Kael exhaled slowly, watching his breath bloom into a pale cloud before dissolving into the winter air. He reached up and ran his fingers through his hair, the strands cracking faintly as the frost broke beneath his touch.
His breath had frozen into it as he walked.
'It should be empty.'
He lifted his gaze to the building ahead. A small cabin, half-swallowed by snow and shadow, stood quietly among the trees. A few weeks earlier, during one of his aimless walks, he had come across it by chance.
It was roughly a thirty-minute walk from the city, but Kael did not mind the distance. If nothing else, it bought him solitude.
His boots sank deep into the snow as he stepped onto the small wooden patio. When he pushed the door open, a loose pile of snow slid down from the frame and scattered across the ground.
The cabin was humble. A narrow kitchen connected to a single bedroom. A small table with two chairs sat near the wall, and a lone rocking chair rested in the corner.
Kael kicked the snow from his boots against the doorframe before stepping inside.
'Looks like I'll need to bring firewood.'
He crossed to the fireplace and nudged the old coals with a stick, watching the ash crumble apart. Then he moved to the rocking chair and lowered himself into it, testing its balance. It creaked softly as he rocked back and forth a few times.
His gaze drifted around the cabin.
It had been abandoned for a long while. Kael had pretty much been certain of that even before stepping inside, judging by the untouched snow covering the trail leading here..
He tapped a finger against the armrest, thoughtful.
If not for the soul-pathway mote he had taken as his first commission, he would never have come out here. Even though he technically had an apartment until Darian returned, it lacked the one thing he needed most.
Privacy.
And while Kael did not believe Mael wished him harm, he did not know her well enough to be careless. Nor did she know him. Casually refining a mote that would earn him execution if witnessed was not a risk he could afford. Worse still, if Mael saw it and failed to act, she herself could be dragged into the consequences, creating a strong reaction.
That alone was reason enough.
Out here, in the quiet snow and forgotten wood, there would be no witnesses.
He stepped back outside, and a cloud of snow burst outward as the Stone Coffin came into existence beside the cabin, its sudden arrival piling snow at the foot of the door. The coffin's lid creaked open slowly.
Kael waited in silence.
Only when it fully opened did he approach, peering into the black abyss within. He reached out, and a splinter of wood formed in his palm.
As he turned and walked back into the cabin, the coffin slammed shut behind him, throwing snow into the air in a sharp, echoing burst.
He settled at the kitchen table, placing the wooden splinter in front of him and studying it.
This was one of the pieces he had taken from the Hollow Mountain.
'This wood caused me quite a bit of trouble.'
He rested his fingers beside it.
Back in the mountain, a splinter just like this had pierced his thigh. The wound had taken hours longer to heal than it should have, lingering far beyond what any ordinary injury would.
He moved and rested his fingers upon the splinter.
"Guess I need to continue studying."
With a quiet sigh, Kael activated the Obsidian Shard mote.
All living things in the Luminaire world were built upon three fundamental components: Soul, Thought, and Will.
Beasts possessed Soul and Will.
Motes possessed Will and Thought.
And humans alone carried all three: Soul, Thought, and Will.
Yet even those were not the deepest layers of reality.
Beneath them existed the structures that made the world function at all. The great, unquestioned laws. Motion that demanded things fall. Time that refused to move backward. Cause that never came without effect.
And then there were the finer laws.
The subtle ones. The ones that defined what a thing was, not merely how it behaved. The reason wood burned the way it did. The reason stone resisted pressure. The reason certain materials resonated with Will while others rejected it outright.
These were the laws noble families obsessed over. The same laws scholars spent lifetimes mapping, categorizing, and naming. Not to change the world, but to understand which rules could be bent without breaking everything that rested on top of them.
Kael's fingers pressed lightly against the splinter.
When Kael advanced to rank three, his soulbound mote advanced with him. Even before, its effects had been impressive, allowing him to understand materials on a deeper level, but what it had become now was something else entirely. The first time he activated it after advancing, even Kael had been left speechless.
In truth, he had never experienced a mote change so drastically through advancement.
The moment he activated it, the world shifted.
In the same way he could enter his inner realm, his consciousness slipped into the wooden splinter. But instead of being met with pale grain and fibers, he found himself standing within a black abyss.
"It's always the same," he muttered softly.
The space could be described as the inner realm of an object, but that description was far too crude. It was empty, yet not. There was nothing to see, nothing to touch, and still Kael felt as if his skull were about to split open.
Information pressed against him from every direction.
He glanced around, taking in the endless dark as best he could, and massaged his temples as a dull ache spread behind his eyes. The space itself offered nothing, yet his mind was being flooded, assaulted by knowledge that refused to take shape.
He had formed a few theories over time.
Since rank one, the Obsidian Shard mote had done one simple thing: help him understand materials. At rank one, it allowed him to sense how much force was required to break something. At rank two, it let him intuitively grasp how much heat might be needed to set an object ablaze.
But rank three was different.
After advancing, the mote no longer merely interpreted information for him. It carried his consciousness directly into the object itself, attempting to force everything it knew into his mind all at once.
That kind of transfer was not meant for a human.
What entered Kael's mind was not understanding, but a deluge. A tsunami of raw, unfiltered information that slammed into him without restraint, making his head throb violently as his consciousness strained to endure it.
Even though it appeared as an abyss, the darkness surrounding him was anything but empty. It was layers upon layers of laws stacked endlessly atop one another, compressed until they became the object itself.
Kael could see everything, and yet nothing at all.
What unfolded before him was no different from handing a child an intricate equation written across an endless page. The symbols existed. The structure was there. But understanding refused to take shape.
Pain lanced through his skull.
Kael turned his head, eyes clenched shut, enduring the pressure for a brief moment longer before dismissing the mote. The world snapped back into place as his consciousness returned to the cabin.
His breath hitched violently.
"It's so annoying," he muttered, a strained snicker slipping through clenched teeth.
It was not the mote that frustrated him.
It was himself.
Kael grabbed the wooden splinter and hurled it through the open door. It cut through the air before vanishing into the waiting stone coffin outside. The coffin slammed shut, snow bursting outward as it disappeared once more.
Even if he could not comprehend the full torrent of information contained within that splinter, Kael could still glimpse its potential. And that made it worse.
A mote capable of exposing the laws that defined an object itself.
A power like that was not merely rare.
It was something noble families would raze cities to possess.
Like standing before a library that held every truth ever written, every lie ever spoken, every answer ever sought, and being unable to read a single word.
Kael exhaled slowly and stepped outside into the forest. The cold wrapped around him the moment he left the cabin, seeping through his coat and settling into his bones. He snapped dead branches from nearby trees, gathering them in his arms before returning. Inside, he stacked the wood neatly beside the fireplace and placed a few pieces within it.
From his pocket, he pulled a small pack of matches and struck one.The flame sputtered weakly in the cold air, trembling as if it might die at any moment, until he cupped it with his hand and lowered it to the stacked wood. After a few tense seconds, it took hold. The fire crept along the dry branches, then flared, filling the cabin with warmth and light.
Kael extended his hand toward the flames, letting the heat seep slowly into his skin.
Firelight danced across the walls, settling on a lone figure seated in silence, his eyes hidden behind a black blindfold as the flames crackled softly before him.