Kai woke up dying.
Salt burned his throat. His lungs seized and convulsed, trying to drag in air that wasn't there. He rolled onto his side and hacked up seawater in heaving bursts. On the last cough something else came with it—something pale and faintly luminous that swirled in front of his lips like a breath made visible.
It hung there, turning slowly, bending the sound of the waves around it. For a heartbeat, the world seemed to hesitate.
Then the light flickered out, and sound crashed back in.
He collapsed onto the sand, cheek scraping against grains that were too fine, too sharp. Not the golden warmth of some sun-kissed shore. This sand was black, glittering like powdered obsidian mixed with ground metal. It was cold. Everything was cold.
Waves hissed near his feet, rushing forward and pulling away, leaving rivulets that traced jagged lines in the dark.
The rhythm was off.
Not the steady in-and-out of a sleeping tide, but a shuddering inhale, a hitch, an exhale dragged out too long—like the sea itself was trying, and failing, to remember how to breathe.
He lay still, eyes closed, while his body trembled and tried to remember how to be alive.
Who am I?
The thought clawed its way to the surface without invitation. It sat there in his mind, bright and alone, waiting for an answer that didn't come.
No name.No faces.No childhood.No home.
He reached for memories and found nothing but blankness, smoother than polished stone. His panic hit a moment later, carrying with it the instinctive understanding that it hadn't always been like this. There had been something before this shoreline. Before the dark sand. Before the burning lungs.
He just couldn't get to it.
The emptiness wasn't simple absence. It felt carved-out, deliberate, like someone had taken his entire life and hollowed it with patient hands.
He sucked air in through his teeth, trying to steady himself. The effort made his ribs ache. Muscles screamed as he forced himself onto his hands and knees.
Pain rolled through him in slow waves. Not sharp, not localized. Just a full-body throb, like he'd been broken down and reassembled by someone who didn't respect original design.
His fingers dug into the sand. The grains clung to his skin, fine and cutting. Up close, he could see they weren't all black—flecks of dull silver were scattered through them, glinting faintly in the dim light.
He raised his head.
The shoreline stretched away in a crooked crescent. Jagged rocks stabbed out of the water, slick and dark, like the ribs of some enormous thing that had died here and never decomposed. The sky above was a flat, heavy gray. The light couldn't decide whether it was dawn or dusk and seemed offended that it had to choose.
Wreckage littered the beach.
Splintered planks. A snapped mast. A length of rigging tangled with torn canvas and bloated seaweed. A shattered wheel half buried in the sand. A crate smashed open to spill ruined goods that the sea had half devoured—grain turned to mush, cloth stiff with salt, fruit collapsed into black rot.
More than one ship.
Some of the wreckage looked old, bleached and rounded at the edges from long exposure. Other pieces were fresh, wood dark with recent soaking. The storm that had done this had not been a one-night temper tantrum. It had been coming here for a long time.
His mind stopped there.
Storm.
He could almost see it if he reached sideways instead of backward. Not a clear memory. More like an afterimage burned onto the inside of his skull—lightning pouring through a sky split like opened flesh, waves that towered high enough to blot out everything else, wind that howled not like air but like voices.
He remembered fear, bright and animal and pure.Then nothing.
Above the beach, on a cliff of the same black stone as the sand, a fortress crouched, its silhouette hard against the low sky. Thick walls. Four watchtowers. A central keep that rose like a broken tooth. The stone was dark enough to drink the light. No banners flew. No torches burned along the battlements.
If the sea had a graveyard, it would look like this place.
You should be dead, something inside him whispered. Calmly. Like an observation, not an accusation. You were.
He swallowed.
"I noticed," he rasped.
His voice sounded unfamiliar in his own ears. Rough, scraped raw by salt and silence. It suited this place. It didn't help him remember anything.
He looked toward the horizon.
It was not a comforting sight. The line where sky met sea was hazy and unfocused, like a badly drawn boundary. Dark clouds sat heavy above it, roiling slowly in a way that felt less like wind and more like… thought. As though something beneath them was considering coming back.
The waves surged.
One rose higher than the rest, rolling toward him with heavy inevitability. Spray leapt before it in foamy arcs.
