Chapter 12: The Black Ember

Tell me exactly how it feels, Maltherion had said, and Kael had not answered right away. He sat in the middle of the empty yard under the stars, watching the black point of light in his core, and tried to decide how much the question was worth.

“Cold,” he said at last. “It is not warm like the books say. It feels like pressing a coin against my skin on a winter morning. And when I send it toward my arm, it wants to keep going instead of staying where I put it.”

The silence that followed was long enough for the wind to cross the whole yard.

That is normal, said Maltherion. First embers are often cold. Nothing to worry about.

It was said smoothly and a little too fast, the same way he had said it is nothing about the wrist. Kael did not argue. He only nodded to the dark and added the answer to the list of things that did not fit.

“You asked me how it felt as if you were afraid,” he said.

I asked as a teacher.

“You asked as a man who has seen this color before.”

Hm. The voice cooled. You are tired, and tired people see patterns. Sleep, Kael.

Kael did not sleep. He sat there until the sky turned gray, waiting for the ember to do something dramatic. It did not. It burned at the same slow pace, like a coal in a stove no one had bothered to feed.

You can stop staring at it, Maltherion said as the first light reached the wall. It will not grow faster because you are impatient.

“I am checking that it is still there.”

It has been there for six hours. Embers do not wander off at night.

“This one is black. I think I am allowed to be suspicious.”

You are allowed to be suspicious of everything. It is one of your better qualities. The voice paused, and when it went on, it sounded like a man choosing which part of a truth to hand over. Since you insist on a name, here is what I will give you. What you have formed is the beginning of a demonic foundation.

“A demonic foundation,” Kael repeated. “So I have just become a demon.”

Do not be dramatic. You are a boy in a ruined yard with a sore stomach. A demonic foundation is a path, not a species.

“That is a very comforting difference.”

It is also true. A righteous cultivator builds a gentle foundation and spends decades tempering it. A demonic cultivator builds a hungry one and spends decades keeping it from eating the person who owns it. Yours reacts to emotion. You saw a small piece of that yesterday.

Kael thought of the goat, the shout, and the cold flash in his stomach. “I was angry. I thought that was only me.”