They said curiosity killed the cat.
Cael thought the cat had only asked the wrong question.
He learned to ask questions the way other kids learned to whistle — loudly, without thinking.
He prodded at the seams of things: why the streetlamps in the north quarter breathed at dusk; why the glass in the old clinic fogged only when someone told a lie; why Aunt Mara's hands shook whenever she held a photograph.
People smiled at him the way you smile at a dog that can count — indulgent, a little scared, never quite sure if it's a trick.
> "You'll drown in questions if you don't learn to swim,"
his teacher warned, rapping the desk.
Cael only grinned.
"What does water dream of when it sleeps?" he asked.
The class laughed.
The teacher didn't.
---
Border towns breed odd children.
Nadir's border was stranger — where the known land met the Fear Realm, fog crept like a living thing.
Cael's village sat on the edge of that fog like a loose tooth.
He grew up with two truths:
his mother loved him like gravity loves a falling stone,
and the world kept dangerous secrets in locked rooms.
The first night the clinic lights went wrong, he was six.
Someone had dragged a body in from the rain — an experiment from the Order's satellite lab.
They said the lights went black on purpose;
the world, they whispered, needed less light.
Cael had pressed his face to the clinic glass and asked the reflection staring back:
> "Why?"
That question lodged itself under the floorboards of his mind and never stopped whispering.
---
Aunt Mara sold herbs and stories in the market.
She kept a key-ring heavy with odd charms — a brass compass, a rusted button, a mirror she never used.
"Questions are hooks," she said once, pressing a finger to the bridge of Cael's nose so hard he tasted iron.
"You catch fish with them. But mind what you pull in."
He nodded. He didn't mind.
He liked the tug.
---
The clinic lights failed again when he was twelve.
This time, the Order's research tent gleamed white beside the market.
They offered tests and stipends and words like perception calibration.
Then the morning went wrong.
A scream split the fog.
People ran.
Aunt Mara's hand clamped on his coat — warm, shaking.
Bodies came out on stretchers.
Some breathed; others just whispered nonsense, spilling secrets like water through paper.
The ground trembled.
The tent shuddered.
Light bled through the canvas, not yellow or white — but something that remembered being light.
Cael saw through the slit in the tent wall — and froze.
Inside, memories hung from the air like laundry soaked in blood.
A woman smiled with a mouth full of other people's names.
And in the middle of it all — a mirror.
His reflection wasn't following him anymore.
The man in the glass was older, hollow, and smiling.
No one else noticed.
The fog thickened as if leaning closer to listen.
Cael felt the tug again — the same pull that had lived in him since he was six.
Aunt Mara's grip tightened.
"Do not," she said.
Curiosity, however, has never learned obedience.
He stepped forward.
---
The moment his foot crossed the threshold,
the world folded like paper.
Pain arrived as an idea before it became sensation — a theft happening inside his skull.
A memory peeled off and fell somewhere dark.
His mother's name dissolved into a half-sound.
The mirror's man only watched, patient, curious.
Something passed between them — not a sound, but a promise.
A thin line of light stitched itself across Cael's chest, marking him.
Then everything went black.
---
When he woke, the air smelled of smoke and salt and silence.
Aunt Mara hovered, face pale as parchment.
"Cael…" she whispered. "You looked."
He tried to answer, but his own name came out wrong, a sound that didn't belong to him.
A strange calm bloomed under his ribs — like the glow after lightning.
From the ruins, a doctor in a clean coat studied him with a collector's eyes.
"Subject shows unusual markers," the man muttered, writing fast.
Cael looked at the doctor.
Then at the fog that curled against the clinic walls.
And softly, instinctively, he asked again:
> "Why?"
The doctor didn't answer.
He just wrote harder, as if trying to trap the question in ink.
Outside, the fog leaned closer to hear the boy who had asked it first.
Something in the back of Cael's mind rang like a bell.
He didn't yet know what had awakened inside him — only that curiosity had teeth,
and it had just bitten back.
---
End of Chapter 1
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