Chapter Nine: The Black Ring
The sky hung the color of old dishwater. Grey without commitment. Not rain, not sun. Just grey, pressing down on Zoe like a damp cloth over a wound.
Zack's wooden knife clattered into the dirt for the sixth time that morning. His fingers had gone numb two hours ago. The rest of his body followed in stages.
Burrel lowered his own blade. He studied Zack the way a man studies a fire he's deciding whether to feed or smother.
"Enough."
Enough. The most beautiful word in any language. I'd marry that word if the ceremony wouldn't kill me.
"Any more and you'll forget your own name." Burrel sheathed his practice knife. His voice carried the weight of conclusion. A door closing. "Every breath you take in that ring tomorrow is a sentence in a different story. Write one worth reading."
Zack picked up his knife. His wrist ached. His shoulders burned. His thighs had been filing complaints since dawn.
"That's almost poetic, Chief."
"Poetry is for people who don't get hit."
Burrel walked to the fence. He leaned against it, arms folded, scar catching the flat light. His jaw worked for a moment. Chewing on something heavier than words.
"That thing you found."
Zack's hand tightened on the wooden grip.
"It's yours now. I don't want its name." Burrel's dark eyes held steady. No curiosity in them. No fear. Just the hard arithmetic of a man who had survived by knowing which questions to leave unasked. "But the world has a list. Three Paths. Anything not on the list? They call it a weed." He paused. "And they pull weeds. With fire."
The air between them went cold. Zack felt the void pulse once behind his sternum, as if it recognized the threat.
"Your best tool is their belief that you have no tools. Don't spoil the surprise."
He knows. He doesn't know what, but he knows something. And instead of reporting me, he's teaching me how to hide. This man is either the best ally I've ever had or the most patient trap.
"Understood."
Burrel gave a single nod. He turned and walked into the grey morning without another word. Gone in three steps. The man moved like silence owed him a favor.
Zack sat on the fence rail and let his body cool. The village stirred around him. Smoke from breakfast fires. The clang of Old Man Kael's hammer at the smithy. Children chasing a dog through the mud.
Normal life. Ordinary sounds. The kind of morning that didn't know a Husk was about to fight a Body Path prodigy for the right to exist.
Footsteps. Quick, sharp, deliberate. The sound of a man who walked like his shoes had somewhere important to be.
Bram rounded the corner of the smithy with his slate tucked under one arm and a fresh ink stain on his collar. His thin face wore an expression that could have been excitement or indigestion. With Bram, the difference required context.
"I need to discuss something with you."
"If it's another petition, I'm full."
Bram sat beside him on the rail. He pulled a folded scrap of paper from his vest and smoothed it against his thigh. Numbers. Columns. Names with figures beside them.
Are those betting odds? The council clerk is running a gambling operation on my trial fight. This village has hidden depths.
"I've placed money on you lasting more than a minute."
"One minute. That's your confidence level."
"Long odds. Good payout." Bram's sharp features arranged themselves into something resembling warmth. "Nobody else bet on you at all. The line for Kael winning in under thirty seconds has fourteen names on it."
Fourteen people bet I'd last less than thirty seconds. I'd be offended, but honestly, thirty seconds against Kael is generous.
"You're my retirement plan, Zack. Don't let me down."
Zack looked at the betting slip. At the single name written next to the longest odds on the page. Bram. Council clerk. A man who believed in accurate documentation and apparently, lost causes.
"How much?"
"Everything I saved from harvest tallying."
He bet his savings on me surviving sixty seconds. That's either loyalty or a cry for help. Possibly both.
"I'll see what I can do."
Bram folded the paper and tucked it back into his vest. He patted the pocket twice, as if reassuring the money inside that help was coming.
"Also, your mother asked me to tell you dinner is early tonight. She made the good bread."
The good bread. She only makes the good bread for birthdays and funerals. I'm choosing to believe this is a birthday situation.
Night fell. The house went quiet.
Zack lay in the loft, staring at the ceiling beams. Mira's breathing was steady beside him. His parents' murmurs had faded an hour ago. The hearth ticked as it cooled.
His brain refused to shut up.
