# Chapter Six
Run.
That was the only thought in Zane's mind as his legs pumped beneath him, carrying him through the darkness of the forest. Beside him, Kaelion's breath came in ragged gasps, both of them pushing their bodies beyond exhaustion, beyond pain, beyond anything Arthur had ever trained them for.
Behind them, the creature had gone silent.
That was somehow worse than the taunting, worse than the laughter. The silence meant it was done playing. The silence meant—
Zane felt it before he heard it—a vibration in the air, a wrongness that made his mark burn with sudden, searing agony. He stumbled, catching himself against a tree, and looked back.
The creature stood motionless in the center of the blood-soaked clearing they'd just fled, its ruined face tilted toward the sky. Its mouth opened, and words poured out in Ancient Tongue—not the mocking taunts from before, but something older, something that predated language itself. The syllables seemed to twist reality around them, each word a violation of natural law.
"Kaelion," Zane gasped. "Keep running. Don't stop, don't—"
The creature's roar cut him off.
It wasn't sound—not really. It was something that bypassed ears entirely and struck directly at the soul. The roar echoed through the forest, through the ground, through Zane's very bones. Birds fell from trees, dead before they hit the ground. Insects burst in mid-flight. And the world itself seemed to *stop*.
Time froze.
Zane tried to move, tried to breathe, but his body wouldn't obey. The forest around him had become a painting, every leaf suspended mid-fall, every shadow locked in place. Even the wind had died, the air thick and heavy like water.
Then came the darkness.
It rolled through the forest like a wave of ink, consuming everything it touched. Trees disappeared. The ground vanished. The sky simply ceased to exist. Within seconds, Zane was standing in absolute void—a darkness so complete that he couldn't see his own hand in front of his face.
"Kaelion?" His voice sounded wrong, muffled, as if he were shouting underwater. "KAELION!"
A response came, but from the wrong direction. Then another voice from somewhere else. Then his own voice calling back to him from behind. The darkness was playing tricks, scattering sound in impossible directions, making everything directionless and unreal.
Zane spun in circles, trying to find his cousin, trying to find anything. "Kaelion! Follow my voice! I'm—"
His words stopped forming sound. He could feel his lips moving, feel his throat working, but nothing emerged. The silence wasn't just external now—it had invaded him, stolen his voice, left him mute in the void.
Panic clawed at his chest. He opened his mouth to scream and heard nothing. Reached out and touched nothing. The darkness was absolute, total, suffocating. This was what death felt like, he thought. This emptiness. This absence of everything.
Then—light.
A single ray, impossibly bright after the absolute darkness, cutting through the void like a blade. Zane didn't think. He ran toward it, desperate for anything other than the crushing nothingness around him.
The light grew brighter, larger, until it consumed his vision entirely. And when his eyes adjusted, when the world reformed around him, Zane found himself somewhere that made his heart stop.
Home.
But not the slave quarters where he'd spent the last twenty years. Not the cramped, dirty hovels where Librans were packed like animals. This was different—a temporary sanctuary, a place the surviving Librans had claimed after everything fell apart.
The walls were simple stone, but clean and well-maintained. Tapestries depicting wind-riders on Pegasi hung from the ceiling, salvaged treasures from the old kingdom, their colors still vibrant despite everything. Through tall windows, Zane could see not the floating cities of legend, but a modest settlement—Librans trying to rebuild, trying to survive, trying to remember what they once were.
A refuge. A home built from the ashes of the old kingdom.
Zane tried to move forward but found he couldn't. His body wouldn't respond to his commands. It took him a moment to understand why—he wasn't in control. He was watching through someone else's eyes, a passenger in a memory that wasn't his own.
The body he inhabited turned, and Zane's breath caught.
A woman stood before him, and she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Her hair was dark as midnight and seemed to move with its own wind, flowing around her face like water. Her eyes were the color of storm clouds, gray and silver and alive with intelligence and warmth. She wore robes of white and silver, marked with symbols of rank that even Zane recognized—the crown of Libra, the mark of royalty.
His mother. The Queen.
She was holding something—someone—in her arms. An infant, wrapped in soft cloth, sleeping peacefully despite the chaos Zane could now hear echoing from outside. The sounds of battle. Screaming. The clash of weapons against something that screamed back.
"Hush, my little one," the Queen whispered, her voice like music. "Everything will be alright. I promise you, my darling boy. Everything will be—"
"Mother!" A child's voice, high and desperate.
The Queen turned, and Zane saw him for the first time.