Then, halfway to shore, the wave stopped.
Not slowed. Not thinned.
Stopped.
Water reared up in an impossible wall, a glassy blue-green sheet that held its shape and stayed there, trembling faintly. Droplets hung in the air in front of it, suspended mid-flight. The spray that had leapt ahead of the wave froze too, a thousand little beads of water caught between falling and flying.
The sound cut out.
No crashing surf. No wind. No creak of wood from the wreckage. Just his breathing and the dull, thick thud of his heart.
Kai stared, chest tight.
The world felt… held. Like someone had pressed pause on everything but him.
There was a pressure in his chest, just under his sternum. Not pain, not exactly. A tug, like something inside him had been tied to invisible strings and someone had just given them an experimental pluck.
The air around him wavered. The edges of things blurred, then doubled, as if reality were having trouble choosing which version of itself to commit to.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
When he opened them again, the wave collapsed.
It came down all at once, slamming into the shallows with a roar that punched the air out of his lungs. Water shot up the beach, icy and vicious, crashing into his legs hard enough to stagger him. He grabbed at the sand to stay upright. The surge soaked him to the waist and dragged at him like it wanted to pull him back out where he belonged—with the wreckage and the dead.
Bits of broken hull knocked against his knees. A splintered spar scraped across his shin. Something pale brushed his ankle that might have been an arm.
Cold sank deep, chewing into his bones.
He didn't move until the water receded again, tugging at the sand beneath his palms and leaving his hands shaking.
"What… was that?" he breathed.
The wind swallowed the question and flung it somewhere out over the churning gray expanse.
No answer came from the sea.
A different answer pressed against his mind.
The voice was neither loud nor soft. It didn't echo. It didn't arrive through his ears. It slid into him like a tide under a door, ancient and patient and heavy with grief.
You are not born of this Cycle, it said.
He went very still.
You are the spark that should not be.
The words rang inside his skull, vibrating down his spine. They carried the same pressure as the wave a moment before. A weight of implication. A sense of being noticed not as an individual, but as an error.
He turned his head slowly, scanning the shore.
Only black sand.
Only wreckage.
Only the distant, looming shadow of the fortress above.
"Who's there?" he croaked. "Say that to my face."
Nothing.
Whatever had spoken was gone, or pretending to be. The ocean went back to its fevered, uneven breathing. The clouds rolled on, thick and disinterested.
He stayed kneeling there for a moment, fingers curled into the sand until the cut-fine grains dug crescent moons into his palm.
No memories. No name.
But not nothing.
When he closed his eyes, he could feel something that wasn't this beach or this body. A different weight on his shoulders. A different air in his lungs. A balcony, maybe, or the edge of something high, a drop below that wasn't water. A voice singing—no, several voices, braided together into a chord that made his chest ache just remembering the shape of it.
And under it all, the sensation of choosing.
Of standing in a moment like a crossroads and feeling the weight of one decision tilt an entire future.
Echoes.
He didn't know the word, didn't know why he recognized that flavor of things that hadn't happened, but he did. Those not-quite-memories clung to him like damp cloth.
He let out a long, shaky breath.
"Fine," he told the empty air. "If you won't tell me who I was, we start with who I am."
He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.
His clothes were a ruin. A simple linen shirt, torn at one shoulder and ripped down one side. Rough trousers, soaked and stiff with salt. No coat. No boots. No jewelry. No tokens. Nothing to say what ship he'd come from, what port he'd called home, what god he'd cursed when the storm took him.
His feet were bare and sore. Calloused, though. Ropes and decks, perhaps. Work, not soft living.
His hands told a similar story. Callouses on palm and fingers. Faint lines where scars had been, long ago, faded to paler shades of skin. No recent wounds. No old, story-marking scars. Whoever he'd been, he'd lived hard enough to earn a worker's hands but not long enough to be carved by it.
He turned slowly, taking in more of the shore.
Beyond the immediate wreckage, bodies lay in irregular intervals along the sand. A man sprawled face-down, one arm twisted unnaturally beneath him. A woman on her back, eyes open and filmed over, hair fanned out in dark strands sticky with salt and blood. Further down, a child's form curled around itself, as if sleeping in a cold and cruel place.
