The children trickled away from the courtyard in small groups, still quiet from what they had seen.

  No one laughed. No one pushed. Even Mira didn’t say anything at first.

  Kael stayed behind a few seconds longer, watching the spot where the stone had floated. It looked the same as it had before. Just a rock. Nothing more.

  Then he turned and followed the others.

  In the main hall, the benches were already half-filled. Lunch had been laid out — bowls of soup, thin but warm, and a few loaves of real bread from the morning.

  Mira was already sitting with Rellen, tearing a piece of crust and talking in a low voice.

  “I mean, it floated. It did.”

  “You saw it too, then,” Rellen said, wide-eyed. “I wasn’t just imagining it.”

  Mira shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I know how it worked. Could’ve been a trick.”

  “Why would he fake it?”

  “I didn’t say he did. I said he could have. There’s a difference.”

  Kael passed behind them without saying a word. He sat at the far end of the table, as usual.

  A moment later, Dora sat beside him.

  She didn’t say anything either. Just dipped her spoon and ate, slowly and carefully.

  After lunch, Ardan gathered them back outside.

  He was standing near the same patch of sun-baked earth where he’d done the demonstration. The satchel was still over his shoulder, the same grey cloak hanging from his shoulders like it hadn’t moved in hours.

  “We’ll keep it simple,” he said once they were all seated in a rough circle. “Today you’ll try to feel the Flow for yourselves.”

  Some kids perked up. Others just blinked.

  Ardan strolled behind them as he spoke.

  “You won’t move stones. You won’t feel fire in your hands. That comes later. If it comes at all.”

  He stopped. “Today is about listening. That’s the first step.”

  He demonstrated the breathing pattern first. Three seconds in. Hold. Three seconds out.

  They copied him, some more focused than others. Rellen sat up straight and closed his eyes. Mira slouched with her eyes half-open. Dora folded her hands neatly in her lap.

  Kael just followed the rhythm.

  Breathe in. Hold.

  Breathe out. Let it go.

  Ardan continued in a calm voice.

  “Focus on your heartbeat. Don’t try to change it. Just find it. Feel it.”

  “Then pay attention to your skin. Any tingling, heat, or pressure. Your body will notice the Flow before your mind does.”

  A minute passed in silence.

  Then two.

  Kael felt nothing.

  His chest rose and fell, slow and steady. His limbs were relaxed. But there was no heat, no pull, no stirring inside him.

  Only stillness.

  Then — something shifted in the air.

  Not in him. Around him.

  A faint breeze, sudden and brief, passed just behind his back.

  He opened his eyes.

  A dry leaf near his heel had turned a half-circle.

  No one else noticed. Not even Dora.

  But when Kael looked across the circle, Ardan was watching him.

  Not with surprise. Not with concern.

  Just watching.

  Then the monk nodded to the group. “That’s enough for today. You’ve done well.”

  Thorne stood by the door, arms folded. The courtyard was quiet now, the children's voices muffled behind thick walls.

  "You’ve done your hour," he said without looking at Ardan. "Didn’t expect more."

  Ardan joined him without a word. His steps were light, but they always were.

  “Most of them won’t feel anything the first time,” he said. “The goal was to show them how to listen.”

  Thorne made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a scoff. “Still odd, seeing one of your kind this far out. South Gate isn’t exactly a priority, is it?”

  “It is,” Ardan replied calmly. “Just not for most.”

  Thorne turned slightly, watching him. “You came from Ravessan for this?”

  “I came from Ravessan a month ago. I've been passing through towns like this ever since.”

  Ravessan lay far to the east, past the broken trade roads and the black cedar forests, carved into the cliffs where the twin rivers met the sea.

  It belonged to no crown, owed fealty to no order—not even the ones it housed.

  Its stone towers rose like teeth from the mist, draped in ivy and whispers.

  Some said the Flow there spoke louder. Others said it simply wasn’t drowned out by power, war, or kings.

  Whatever the truth, Ravessan endured — and those who wished to understand the Flow went there, or never returned.

