The forest grew wilder as Kaelen moved farther from the lands marked by the Academy's maps. Trees clustered so tightly their branches tangled like skeletal fingers above, blotting out much of the daylight. The underbrush thickened, thorns tearing at his legs and cloak, but he did not slow. His hunger gnawed at him constantly, a dull and persistent pain in his gut, but he had learned to ignore it. The cold no longer bites the same way it had in the first days. Whether that was because his body had numbed or because something inside him had begun to change, he did not know. He only knew that the wind no longer felt like punishment.
There was a pull inside him now, constant and firm, like a thread stitched into his spine and tugging forward. He could not explain where it came from, but he felt it with certainty. He no longer questioned the direction he took. His feet obeyed instinct rather than reason. And everywhere he walked, he noticed the world around him differently. Small patterns emerged in the moss growing across old stones, as if ancient symbols lay beneath. Trees leaned in ways that hinted at long-forgotten paths. The air felt thicker in certain places, pulsing faintly with the memory of power. He could sense it all now, as if a new layer of reality had unfolded before his eyes.
On the second night, Kaelen dreamed.
It was not like the broken, haunted dreams of the days after his exile. This one was slow and vivid, colored in muted silver and deep violet. He stood beneath a sky he had never seen before, stars swirling in impossible configurations, and the moon above him was not the pale disc of Halemir but a black sphere etched with glowing lines. Before him stood a figure cloaked in robes that writhed like mist. Its face was hidden, but its presence was familiar. He felt no fear. The figure extended its hand and in its palm was a flame. Not a normal flame, but one that flickered without heat, made of pure memory. Kaelen reached for it.
When he awoke, he could still feel the warmth of that flame on his fingertips.
He continued walking, silent and calm. Birds did not sing here. No animals rustled in the brush. It was as if the forest itself was holding its breath. He passed beneath fallen arches buried in ivy and moss, the remains of some structure lost to time. Though crumbled and sunken into the roots of the earth, Kaelen recognized something in the shape of those stones. He could not name the style, nor the era, but it stirred recognition in him. Not the way a person remembers, but the way a dream clings to the waking mind just long enough to unsettle.
By the end of the third day, Kaelen no longer felt like he was walking forward. He felt like he was being drawn in. The forest grew quieter, more reverent. The trees bowed, not from wind, but in solemn stillness. The air pressed heavy on his chest. There were no paths here. No roads, no signs. But Kaelen did not hesitate.
Then, without warning, the trees parted ahead, and he saw it.
The Hollow Temple.
It was not a temple in the way the Academy might define one. There were no pristine domes, no marble steps, no sigils of gods carved into gold or silver. The Hollow Temple was quiet and sunken into the earth, its structure blackened with age and buried halfway in creeping vines. Two trees flanked its entrance, long dead but still standing, their bark pale and flaking like bone. They curved inward at the top, their branches forming an arch that seemed more deliberate than accidental. Between them yawned a doorway shaped not by hands, but by erosion and time, as if the earth itself had opened to make room for something older than civilization.
Kaelen approached slowly. The temple exuded silence, but not emptiness. It was a waiting silence, deep and alert, like a breath held just beneath the surface. His feet hesitated at the threshold. There were markings along the edges of the black stone , faint, nearly worn away, but unmistakably familiar. They echoed the shapes of the sigil he had drawn in the Ritual of Ascendance. No instructor had ever seen the symbol before, but here it was. Not as an accident, but as a foundation. The lines curved the same way. The geometry twisted in the same impossible angles. Kaelen reached out, brushing one fingertip over a segment of the glyph, and a shimmer ran across the stone, reacting to his touch.
This place recognized him.
With a slow breath, Kaelen stepped inside.
The air was still and heavy, thick with the scent of stone and damp earth. His boots echoed across the ground, sending hollow thuds into the darkness. There were no torches, no magical lights, but his path was dimly illuminated by faint strands of silver embedded in the walls and floor. They pulsed softly, like veins carrying some kind of ancient current. Dust choked the corners, but nothing stirred. There were no vermin here. No birds nesting in the rafters. Only silence and the faint sound of Kaelen's own heartbeat.
The interior opened into a wide circular chamber with a domed ceiling of cracked obsidian. The dome bore no stars, only jagged etchings that spiraled upward like a cyclone. At the center of the chamber stood a pedestal. Black and gleaming, shaped like an open hand. It held a crystal no larger than a human heart and yet Kaelen felt its presence before he even saw it. The crystal pulsed a deep, steady rhythm that matched the thrum in his chest. It was not bright. It did not glow. But it felt alive, ancient and patient, as though it had been waiting a very long time for someone to arrive.
He moved toward it with reverence, not fear. His legs trembled slightly, not from weakness but from the awareness that something important was about to happen. He felt like he had stepped into the center of a story that had begun long before he was born, a tale he was not supposed to know but had been chosen to finish. As he stood before the pedestal, he felt a familiar weight settle behind his eyes. The pressure of that voice, not heard since the statue, returning once more.
"This was never exile," it said, neither loud nor soft. "This was inheritance."
Kaelen reached out, and the moment his fingers touched the crystal, the world inside him shattered.
The moment Kaelen's fingertips brushed the crystal, the world ripped away.
