Three weeks after the Awakening, Kael was Level 7.
He told no one.
It wasn't difficult. The System handled the secrecy better than he ever could have managed himself. When the Church's monitoring priest came for his weekly check — punctual as a tax collector, twice as unpleasant — the man pressed a cold sensing stone to Kael's wrist, studied the readout, and wrote in his ledger without looking up.
Level 1. No advancement. Class remains dormant. Multiplier unreadable — altar defect confirmed.
He left without offering so much as a glance at Kael's face.
Kael had been Level 4 at the time of that visit. He'd watched the priest's back disappear down the stairwell and felt something he didn't have a clean word for — not quite satisfaction, not quite contempt. Somewhere between the two. The feeling of being underestimated so completely that it circled back around to becoming a gift.
He'd gone hunting that same night and reached Level 5 before dawn.
The Ashrow was generous with its dead.
Not people — not yet. He wasn't ready for that, and more importantly, missing people drew attention that dead rats did not. But the district had no shortage of small deaths. Rats in the walls. Stray dogs that collapsed in alleys after bad winters. Piglets that wandered from the slaughter district and lay down in gutters and simply stopped. A crow that fell from a rooftop one grey afternoon and landed at his feet as if delivering itself.
Every death the same to the System.
[STRAY DOG — DECEASED]
[EXP GAINED: 1,000]
[CROW — DECEASED — CAUSE: UNKNOWN]
[EXP GAINED: 1,000]
[PIGLET — DECEASED — CAUSE: EXPOSURE]
[EXP GAINED: 1,000]
He didn't even need to kill them himself. He only needed to be present when the System registered the death — to reach out with that grey instinct the Class had planted in his chest, like a hand extended in the dark, and claim it.
By Level 5 he understood why the System had hidden his multiplier. A x1000 rate, visible to the world, would have brought the Church's inquisitors to his door within a week. Power like that in a Necromancer's hands — a Necromancer from the Ashrow, no family name, no guild backing, no noble to speak for him — was not something Valdenmoor's ruling Levels would permit to exist freely.
By Level 6 he understood that he was still thinking too small.
By Level 7 he stopped sleeping more than four hours a night.
His mother noticed.
She said nothing for two weeks — she was a woman who understood that some silences were load-bearing, that the wrong question at the wrong moment could collapse something fragile. But on the twenty-second day after the Awakening, she set a bowl of soup in front of him and sat down across the table and folded her hands and looked at him.
"You're different," she said.
Not an accusation. An observation, the way she'd say it's going to rain while looking at a particular shade of cloud.
"I'm leveling," he said.
Her eyes moved to the space above his head — the blank where his multiplier should show, the Level 1 that the System projected to every external gaze. She couldn't see his truth. No one could.
"How fast?" she asked.
He considered lying. Decided against it. She had earned the truth more than anyone.
"Faster than anyone in this city," he said. "Faster than anyone in this city has ever leveled."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the Ashrow made its usual sounds — a cart on cobblestones, someone arguing two floors below, the distant clang of the slaughter district's bells.
"The Church," she said.
"They see Level 1. They'll keep seeing whatever I want them to see."
Another silence. She picked up her spoon, set it down without eating. "For how long can you hide it?"
"Long enough," he said. "I just need time."
"Time for what?"
He looked at her hands on the table. Cracked across every knuckle. Red from wrist to fingertip, the skin rough as bark from thirty years of cold water and harsh soap. Level 3. Washerwoman. A woman who had given everything she had to give and received in return exactly enough to keep giving.
"To make sure," he said carefully, "that what happened to Father can't happen to us again. That no one with a higher Level can take anything from us again."
She looked at him for a long time. He couldn't read her expression — it was too layered, too many things at once, the way her face got when she was feeling something that didn't fit into a single word.
Then she reached across the table and put her rough hand over his.
"Then eat your soup," she said. "You need to keep your strength."
The letter arrived on a Tuesday.
She brought it upstairs without opening it — she couldn't read, and she had learned long ago not to open things bearing the Church's pale sun seal. She set it on the table and stood by the window with her back to him while he read it.