The sight hit something in him that memory couldn't touch—an old instinct, maybe, against letting people lie unmarked.
His stomach turned.
He looked away.
Closer at hand, half-buried under a tangle of rope, a crate had washed up and come apart at one corner. He trudged toward it, legs protesting each step. The brand scorched into the side of the wood had been mostly burned away, but enough remained to show a shape once pressed there in proud, clean lines.
A crown.
A trident.
The sight made his skin crawl.
It shouldn't have meant anything. He didn't remember it. But his bones recoiled before his brain could form the thought. His jaw clenched. His heart thudded oddly, skipping one beat, then slamming the next too hard.
A crown over a trident.
He reached out on reflex as another wave rolled in, slapping against the crate and trying to drag it away. His fingers brushed the wood.
The world lurched.
For a split second, he wasn't on the shore.
He stood on a blood-slick deck under a sky the wrong color, surrounded by bodies wearing armor stamped with that same symbol. Voices roared. Fire fell like rain. Somewhere close, someone shouted orders in a language he almost understood. There was that symbol again, on black banners whipping in a howling wind.
He blinked—
And staggered back onto the shore, breath shuddering, heart hitting his ribs like it was trying to escape.
The crate was just a crate again. The brand was just a mark in burnt wood.
The wave receded, dragging at the sand around his ankles.
He let it go. Some things he wasn't ready to hold yet.
He turned away.
Further down the beach, beyond a half-crushed hull, something moved.
Not the twitch of a dying fish or the lazy sway of seaweed. A heavier shift, the kind made by muscles remembering they had work to do.
He found the source a few moments later.
A man lay half propped against a rock, as if he'd sat down and then forgotten to finish the motion. His hair was salt-and-steel, matted to his brow with drying blood from a cut that ran diagonally across his forehead. The wound was messy, but not deep enough to kill outright. His beard was three days past intentional. His skin was weathered, lined in ways that spoke of squinting into sun and salt-spray for a lifetime.
He wore seaworn leather reinforced with patches of metal. Not uniform armor. Not a soldier of a king. More like a man who'd fought storms and men and didn't trust either to play fair. A long knife rested in its sheath at his hip. His boots, mercifully, were still on his feet.
His chest rose and fell.
Alive.
Kai stood over him for a moment.
Helping another person meant... something. A risk. A commitment. He had no idea who this man was, what allegiances he held, what he'd do to the stranger who shook him awake.
But leaving him here, on this graveyard shore, while the sea pulled higher with every breath…
That felt wrong.
The wrongness wasn't abstract. It was a physical itch under his skin, a prickle at the base of his skull. As if somewhere out in the unseen tangle of possibilities, threads were tightening in distaste at the idea of that choice.
He knelt and grabbed the man's shoulders.
"Hey," he said, giving him a rough shake. "Wake up."
The man groaned, the sound crushed and rusty. His eyelids fluttered. For an instant his gaze slid right over Kai's face, unfocused and lost. Then something in him snapped back into place. His eyes sharpened, storm-gray and assessing.
They swept Kai up and down in a quick, measuring pass.
"You're not mine," he rasped. His voice was gravel dragged over stone.
"Good to know," Kai said. His own voice was a little steadier now. "You're bleeding."
"Feels that way," the man muttered.
Another wave crept up the sand, closer to their feet.
"We need to get higher," Kai said. "Unless you want to go back to drowning."
"That's behind my favorite ways t'start a morning," the man said dryly. He tried to push himself upright. Pain flashed across his face. "Ah—damn. World's tilting."
Kai slid an arm under his and heaved.
The moment their skin touched, the world twisted.
Not literally. His feet stayed on the sand. His eyes still saw the beach. But overlaid on top of that, sharp and clear as a memory that wasn't his, another scene snapped into place like a double exposure.
The same man, younger by years, stood at the prow of a sleek ship that cut through clear blue water. His hair was darker. His face had fewer lines. Laughter rode the wind as a crew moved around him with practiced ease. Above them, a flag snapped.
A name burned on the hull just below his hand.
Starbreak.
Kai sucked in air.
The vision ripped away.
He staggered half a step, grip tightening involuntarily. For a heartbeat, the beach tilted.
