly re certified in front of the whole Dominion, including the four who’d left him to die on the ninth floor. It was reckless to think about revealing himself there. It was also, he was starting to realize, exactly the kind of stage his uncle’s crime deserved. Public, undeniable, impossible to bury a second time.

Eleven days to get strong enough to survive walking back into that hall.

Kael closed his eyes, felt the curse mark’s slow, patient countdown beneath his ribs, and began, for the first time since the fall, to actually think like someone who intended to win.

He started with what he knew. Doran was broken and terrified, useless as a threat but still dangerous as a loose thread, someone who might crack under enough pressure from the wrong direction. Varic was hollowed and hiding it, buying himself time before anyone noticed his Attunement had dimmed. Neither of them would move against him openly, not without risking the very secret they were trying to bury.

That left the other three from the ninth floor. Names he didn’t have yet, faces he remembered clearly enough from the fight: the swordsman, the spear wielder, the one with the staff who’d struck the blow that should have killed him outright. If the Title required three more Cores, the math wrote itself. He wouldn’t have to hunt far. He’d have to hunt smart, and he’d have to be ready to bleed for it, the way he’d bled for every inch of progress so far.

For the first time in longer than he could remember, Kael found himself looking forward to a fight instead of dreading it. Eleven days. It wasn’t much. It was more than he’d had yesterday, and it was entirely his to spend however he chose.