By order of the Office of Level Integrity, the individual registered as KAEL ASHFEN, Class: Necromancer, is hereby notified that his Awakening has been flagged for formal review. The absence of a registered multiplier constitutes an irregularity under Valdenmoor Statute 7, Article 3. Failure to present himself at the Hall of Ascension for re-assessment within seven days will result in Classification Suspension and possible detainment pending investigation.
By authority of,
Grand Inquisitor Voss. Level 61.
Kael read it twice. Set it down. Picked up his spoon and finished his soup.
"Bad?" his mother asked, still facing the window.
"They want to re-examine my Awakening. The blank multiplier bothers them."
"Will you go?"
He thought about Level 61. He thought about his own Level — 7, climbing nightly — and the gap between them. Enormous. And also, for the first time in his life, moving. Closing. Slowly, then faster, the way debts compound in reverse.
"Not in seven days," he said.
She turned from the window. Her face was doing the thing it did when she was frightened and refused to show it — very still, very deliberate. "Kael."
"I need more time. Two weeks. Maybe three."
"For what?"
"To be ready." He met her eyes. "When I walk into that hall again, I want to do it on my terms. Not theirs."
She studied him the way she'd studied him his whole life — looking for the thing beneath the thing he was saying. Then she sat down across from him and folded her cracked hands on the table and said something that surprised him.
"How can I help?"
He stared at her.
In his seventeen years he had never once heard her ask that question — not because she wasn't willing, but because there had never been anything she could do. The world they lived in didn't give Level 3 Washerwomen levers to pull. It barely gave them handholds.
"You already are," he said, and meant it more than she would ever understand.
That night he went deeper into the city than he'd risked before.
The noble quarter's walls were high and smooth — designed to keep the low-leveled out as efficiently as any dungeon gate. But walls kept people out. They didn't account for what was already inside them, for the things that died naturally behind their careful fortifications and lay waiting without knowing they were waiting.
The noble quarter had its own dead.
Ornamental birds in gilded cages, tiny hearts giving out from lives lived too small. Ancient hounds sleeping on silk cushions, drifting from sleep into something deeper without ceremony. And in a stable yard off the eastern lane, a warhorse that had broken its leg that afternoon — he'd heard the commotion from three streets away — and been left untreated while its owner sent for a specialist who would arrive, Kael had gathered from the stable boy's muttering, sometime tomorrow morning.
The horse was still alive when he pressed his back to the stable wall.
He waited.
It took two hours. He sat in the shadow of the alley and listened to the animal's breathing slow by degrees, and he thought about patience, which was something the Ashrow had taught him whether he'd wanted to learn it or not.
When the breathing stopped, the System pulsed.
[WARHORSE — DECEASED — QUALITY: RARE]
[RAISE AS: SKELETAL MOUNT / DEATH STALLION / BONDED REVENANT]
[EXP YIELD ON RAISE: 8,000]
Eight thousand. He'd been averaging four to five hundred per creature. He read the number three times.
Higher quality deaths give higher yield, the System informed him in that voiceless way — knowledge deposited directly into his understanding, bypassing language. The greater the life, the richer the death.
He chose Bonded Revenant.
The stable wall didn't stop what he sent through it. The grey instinct passed through stone and wood like smoke through cloth, found the horse on the other side, and pulled.
[DEATH STALLION RAISED — BONDED REVENANT]
[EXP GAINED: 8,000]
[TOTAL EXP: 68,000 / 80,000]
[LEVEL: 7 — APPROACHING LEVEL 8]
He walked around to the stable entrance and looked at what he'd made.
The horse stood in the centre of the yard, motionless and vast. Grey-white bone wrapped in the ghost of its former muscle, black hooves silent on the straw, dark smoke drifting from its empty eye sockets like breath on a cold morning. It turned its head toward him slowly, and he felt the bond settle between them — a thread of grey light running from his chest to the animal's, thin as spider silk, strong as chain.
It was the most powerful thing he had ever raised.
He was still looking at it when he heard footsteps behind him — deliberate, unhurried, the footsteps of someone who had been standing there long enough to decide they weren't afraid.
"Well," said a voice. "That's not something you see every day."