"You just went white," the man said, leaning more heavily on him to stay upright. "You going t'keel over on me, boy?"
"No," Kai said. The word came out flatter than he'd intended. "Just… dizzy. Storm. Wreck. Dying. You know. Busy morning."
A corner of the man's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "You sound new to it."
Kai didn't answer that.
Together, they got him fully to his feet. The man swayed, but held.
He smelled of salt and old leather and iron. There was a familiar comfort to it that Kai's lost memories couldn't explain.
"What's the last thing you remember?" the man asked, squinting out at the restless sea.
"Water," Kai said. "Wind. Fear." He hesitated. "Nothing before that."
The man's eyes cut toward him, sharp.
"Nothing," he repeated.
Kai shook his head.
The blank inside him seemed to widen when he tried to push against it. It didn't feel like forgetting a particular day or face. It felt like an entire life had been peeled clean away.
"Do you remember your name?" the man asked.
Kai opened his mouth.
Silence waited.
Then, without warning, a word slid into the gap. Not from memory. From somewhere deeper. From the place the strange light had come from when he'd first coughed himself alive.
"Kai," he said.
It fit in his throat as if it had been there all along, waiting.
The man studied him. "So you do remember something."
"I don't know where it came from," Kai admitted. "But it feels… right. Like it's mine."
"Good enough for now." The man shifted his weight, testing his legs again. "We can pick apart the rest later. Once we're somewhere that isn't being eaten one wave at a time."
"Where is 'somewhere'?" Kai asked. "All I see is black sand and dead things."
The man's gaze drifted up toward the cliff, toward the fortress hunched at the top like something that had climbed out of the earth and then gone still.
"Blackstone Isle," he said. The name came out wrapped in a complicated mix of resignation and contempt. "End of the line for folk like us."
The title slotted into Kai's awareness with the same too-familiar ease as his own name. It wasn't a memory. It was more like a word in a language he hadn't known he could speak.
"Where… is that?" Kai asked.
The man snorted softly. "Middle of nowhere. North of sense, east of mercy." His eyes flicked to the sky, reading the clouds and wind with the automatic skill of a man who'd lived under both too long. "And far too close to things that should've stayed deep."
He held out a scarred hand.
"Captain Ryden," he said. "Of whatever's left of the Starbreak."
The phantom image of the ship reared up again in Kai's mind—sunlight, laughter, the carved name on the hull.
He grabbed Ryden's hand.
"Just Kai," he said. "Of… nothing, apparently."
"Everyone's from somewhere," Ryden said. "Even if that somewhere doesn't exist anymore."
The words hit harder than they should have.
He didn't have space to unpack it.
The tide crept a little closer, greedy, rolling over the feet of the nearest corpse.
"Up there?" Kai asked, nodding toward the fortress at the cliff's crown.
"You see anywhere better?" Ryden said. "Somewhere with fewer rocks and more roof?"
"No."
"Then up there," Ryden said. "Place is trouble, but it's sheltered trouble, and for now I'll take the difference."
Fair enough.
They moved.
The climb up the beach was slower than Kai liked.
Every few paces, he had to pick his way around broken beams, shattered crates, twisted ropes. Sometimes he had to step over bodies. Sometimes he had to walk between them.
A young woman lay on her side, hair braided back from a face that would have been pretty if it weren't slack in death. A boy who might have just started shaving stared sightlessly at a sky that wasn't interested. A man with a tattoo of a spiral storm inked into his neck lay half-buried in sand.
Kai's throat tightened each time.
He wanted to stop. To close eyes. To pull bodies above the tide line. To mark something, even just a circle of stones, to say you were here, you mattered.
The part of him that counted practicalities hissed in his ear about time and danger and useless sentiment.
The part that remembered a woman standing on a terrace singing against the end of the world—the echo of that image shivered through him again, sharp and hot—wouldn't let him treat the dead like debris.
He compromised.
As they passed one particularly young-looking body, he stooped and brushed a handful of black sand over the boy's face, shielding empty eyes from the sky.
Ryden watched from the corner of his gaze. Said nothing.
