Chapter 1 - Draven

I woke up coughing on dust and blood, my body trapped between the slant of a fallen support beam and a wall of stone. The safehouse groaned and splintered around me, slow crumbling death of a thing that had been built to last, stone scraping against stone as wards faltered and snapped in succession. Interregnum construction wasn’t designed to survive unsupervised. Everything they built was predicated on obedience. Predicated on control. 

They did not account for me. 

My ribs groaned as I pulled my body free. At least three of them were cracked. I had a good chance that one was punctured, given the wet pull in my chest every time I breathed. Blood had soaked through the shirt and the lining of my coat, slick and warm despite the cold sinking into the bones of the mountain. Ronan Draxmere had done that. His claws. His teeth. The feral snarl of a Bloodpine wolf was finally allowed to kill me. 

I had earned some of it. I knew that. I had baited the dragon. I had attacked her and the wizard who stood by her side as if he thought he could rewrite history just by being near her. I had underestimated them. Worse, I had underestimated Ronan. 

That cost me more than flesh. 

I forced myself to my feet, using the broken wall as a brace as the safehouse groaned its final protestations. A lesser man would have passed out. A normal man would have bled out. I had been designed for worse than this. I had always been. 

Instinctively, I reached inward, feeling for the familiar weight that had been embedded in me as long as I could remember. The voice. The leash. The constant of my handler, the whisper of data streaming across every nerve in my body, prompting and chastising and guiding me. 

Nothing. 

The silence was disorienting. Loud. I reached again, this time digging deeper, forcing the internal gates to open, opening the channels that had never failed me before. I felt the system boot, cracked and sluggish, but the magical tether that lashed my handler’s consciousness to my mind was gone. Not muted. Not suppressed. 

Severed. 

A choked, involuntary sound ripped out of me. Part laugh. Part scream. I covered my chest with a hand, fingers pressing into torn fabric and burned flesh as I tried to steady myself while the reality of it sank like poison in my veins. 

They had let me go. 

There had been someone there for longer than I could count. A hundred years, at least. Sometimes soft. Sometimes harsh. Sometimes quiet for days, months, years, but always present. Words whispered into the marrow of my bones. Guidance layered on instinct. Pain as punctuation when I wavered or strayed. I had never been permitted the luxury of asking myself what I wanted. Want was a privilege, not a given, when you were built, not born. 

Now there was no one. 

The safehouse shuddered, massive plates of stone buckling under the strain of gravity. The movement forced me to my feet, or I would have died here, entombed in Interregnum stone. I staggered along the corridor, boots skidding on blood and dust, vision starting to pool at the edges. Emergency sigils flared overhead, stuttering like the heartbeat of a failing star. With every step, the pain tore through my body, but the sensation kept me. Reminded me I was still alive. 

Abandoned, but alive. 

Near the exit, I found a cracked mirror and saw my reflection as I passed. Blood crusted my jaw. One eye was swelling shut. Scarred fractures pulsed with pale fire beneath my skin where magic had been strained too hard, too fast. I barely recognized the man I saw. 

Good. 

The world had changed while I bled. The Interregnum had decided I was no longer worth taming. A failed weapon. A liability. A loose end. 

For the first time since I had been created, there was no voice in my head to tell me what to do next. 

The knowledge sent a deeper, more primal terror through me than Ronan’s claws had. 

I dragged my aching body out into the cold night as the safehouse imploded around me, stone folding in on itself like a grave closing. Snow crackled against bare embers. The mountain consumed the sound. 

I was hurt. I was hunted. I was alone. 

And for the first time in my life, every choice that followed was mine. 

I didn’t go far. 

Snow was good cover. It was on top of the ground, muffling the sound of boots on hardwood. It didn’t help with the heat radiating out of me, though, or the shudder rippling through my skin as my magic jittered and sparked. Whatever Nora’s flames and Elias’s rune detonations had done to me, it didn’t just hurt my muscles and break my bones. It had torn into the weave of who I was, fraying strands the Interregnum had carefully wrapped around me over time. 

I went down under an angled pine beside a frozen creek, fumbling with my coat. I needed to get to the lining. Under a tucked-in leather flap no one was ever meant to open without orders, there were two vials sealed with obsidian wax and an emergency sigil slate with nine contingency runes etched onto the stone surface. 

I had never used them. 

They were for containment teams. For handlers. For people who might have to go after me, if I went off-mission and lived. 

Well, I was off-mission. I was off-grid. And I was fugitive, most likely. 

I jerked the first vial free and ripped the seal with my teeth. It was thicker than I expected. Metallic, a little, and laced with a cocktail of regenerative enhancers and stabilizers I didn’t know. It burned the back of my throat. I tasted fire and rust and swallowed it down. 

Vision fuzzed as it coursed through my system. 

It was not a healing salve. Not exactly, anyway. It simply slowed the decay, mitigated the internal feedback echoing behind my eyes and in my spine like a drumbeat attempting to crack my skull. 

