Kael learned very quickly that suppression hurt more than release.
Rothmar did not explain it at first. He never explained things at the beginning. He only set the conditions and watched to see how Kael broke against them.
The first lesson began the morning after the awakening.
They stood on a bare stretch of ground overlooking a wide valley, the air thin and cold enough to sting the lungs. The land rolled away beneath them in quiet waves of stone and scrub, empty of people, empty of sound.
Rothmar turned to him.
"Reach for it," he said.
Kael's stomach tightened. "You said not to."
"I said not to use it," Rothmar corrected. "There's a difference."
Kael hesitated, then closed his eyes.
He reached inward.
The response was immediate.
Pressure bloomed beneath his ribs, heavy and coiled, like something massive shifting just beneath the surface of still water. His heartbeat slowed against his will. His breath caught.
The world sharpened.
Rothmar's presence became painfully clear—every movement, every breath, every shift of weight. The valley below felt closer, as if distance itself had folded inward.
Kael gasped.
"Hold it," Rothmar said.
Kael's hands trembled.
It wanted out.
Not violently. Not desperately.
Patiently.
Kael gritted his teeth and tried to push it down.
Pain lanced through his chest.
He cried out despite himself, dropping to one knee as the pressure rebelled, pushing back against restraint like a living thing.
"Do not fight it," Rothmar snapped. "Contain it."
Kael's vision blurred. "What's the difference?"
"Fighting is rejection," Rothmar said. "Containment is dominance."
Kael's breath came in ragged pulls. Slowly—very slowly—he imagined walls instead of resistance. Boundaries instead of denial.
The pressure compressed.
The pain didn't vanish, but it settled.
Kael collapsed forward onto his hands, shaking violently.
Rothmar waited.
When Kael finally lifted his head, sweat soaked his hair and his hands were clawed into the dirt.
"That," Rothmar said, "is suppression."
Kael laughed weakly. "That felt like I was tearing myself apart."
"Yes," Rothmar replied. "And you didn't."
That became the pattern.
They travelled for weeks after that, never staying anywhere long, never allowing routine to dull Kael's awareness. Every morning began with suppression. Every night ended with it.
If Kael failed to contain it, Rothmar escalated the pressure.
Physical exhaustion.Hunger.Cold.Sleep deprivation.
Once, Rothmar left him alone for an entire night in a ravine where the wind screamed like something alive. Kael spent hours curled against stone, shaking, holding the pressure inside his chest until blood ran from his nose and his vision went grey at the edges.
Rothmar returned at dawn.
"You didn't release," he said.
Kael couldn't answer. His throat was raw. His body felt hollow.
Rothmar nodded once. "Good."
The next phase was worse.
Combat under suppression.
Rothmar attacked him without warning—sometimes with a blade, sometimes bare-handed, sometimes while Kael was mid-suppression and already fighting to keep control. Every instinct Kael had screamed at him to let go, to crush, to impose.
Rothmar punished every lapse mercilessly.
A moment's loss of focus earned Kael a cracked rib.
A surge of pressure earned him a blade at his throat.
"You will not rely on it," Rothmar said once, blood trickling from a cut on Kael's brow. "Not now. Not ever."
Kael spat blood into the dirt. "Then why give it to me at all?"
Rothmar struck him hard enough to knock him flat.
"Because it's already yours," Rothmar said coldly. "And pretending otherwise will get you killed."
Months passed.
Kael's body hardened. Not visibly—not in the exaggerated way of warriors from stories—but internally. His breathing grew steadier. His reactions sharpened. His fear stopped paralysing him and began informing him instead.
More importantly, the thing inside him quieted.
Not asleep.
Contained.
Kael learned its edges. Learned how far he could let awareness expand before pressure became pain. Learned how to pull back without backlash. Learned, above all, how to lie convincingly to the world.
They passed through villages now and then.
Kael learned to walk without projecting presence. Learned to meet eyes without inviting attention. Learned how to look unremarkable.
Rothmar drilled him in mundane skills as ruthlessly as combat.
How to read people quickly.How to lie without emotion.How to speak just enough and no more.