The black sand gave way to slick stone at the cliff's base. A path had been carved into the rock, narrow and worn, switchbacking its way up. Someone had taken the time, over years, to make this approach doable even half-drowned and bleeding.
It implied Blackstone expected shipwrecks the way other places expected traders.
Kai's legs burned as they climbed.
His lungs felt too small. Every breath scraped.
Halfway up, he made the mistake of looking back.
From this height, the patterns stood out more clearly.
The tide's reach wasn't random. Each receding wave left wet lines on the sand that curved and intersected with uncanny precision, forming spirals and chains of symbols. The marks glowed faintly blue just before the next wave rolled over them and broke them apart, only for new lines to form in slightly altered shapes.
He recognized nothing consciously. But the sight made his head throb. The shapes felt like half-forgotten letters of a language that had once been native to his tongue.
"Do you see that?" he asked.
Ryden didn't turn. "See what?"
"The marks in the sand. Like… writing." Kai squinted. "They're glowing. That's not normal, right?"
"The only marks I care about are where the high tide hits and where the rocks end," Ryden said. "The rest is for priests and fools. Keep moving."
"So you don't—"
"Boy." Ryden's voice was tired. "Right now, I've got storm in my bones, blood in my eyes, and an island under my feet that has no business existing in polite company. If the sea wants to scribble warnings on the shore, it can do it without my help."
So he didn't see them.
Or couldn't.
The thought crawled cold fingers up Kai's spine. He looked away from the shifting runes and focused on the path, on the scrape of his soles after too long on rough rock, on the rasp of his breathing.
By the time they reached the top, his body felt hollowed out. Sweat mingled with drying salt on his skin. Each heartbeat landed heavy.
The fortress was bigger up close.
Blackstone's walls were thick, built from blocks of the same dark stone as the cliff. Time and weather had chewed on them, but not broken them. New patches of masonry, slightly different shades, showed where damage had been repaired. The watchtowers rose higher than they'd looked from the beach, their tops crowned with crude crenellations.
Black banners hung from poles above the gate, limp in the sluggish wind. Each banner bore the same symbol Kai had seen burned into the crate on the shore.
A crown.A trident.
The sight made his jaw clench.
"Whoever uses that emblem," he said quietly, "I already don't like them."
"Good," Ryden said. "You're starting from the correct assumption."
The main gate was open.
That didn't feel like kindness.
Two men stood just inside the archway, one on each side. Neither was dressed in tidy uniforms. Instead they wore mismatched armor—leather reinforced with metal plates taken from other sets, a chain shirt here, a single pauldron there. They looked like men who'd cobbled together their protection from what they'd taken off others.
One had a crooked nose that had clearly been broken more than once. His eyes were a flat, pale brown, the color of waterlogged wood. The other chewed on something, jaw working slowly, gaze hooded.
Both straightened as Ryden and Kai approached.
"Knew the sea wasn't done spitting out its mistakes," the broken-nosed man said. His voice carried the bored flavor of someone whose job rarely surprised him. "Captain Ryden, back from wherever corpses go when they're trying to be difficult."
"Did you miss me?" Ryden asked.
"A bit like I'd miss a hole in my boat," the man replied. His gaze flicked to Kai. "And you've dragged in what, exactly?"
"Something the sea coughed up," Ryden said. "Thought I'd be polite and return him."
Kai felt the weight of the man's study.
It wasn't the simple greed he'd expected—no obvious assessment of whether he was worth ransom or labor. There was that, sure, but something else too. A faint crease between the guard's brows. An uncertainty. As if his instincts were giving conflicting answers.
For a moment, Kai felt pressure again. The air thickened. The world sharpened.
He could feel possibilities splayed out around him in invisible strands.
If he met the man's gaze and didn't look away, one thing would happen.If he ducked his head, another.If he spoke first. If he stayed silent. If he lied. If he told the truth.
Thousands of tiny branches, most insignificant. All leading to different versions of the next minute.
He didn't know how he knew that. He just knew it in the same way he knew he was standing upright and not falling.
His heart sped up.
The sensation recoiled from his attention like a shy animal caught in the open.
The air went back to normal.
The guard's eyes narrowed, like a man noticing a breeze change direction without catching its source.
