Chapter 19 19- Kael
RANDOM FACTS: Kael speaks elvish when he feels overwhelmed. On a normal occurrence, he cannot.
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My real name is not Kael Veyne.
It is something older. More ancient. But I refused to use it because my Father had been the one to name me.
An elvish name.
Maedhrim.
Meaning He who grasps through blood. A person whose touch was only there to cause chaos and violence.
I was two years old when I found out what the name meant. That he did not believe I could do good or be good. He made it clear from the beginning that I was never to speak to anyone else or make myself visible to the other people around.
I was to stay in the caves, waiting for whenever he would come to feed me or teach me about the world outside.
I was three when he introduced me to the woman someone would have called my Mother but she was not that. A mother. Or a woman.
She was something that Thaelon, my Father, had created with magick that he was never supposed to have access to.
A Lycaon. A human woman who had lost all her humanity and was now a feral creature with only a desire to hunt and kill. She was all fur and large, growls and fangs bearing at us the second we were close enough.
He made me understand that I was what she was supposed to be. A more perfect form. Better. Stronger.
He warned me never to go meet her.
I did not listen.
When he was gone for long periods, I would go meet her. Naturally, she never knew who I was and acted as if she was only minutes away from ripping me limb from limb.
But I never stopped visiting her.
Thaelon punished me for every time that he caught me. Digging a nail into my skin with molten lava that he had kept just for me, making the runes that would stay burning on my skin for days on end.
And they were the worst part of the punishment.
Not the pain itself, though that was bad enough.
Molten lava applied to skin had a way of making the world narrow down to nothing but white-hot agony. But pain faded. Eventually. After days of screaming into the dark, of clawing at stone walls until my fingers bled, the pain would recede to a dull, constant thrum.
But the runes remained.
They were Thaelon's signature. His mark.
Every time I disobeyed, he would carve a new one into my skin with that lava, and it would heal into a permanent black mark.
By the time I was seven, I could not take off my shirt without seeing the constellation of my failures.
I asked him once what they meant. The symbols. He had been in one of his better moods, drinking wine from a glass, reading through old texts by candlelight.
"They are reminders," He said, not looking up.
"Of what?"
He had set down his glass then. Looked at me with those green eyes that were mine but older. Colder. "Of what happens when you forget your purpose."
"I do not know what my purpose is."
"Yes, you do." He had returned to his reading. Conversation over.
I was ten when I finally gave the Lycaon a name.
It had taken years of visits for her to stop lunging at the cage the moment I appeared. Years of sitting on the cold stone floor of her cave, speaking softly while she paced and snarled and snapped her jaws at the air between us. Years of bringing her pieces of meat I had hunted, tossing them across the boundary line and watching her devour them like she had never been fed at all.
Which she probably hadn't. Not regularly. Not by him.
I called her Vena.
It was not an elvish name. It was not anything, really. Just a sound that came out of my mouth one day while I watched her sleep.
The first time I had ever seen her truly still. In sleep, the ferocity left her face. The fur seemed softer. She looked almost like the drawings I had seen in Thaelon's books of human women. Serene.
I started leaving her better things after that. Not just meat, but blankets stolen from my own bed.
Small carvings I made from wood I gathered during my rare trips to the surface. Once, a flower. She had sniffed at it, sneezed, and then ignored it completely. But she hadn't eaten it. That felt like progress.
Thaelon caught me leaving her cave three months after I named her. And this time, he seemed to have had enough of my mischief.
He did not use the lava this time.
He used his hands.
I remember the surprise of it more than the pain. That he would lower himself to something so primitive. So physical.
He was an elf lord, a master of magicks both sanctioned and forbidden. And yet there he was, digging his knife repeatedly into her chest, his voice sharp and loud, “She is a failure. An experiment that should have been destroyed decades ago. But I kept her. Do you know why?”
I did not. Could not.
“Because she is useful. As a reminder. Of what happens to imperfect things.” Blood stained his shirt as he rose from the floor, panting loudly as he moved his hand to her body. “You were so worried about your ‘mother’. Tell me, boy. Did she ever once try to protect you? Did she ever once look at you with anything but hunger in her eyes?”
Vena looked like she still bore some life as her yellow eyes fell on me, her chest rising and falling like it hurt her.
No. She had never protected me. She had never done anything but snarl and pace and wait for me to slip.
But she had also never left.
“No,” Thaelon said, answering for me. “She did not. Because she cannot. Because she is nothing but hunger and fur and the ghost of a woman I killed to create her. That is what awaits you, if you fail. That is what you were made to surpass.”
I waited for the inevitable feeling of emotions that any normal person would feel in regards to this but instead, all I did was watch as the light left her eyes, realizing with shock that I did not… seem to care.
I know what emotion is even if the man called Father did not teach me. I saw how the children of the animals I hunted acted. How they whined and tried to attack me. The pain in their faces.
The emotions I did not… have.
Thaelon’s hands found my face, the smell of blood eroding my senses as he cradled my cheeks, his voice rough. “Remember the prophecy, Maedhrim. The death that comes for our people. You must avert it. All these… emotions are beneath you. You are not like us. You are stronger. A better species.”
Thaelon must have seen it in my eyes. The emptiness. Because for just a moment— a fraction of a heartbeat— something flickered across his face.
Surprise.
Then it was gone, replaced by that cold satisfaction I knew so well.
He released my face, stepped back, surveyed me like a craftsman admiring his work. “You will not love, Maedhrim. You will not grieve. You will not be crippled by the weaknesses that destroy lesser beings. You will be what we need.”
It was only a month after this that the people of our village tried to murder Thaelon for taking forbidden magick and with his last breath, he had asked, with a kindness he had only shown me at the moment, to kill him finally myself.
I had not cared for him, but I felt indebted to him so I did as I was told.
That was the day the Hunger awoke.
That was the day that I, Maedhrim, brought the prophecy to life— that the great evil Thaelon had wished to fight all along that would end the race of all elves as he so feared…
Was me.
And it was only a day after that I met Eryndra and she called me Aranel.