A boy, no more than ten years old, stood in the doorway clutching a wooden practice sword like it was a real weapon. His clothes were fine but worn, as if they'd been handed down or hadn't been replaced in too long. His hair was dark, but his face—his face was strangely obscured, as if the memory itself refused to show it clearly. Shadow clung to his features no matter how he moved, keeping his identity hidden.
And around his neck, hanging from a simple chain, was a pendant that made Zane's heart stop.
The one-winged angel.
"We have to go!" the boy said, his voice cracking with fear but trying to sound brave. "The Commander says the demons are coming! He says—"
The door exploded inward.
A Libran soldier burst through, his armor bearing marks that Zane recognized—the same design Arthur wore, the insignia of the old kingdom's military elite. But his face was obscured, shadowed, as if the memory itself was protecting his identity.
"My Queen!" The soldier's voice was urgent, professional, but beneath it Zane heard genuine fear. "The situation has collapsed. The demons have breached the outer walls. We need to evacuate immediately—the human realm is our only chance."
"The human realm?" The Queen's face paled. "But the crossing... the children can't survive—"
"The human King owes us a blood-debt from the Treaty of Windfall," the soldier interrupted. "He'll raise the gates for us. It's the only place these creatures can't follow—the barrier between realms will hold them back."
The Queen looked down at the infant in her arms—at Zane, he realized with a jolt—then at the older boy with his mismatched eyes and wooden sword.
"Very well," she said, and her voice carried the weight of command that had ruled an empire. "Gather the royal guard. We leave immediately."
---
The memory shifted, blurred, reformed.
Zane was moving now, still trapped in the infant's perspective, being carried through corridors that shook with each impact from outside. The Queen ran, her breathing controlled despite her fear, while the ten-year-old boy ran beside her.
The boy—his brother, Zane understood now—had abandoned the wooden sword for a real blade, far too large for his small hands. But he held it with grim determination, his mismatched eyes constantly scanning for threats.
They emerged into a courtyard where a company of royal guards waited, twenty of the finest warriors in the kingdom. At their head stood the same soldier from before, his face still frustratingly obscured by shadow.
"This way, Your Majesty!" The soldier gestured toward a side gate. "We'll take the old mining tunnels. They lead straight to the barrier gates."
They ran through tunnels carved from living stone, the sounds of battle growing more distant but never truly fading. Zane could hear his mother's heartbeat, fast and strong, could feel her arms holding him tight against her chest.
Beside them, his brother ran without complaint, his short legs working overtime to keep pace with the adults. Once, when the Queen stumbled, the boy was there immediately, his small hand steadying her with surprising strength.
"I've got you, Mother," he said quietly. "Just like you always had me."
The Queen's hand touched his hair briefly, a gesture of love so pure it made Zane's heart ache.
Then they saw them.
The demons emerged from a side tunnel like a tide of nightmares. They weren't like anything Zane had seen in his waking life—creatures of shadow and teeth and too many limbs, their forms shifting and wrong in ways that hurt to look at. Their screams echoed off the stone walls, a sound like metal being torn apart.
The royal guards formed a defensive line, their blades gleaming with Libran magic. Wind swirled around them, compressed into edges sharper than steel. They met the demon tide with the skill of warriors who'd trained their entire lives for this moment.
And they died.
Not immediately. Not easily. But the demons were too many, too fast, too *wrong*. For every demon that fell to Libran steel, two more crawled from the shadows. The guards fought with desperate courage, buying seconds with their lives.
The shadowed soldier grabbed the Queen's arm. "Through here! Quickly!"
They ran through a side passage while the guards died behind them, their screams echoing in the confined space. Tears streamed down the Queen's face, but she didn't stop running, didn't stop protecting the infant in her arms.
The ten-year-old boy's face was stone. He'd seen death before, Zane realized. Had seen far too much for someone so young.
They emerged into a larger chamber, and for a moment, it seemed like they might make it. The barrier gates were visible ahead, their surface shimmering with the energy that separated the magical realm from the human world.
Then the boy stopped running.
"Brother?" The Queen turned, confused. "What—"
"Something's wrong," the boy said quietly. His black eye seemed to be looking at something the others couldn't see. "Mother, don't—"
The shadowed soldier raised his hand. "Everyone stop. Now."
The remaining guards—only five left now—froze. The Queen clutched infant Zane closer, her storm-gray eyes widening with terrible understanding.
"No," she breathed. "You wouldn't. Your oath, your *vow*—"
"Was always conditional, Your Majesty." The soldier's voice had changed, become colder, harder. "Bleed yourselves. A single drop from each finger. We need to check for infection."
"There's no infection," the Queen said, her voice shaking. "This is madness. We need to—"
"NOW!"
