The four-poster loomed massive, hewn from ancient wood, its surface carved with the shapes of the forest—wolves and lynx,soaring birds—each animal etched with reverence by hands long dead. It had passed down through the royal line of the Varak clan for generations, a relic of their blood and their bond with the wild.
For a long moment, Rakhal stood there in silence, the shadows coiling at his feet, watching the king slumber.
The etched face was peaceful in sleep, stripped of its usual fierceness. The lines of command and war softened, the scars less stark. For once, his father looked almost... human.
Memories pressed in, unbidden.
His father had been stern, strict, at times brutal. Yet there had been moments of something else—flashes of kindness, rare as winter sun. Both he and Kardoc had been forged beneath that iron hand, shaped into weapons before they'd grown into men.
But their mothers...
Kardoc's mother had been a princess from a neighbouring clan, fierce and proud, slain in battle when Kardoc was still a boy.
Rakhal's mother?—
Sanari.
A shaman of great power, her hands steeped in shadow and flame. She had fallen in the war with Ketheri mages, her body broken on the plains while she defended their land. Rakhal had been five years old. The memory was there, sharp and painful, but buried deep beneath years of silence. Crystallised. Inaccessible.
No emotion now.
Just fact.
The king had raised them both to fight, to bleed for the clan, to embody strength. And when Rakhal's aptitude for magic had surfaced, raw and undeniable, his fate had been sealed.
He had been sent into the forest, away from the stronghold, away from comfort. To train with the shamans. To learn theshadows' voice. To let them crawl into his blood and bind themselves to him.
From the age of eight until manhood, he had lived in the forest.
Among the animals and the ancient trees, in silence broken only by wind and water, he had walked paths that no soldier ever would. There, in the hidden clearings and beneath the watchful eyes of stone-faced idols, he had been raised by the shamans—those reclusive and mysterious figures who rarely returned to the stronghold, who lived apart from the clan as guardians of older, darker knowledge.
He remembered his first night there. The sky above unfamiliar, the trees pressing close, the strange sounds of the forest reaching through the darkness. He'd been left alone in a small hut, door open to the night, no fire to warm him. "Listen," Azfar had commanded before leaving. "Listen to what speaks from the shadows."
He had heard them that night. Whispers like dry leaves rustling, like water over stone. They had called to him, reached for him with tendrils of darkness. By morning, his hair had turned white at the temples—a mark that faded as he grew but remained visible in certain lights. The shamans had nodded in approval when they saw it. "The shadows have touched you," Azfar had said. "Now you must learn to touch them back."
His mentor, Azfar, was one of the greatest living shamans. It was Azfar who had taught him everything he knew of the anakara. The old shaman still dwelled in the forest, rarely visiting the stronghold, communing with the shadows in ways even Rakhal could not fully comprehend. Rakhal sometimes wondered what Azfar would think of him now, of the choices he was making, of the shadows' growing influence. The thought both comforted and unsettled him.
"You have grown powerful, Rakhal. You will be a weapon for the clan. But listen well—never let the shadows consume you. Never let them control you. The anakara gives, but it also takes. Every time you draw it forth, it drinks your strength. Use it too long, push too far, and the shadows will pull you into themselves. They will hollow you from within, until nothing remains but a vessel for their hunger."
The shadow magic had rules, boundaries that even the most gifted could not break without consequences. It could not create, only transform. It could not heal, only harm. It fed on life—the user's own if no other was offered. And the more one drew from it, the stronger its hold became, until the whispers turned to screams, until madness claimed even the strongest mind.
At the time, the warning had seemed hollow, abstract. But now... now he understood.
The shadows wantedeverything. And every battle, every kill, every drop of blood only sharpened their hunger.
When he had returned from the forest as a man, his place in the stronghold had already shifted. Kardoc commanded warriors, lauded for his brutality. His father had aged, his hair silvering, his voice rasping with wear.
And Rakhal?—
Rakhal had been something different.
He had not been raised in the stronghold's halls, nor tempered by the same bonds as the others. He was a son of the king, yes, but also an outsider. An exile in his own home, carrying the forest and its shadows within him, apart even from his kin.
Now, he had made his choice.
On the bed before him, his father stirred. The warrior in him must have sensed the presence at last—the shift of air, the weight of intent—because his eyes fluttered beneath their lids.
Rakhal released the shadows.
