They came for me without speaking.
Two guards. Same masks. Same dead gait. One unlocked the door, the other pointed. I stood and followed.
No one in the cell asked where I was going. The man with the silver cords just watched. The stitched one smiled. The blistered woman scratched her arm without looking up.
The hallway was narrow, but different from the others. The lights here were soft and blue, embedded into the walls like frozen veins. No torches. No fire. Just a strange hum in the air that touched the back of my teeth.
The guards led me through a winding path. Every corner twisted tighter. I passed metal doors with slats like old prison cells. Behind one, something wept. Behind another, someone whispered my name.
At the third door, they stopped.
It opened with a press of a gloved palm.
The room was square. No windows. Walls were seamless, coated in black stone that neither reflected light nor swallowed it. A table stood in the center, made of glass or something close to it. No chairs.
Warden Kloch stood on the other side.
He didn't look up when I entered. He was writing.
The guards closed the door behind me.
I stepped forward once and stopped.
Kloch wrote for a while longer. His quill didn't scratch. It slid, silent and steady, like it knew exactly where it belonged.
Finally, he spoke.
"Tell me what you felt when you watched the gate open."
I didn't answer.
His eyes rose slowly. Not hostile. Not kind. Just... empty.
"I'm not asking what you thought. Not what you did. What you felt."
I said nothing.
He tapped his pen twice against the parchment and leaned back.
"You're difficult. But I already expected that."
He reached down and opened a thin drawer beneath the table. From it, he pulled a small object—an instrument shaped like a triangle, flat and dark, with a symbol etched at the center. It wasn't metal, but it caught the light like it wanted to be.
He placed it on the table.
"What do you know about instincts?" he asked.
I looked at the object.
"Nothing," I said.
"Wrong answer. But understandable."
He lifted the instrument and turned it in his hand. The etched symbol caught the blue glow from the walls. I didn't recognize it, but something about it made the air feel thicker.
"You were born with instincts," he said. "Most are mundane. Useful for survival, for prediction. But some..."
He let the object rest again.
"Some are inherited. Carried through blood. Buried. Rotten. Waiting to be bled into."
He waited.
I didn't blink.
Then he asked something else.
"Have you ever seen your own blood move when it shouldn't?"
I kept my voice steady. "No."
"Have you ever bled without injury?"
"No."
He nodded slightly. "Heat changes? Tremors in your limbs before violence?"
"Pain is not magic," I said.
He smiled. Barely.
"No. But not all magic is pain either."
He stood now, his coat silent against the stone.
"You're not the first Cravik I've seen here."
That caught my attention.
He noticed, but didn't push.
"Most who carry the name died fast. Not from blades or poison, but from... strain."
He walked around the table.
"The ones who don't break tend to burn. Slow at first. Then fast. Like something inside them is waiting to boil."
He stopped just behind me.
"Do you dream, Vaun?"
He knows the name.
"Yes," I said.
"What of?"
""A throne made of stone and veins. It pulses when I sit. Below me, the world chokes on ash. And I smile."
Kloch circled back in front of me and retrieved a scroll from a shelf near the wall. He unrolled it but didn't read it aloud. His eyes flicked across the lines. Whatever he saw made him frown.
He rolled it up again.
"You'll be assigned soon," he said. "The first task will not be survival. It will be obedience."
"I don't follow orders."
He paused. "That's why you'll be tested again."
He returned to his desk and dipped the quill once more. This time he wrote something in a red-marked section on a parchment I couldn't see clearly.
When he finished, he sealed the page with black wax and stamped it with a signet I didn't recognize.
He placed the parchment into a thick envelope and slid it into a steel drawer. The drawer locked with a quiet click.
"You may return to your cell," he said.
I turned toward the door.
"Vaun."
I stopped.
Kloch didn't look at me when he spoke again.
"Do not bleed in front of them. Not yet."
The guards walked me back.
The same halls. The same walls. The blue light still flickering behind my eyes.
But something was different.
Not in the air. Not in the room.
In me.
There had been nothing magical in that chamber. No spells. No rituals.
But when he asked about blood... something moved.
Not in my veins.
In my memory.
Why can't I remember what my mother's voice sounded like?
I sat in the same corner when they threw me back into the cell. The others glanced. No one spoke.
The silver-corded man narrowed his eyes slightly. The stitched one kept smiling.
I closed my eyes and listened to the silence.
Not for answers.
For a pulse.