Elara tapped her hand against her leg as she walked with two other Luminaires through the market square.
After going to Valthorne and reporting what she knew about Kael, she had been offered a position among their hired Luminaires. They had recently been notified of violent trembling beneath the ground and were now tasked with investigating it. A fitting job for someone cultivating an information pathway.
After an hour of asking around and turning up nothing, the three sat down on a bench.
"What do you think, Elara?"
She turned toward Javen with a thoughtful expression, hesitating. He was kind to her, but she respected him too. He was a full rank above her at rank two, which made him a superior in every practical sense.
She glanced at the woman beside her.
Molly was just as kind, and while she was the same rank as Elara, she commanded respect of a different kind. Nearly ten years more experience, well into her mid thirties. That counted for something.
Elara sighed and shrugged. "I feel like everything could be a decoy these days." Javen nodded slowly.
"I mean..." she hesitated. "We haven't checked the black market."
Molly gave her a firm nudge.
"Don't."
Elara went quiet.
In truth all three of them knew the trembling had most likely come from the black market. But they had quietly agreed not to go there. They were official Valthorne Luminaires, and showing up on official business in a place that was supposed to operate beyond their reach would only make things worse. People were already unhappy with them. The last thing they needed was to be seen interfering with the one thing the public still believed they had no control over.
Javen rose to his feet.
"I agree with Elara though. We can't ignore a potential threat because it might hurt someone's feelings. I'm going. You two can do whatever you want."
Molly crossed her arms. "Go ahead. But I'm not willing to risk turning friendly Luminaires against Valthorne over this."
Elara's eyes moved between them. She had to make a choice.
She stood up.
"I'll come with you. My pathway might be useful."
Molly said nothing. She just rolled her eyes and watched as the two disappeared around the corner.
The air inside the church was still, dust drifting lazily through the dim light. Wood splinters lay scattered across the floor where benches used to be.
"What happened here?" Javen asked, kicking a piece of wood aside.
Elara let her fingers trail along the wall as they ventured deeper.
"Someone rank three has been here." she murmured.
Javen looked at her. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Information pathway motes weren't as uncommon as refinement, but they were exceedingly rare in their own right. When she joined Valthorne they hadn't been shy about equipping her.
"Is that normal?" she continued.
"No." Javen's voice was measured. "There are only a handful of rank three Luminaires across Velthoria and Farkath combined. The ingredients and motes they require rarely surface in a black market of this quality."
The further they went the quieter he became, and the sense that something was deeply wrong grew with every step.
Elara was the first to reach the far end of the church. She turned, and immediately doubled over and vomited.
Javen closed the distance quickly and placed a hand on her shoulder.
"What's wron—"
His eyes found the pile of bodies before he could finish.
His hands began to shake.
How was this possible? More than a dozen Luminaires, each killed with a single strike to the throat, stacked neatly as though someone had tidied up after themselves.
He turned to Elara, who had managed to straighten herself.
"How many people caused this?" Javen asked.
Elara wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
"One."
The breath left Javen slowly. Something he hadn't felt in a long time settled over him. Fear.
"It must be the rank three." He whispered.
It was a terrifying thing to sit with. After reaching rank two he had been considered one of the gifted, one of the elites of Velthoria. And with so few rank threes in existence they had always seemed more myth than reality. You heard about them, read about them and collected stories about them. But that was all they ever were. Words.
Now the aftermath of one stood in front of him, and it was too real.
The room suddenly felt smaller. What if the rank three was still here? What would he do? Could he even run fast enough to matter?
"Elara." He kept his voice low. "Can your mote show you what happened?"
He knew her motes and she knew his. It was a necessary exchange, the kind that kept a group functioning at its best.
"Probably." She turned and walked toward the pile.
Her mote performed well above its rank one. The mechanic was simple enough. If something had happened recently, she could place her hand on an object or creature and receive brief flashes of its final moments. These flashes were typically faint and blurry, rarely containing anything useful on their own. But with so many corpses killed by the same Luminaire, the images would likely bleed together into something closer to a sequence, clear enough to be worth something.
Javen nodded and moved toward the stairs.
"I'll take a look at the black market while you do that."
His sensory motes were mediocre at best, but sufficient to navigate the dark. He started down, and his foot slipped on a broken step, landing squarely on something hard. His ankle twisted.
He cursed under his breath, looked down, and frowned at the arrow before continuing.
The market looked like nothing more than a scrapyard, bodies scattered here and there amongst the wreckage.