I went for the sigil slate next, thumb pressing to the surface. It registered me after two attempts—the rune interface was degrading, likely due to the spell overload I’d received after Elias snapped that collapsing glyph array on me. It lit up, several sigils flickering in dark red, warning patterns scrolling before going active. 

Heat raced down my spine as the runes sown into my back responded. I clenched my teeth, biting hard into the leather loop I kept knotted on my wrist. The pain exploded through me, searing. Ancient circuitry buzzed and flared, initializing the contingency spells sown beneath scar and specially keyed to suppress critical failure. 

This was not meant for me to use. 

This was a set of safety protocols designed to keep me alive long enough for someone else to leash me back up. A recovery contingency. Temporal control. Emergency suppressant. 

But now, no one was left to lead the charge. 

My body twitched, bones cracking in protest as the stabilizer attempted to force my systems back in line. Internal nodes flickered. Something in me, primal and old, snarled at the interference, fighting the forced adjustment. Blood ran hot for a moment before going cold. 

I lay heaving in the snow, gazing through clawed branches at a crack of sky, steam wafting off my chest as the heat wave dissipated. 

I was still dying, in a way. It was still leaking out through the damaged areas. 

But I was not dead. 

I raised myself, cradling the slate against my knee. One of the sigils was still lit. Faint, stuttering, but not deactivated. It was not for healing. It was not for concealment. It was a tracking blocker, a last-ditch contingency to prevent Interregnum assets from pinpointing a rogue construct. 

I pushed it. Didn’t hesitate. 

The rune buzzed and popped. The mark beneath my collarbone, the one they used to track me, call me, control me, shift me if need be, flared hot then seared cold. Wasn’t there. Gone. 

Voice was gone. 

I collapsed back into the snow, leaned back against the tree to let the chill seep deep. My systems were damaged. Magic was spiking erratically. Control points were fragmented. 

But now, no one would find me. 

I was no longer a mission. I was no longer a tool. I was no longer theirs. 

And if I were going to survive whatever came next, I would have to become something I was never meant to be. Someone who made his own fucking choices. 

By nightfall, I had made it to the drop point. 

It wasn’t much, just the rusted remains of a boundary marker from an old Aetherwind ward line, buried deep in the northern foothills where magic ran thin and wild. The wind here carried whispers from long-dead rituals, and the trees grew wrong, bending away from the ruins like they remembered what bled here last. 

This place wasn’t on any map. Only two people knew the coordinates. Myself and the contact who was supposed to meet me here with extraction supplies, false credentials, and the next assignment. 

I waited for two hours. 

Every minute stretched, heartbeat by freezing heartbeat. I knew better than to expect warmth or conversation, but the Interregnum ran on efficiency, not sentiment. Even if they wanted me gone, they wouldn’t leave a tool like me unaccounted for. 

Until they did. 

The courier came at midnight. 

He was young. Human. His breath fogged in the cold, and his boots didn’t crunch when he walked, silencing runes threaded into the soles, standard issue for low-tier runners. He didn’t make eye contact. Just held out a sealed parchment and waited. 

I didn’t speak. Neither did he. 

I broke the seal. 

Only five words were scrawled across the page in hurried, impersonal ink. 

You’re compromised. Burn the identity. 

Below it, smaller: 

If you resurface, you’re a liability. 

No name. No insignia. No sigil key for communication. Just the final nail in a coffin they’d already buried me in. 

The courier waited, silent and stone-faced. I didn’t bother asking who sent him. I already knew. 

I gave a single nod, and he vanished into the trees as if he had never existed. 

I stood alone, holding the parchment until the ink blurred from the blood on my fingers. The message was clear. No rescue. No redirection. No purpose. 

Just silence. 

I’d been erased. 

I burned the parchment in the crook of my palm until the edges curled and blackened, and the ash blew away in the wind. It was little comfort. Skin had grown numb in this palm, already. Already had burn marks from magic that never should’ve touched me. I should’ve walked to the woods and vanished. Let the wilds do to me what they would. Let time do what the Interregnum had started by calling me a failed experiment. 

But I didn’t. 

I just stood in the dark with firelight sputtering low, and listened to silence where a handler’s voice had been. It was not peaceful. Not at all. It was filled with questions. Not about orders. About origin. About motive. About who, besides me, had known I was never meant to walk away from that fight alive. 

I hadn’t just been abandoned. 

I had been set up. 

Someone had pulled the strings the wrong way on purpose. Pulled them too tight. The operation. The pieces. How they fit together had been impossible. Meant for failure. Meant for me. They never expected Ronan to leave me the way he did. Never expected me to leave at all. 

That was what stuck. 

What I could not let go of. 

I started walking before I even realized I was going. South. Toward the valley. Toward the place where it all fell apart last spring. Obscura Arcanum. 

Not for vengeance. Not yet. 

But for answers. 

Buried there, under the wards and the whispers and the bloodstained stone, was the only place left that might give me the truth. About what I was. About who made me this way. About why someone in the Interregnum had decided I was worth sacrificing after a hundred years of obedience. 

I didn’t want redemption. 

I wanted clarity. 

And if I found the one who wrote my fate, they would bleed for it.