  “And what makes this place worth stopping for?”

  “You sent a letter.”

  “I send one every season,” Thorne muttered. “You’re the first to answer in three years.”

  Ardan gave a slight nod. “That’s not uncommon. The Order’s spread thin.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Thorne was silent for a while. Then: “Remind me again. What exactly does your Order do, beyond asking strange kids to sit still and breathe?”

  Ardan didn’t seem offended. “We observe. We record. We teach, if possible.”

  “That’s vague.”

  “The Order of the Third Vein exists to identify those who can Walk the Flow, and ensure they’re not left to break under it. Or misuse it.”

  Thorne raised an eyebrow. “Right. The Flow. That thing none of us have ever seen, but some people explode because of.”

  “It’s less dramatic than that,” Ardan said. “Usually. But yes. When a child awakens without guidance, the Flow inside them turns chaotic. It burns through them, or those around them.”

  “You’re telling me one of my kids could set the place on fire just by breathing wrong?”

  “Not today,” Ardan said simply. “But maybe next year. Maybe next week. That’s why we watch. That’s why we come.”

  Thorne shifted, rubbing his beard. “And you came from Ravessan for this.”

  “Not directly,” Ardan replied. “I’ve been travelling the eastern provinces for months. Ravessan sent me east to follow a string of delayed reports. Your letter was one of them.”

  Thorne frowned. “So the Order just sends people like you out wandering, hoping to trip over a child with too much power?”

  “We don’t wander without reason,” Ardan said. “We follow patterns. Gaps in records. Places that used to send names but stopped. Places where the Flow runs quiet for too long.”

  He looked out toward the forest line, then back at the building.

  “When something stirs in places like this, there’s usually no one around who knows how to see it. That’s when things go unnoticed. Or wrong.”

  He paused.

  “And sometimes, when power shows up in the wrong place… it doesn’t look like power at all.”

  Thorne exhaled slowly. “So this isn’t mercy. It’s containment.”

  Ardan gave him a long look. “We don’t contain. We understand. And sometimes, yes… we intervene.”

  Thorne stared at the horizon. “You think one of them has it?”

  “I think one of them doesn’t react the way he should. That’s enough to keep me here another day.”

  The sun was lower now, slanting through the trees behind the orphanage and throwing long shadows across the courtyard wall.

  Kael sat on the outer edge of the training field, legs folded, elbows resting on his knees.

  No one had followed him. Good.

  The others had gone back inside — some to chores, others to talk about floating stones and breathing patterns like they meant something already. Mira had laughed at the idea of “feeling the Flow,” and Rellen had looked crushed by it. Dora had said nothing, as usual.

  Kael hadn’t said much either. He rarely did.

  He stared ahead at a small patch of dirt, breathing evenly, eyes half-lidded like Ardan had shown them.

  Inhale. Hold.

  Exhale. Wait.

  Feel.

  He didn’t expect anything. Not really. But if something was inside him — if the Flow was real, if it had rules — then maybe it could be felt. Measured. Understood.

  So he sat. Still.

  Nothing stirred.

  Not in his chest. Not in his limbs. Not in his breath.

  Just wind in the trees, distant voices from the kitchen, and the slow cooling of the earth beneath him.

  Then—

  Something shifted.

  Not inside him. Around him.

  A faint pulse. Like pressure changing in the air. The hairs on his arms lifted slightly, not from cold, but from something else. Like the space beside him had inhaled.

  He turned his head slowly.

  A pebble near his boot rolled once, as if nudged by a breath he hadn’t heard.

  Kael narrowed his eyes.

  It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even strange if you looked at it the right way.

  But the timing was… exact. Too exact.

  He reached down. Picked up the stone and held it in his palm.

  It was smooth, flat, and warm from the sun. Ordinary.

  He closed his fingers around it. Sat a little longer. Nothing happened.

  Still—

  That pulse.

  He hadn’t imagined it.

