The Son in law They Should Never Have Betrayed

THE AWAKENING SEED

CHAPTER 10 – THE AWAKENING SEED

"Guard." Kaelith gripped the bars of his cell. "Guard, there is a man down. I need someone over here right now."

His voice carried down the corridor and came back to him as echo. Nothing else came back with it.

The block was dim at this hour, the overhead lights cut to their nighttime level, long strips of dull yellow that threw more shadow than light. Most cells were quiet. A few men stirred at the noise but nobody appeared at their bars. Nobody wanted to be involved in something at this hour.

The old man was on his side against the base of his cell door, one arm folded beneath him, the other stretched out through the bars into the corridor. His breathing was audible from where Kaelith stood, shallow and wet and laboured, like something moving through liquid that it was not meant to move through.

"Guard." Kaelith hit the bars with his palm. The sound rang out sharp and loud. "Someone is having a medical emergency. I need a guard on this block."

A door opened somewhere far down the corridor. Footsteps. Slow ones. A guard appeared at the far end of the block moving without urgency, torch sweeping lazily across the cell doors.

He reached the old man's cell and looked down.

"He needs medical attention," Kaelith said. "He's coughing blood."

The guard crouched slightly and angled his torch through the bars. He looked for a moment with the detached expression of someone assessing an inconvenience rather than a person. Then he straightened up.

"I'll put in a call," he said.

"He needs help now."

"I'll put in a call," the guard said again, in exactly the same tone, and walked back the way he had come.

Kaelith stood at his bars and listened to the footsteps recede and felt something move through him that was hotter than anger and older than anything he had a name for.

The old man coughed again. It sounded like it cost him something each time.

"Hey." Kaelith lowered himself to the floor and reached his arm through the bars as far as it would go. The corridor between their cells was narrow, three feet at most. "Can you hear me? Stay awake. Someone is coming."

The old man's eyes opened.

They were dark and very clear, which was not what Kaelith expected. Not the clouded, unfocused eyes of someone losing consciousness. Clear and present and looking at him with full recognition.

"Kaelith Dren," the old man said. His voice was rough but steady.

Kaelith went still. "You know my name."

"I have known your name for a very long time." Another cough, shorter this time, and the old man pressed his fist against his mouth until it passed. "Longer than you would believe if I told you."

"Who are you?"

"Magnus." He paused to breathe. "Magnus Zepharion Krythe." He said it the way a person said a thing they had not spoken aloud in years, carefully, with full awareness of its weight.

It meant nothing to Kaelith. But the way the man said it made him feel that it should.

"You need to stay still," Kaelith said. "Don't keep talking."

"I have been still for three years in this place," Magnus said. "Waiting." His eyes did not leave Kaelith's face. "I can afford a few more words."

The burning started without warning.

It began in Kaelith's chest, below the sternum, a deep interior heat that had no connection to the temperature of the room. It moved outward slowly, the way heat moved through metal, travelling from his chest along his shoulders and down both arms simultaneously. 

It was not painful. That was the strangest part of it. It should have been painful, something moving through his veins like that, filling the channels of him from the inside. But it was not pain. It was pressure and heat and something underneath those things that he had no word for, something that felt almost like recognition, like a part of him waking up that had been asleep for a very long time.

He looked down at his hand. The glow was back.

Stronger than the night before. It rose from his palm in a soft, steady pulse, gold as morning light, gold as firelight seen through closed eyes. It moved with his heartbeat. He could feel it and see it simultaneously, which should have been impossible and was, and he looked at it for three full seconds without moving.

Magnus saw it from the floor. His breath caught.

Kaelith did not think about what he did next. He reached his glowing hand through the bars and pressed his palm flat against Magnus's chest.

The heat left him in a single wave.

It moved from his palm into the old man's body and Kaelith felt it go, felt the absence of it the way you felt a held breath finally released. Magnus went rigid for a moment under his hand, a full body stillness, and then something in him loosened. His shoulders dropped. The terrible wet sound of his breathing changed, the liquid quality draining out of it slowly, the rhythm evening, deepening, finding a pace that belonged to a living person rather than a drowning one.

The coughing stopped.

Kaelith pulled his hand back through the bars and sat on the cold corridor floor and looked at his palm. The glow was fading now, pulling back toward the centre and dimming, but slowly, as though reluctant.

Magnus lay still for a long moment.

Then he pushed himself upright against the cell door. His movements were careful but no longer desperate. He sat with his back against the bars and his legs stretched out and he breathed, long and even, four breaths, five, six. He raised his hand and looked at it, then wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked at that too.

He turned his head toward Kaelith.

His eyes were wide. Not frightened. Something beyond frightened, something on the other side of it, a man who had expected something extraordinary and had still, despite all his expecting, been shaken by its arrival.

"How do you feel?" Kaelith asked.

Magnus did not answer immediately. He looked at him the way a man looked at something he had spent years searching for and had begun to quietly doubt existed. His jaw moved slightly. He swallowed.

"You have no idea what you are," Magnus said. It was not a question.

"I don't know what just happened," Kaelith said.

"No." Magnus shook his head slowly. "You would not. Not yet." He pressed his hand flat against his own chest where Kaelith had touched him, feeling something there, checking something. Then he looked up. "I have been in this prison for three years, Kaelith Dren. I was not sent here by a court. I was placed here." He held his gaze. "I was placed here to wait for you."

The corridor was completely silent around them.

"That doesn't make any sense," Kaelith said.

"Very little about what just happened makes sense by any measure you currently possess." Magnus straightened slightly against the bars. "But you felt it. The heat. The current moving through you. You have felt pieces of it before, haven't you. Small moments. Things you dismissed."

Kaelith said nothing. But his silence was an answer. Magnus nodded slowly, as though something had been confirmed.

"I spent thirty years looking for you," the old man said quietly. "Thirty years across seven countries and four different lives following the signs of a lineage that most people believe is extinct." He paused. "It is not extinct. It is sitting on a prison floor three feet away from me."

"What lineage," Kaelith said.

Magnus looked at him with those clear, dark, exhausted eyes and said it the way a man said something he had rehearsed ten thousand times and was only now, finally, allowed to speak aloud.

"So," he whispered. "You have finally awakened, Dragon Sovereign."

The words landed in the silence and did not dissolve. They stayed, solid and strange and heavier than words had any right to be.

Kaelith opened his mouth. Before he could speak, the mark on his palm ignited.

Not the soft pulse from before. Not the gentle gold warmth that faded in seconds. This was bright and total and it flooded the corridor with light, throwing shadows hard against the cell walls, illuminating Magnus's stunned face and Kaelith's own outstretched hand in sharp and blazing gold.

It burned. For the first time, it truly burned.

And somewhere deep inside the burning, something ancient turned over like an engine finding its power, and Kaelith felt, in a way he could not explain and could not deny, that nothing about his life would ever look the same again..