The guards moved like automatons, drawing small knives and cutting their fingertips. Blood welled up, dripped to the stone floor, and then...
And then it *moved*.
The blood didn't flow. It crawled across the stone like living things, defying gravity, defying nature. The guards' eyes widened in horror as they realized what was happening to them.
"I'm sorry, my Queen," the shadowed soldier said, and he actually sounded regretful. "But I have done my part."
The blood exploded.
It happened so fast that Zane's infant mind couldn't process it. One moment, the guards were whole. The next, they were being torn apart from the inside as their own blood transformed into blades, into spears, into instruments of agony that shredded them from within.
The screams were inhuman. The guards fell, their bodies twisted into impossible shapes by the blood that had betrayed them, and the Queen could only watch in frozen horror.
Behind the dying guards, reality split open.
A portal, circular and wrong, its edges bleeding darkness into the world. Figures emerged—demons, but also something worse. Something that walked upright, that wore robes of crimson and black, that moved with the confidence of something that had never known fear.
At their head was a figure whose face was hidden behind a mask of bone and blood. When he raised his hand, the guards' screams stopped—not because their agony had ended, but because their throats had been compressed shut by their own blood.
"Well done, General," the masked figure said, his voice a whisper that somehow carried across the entire chamber. "You have served your true master admirably."
The shadowed soldier—the General—bowed stiffly. "I have brought what was promised. Now honor your word. My family—"
"Will be spared. Yes, yes." The masked figure waved dismissively. "But first, there is the matter of payment."
He moved closer to the Queen, his movements unnaturally smooth, and the boy with mismatched eyes stepped between them, his oversized sword raised with trembling hands.
"Stay back!" the boy shouted, and his voice cracked with youth and fear. "Don't you touch them!"
The masked figure paused, tilted his head. "How precious. The cursed child, trying to play hero. Tell me, boy—how many of your adopted people called you demon? How many wished you'd never been found at the lake? How many blamed you for their kingdom's fall?"
The boy flinched as if struck, but his sword didn't waver. "That doesn't matter. She took me in. She loved me. And I won't let you hurt her."
"Admirable. Futile. But admirable." The masked figure leaned forward. "My master has need of the elden blood. The infant will come with us. The rest of you... well. Loose ends must be tied."
He gestured, and demons poured from the portal, their numbers seemingly endless.
The Queen handed infant Zane to the ten-year-old boy, her hands shaking but her voice steady. "Run," she commanded. "Take your brother and run. Get through the barrier gates. Find safety in the human realm."
"Mother, no!" The boy's composure finally cracked. "I can't leave you! I won't—"
"You *will*." The Queen drew a blade that seemed to be made of compressed air itself, its edges singing with power. "You will protect him. You will keep him safe. And you will *live*." Her storm-gray eyes—the same eyes Zane saw every time he looked in a reflection—fixed on her adopted son with fierce love. "You are not cursed, my darling boy. You never were. You are *blessed*, and someday you will understand why."
She kissed his forehead, then the infant's, and turned to face the demons.
What followed was a display of power that Zane had never imagined possible.
The Queen's eyes began to glow—not with ordinary light, but with something deeper, something that seemed to pierce the veil of reality itself. When she looked at the demons, they *stopped*. Simply froze in place, as if her gaze had weight, had substance, had the power to command the very fabric of their being.
"KNEEL," she commanded, and her voice carried harmonics that shouldn't exist.
The demons knelt.
Even the masked figure took a step back, his confidence wavering. "Impossible. The Sight of Command is a myth. It can't—"
"I am Elara of the Storm Throne, daughter of the Wind King, bearer of the Sight that sees truth in all things!" The Queen's voice thundered through the chamber. "You dare threaten my children in my presence? You dare bring corruption into this sacred space?"
Her blade carved through the air, and the wind obeyed. Demons were torn apart by invisible forces, their bodies shredded by compressed air moving faster than sound. The Queen fought like a goddess of war, each movement precise and devastating.
But the General knew her weakness.
While she was focused on the demons, while her power was directed at the tide of darkness, he moved. His speed was wrong—enhanced by something, by some dark gift. He crossed the distance to where the boy stood protecting infant Zane in less than a heartbeat.
His blade pressed against the boy's throat.
"Surrender, Your Majesty," the General said quietly. "Or I open his throat and the infant is next."
The Queen's power faltered. The demons she'd been commanding broke free, but she didn't seem to notice. All her focus was on the blade at her adopted son's neck.
"Please," she whispered, and the mighty Queen was just a mother now. "Please don't hurt them. They're children. They're innocent."
"Then surrender. Die willingly, and I give you a blood-binding oath—I will protect both children with my life. I will raise them, keep them safe, ensure they want for nothing."