He didn't fall, yet the ground vanished beneath him. Light flared behind his eyes. Not white but a saturated black so complete it felt like drowning in ink. He tried to gasp, but there was no air. He was motionless, bodiless, a soul unanchored. Then came the first vision, sharp and searing: a stone tower crumbling in slow motion, each block suspended mid-fall, lit by a violet storm that raged above. Figures screamed below, hands raised not in prayer, but in fury. A single robed figure stood at the tower's peak, arms wide as if welcoming the collapse. Lightning forked around them, not touching their body, but arcing toward it. Their faces remained hidden , cloaked in shadow and symbols, but Kaelen knew this figure. Not from memory, but from recognition.
Before he could understand, the vision dissolved. He fell again, this time sideways into another moment not his own. A child stood in a stone circle carved into the middle of a forest clearing, surrounded by ten masked figures. The child did not cry or move. They simply watched as each figure stepped forward and offered a different object: a cup of blood, a scroll inked in black fire, a ring with no visible end, a shard of mirror that reflected nothing. The objects vanished as they were placed before the child, drawn into a sigil underfoot that twisted and burned with the same shape Kaelen had drawn weeks ago. He could not move, only observe, but he felt the child's breath, the pounding of that small heart, the gravity of that moment. It was a ritual. It was the beginning. The child was not being blessed. They were being prepared.
Again, the world spun.
Now Kaelen stood in a city unlike Halemir. The buildings were jagged and dark, built not for beauty but function, fortresses designed to last through centuries of siege. In the center of a black plaza stood a gateway, massive and oozing with shadow. It was not carved. It had grown. The gate pulsed with a heartbeat too slow, too loud. He saw cloaked figures moving around it, placing runes along its base, feeding it sigils that stretched and breathed like living creatures. As they worked, the gate split open with a sound like tearing cloth and exposed a vortex beyond, stars swirling backward, light collapsing inward, and in the very center of that rift: his sigil. It was etched across the void, massive and impossible, turning like a wheel of fate.
Kaelen tried to cry out. He could feel the power of the moment pressing against him, squeezing his mind like a vice. This was no illusion. These were memories. Not fragments of his own, but echoes of something far older that now lived inside him. He wanted to pull away. He wanted to hold on. Both urges fought inside his chest like caged animals.
The visions began to collapse into each other: a child screaming under a blood moon, a desert burning from the inside out, a hall of mages crumbling under their own arrogance, a mirror cracking to reveal not a reflection, but an eye. His eyes. And through it all, the voice returned, no longer a whisper but a presence wrapped around his thoughts.
"You are the heir of the Forgotten Will," it said, with slow finality. "You are not the first. But you will be the last."
Kaelen fell to his knees.
The visions ended like the snapping of a thread. The light vanished. The sound returned. The cold floor of the Hollow Temple met his palms. His breath came in ragged bursts. The crystal was gone, as if it had never existed, but its heat lingered inside his chest. It pulsed in his veins. He could feel the presence of something, not as an invader, but as a companion, deep within. It did not control him. It did not need to.
It had always been waiting for him to arrive.
Kaelen stood slowly, his legs unsteady, as though the weight of what he now carried had changed his center of gravity. He pressed a hand to his chest, half-expecting to feel the crystal there beneath the skin. There was nothing to touch, but the warmth remained. It pulsed with quiet certainty, no longer overwhelming, but alive. He breathed in deeply. The air of the Hollow Temple no longer smelled ancient or cold. It smelled of potential.
The murals along the chamber walls seemed clearer now. Where once they were faded and indistinct, Kaelen now saw with new eyes. The figures carved into stone were not gods, and they were not men. They were something else entirely. They wielded magic not with focus and discipline, but with raw intention. Their hands called forth creation and ruin in equal measure, not bounded by laws, but by purpose. He could not read the language carved beneath their feet, but he understood it regardless. The message was simple.
We were before. You are after.
When he left the chamber and passed beneath the dead trees once more, the sky had darkened. Clouds churned overhead, thick with approaching rain. The forest remained still, yet it no longer felt lifeless. Every branch seemed to bow slightly in his direction. The ground felt firmer beneath his steps, as though the land itself had recognized his return. The wind shifted, cool and fragrant with pine and frost, whispering over his shoulders as he moved forward.
Hours passed. Or perhaps only moments. He walked in silence, no longer in search of direction. It was already within him. When the tree line thinned and the land sloped gently downward, Kaelen saw smoke curling in the distance. Not the black smoke of battle or fire, but the white coils of hearths and kitchens. A village. Tucked between hills and shielded by time, forgotten by those who believed themselves rulers of magic and knowledge.
They would not know him. Not yet.
He would not arrive as a savior. Not yet.
But he would speak to them. He would listen to their wounds. They would see him as a traveler at first, a strange boy with hollow eyes and a quiet voice. He would help them, perhaps with a healing touch or an end to a blight no healer had yet solved. He would be useful. He would be kind.
Because the greatest truths are not shouted. They whispered.
And when the time came, when the seeds he sowed had grown into trust and reverence, they would believe what he told them. They would follow.
Kaelen paused at the edge of the trees. In the distance, the lights of the village flickered like stars fallen to the earth. A cold wind brushed his cheek. He no longer shivered.
The world had chosen to forget the power that came before their rules. But Kaelen had seen it. He had become it.
He took his first step toward the village with calm certainty.
The Abandoned One had found his path.
And the world would never be the same.