The deeper he went the faster his heart beat. When he finally reached the far end and laid eyes on what remained of the bodies, stripped of everything they had once been, he turned and ran. He had seen enough.
Back in the church, Elara moved from body to body, and flash after flash sparked through her mind. With each one her breathing grew a little shallower.
She watched as Luminaire after Luminaire collapsed beneath the knife of a blindfolded young man. Snow white hair, painted crimson by the blood. He moved through them without urgency, without expression, as though the slaughter happening around him was simply weather.
The more she watched the more her mind raced.
He hadn't used a single mote. Not one.
A tear ran down her cheek.
Why did so many people have to die? What had any of them done to deserve this? It hurt to watch them so helpless against something so far beyond them. It reminded her of people she had lost before, in a different place, a different time.
But before her mind could go further she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Javen stood behind her, cold sweat on his forehead.
"Please tell me you found something."
Elara nodded. "Young man, around my age. Blindfolded. One arm."
"Motes?" Javen cut in.
"I couldn't tell. He never used any. He killed them all with a simple kni—"
Her entire body went still.
A black knife.
Where had she seen that before?
The dots connected one by one, and then all at once.
She folded forward onto all fours, breathing in short uneven bursts. The edges of her vision began to close in.
"It's Kael." She whispered. "It's Kael."
"What?" Javen crouched down beside her.
"It's Kael. The man who killed everyone here is Kael."
Javen took an unconscious step back.
"Sinclaire? Kael Sinclaire? The Luminaire hired from Eireindaile?"
Elara didn't respond. Her words came in fragments, barely coherent.
"How has he become rank three. How has he gotten that strong. No…. NO! Why is he still alive. Why does he look so different."
"Elara!" Javen's voice cut through but she didn't hear it.
Then without warning she pushed herself upright and grabbed his coat with both hands.
"We have to go. Right now. Vael needs to know about this." Her eyes were wide and fixed. "He's become unrecognisable. Vael needs to know now."
She didn't wait for an answer. She released him and stormed toward the exit. Javen followed without a word.
—
Syleena's hand was almost through the wall when she paused and glanced back over her shoulder.
Kael lay motionless on the hardwood floor, back against the wall. Dried blood had soaked into every layer of his clothing, turning each piece a shade darker than it should have been. The bandages she had wrapped around his hand earlier were still neat, and undisturbed.
Her gaze darkened.
Should she kill him? She would never get a chance like this again. She was certain of that.
"No." she murmured, and stepped through the wall.
He was a threat, yes. But not a greater one than the two noble families already coming for her neck. The value of killing him didn't outweigh what he was worth alive.
He probably knew that too. Which was likely why he had come to her in such a sorry state to begin with.
Syleena hated it. Hated him. No matter what she said or did, Kael always left her with the feeling that he had already accounted for it. That whatever move she made, whatever she chose, he had been there first. Whenever he was around she felt pulled by invisible threads, her direction changed without her consent. And he wasn't even from the mind pathway. He didn't need to be. He had a way of making himself the hand that moved everything while appearing to be nothing more than another piece on the board. Always pretending to be the pawn, when in reality he was the one controlling the king.
The sky was clear and the streets surprisingly lively, all things considered. More Luminaires than usual moved through the crowds. Syleena paid them no mind and continued on her way.
She passed through the market square.
Valthorne members were on the stage again, cycling through the endless list of missions available for anyone looking to make a living. The square was packed, shoulders brushing, bodies pressing close. And yet not one person seemed to register her. It was as though contact with her simply failed to leave an impression.
Syleena lifted a few mindstones from oblivious passersby as she moved through, pocketing them without breaking stride.
This was the power of the mind pathway. Or more precisely, the power of Syleena's mind pathway.
Like Kael, she had awakened as a Luminaire with two soul-bound motes. Extraordinarily rare, and the reason she had refused to abandon the mind pathway for blade, regardless of what her family wanted.
What she had been given was too valuable to trade away.
The mote that had surprised her most was one she had never read about in all her years of study. Not a passive in the traditional sense, where a single activation left a permanent mark. Something else entirely.
Her passive soul-bound mote worked without cost, effort, or conscious thought. It simply ran. And what it did, in its quiet and constant way, was make her invisible. Not literally. Not in any way she could fully explain even to herself. But in a stranger, more complete sense than transparency could ever achieve.
Wherever she went, the mote reached outward and nudged the attention of everyone around her gently aside. If she walked past a person admiring a painting their eyes would start drifting toward the ceiling, or the floor, or a bird at the far end of the street. Someone in conversation would briefly lose the thread of what they were saying. The awareness simply slid away from her authentically, as though noticing Syleena required an effort no one could quite be bothered to make.