The Queen's blade fell from nerveless fingers. "You swear it? By the old laws? By the binding that cannot be broken?"
"I swear it," the General said, and power rippled through the air as the oath took hold. "I will protect them both until my last breath."
"Then..." The Queen's voice broke. "Then take care of them. Love them. Tell them—tell them their mother died protecting them. Tell them she loved them more than life itself."
She knelt.
The masked figure—the Blood Bender—approached slowly, savoring his victory. "How noble. How beautifully tragic. Your sacrifice will be remembered, Your Majesty. Remembered and *wasted*."
His hand moved in a gesture that seemed almost gentle. The Queen's own blood turned against her, forming a blade from within. It erupted from her throat with terrible precision, and she had time only for one last look at her children before the light faded from those storm-gray eyes.
The boy's scream was silent—his voice stolen by shock and grief too large for sound. Infant Zane wailed, sensing his mother's death even if he couldn't understand it.
And then everything changed.
The boy went absolutely still. His mismatched eyes—one silver, one black—fixed on his mother's falling body. And the black eye began to *spread*.
Darkness crawled across his face like living ink, consuming the silver eye, bleeding down his cheeks like tears of shadow. His small body convulsed, and something began to emerge from the pendant around his neck.
The one-winged angel.
Except it wasn't just a pendant anymore. It was *manifesting*, taking form in the space around the boy. Zane saw—or thought he saw, because the vision hurt to look at directly—the outline of something vast. A wing, singular and magnificent, made of light and shadow intertwined. It spread from the boy's back, each feather seeming to contain entire galaxies, entire universes of possibility.
The boy's face was changing—though Zane still couldn't see the features clearly through the shadow. But the *presence* emanating from him was becoming something other, something that shouldn't exist in the mortal realm. Beautiful and terrible in equal measure, divine and demonic at once.
When he spoke, it wasn't with a child's voice anymore. It was layered, harmonized, as if multiple beings were speaking through the same throat:
"*YOU TOOK HER FROM US.*"
The General stumbled backward, his confident facade shattering. "What... what are you?"
"*WE ARE VENGEANCE. WE ARE FURY. WE ARE THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR SPILLING ROYAL BLOOD.*"
The transformation completed. The boy—or what had been the boy—stood wreathed in power that made the air itself scream. The single wing beat once, and the shockwave shattered stone, collapsed tunnels, sent demons flying like leaves in a hurricane.
What followed was not a battle. It was an *execution*.
The creature that had been a frightened ten-year-old boy moved through the demon horde like death itself. Where his hand passed, demons simply ceased to exist—not killed, but *unmade*, erased from reality with casual finality. The wing swept across the chamber, and anything it touched was reduced to fundamental particles.
The Blood Bender tried to fight back, his mastery of blood meeting the creature's mastery of existence itself. The battle between them lasted seconds but felt like hours, reality bending and breaking under the weight of their power.
In the end, the Blood Bender barely escaped, diving through his portal with wounds that leaked light instead of blood. But before he fled, he pulled something from his robes—a crystal that pulsed with wrongness, with corruption.
"A gift from my master," he wheezed. "For the fallen angel that dares defy the natural order."
He shattered the crystal.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. The power surrounding the boy flickered, wavered, began to consume itself. The transformation reversed in agony, the wing folding back into the pendant, the divine/demonic presence being forced back into a body far too small to contain it.
The boy collapsed, human again, his face still shadowed and unreadable. Blood leaked from his nose, his ears. Whatever that crystal had done, it had destabilized something fundamental within him.
The General lay crumpled against the wall, unconscious from the shockwaves of the battle. The Blood Bender had escaped through his portal. The demons were dead or fled.
The boy was alone with infant Zane and their mother's body.
The child crawled toward the infant, his small body shaking with exhaustion and grief. His hands trembled as he reached for the pendant around his neck and pulled it free. The one-winged angel caught the dim light as he held it for a moment, tears falling onto the silver surface.
"I'm too dangerous for you, little brother," the boy whispered, his voice raw from screaming. "This power... it calls to dark things. It makes me a target. But maybe... maybe one day, when you're stronger, when you need help..."
He placed the pendant carefully beside infant Zane's tiny hand. The baby's fingers curled around it instinctively.
"Keep it safe," the boy breathed. "Remember me. And when you're strong enough, when you need me... come find me. I'll be waiting. I swear it."
Then he crawled to their mother's body and collapsed beside her, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs. A ten-year-old child, grieving a mother who'd loved him when no one else would, holding her cold hand as if he could will warmth back into it.
That's when Arthur arrived.
