CHAPTER EIGHT
633 Words
The night did not end.
Time itself felt fractured—slipping, stretching, folding in on itself. Hours passed, or seconds. Kael couldn’t tell. Each breath was a battle, each heartbeat an echo of something not his own.
He had lived with pain for centuries.
But this was different.
This pain was not an affliction. It was a calling.
A pull.
A tether tightening around his soul.
Kael stood in front of the obsidian mirror that had never shown his reflection. Not once, since the night he was cursed. The surface was dark, empty, like a pool of ink.
Tonight… it rippled.
Slowly.
As if something beneath the surface was breathing.
His jaw tightened.
“Show yourself,” he said quietly—not a command, but a dare.
The mirror trembled.
And then—
A pale hand, thin as bone and covered in runic scars, pressed against the inside of the glass.
Kael’s body went still. His fingertips twitched, aching to reach out and touch.
The hand dragged down, leaving trails of light across the surface. Then another hand. Then a shape—tall, wraithlike, trembling as though held together by rage alone.
The witch’s silhouette.
No face. No eyes. Just a hollow shape of shadow and fire.
Kael didn’t step back.
But something inside him did.
He felt the curse react in his blood—like chains rattling against stone.
The figure tilted its head, and the air around Kael thickened. The candle flames in the chamber surged high, then vanished, extinguished by a cold wind that came from nowhere.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Except the mirror.
It glowed now—casting eerie silver light across Kael’s sharp features.
A whisper rose—not from the mirror, but from his own pulse.
“He is awakening.”
Kael growled, low and sharp. “Who?”
The figure moved.
Not walking.
Appearing.
Suddenly closer.
The room groaned, walls bending inward as if the castle itself feared what stood before him.
“Not who.” The voice was everywhere. In the stone. In the air. In Kael’s blood.
“What you were meant to become.”
The curse throbbed violently—like a second heart, beating beneath his skin.
Kael’s hand flew to his chest, eyes narrowing with a mixture of fury and denial.
“I am not yours,” he said, voice dangerously calm.
The shadow in the mirror did not speak. But the curse answered for it.
A violent pain shot through Kael’s spine, forcing him to one knee. His vision blurred. He tasted iron.
Through the haze, he saw something—just for a moment.
A throne in flames.
A crown made of bone.
A figure seated upon it…
His face.
…but not his eyes.
Eyes that belonged to something older. Darker. Consuming everything it beheld.
Kael gasped, claws bursting from his fingers as the curse ripped through him, dragging him toward that vision—forcing him to see.
The world around him pulsed, flickered… then vanished.
He was no longer in his chamber.
He was standing on an ancient battlefield. Skulls beneath his feet. The sky torn open with red lightning. Legions of creatures knelt before him—
Not out of loyalty.
Out of fear.
A voice spoke inside his skull:
“This is not a curse.”
“It is your ascension.”
Kael’s eyes snapped open. He was back in the chamber. Bleeding. Shaking.
The mirror was dark again. Silent.
But the truth remained.
The curse was not something placed upon him.
It was something awakening within him.
Not a punishment.
A prophecy.
He stood slowly, wiping crimson from his lips.
For the first time in centuries… Kael did not fear the curse.
He feared the monster it promised he would become.
A king not of night…
But of ruin.
- Writer
