*Some men are born into destiny.*
*Others have it carved into them — with a blade.*
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The snow didn't care that a man was dying in it.
It fell the same way it always did over the Ashen Wastes — slow, indifferent, like the sky was shedding skin it no longer needed. Each flake kissed the cracked earth and disappeared, leaving nothing behind. No mark. No memory.
Kael Dawnveil thought that was a fitting thing to witness with his last breath.
*Even the snow knows how to vanish without a trace. Maybe I should've learned that sooner.*
He lay face-down in the dirt, wrists bound behind him with iron-laced rope — the kind enchanted to suppress a mage's core. Not that it mattered. His core had been shattered three hours ago, right there in front of the crowd, right there in front of the Emperor's golden throne, right there in front of the man who had once called him brother.
Darien Ashveil.
First Prince of the Solaran Empire. Beloved by the nobles. Adored by the people. And the single greatest liar Kael had ever had the misfortune of trusting with his life.
*I really was an idiot.*
A boot connected with his ribs. He didn't cry out — he was past that — but the crack of something breaking inside him was almost polite in how quietly it announced itself.
"Still breathing?" a guard muttered above him. "Tough one."
"Won't be for long," another replied, bored. "The Wastes'll finish what the Prince started. Leave him."
Footsteps crunched away through the snow. The jingle of armor faded. Then silence, vast and total, swallowed everything whole.
Kael opened one eye.
The sky above the Ashen Wastes was the color of a bruise — deep purple bleeding into black at the edges, the twin moons hanging low and swollen like they'd eaten too much and couldn't move. No stars. There were never stars out here. The Wastes ate light the way it ate everything else: quietly, completely, without apology.
*Appropriate,* he thought, *that I die somewhere even the stars won't look at.*
He'd been the Empire's greatest battle mage at twenty-three. Youngest Commander in three centuries. The Golden Spear, they'd called him — a weapon so precise, so devastating, that enemies surrendered at the rumor of his name. He had carved victory out of impossible odds a dozen times over, had bled for Solara across four wars and six borders, had laid his loyalty at Darien's feet like an offering on an altar.
And Darien had used that loyalty to frame him for treason.
It was elegant, really, if Kael could admit that without wanting to laugh until he choked. The forged letters. The planted evidence. The witnesses who all wore the same quiet, coached calm of people reciting lines they'd been paid to memorize. Even the judge had the decency to look uncomfortable — for exactly three seconds, before the money clearly reminded him to look neutral instead.
*Forty-seven citations of valor. Seventeen battle commendations. One golden medal from the Emperor himself.*
*And it all meant nothing the moment Darien decided I was inconvenient.*
Why? That was the part Kael still couldn't quite reach. What had shifted? What line had he crossed without knowing it? Had he grown too popular? Too powerful? Had he looked at Darien's throne and not looked away fast enough?
Or had Darien always been planning this, right from the very beginning, and Kael had simply been too busy being loyal to notice?
*Fool,* he thought. *You magnificent, devoted fool.*
The cold was getting into his bones now — the deep cold, the kind that didn't just chill you but started making arguments for why warmth had always been overrated. His fingers had gone numb an hour ago. His legs weren't much better. The broken ribs made every breath a small negotiation between his lungs and his dignity.
He should've been dead already.
He wondered, distantly, why he wasn't.
Then he felt it.
At first he thought it was the cold playing tricks — a warmth where there should have been none, a pressure at the center of his chest where his shattered core used to sit. Mage cores, when destroyed, didn't recover. Every scholar in the Empire's academy agreed on that with the comfortable certainty of people who had never personally had theirs crushed. A shattered core was a death sentence delivered slowly: the mage's body, deprived of its internal anchor, began to unravel at the spirit-threads. A few days, maybe a week, of accelerating deterioration.
Kael had assumed he'd be dead from exposure long before the unraveling got interesting.
But the warmth didn't feel like a hallucination.
It felt like a *presence.*
Something deep. Something old. Something so thoroughly without light that it somehow announced itself by making the darkness around it look pale and thin by comparison.
*...found you.*
The voice didn't come from outside him. It arrived the way a memory does — already inside, as if it had always been there, waiting for enough silence to be heard.
Kael's one working eye widened.
*Who's there?*
A pause. Then, with something that felt almost amused:
*The thing your world forgot to fear.*
The warmth intensified, and Kael realized with slow, dawning shock that it wasn't warmth at all. He'd been confusing absence for presence, the way you confuse a deep cave for shelter before you realize nothing has lived inside it for a thousand years. It wasn't warmth.