Kael turned slowly.
A girl stood at the stable entrance. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, dressed in the dark fitted uniform of the Assessor's Guild — the organization responsible for monitoring System irregularities across the city. A silver badge on her chest caught the torchlight. She was looking at the death stallion with an expression that was far more curious than frightened, which immediately made her the most dangerous person he'd encountered since the Awakening.
Her gaze moved from the horse to the space above his head.
"Blank multiplier," she said. "You're the Ashrow boy they're looking for." A pause, casual as a comment about weather. "You're also standing in Lord Caven's stable yard with his dead warhorse."
Kael said nothing.
She looked back at the stallion, tilting her head slightly as if studying a painting she hadn't decided about yet. "I'm Sera. Level 14, Assessor Class." She tapped the silver badge once. "My job is to find, evaluate, and report irregular System activity to the Office of Level Integrity." A beat. "I've been watching you for four days."
The death stallion shifted behind him, patient, waiting for instruction.
"And?" Kael said.
Sera smiled — sharp and specific, the smile of someone who had already thought several moves ahead and found the view satisfactory. "And I haven't reported you yet." She let that sit for a moment. "Which should tell you something about why I'm here."
Kael studied her. Level 14 at her age meant guild family — old money, good connections, a future already laid out in comfortable detail. People like that didn't linger in noble stable yards at midnight making conversation with Ashrow Necromancers unless the calculation behind it was very clear to them.
She wanted something. The only question was whether it was something he could afford to give.
"What do you want?" he asked.
She was quiet for a moment — not hesitating, he sensed, but choosing her words with the same care he used for everything.
"Grand Inquisitor Voss," she said. Her voice was flat and even, all the grief already processed into something harder and more useful. "Six months ago he had my brother executed. Called him a System Deviant — his Class developed an unregistered ability at Level 38 and Voss decided that was threat enough to warrant a public example." She paused. "My brother was thirty-one years old. He had a daughter. She's four."
Kael said nothing. He knew better than to offer condolences to someone who had moved past the stage where condolences were useful.
"Voss is Level 61," she continued. "Untouchable through any legitimate means. The guild won't move against him — he has too many connections in the upper Levels. The nobles won't move against him — he protects their interests." She met Kael's eyes directly. "But you're not a legitimate means."
The System pulsed quietly at the back of his skull.
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: THE INQUISITOR'S DEBT]
[TARGET: GRAND INQUISITOR VOSS — LEVEL 61]
[REWARD: ???]
[ACCEPT? Y/N]
Kael looked at the girl with the sharp smile and the silver badge and the dead brother and the four-year-old niece. He looked at the death stallion standing silent behind him. He thought about the letter on his kitchen table. He thought about his mother's hands.
He thought about Level 61 and the distance between there and Level 7, and how that distance looked different when you were moving a thousand times faster than anyone could see.
Yes, he thought.
[QUEST ACCEPTED]
[TRACKING: GRAND INQUISITOR VOSS]
[CURRENT LOCATION: HALL OF ASCENSION — NORTH TOWER]
[RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 40+]
[YOUR CURRENT LEVEL: 7]
[NOTE: RECOMMENDED LEVELS ARE CALCULATED FOR STANDARD MULTIPLIERS]
That last line. He read it twice and felt something loosen in his chest — not quite a smile, not quite relief. Something colder and more certain than either.
Recommended for standard multipliers.
He was not standard.
"Tell me everything you know about him," Kael said. "His routines. His guards. Their levels. His weaknesses if he has any." He glanced at the death stallion, then back at her. "And tell me what you want in return. Specifically."
Sera reached into her coat and produced a folded sheaf of papers — already prepared, he noticed. She'd come ready to make a deal.
"Voss dead," she said simply. "And my niece's future secured. She deserves a Level that the city didn't decide for her before she was born."
Kael took the papers.
In his peripheral vision the System notification still glowed, soft and grey and patient.
Level 7. Recommended level 40. Gap: 33.
At a thousand times the normal rate, in a city full of dying things and corrupt men who deserved to become useful —
He could close that gap faster than Voss could possibly imagine.
"We start tonight," Kael said.
Author Note:
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