VIODBORN

Zane

The first time Kael met Zane, somebody was throwing rocks at him.

Three boys. Older than both of them by at least two years. They had Zane backed against the outer wall of the grain storage building at the far edge of the village — the part of Ashren where the roads turned to uneven dirt and the houses thinned out and nobody came unless they had a reason to.

Kael had no reason to be there that afternoon.

He was simply walking. He did that sometimes when the words in the books stopped making sense and his head needed emptying. He would pick a direction and follow it until something changed — inside or outside, didn't matter which came first.

What changed that afternoon was the sound of something hitting stone repeatedly and boys laughing at the rhythm of it.

He came around the corner and stopped.

Zane was not cowering. That was the first thing Kael noticed. Most people being pelted with rocks against a wall would have covered their head, dropped low, made themselves small. Zane stood straight with his jaw set and his strange amber eyes tracking each boy with an expression that wasn't fear.

It was patience.

Like he was waiting for something specific and the rocks were simply the weather until it arrived.

One of the boys noticed Kael standing at the corner. He nudged the others. They turned.

"Look," the tallest one said. "The empty boy came to watch."

They laughed. Turned back to Zane. Lost interest in Kael as quickly as they had found it.

That happened a lot. People looked at Kael, remembered what he was, and looked away again. He had learned not to take it personally. Invisibility had its uses.

He watched for another moment. Then he picked up a rock from the ground near his foot, measured the distance with one eye closed, and threw it.

It caught the tallest boy hard on the back of the knee.

The boy yelped and spun around. His eyes found Kael with an expression that had lost all its humor.

"You just made a very stupid decision," he said.

"Probably," Kael agreed.

What followed was not a fight in any dignified sense of the word. It was brief and painful and ended with Kael face down in the dirt with a split lip and the taste of blood sitting warm on his tongue. The boys left when they got bored, which didn't take long.

He lay there staring at the side of the grain building.

A shadow fell over him.

Zane crouched down and looked at him with those amber eyes — close now, and more layered than they seemed from a distance. Like something old lived behind them.

"Why did you do that," he said. Not a question exactly. More like something he genuinely needed to understand.

Kael thought about it honestly.

"I don't know," he said. "It seemed wrong to just watch."

Zane was quiet for a moment.

Then he sat down in the dirt beside him.

He didn't say anything else. Neither did Kael. They simply sat there together against the grain building while the afternoon light shifted and the village made its distant sounds around them.

It was the easiest silence Kael had ever shared with another person.