It was the *Void.*
He'd read about it once, in a restricted archive text he probably shouldn't have had access to — one of the perks of being the Empire's golden weapon was that doors opened before you reached them. The Void was theoretical. Mythological. A concept from pre-Imperial theology describing the space between magical frequencies, the silence between notes, the nothing from which all somethings had originally been torn. Ancient cultures had worshipped it. The Empire had declared it heresy and moved on to worshipping power, which was at least more honest.
The text had said: *The Void does not grant. It does not take. It simply is — and in the presence of what simply is, all pretense of what 'is not' collapses.*
At seventeen, reading that by candlelight in a stolen hour between drills, Kael had thought it was pretentious nonsense.
Lying broken in the snow at twenty-three, he revised that opinion.
*What do you want?* he thought at the presence, because he had nothing left to lose and hypothermia was making him bold.
*Want* is a word for things that lack,* the Void replied. *I lack nothing. I am everything your kind discarded when you decided light was more comfortable than truth.* A pause, like a held breath — except that breath was the size of the sky. *But you. You interest me, Kael Dawnveil. You burned so bright they had to break you just to feel safe. That is... not nothing.*
*I'm dying.*
*Yes.*
*So this is a hallucination.*
*Is it?* Something shifted — the pressure in his chest moved, and Kael felt it touch the ruins of his shattered core the way a craftsman picks up a broken piece to examine whether it's worth repairing or replacing. *Your core is destroyed. But the *shape* of what you were — the pattern, the blueprint — that remains. Cores can be shattered. Patterns cannot.*
*What are you saying?*
The answer didn't come in words. It came as sensation — as something vast and cold and absolute pouring itself into the hollow where his power used to live, filling every crack and dark corner, settling into the shape of him the way water settles into the shape of whatever holds it. Except water conforms. This didn't conform.
This *claimed.*
Kael screamed.
Or tried to. What came out was silence — a silence so complete it seemed to push back against the air, against the snow, against the moons above. The snowflakes within three feet of him stopped mid-fall, suspended, then dissolved into fine black dust that drifted upward instead of down.
It lasted seven seconds.
Then it was done.
Kael lay in the snow, breathing — really breathing, deep and clear, no negotiation required. The broken ribs were gone. The cold was gone. The ropes around his wrists had turned to ash without him feeling them burn. His hands, when he looked at them, seemed the same as always.
Except that his shadow was moving.
Slowly. Independently. Reaching across the snow in the wrong direction, away from the moons' light rather than toward it, fingers splayed as if curious about the world just beyond Kael's reach.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Then, for the first time since they'd dragged him out of the throne room in chains, Kael Dawnveil smiled.
It was not a kind smile. It was not the smile of the Golden Spear, loyal and bright and useful. It was something older — the smile of a man who has lost everything that could be taken from him and discovered, in the rubble of that loss, something that cannot be.
He stood up.
The Ashen Wastes stretched around him — empty, dark, howling faintly at the edges with the kind of wind that carries ice in its teeth. Somewhere beyond the horizon, behind walls of gold and armies of enchanted steel, Darien Ashveil sat on a throne he'd purchased with a friend's blood.
Kael looked in that direction for a moment.
Then he looked down at his shadow, still moving on its own, still reaching, still hungry.
*Is there a limit?* he asked quietly. *To what this can do?*
The Void's answer was almost gentle.
*Ask me again once you've tested the ones you've already been given.*
Kael exhaled slowly. Rolled his shoulders. Felt the new thing inside him settle and hum — patient, bottomless, and entirely, terrifyingly *his.*
"Darien," he said softly, to the uncaring dark and the indifferent snow.
*"I'll make sure you hear my name one more time before the end."*
He walked north, into the dark, and the shadows followed him like loyal hounds finally reunited with their master.
Behind him, the snow where he had lain stayed black.
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*The Void King had not yet chosen his crown.*
*But the Void had already chosen him.*
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**— End of Chapter One —**
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> *Next Chapter: "The Village of Hollow Bones" — In which Kael discovers the first limit of his power is not strength, but hunger. And hunger, he will learn, is not always his own.*
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*If you're already hooked — add this to your library, leave a comment, and follow for weekly updates. The revenge arc starts in Chapter 3 and trust me... you don't want to miss it.* 🖤
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*© Echoes of the Void King | The Shattered Throne, Book One*
*Written by Daoistaglcx *