Chapter 2: The Echo of Fate

Chapter 2: The Echo of Fate

The phantom agony came first. A wave of cosmic nausea, the memory of being unmade, clawed its way up from the pit of his stomach. Kaelen recoiled from his own hand as if it were a venomous serpent, scrambling back against the headboard of his bed. His breath came in ragged, panicked bursts.

It wasn't a dream. Dreams faded. Dreams didn't leave behind the ghost of their torment, a soul-deep ache that whispered of the void. And dreams didn't heal withered limbs.

He stared at his left arm, now a conduit for pulsing, silver-blue light. He flexed the fingers again, watching in horrified awe as they responded with fluid grace. The glyph on the back of his hand, the open eye within a broken circle, seemed to watch him back, its faint luminescence a constant, impossible truth.

Was this a curse? A sick joke played by some malevolent god? To grant him the power he had yearned for his entire life, only after showing him how utterly it would fail to save anyone?

Panic gave way to the Scribe’s instinct for analysis. He had to test it. He had to be certain. If this power was real, then the memory of the end was real, too.

Sliding out of bed, his legs unsteady, he looked around his small, familiar room. A stack of books on celestial cartography. A half-eaten apple on a plate. The ink pot and quill on his writing desk. All mundane. All blessedly, terrifyingly normal. The sun was shining. The sounds of Aethelburg waking up—the distant chime of the Chronomancer’s Tower, the rumble of a cargo automaton—drifted through his open window.

He focused on the quill resting beside a sheet of blank parchment. Scribes were taught the theory of magic from birth. The core principles: intention, invocation, and direction. A true mage could whisper a word of power and lift the quill, making it dance in the air. Kaelen had spent years mouthing those words, feeling nothing but a hollow ache in his Muted Core.

Now, something was different. He didn't need words. He felt the power thrumming in his left arm, a reservoir of raw, untamed energy waiting for a command. He raised his hand, pointing a finger at the delicate feather.

Lift, he thought, focusing his will with all the desperate intensity he could muster.

The result was not a dance. It was an explosion.

A torrent of chaotic, silver-blue energy, raw and unstructured, erupted from his fingertip. It wasn't a spell; it was a physical blow of pure mana. The quill didn't lift, it vaporized. The ink pot shattered, spraying a black constellation across the wall. The solid oak of his desk splintered and cracked, a smoking, ozone-stinking furrow carved into its surface where the quill had been.

Kaelen stared, his arm dropping to his side, his ears ringing. The glyph on his hand flared with a blinding light before dimming back to a soft glow. This wasn't the precise, elegant magic of the Aethelburg mages. This was something wild, primal, and terrifyingly potent.

The confirmation hit him like a physical blow, knocking the air from his lungs. It was real. All of it. The cracked sky. The oily shadows. The screams. The feeling of his soul being shredded. In a few days, the vibrant city outside his window would become a charnel house, and every person in it would die.

The weight of that foreknowledge was suffocating. He leaned against the scorched desk, the truth threatening to buckle his knees. What could he possibly do? He was a Scribe with a magical cannon for an arm he didn't know how to aim. No one would believe him. They would call him a madman, a doomsayer. They'd lock him in the asylum beneath the Alchemist's guild until the world ended around them.

He couldn't do this alone. The thought was a lifeline in a rising sea of despair. He needed help. He needed someone who would listen, someone with the authority to make others listen.

One name came to mind. Rhys.

Captain of the City Guard. Pragmatic, honorable, and his friend since their days as orphans in the city’s care. Rhys had always been his protector, the shield to his scholarship. He had teased Kaelen about his useless arm but had never let anyone else do the same. If there was one person in all of Aethelburg who might believe him, who might trust him even when he sounded insane, it was Rhys.

Decision made, a surge of adrenaline cut through his fear. He threw on his Scribe’s robes, the simple grey fabric feeling like a flimsy costume. He didn't bother with the ink stains on his fingers or the wildness in his eyes. There was no time.

He burst out of the Great Library, the morning sun feeling like a cruel mockery of the violet-streaked twilight he remembered. The plaza was alive. Merchants hawked shimmering arcane trinkets, children chased pigeons that cooed and scattered, and guards in polished silver-and-blue armor stood at their posts, their expressions bored and placid. Every normal, everyday sight was a dagger in his heart. You're all going to die.

He pushed through the crowds, his gaze fixed on the distant, stone bulk of the City Guard barracks. He rehearsed what he would say, how he could prove it. He knew things. Small things. The winning lottery number for today’s drawing. The minor cargo automaton malfunction that would cause a jam on the Sky-Bridge at noon. He could prove he wasn't crazy. He had to.

He ducked into a quieter side alley, a shortcut he’d taken a thousand times. The shadows of the tall buildings offered a moment of cool respite from the growing urgency.

And then, a figure stepped out from a recessed doorway, blocking his path.

It was a woman. Young, like him, with a lithe, graceful build that spoke of quiet strength. She was dressed in dark, practical clothing, the cuffs and collar embroidered with esoteric symbols in silver thread that seemed to absorb the light. She held a gnarled staff of a strange, dark metal that swirled like a captured galaxy.

But it was her eyes that made Kaelen freeze, his heart seizing in his chest. They were silver. A pale, luminous silver, just like his own. Yet where his held the frantic terror of a hunted animal, hers held the unnerving calm of an ancient predator. They seemed to see right through his skin, past his bones, and into the raw, wounded core of his being.

He opened his mouth to demand she move, but she spoke first. Her voice was not loud, but it cut through the morning air with the chilling finality of a tomb’s closing slab.

“It is a terrible thing, to carry the memory of a death that has not yet happened.”

Kaelen’s blood ran cold. Every rehearsed word, every desperate plan, vanished from his mind. He could only stare, speechless.

The woman took a single, silent step closer, her silver eyes fixated on him, filled not with malice, but with a terrifying, absolute certainty.

“Your soul is fractured,” she whispered, the words sealing his fate. “You’ve already died.”