Kael watched Thorne with new eyes. In the past timeline, this awkward stable boy had died during the bread riots—stabbed for a crust and left to rot in the gutters of Aramore. His name had faded from Kael's memory before the crows had finished picking at his corpse. Now, here he was, alive again, scrawny and angry at the world.
It was perfect.
Not because Thorne was powerful. Not because he was smart. But because he burned. And Kael needed fire.
"Why burn it down, Thorne?" Kael asked, crouching beside the boy outside the stables. The sun dipped low behind them, throwing shadows long and thin like knives across the grass. Kael's fingers absentmindedly traced the handle of his worn shovel—a crude prop for a clever lie.
Thorne hesitated, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "'Cause it's rigged. My mum died last winter. No healer would come 'cause we didn't have enough coin. The baron's sons ride past our house in golden carriages while we eat boiled bark. It ain't fair."
Kael nodded slowly, letting the silence stretch. The weight of injustice was not foreign to him—just irrelevant. Fairness was a lie sold to peasants to keep them quiet.
"Fairness is for the dead," he said at last. "But vengeance? That's for us."
Thorne blinked. "Vengeance?"
Kael smiled, slow and crooked. "We don't need to burn it down yet. First, we salt the earth."
And just like that, he had his first pawn.
Thorne thought he'd found a friend.
Kael had found a fuse.
The next weeks passed in calculated silence. Kael resumed his duties in the stables, feigning humility, enduring kicks from horses and insults from nobles with the same faint, infuriating smile.
Behind the smile, plans nested like vipers.
He remembered this place—the Castle Aramore Training Grounds—so well. In the old timeline, he had spent years clawing up the ranks only to be betrayed. Now he had a head start and a score to settle.
Kael used the hours mucking stalls to watch. To listen. The guardsmen laughed at crude jokes. The maids gossiped. The knights boasted.
It was all valuable.
"You never look tired," Thorne said one evening. "Even after hauling hay all day."
"I'm always tired," Kael replied without missing a beat. "But I've learned how to make tired look like thinking."
"Thinking of what?"
"Storms," Kael said. "The ones that start small."
He began testing Thorne's loyalty in quiet, harmless ways. A stolen apple here. A misleading message there. Thorne obeyed with wide-eyed excitement, still unaware that he had become an accomplice to a ghost's vendetta.
Kael spent nights mapping the castle in secret, remembering where hidden passages lay, where guards changed shifts, which stewards took bribes. He spoke to no one of importance but learned their routines. People forget servants, but Kael noticed everything.
On the third week, he made his first move.
There was a merchant caravan in the lower courtyard, unloading goods for the Winter Feast. Kael knew from memory that one of the crates contained refined sunpowder—dangerous in untrained hands.
He stole a single vial.
Then he set it beneath the shoe of a pompous young knight-in-training named Barrek, who enjoyed whipping stable boys when no one looked. When Barrek mounted his horse the next morning, the resulting explosion threw him ten feet into the air and sent his stallion fleeing through the courtyard.
Barrek survived. Bruised. Humiliated.
But Kael had made his point.
Thorne looked at Kael that night with a strange mixture of fear and awe.
"Did you… was that you?"
Kael feigned innocence. "Was what me?"
"You're scary, Kael."
Kael looked at the stars. "Good."
But Kael needed more than chaos. He needed knowledge.
Deep in the cliffs east of Aramore lay the Chronomancer's Tower, hidden behind ancient illusion wards. In the past, Kael had found it too late. But now, with his timeline reset, he could claim its secrets early.
Under a cloudy night sky, Kael and Thorne left the castle through a hidden servant's exit. The path to the cliffs was treacherous, and Thorne complained with every step.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Thorne whispered, torchlight trembling in his hand.
Kael gave him a lopsided grin. "No. But it's my idea."
The tower was as he remembered—weathered stone, covered in ivy, guarded by illusions that shimmered like heat waves.
Inside, the air was thick with temporal magic. Gears hung suspended mid-turn. Clocks ticked backward. Candles burned with cold light.
Time itself hung heavy here.
In the tower's heart rested the Codex of Temporal Knots—a book bound in flesh and silver gears, its pages constantly rearranging.
He reached out. The glyphs recoiled, testing his will.
Kael bled a single drop of blood onto the cover.
"I broke the blade once," he growled. "I'll do it again."
The tower stilled. The Codex opened.
Behind him, Thorne gasped.
"What is that?"
Kael turned a page. "Hope."
And war.