"How you carry yourself," Rothmar told him, "will draw more attention than how you fight."
By the time Kael turned thirteen, the hunters stopped coming openly.
That didn't mean they stopped looking.
Once, Kael sensed someone watching from the edge of a market crowd—felt the faint tightening in his chest that warned him of recognition. Rothmar noticed his hesitation instantly.
They left the town without incident.
That night, Rothmar made Kael suppress for hours without rest.
"You felt seen," Rothmar said.
"Yes."
"And you didn't react," Rothmar continued.
Kael clenched his jaw. "I wanted to."
Rothmar nodded. "That's control."
The final test came without warning.
They were crossing a ruined stone bridge at dusk when Rothmar stopped abruptly.
"Draw," Rothmar said.
Kael complied instantly.
Rothmar turned on him without hesitation.
The fight was brutal.
No instruction.No correction.No restraint.
Rothmar fought as if Kael were an enemy he intended to kill.
Kael barely survived.
His suppression wavered repeatedly, pressure screaming to be released as Rothmar drove him back step by step, blade biting into flesh, strikes landing with bone-jarring force.
At the edge of the bridge, Kael slipped.
For a heartbeat, death yawned beneath him.
The thing inside him surged.
Kael roared—not in rage, but in refusal—and forced it down with everything he had.
He caught the bridge edge, hauled himself up, and counterattacked—not with power, but with precision.
The fight ended seconds later.
Rothmar stepped back, blade lowering.
Kael collapsed to his knees, chest heaving, blood dripping onto stone.
Rothmar looked down at him.
"You're ready," he said.
Kael looked up, disbelief cutting through exhaustion. "Ready for what?"
Rothmar sheathed his blade.
"To stop being forged," he said. "And start being tested."
Time did not pass cleanly.
It layered itself over Kael in slow, unkind increments—scar over scar, habit over instinct, restraint over impulse. Days blurred into seasons, seasons into years, until memory stopped organising itself by age and began organising itself by survival.
He grew.
Not suddenly. Not noticeably.But inevitably.
The boy who had once struggled to lift a blade now woke before dawn without thought, his body already moving through drills ingrained deeper than language. His hands hardened. His shoulders broadened. His balance changed, his centre of gravity shifting as his frame lengthened and settled into something lean and efficient.
The thing inside him did not disappear.
It learned its place.
Kael learned to keep it buried beneath layers of discipline so thick that even he sometimes forgot it was there. Suppression stopped being agony and became tension—constant, familiar, like carrying weight that never left his back.
Rothmar never praised him.
He corrected less.
That was how Kael knew he was improving.
They stopped running from every road and began choosing them instead. They passed through towns without drawing eyes. Kael learned how to be ordinary so thoroughly that it became a second skin. People remembered him only vaguely—if at all.
Hunters came less often.
When they did, they came carefully.
And when they failed, they did not return.
Years later, Kael stood alone at dawn, practising with a blade that was no longer borrowed. His movements were economical now—no wasted motion, no excess force. He finished the sequence, wiped the steel clean, and sheathed it without ceremony.
Rothmar watched from a distance.
"You no longer react," Rothmar said. "You decide."
Kael nodded. He had stopped needing to prove that.
They reached the hill overlooking the academy without fanfare.
No swelling music.No revelation.Just stone and towers rising from the land like something that had always been there.
Kael stopped.
He did not feel awe.He did not feel anger.He felt distance.
Years of it.
"This is where you separate," Rothmar said.
Kael already knew.
He looked at the academy again, memorising its shape, its walls, the way people moved along its outer roads—unaware, unwatchful.
"They won't recognise you," Rothmar continued. "Not as you are. Not yet."
Kael adjusted the strap of his pack. "Good."
Rothmar studied him for a long moment.
"You were seven when they tried to erase you," Rothmar said quietly. "You are not that child anymore."
Kael didn't answer.
He stepped forward.
Behind him lay years without names, without rest, without mercy.Ahead lay a place that believed it was safe from the past.
Kael walked on.
And the world prepared—without knowing it—for the return of something it had failed to finish destroying.