  The dormitory was quiet, save for the usual creaks in the beams and the slow, muffled breathing of children deep in sleep. Mira had rolled over once and muttered something in her dreams. Rellen, across the room, was snoring softly through his nose. Even Dora, who often woke at the slightest sound, hadn’t stirred since lights-out.

  Kael lay awake longer than the others, staring at the wooden planks above him, his hands resting over the blanket with the hidden stone pressed into one palm. The sensation wasn’t exactly warm or cold, but it held a strange familiarity, like touching the hilt of a practice blade you hadn’t used in months, yet your fingers still knew the grip.

  His thoughts circled the same images: the breathing exercise, the pressure in the air, the pebble that had rolled without a breeze, the moment Ardan had looked at him a beat too long. He didn’t understand any of it. But something inside him refused to let go of it either.

  Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under.

  And he dreamed.

  But it was not the same dream as before — not quite.

  There was no running this time. No echo of footsteps slapping frantically down a corridor, no throne half-swallowed by black vines, no faceless figure bleeding in silence.

  That dream—my first dream—had always come with a sense of panic. Of being watched. Chased, even though he never saw the thing behind him. He would run, compelled by some primal urgency, until the dream devoured itself in sound and smoke.

  But tonight, it was different.

  Tonight, he was aware.

  The space was quiet. Still. Measured.

  Kael stood alone in a corridor that stretched into a soft, shapeless fog — its walls smooth and pale, marked by vertical grooves like stone that had grown under pressure. The air was neither warm nor cold. His bare feet felt the floor beneath him, cool but not unpleasant. For the first time, he didn’t feel like a prisoner inside the dream, but more like… a guest. Or something close to it.

  He walked forward, slowly, deliberately.

  The corridor was not endless. It curved gently to the left, like it always did — though he couldn’t remember when “always” had begun. The light that illuminated the hall came from nowhere in particular. It simply existed, hovering above like a memory of sunlight.

  Every detail felt… sharper as though a film had been peeled away from the edges of the world.

  He paused.

  He had never stopped before, not in this dream.

  In the others, the pace had always been dictated by fear, or momentum, or some invisible pull. But now, his body obeyed him entirely.

  And that’s when he noticed it.

  The air around him didn’t keep moving. It didn’t drift lazily past him like in waking life. It froze.

  The silence, once comforting, grew heavier. Thicker.

  Even the faint hum — one he hadn’t known was there until it vanished—cut off like a breath held too long.

  Kael turned slowly, not out of instinct, but curiosity. Behind him stretched the same corridor, untouched and unchanged.

  But ahead—

  At the far end, just before the curve that always led nowhere, a shape had appeared.

  It wasn’t a figure. Not yet.

  It was a single mask, suspended in midair.

  It didn’t glow. It didn’t float. It simply existed — motionless and out of place, like a punctuation mark dropped into a sentence that hadn’t been written yet.

  It was white. Smooth. Blank. No eyes, no mouth, no colour.

  Only a thin, jagged crack running from the left temple down to the cheek, like a scar carved by time itself.

  Kael took a step forward, and the floor echoed beneath him — one sound, crisp and sharp, against the weightless silence.

  The mask did not move.

  Another step.

  The air thickened again, not with heat, but with pressure, as though the space around the mask demanded reverence.

  He stopped just a few paces away.

  And then, without motion, the mask turned to face him.

  No wind. No movement. No cause. One moment, it faced the void, and the next, it was watching him.

  Kael didn’t flinch. But he didn’t breathe either.

  And then he heard it.

  Not with his ears. With something else.

  A voice, dry as ash, soft as rotting silk, yet clear as anything he’d ever heard.

  “You walk with feet not yet yours.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  The mask hung there, still as bone. The silence stretched.

  Then the voice returned. Slower this time. Heavier.

  “One path forgotten… is not the same as one never made.”

  The moment the words reached him, the corridor cracked.

  Not shattered — cracked, as though the very structure of the dream recoiled.

  Lines spread across the walls like fractures in ice. The floor buckled underfoot. The light bent sideways, an impossible and wrong thing.

  Kael tried to move, but the world collapsed inward before he could take a step.