"Xeran will want to see you," he said. "And your… new friend."
"Lucky us," Ryden said. "You offering a bath and a meal first, or is this one o' those hospitality-light visits?"
"That depends," the guard said. "On how useful you are."
The other man spat something dark onto the packed dirt and jerked his chin toward the inner courtyard. "Move."
They passed under the arch.
Inside, the fortress opened into a wide yard of hard-packed earth and uneven cobbles. Structures crowded around the edges—long, low barracks; a stable that smelled of wet animal and hay; racks of weapons; a forge cold at the moment but blackened with use. Near one wall stood a rough gallows, its beam stained darker in one spot.
Men and women moved through the space, all in the same ragged mix of gear as the gate guards. Some sharpened blades, steel scraping against stone. Others hauled crates or argued over the distribution of supplies. A group of younger ones practiced with blunt-edged weapons in a corner, their faces set in the intent frowns of people trying not to die early.
A few heads turned as Kai and Ryden entered.
No one looked particularly surprised to see survivors. No one rushed with blankets or concern.
This was a place that treated shipwrecks as weather.
As they walked across the yard, the ground shifted under Kai's feet.
Not physically. The cobbles didn't move. The sensation was deeper, like standing on the shell of some enormous sleeping beast that had just twitched in its slumber.
A low thrum rolled through him from below, too slow to be a heartbeat, too deep to be anything as simple as machinery.
He stumbled.
Ryden's hand shot out, fingers tightening around his arm. "Easy."
"You felt that?" Kai whispered.
"You mean you—"
"Yes," Ryden cut in, voice just as low. "I felt it."
He didn't look surprised. That was somehow worse.
"What was it?" Kai asked.
"Best not to name things you can't see yet," Ryden said. "But if I had to put a shape to it…" His mouth tightened. "I'd say the island was breathing."
A gust of wind swept through the yard.
For a heartbeat, the world didn't blur so much as… fracture.
The walls were there, and they weren't. One moment, they rose solid and dark as they did now. The next, they were lower, crumbling, the banners gone, everything overgrown and moss-slick. Overlaid atop that, another version loomed—higher walls, freshly cut stone, banners of a different design.
Three realities flickered over one another like images painted on glass, sliding slightly out of alignment.
Kai's vision swam.
He blinked hard.
The yard snapped back to one version of itself. The present, presumably. The others retreated like thoughts half-remembered upon waking.
Ryden's grip on his arm tightened.
"You saw something?" the captain asked quietly.
"Nothing I know how to explain," Kai said.
"Good," Ryden muttered. "Try not to. Explaining gets you in trouble here."
Before Kai could ask what that meant, a voice called out from ahead.
"Bring them in."
It wasn't raised much, but every conversation in the courtyard dipped or stopped entirely at the sound. Heads turned toward the source.
At the far end of the yard, a set of stone steps led up to the main hall. The doors, thick and iron-bound, stood open. Dim light spilled out, warm in color but not in feel.
The gate guards nudged them forward with the casual ease of men accustomed to moving people wherever someone else wanted them.
Inside, the hall was long and narrow, more utilitarian than grand. Stone walls rose on either side, patched in places where cracks had formed. Lanterns burned along them in brackets, smoke trailing upward to stain the ceiling. The air smelled of damp stone, old wood, sweat, and iron.
At the far end, on a slightly raised dais, stood a chair that was trying its best to be a throne and not quite succeeding. It had height, at least. And iron. And crude carvings of crowns and tridents and waves that someone had stabbed into the wood with more enthusiasm than skill.
A man sat on it like it belonged to him.
He rested one boot on the step below, elbow on his knee, fingers drumming a quiet rhythm on the chair's arm. His hair was dark, tied back at the nape of his neck. A neatly trimmed beard framed a mouth that looked more practiced at smirking than smiling. His eyes were a pale, clear blue—a dangerous color on land.
He wore a breastplate scuffed from use, with the crown-and-trident emblem painted across it in white. The paint had chipped in places. Enough remained to show whoever had put it there cared more about being recognized than about neatness.
In his right hand he held a knife.
It wasn't large. It wasn't ornate. It simply existed in his grasp with the casual familiarity of a limb.
He looked at Ryden first.