The fight is tomorrow. Fine. I can handle the fight. Dodge, read, survive. Burrel taught me the tools. The void gave me the sight. One minute, Bram needs. I can give him one minute.
But after the fight? Win or lose, the clock keeps ticking. Ash Corps. Blight-lands. Monster-chow. The trial buys time, not freedom. Even if I impress the council, I'm still a Husk on paper. Still zero on the crystal. Still a line item in someone's disposal budget.
He rolled onto his side. Something poked his cheek.
Hard. Cold. Sharp enough to leave a mark.
He reached under the pillow. His fingers closed around a small, smooth object that had not been there when he lay down.
A ring.
Plain. Black. The surface absorbed the thin moonlight filtering through the loft window and gave nothing back. No reflection. No gleam. It sat in his palm like a hole punched through the fabric of the room.
This was not here an hour ago. Rings do not appear under pillows. This is not how personal accessories work.
He slipped it onto his finger. It fit. Perfectly. As if someone had measured his hand while he slept and forged the band to match.
The cold hit him.
Not the void's familiar pulse. Something sharper. A focused, narrow chill that climbed from the ring through his knuckle, up his wrist, and settled into the hollow behind his sternum like a key turning in a lock.
A voice entered his skull.
Not the Warden's exhausted whisper. This was clipped. Precise. Irritated. The tone of a tutor who had been grading papers for centuries and found every single one disappointing.
"You. Are. A Slow Student."
That's rude. Also, who are you?
"This Is Not a Hobby. It Is a Scalpel. You Are Whittling a Stick with a Scalpel."
Great. A judgmental piece of jewelry. Exactly what I needed the night before a fistfight.
The voice carried no emotion. No patience. It spoke the way a manual speaks. Flat instructions delivered with the assumption that the reader was an idiot.
"The Last Heir Died Confused. I Will Not Permit a Repeat."
Comforting. What are you?
Silence. Then, with the air of a professor forced to explain basic arithmetic: "A footnote. A suggestion left in the margin. The Warden guarded the door. I am the instructions nailed to the wall behind it."
The Warden had an instruction manual. Of course he did. And the instruction manual has opinions.
"See the Currents. The Opponent Is a Knot of Crude Threads. Strike the Gaps. Be the Unwoven Space."
Yeah, okay, poetic. But how? I can see the heat. I can read the signals. That's not the problem. The problem is a two-hundred-pound boy made of reinforced bone who hits hard enough to dent the earth.
"Look with the Cold Place. Not Your Eyeballs."
I've been looking with the cold place. It shows me heat patterns and Aether flow.
"You Have Been Squinting Through a Keyhole and Calling It Vision. Open the Door. The Void Does Not Read Heat. It Reads Absence. Find Where the Threads Are Thin. Strike There. The Strongest Armor Has Seams."
Seams. Kael's reinforcement has seams. Places where the Aether thins during movement, during transition, during the split second between one strike and the next. I've been reading the signals. I should be reading the gaps between them.
"Finally. Progress. Glacial, Humiliating Progress. But Progress."
You know, for a footnote, you have a lot of personality.
The voice did not respond. The ring's cold faded to a low, persistent frost against his finger. The presence withdrew, leaving behind the distinct impression of a door being closed by someone who found the conversation beneath them.
A ring that insults my technique and vanishes. My collection of supernatural mentors is really something. An exhausted ghost and a sarcastic accessory. I'm building a team of legends here.
He lay back. The ceiling beams were faintly visible in the pre-dawn grey. Cracks ran through the old wood in patterns he'd memorized over fourteen years of staring at this same view.
The void sat quiet in his chest. The ring sat cold on his finger. Tomorrow, the whole village would drag out their stools and blankets and watch the Husk step into a ring with a boy who could crack stone.
I'm not what they stamped on that notice. I'm a question mark in a boy-shaped package.
He pulled on the new shirt his mother had laid out. Clean. Dark fabric. It sat on his shoulders and felt good. Solid. The kind of shirt a person wore when they wanted to look like they belonged somewhere.
He walked downstairs.
The morning had come. Grey and still and holding its breath.
Let the circus begin.