The sound of wings—massive wings, beating against the wind itself.
Arthur crashed through the ceiling of the chamber riding Zephyr, the legendary Pegasus moving with the speed of thought itself. Behind him came a hundred Libran warriors, the remnants of the royal army, too late to save their Queen.
Arthur's gaze swept the chamber: his Queen, dead on the ground. An infant crying beside her body. And a ten-year-old boy, covered in blood, kneeling beside the corpse, his hands touching her lifeless face.
Arthur's expression twisted with grief, with rage, with something beyond reason.
"DEMON!" His voice broke on the word. "What have you DONE?"
The boy looked up—his shadowed face turned toward his uncle—and his body language screamed desperation. "Uncle Arthur! I didn't—she made me promise—I was trying to—"
But Arthur was already moving. His hand flashed, and a spear—wrought from compressed air and fury itself—materialized in his grip. The same technique he'd used to kill thousands of enemies, now turned on a child.
"Die, demon!" Arthur's voice was raw with loss. "Go back to whatever hell spawned you!"
"Uncle, I didn't kill her!" The boy's voice cracked, ten years old and facing down death from the only father figure he'd ever known. "Please believe me! PLEASE!"
The spear left Arthur's hand with the force of a hurricane, launched from Zephyr's back high above.
It punched through the boy's chest with terrible precision, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the stone wall behind. The boy's scream cut off mid-breath, blood erupting from his mouth.
The General, wounded and barely conscious, forced himself to his feet. With desperate strength, he lunged forward and pulled the spear free. The boy crumpled, his life bleeding out onto the stone.
The General scooped up the child's broken body and staggered toward a side passage, toward an escape route he'd prepared for himself. The boy's blood left a trail across the stone.
"NO!" Arthur screamed, diving from Zephyr's back, but the General had already disappeared into the shadows with the dying child.
The chamber fell silent except for infant Zane's wailing.
Arthur dropped to his knees beside the Queen's body, his hands shaking as they touched her cold face. And Zane, trapped in this nightmare memory, saw the moment Arthur understood what he'd done.
The boy's last words echoed in the silence: *"I didn't kill her."*
And Arthur, the legendary general, the Wind Walker, the man who'd never failed in battle, broke.
His scream of grief and rage shook the chamber. He clutched the Queen's body and wept like a child, and infant Zane's cries joined his in a symphony of loss.
Beside the infant's tiny hand, the one-winged angel pendant gleamed with innocent beauty, a final gift from a brother who'd given everything.
---
Present-day Zane felt the memory shattering around him, felt himself being pulled back toward reality. But the emotions remained—grief for a mother he'd never known, rage at a General who'd betrayed them all, and most devastating of all, the knowledge of what his brother had sacrificed.
The darkness began to crack like glass, each fragment falling away to reveal something else. Something that was calling his name.
"Zane!" The voice was familiar, desperate. "ZANE, ARE YOU OKAY?"
The nightmare shattered completely.
Zane gasped, his eyes snapping open to find himself lying on the forest floor. Kaelion knelt over him, his face pale with fear, shaking Zane's shoulders with desperate strength.
"Are you okay?" Kaelion repeated. "Zane, please, say something! You've been screaming for minutes, I couldn't wake you, I couldn't—"
Zane sat up slowly, his hand moving automatically to the pendant around his neck. The one-winged angel felt warm against his palm, warmer than it had ever been before. As if it recognized him now. As if it had been waiting for him to understand.
His brother. He had a brother. A brother who'd been taken, who'd sacrificed everything, who'd promised to help when Zane was strong enough to find him.
*Come find me when you're strong and in need of help. I'll be waiting. I swear it.*
The words echoed in his mind with perfect clarity. The pendant against his chest felt different now—not magical, not powerful, but *meaningful*. A connection across the years. A brother's last gift. A promise kept in silver and memory.
"Zane?" Kaelion's voice was worried. "What happened? What did you see?"
Zane opened his mouth to answer, but the words wouldn't come. How could he explain? How could he put into words the revelation that his entire life had been built on a lie, on a mistake, on Arthur's grief-fueled rage?
Arthur had killed his brother. The man he loved like a father had murdered his actual brother while that brother was trying to save him.
The rage that flooded through Zane was so pure, so hot, that his mark erupted into pain. But beneath the rage was something else—a desperate, aching need to know if his brother had survived. If he was still out there somewhere. If Zane could find him and finally understand the truth.
The darkness began to crack like glass, each fragment falling away.
"Zane!" A voice, familiar and desperate, cut through the collapsing nightmare. "ZANE, ARE YOU OKAY?"
The nightmare shattered completely.