"Captain," he said. His voice was smooth but carried the gravel of someone who shouted orders as often as he spoke quietly. "The sea finds you tedious. It keeps sending you back."
"Xeran," Ryden replied. "Always did say you had a talent for hospitality."
"Here you are," Xeran said, spreading his free hand a fraction. "Alive-ish. Breathing, at least. That's more than I expected when I saw what last night's storm was doing."
He gestured lazily with the knife toward Kai. "And you've picked up something on the way. The sea's version of driftwood?"
Kai felt those pale eyes fix on him.
The world narrowed.
Xeran didn't look at him like a person. He looked the way a man might look at a new tool found on a battlefield. Weighing its usefulness. Estimating how sharp it could be made before it broke. Considering whether its danger was worth the trouble of picking it up.
"And what are you?" Xeran asked quietly.
The question tugged at him.
Not metaphorically. He felt it. A pull inside his chest where the earlier strange pressure had been. A nudge from the world, or from something behind it, as if everyone present expected an answer not just out of curiosity, but because the story they were in required it.
He could feel threads again.
Thin, almost invisible ones, connecting him to Xeran, to Ryden, to the guards at the doors, to the men and women lingering along the walls pretending not to be listening. Each thread vibrated faintly, humming with potential.
If he said nobody, one set of threads brightened.If he lied and named a ship, another set tightened.If he named a god, something deep and unwelcome stirred.
He hated that he could feel all that and still not know his own past.
His fingers flexed at his sides.
The tide-soft voice from the beach uncoiled again inside his skull, words a memory he had not lived.
You are the spark that should not be.
He took a slow breath, feeling it burn all the way down.
"My name is Kai," he said.
His voice didn't shake.
"The sea took everything before that. I don't know what else I am yet."
A strand of something—tension, expectation, reality itself—thrummed in response.
Ryden glanced at him sideways.
Xeran watched him without blinking.
"Everyone is something," Xeran said eventually. His tone hadn't changed much, but there was a new alertness in his gaze, the speculative interest of a man who had just realized the tool in front of him might be rarer than he'd thought. "If the sea spat you out here, boy, it did it for a reason. It doesn't waste storms on people who don't matter."
"I wasn't given a choice in the storm," Kai said.
"None of us are given a choice in most of what matters," Xeran said. "The question is what you do with the pieces you wash up with."
He leaned back in his not-throne, tapping the knife lightly against the armrest.
"Blackstone doesn't feed useless mouths," he added, almost as an afterthought. "You'll earn your rations here, or you won't eat long. But I'm in a generous mood. Today you get time to consider the question of what you are before the island answers it for you."
"The island?" Kai asked.
Under his feet, the stone throbbed again. Faint. Steady. Not like a heartbeat. More like the ticking of some immense clock buried far under the fort, one that had only just remembered it was supposed to be counting.
Ryden's eyes flicked downward for the briefest moment.
Xeran's mouth curved.
"You felt it," he said.
Kai didn't bother denying it.
"Good," Xeran said. "Means you might be worth the trouble."
Worth the trouble.
The phrase clung unpleasantly, but Kai didn't have the leverage to object to how he was being measured.
He did what he'd done since the moment he'd woke on the shore: breathed, listened, tried to gather enough of this shattered world into his hands to make sense of at least the next step.
Somewhere deep beneath Blackstone Isle, past cliffs and bedrock and the shrapnel of drowned ages, something ancient turned a fraction in its sleep.
It was not fully awake.
Not yet.
A ripple moved through the unseen Web that bound choices and consequences, barely perceptible, like the tremor before a much larger quake.
The gods felt it, faintly. The ones who'd helped sing the last Cycle to its end paused in their distant arguments and frowned. The one chained in the deepest Abyss strained uselessly against bonds forged in song and light.
On a black shore, in a fortress built by men who did not believe in miracles, a boy with no past and too many possible futures stood under a symbol that made his bones want to burn and met the gaze of a man who thought he could turn him into a weapon.
The shore that should not have existed had received its first anomaly.
The Echo that should not have survived had found a throat to breathe through.
And history, which had tried so many times to end, quietly reshuffled its pieces and prepared to begin again.