It was also why pickpocketing Luminaires in a crowded market required almost no effort at all. They strained themselves quite literally, without knowing it, to look anywhere but at her hands.
Deactivating it was the only time it demanded Thoughts. This had both its advantages and its drawbacks. On one hand it functioned as a constant defence, protecting her even in her sleep. On the other, any situation requiring her to interact naturally with mortals or lower ranked Luminaires meant cycling it off repeatedly, bleeding Thoughts in a steady drain.
It was also one of the reasons her family had been so opposed to her taking the position of family head. A pathway built around invisibility was no foundation for the kind of relationships noble families depended on.
But even accounting for all of that, she had no regrets. If this path meant walking alone, then alone was how she would walk it.
And the ability to move through the world unseen by almost everyone was too compelling to surrender.
'Almost...'
The thought carried a bitter edge.
Since advancing to rank three, not a single Luminaire she had encountered had been able to sense her without her deactivating the mote herself. Not one, with a single exception.
Kael.
She bit her lower lip.
Of every Luminaire she had crossed paths with, why was he the only one her mote seemed to have no effect on? He was sharp, she knew that. At their very first meeting he had noticed her attempting to influence his thoughts and grabbed her by the throat before she could finish. She had written that off at the time, put it down to her own inexperience. But that excuse had long since expired. No matter where she was, no matter the distance, he always seemed to know exactly where she stood.
She had first noticed it properly when he stumbled onto her and Adam by mistake. He had glanced straight at her the moment she approached, blindfold and all.
For someone to pierce her mote they would need a sensory mote at the absolute peak of rank three, or something higher. The idea of Kael possessing something that rare while stranded in Velthoria was laughable. His odds of taking Vael in a straight fight were better than those.
And a higher ranked mote was equally impossible. It wasn't simply a matter of activating one. He would first need to sense her in order to know to activate it at all, and he could never sense her without one already running. The logic collapsed on itself.
It was as though his senses were permanently dialled to a register no one else could reach. A constant, effortless awareness of everything around him, blindfold included.
And so even beneath the wariness, beneath the frustration, there was something else she couldn't entirely ignore. A quiet, reluctant thread of awe.
She forced the thought away and made her way to the mortal district.
Ten minutes later she reached a building that had no right to still be standing.
Inside, mortals filled every corner. Some frozen, some clinging to whatever remained of their warmth, all of them homeless. She stepped over a few and made her way to the furthest end, where a man with a golden beard sat wrapped in a blanket against the wall.
Syleena crouched in front of him and deactivated the Aether mote, letting herself become known.
Adam's gaze found her instantly. He pressed himself back against the wall.
"Syleena." His voice came out as a rasp.
"Have you done what I asked." Her tone left no room for anything else.
"Yes. Yes I have." A bead of sweat ran down his throat.
"Good. Then use the Pale Ones to kill as many mortals in this district as you can." She pulled the gloves from her hands as she said it.
"They're innocent mortals Syleena." The protest was weak before it even left his mouth.
Syleena raised a finger and flicked his forehead.
The moment she made contact something in him settled. The tension left his shoulders. His expression evened out, became calm, almost confident. He rose to his feet and brushed down his coat.
"I'll get to it, Miss Syleena." He walked out without looking back.
Syleena slid her gloves back on and followed shortly after.
This was her second soul-bound mote. Thoughtweaver.
In many ways its reach exceeded even the Aether mote, despite carrying no real combat strength. What it lacked in force it made up for in scope. Using it, Syleena could reach into a person's thoughts and tilt them, nudging opinion, smoothing suspicion, planting the seed of an idea and leaving it to grow on its own.
It was the same mote she had attempted to use on Kael at their first meeting.
At rank one she had used it subtly, shaping perception rather than commanding it. Softening a rumour here, sharpening a grievance there. The Luminaires of Velthoria hadn't simply reacted to Kael's first assassination out of instinct. She had helped that reaction along, and once it had taken root it had grown on its own, becoming something genuine. Real hatred, earned through careful and invisible tending.
At rank three the mote had grown with her. Now, given a target weak enough or undefended enough against the mind pathway, she could bypass suggestion entirely and simply rewrite.
This was the true reason Eireindaile wanted her gone. Not only the invisibility or the politics. A mote that could silently reshape a person's loyalties made every alliance fragile and every relationship a question mark. There was no future for a family built on trust if its heir could unmake trust with a touch.