Teaser

  Tonight, Kael takes flight.

  Tomorrow, he enters the mountain.

  But before dawn breaks, the world will ask him one question—

  And he must decide who he truly is.

  ...

  Two days after …

  The palace quieted behind them until it was only a memory of torchlight and murmurs.

  Stone gave way to grass, grass gave way to dew, and dew glittered on the lawn like a field of tiny stars that had fallen to rest. The hour rode close to midnight; the twin moons, Selara and Varon, sat high—one bright as a polished shield, the other milk-soft and misted—as if the sky wore two eyes that refused to blink.

  Elder Maerath walked without hurry, staff tapping a thoughtful rhythm.

  Kael matched his pace, feeling the ache of ceremony leave his shoulders with each step away from gold and politics.

  For the first time in days, he let his shoulders fall.

  No crowds. No drums. Just grass, wind, and sky.

  He had forgotten how quiet the world could be when it wasn’t watching.

  Night air moved through the trees beyond the palace walls and into the wide meadow by the river, carrying scents of damp earth and distant rain.

  Crickets stitched sound between moments. Somewhere, a hound barked and decided it was not worth the effort again.

  Maya warmed in the pendant against his chest, as if the Starbloom itself had caught a moonbeam.

  “Listen,” she whispered, delighted. “No shouting nobles. No clanking armor. It’s almost like the world took a bath.”

  Kael closed his eyes and breathed in.

  “I forgot it could feel like this,” he said. “Like the world isn’t angry all the time.”

  He remembered nights in the old orchard, before ash claimed his name—when the only thing that hunted him was sleep, and his father's voice was a roof that kept the world from falling in.

  Kael’s mouth quirked despite himself. “Master,” he said softly, “the Five Oaths… what are they?”

  Kael’s question lingered unanswered, folding itself into the night as they walked.

  A rustle broke the meadow’s hush.

  Kael turned.

  By the river’s edge, something black fluttered weakly in the reeds. A crow struggled there, one wing bent, feathers caked with mud.

  He crouched, hands steady. The bird struck once with its beak—more pride than threat—then sagged as exhaustion claimed it. Kael’s brows knit.

  He gently spread the injured wing, checking the joints beneath the feathers. “Not broken,” he murmured, “only strained.”

  He dipped the wing into the stream. Mud drifted away; the feathers darkened and gleamed again. When he set the bird down, it hopped once and, after a moment, placed one clawed foot upon his boot—steadying itself, as if claiming his shadow for safety.

  “Poor thing,” Maya whispered, soft for once. “It fell from the sky.”

  “Or the sky sent it,” Kael said quietly.

  Maerath’s glance flickered, brief as lightning on stone. “Some companions choose the road before the traveler does.”

  The crow tilted its head, watching him, and gave a soft croak—neither fear nor gratitude, just recognition.

  “It likes you,” Maya said, pleased. “Maybe it thinks you’re scruffy enough to be kin.”

  The bird didn’t blink. Its eyes were too steady, too knowing—as if it had seen him before, somewhere far from this riverbank.

  Kael smiled faintly. “Then it has taste.”

  The bird spread its cleaned wing, testing it, and fluttered up to perch on his shoulder before shifting again to the low branch above the path.

  When they moved on, it followed—gliding from tree to tree, always just within sight.

  “Duskrim,” Maya decided. “The color between day and night.”

  The name settled like a seal on water.

  Duskrim kept its distance, a dark stitch moving from branch to branch, as if it understood how to walk beside a road without entering it.

  Far above, the moons crossed paths, and for a heartbeat their twin lights met on the river, silver over silver, as if something unseen had nodded approval.

  Elder Maerath’s white brows lifted a fraction.

  “Five doors a man must open in himself before he is trusted with opening doors in the world.”

  Kael nodded slowly. “Then I’ll open them,” he said simply. “However many there are.”

  “That sounds like something a wise man says when he means to say nothing,” Maya informed him, very seriously.

  “Your companion is not wrong.” Maerath smiled without looking back. “Words spoken too soon steal the wonder that comes when understanding arrives on its own.”

  At those words, Duskrim gave a quiet caw—low, deliberate, as though in agreement.

  Kael glanced at the bird and almost laughed.

  Kael chewed on the thought. “Then at least tell me where we go.”

  “North,” Maerath said. “To Murath.”

  “The Mountains of Murath?” Kael breathed. He had seen their painted shapes in temple friezes, heard their names in songs about old kings and older storms. But pictures were coins compared to the weight of a mountain.

  “What waits there?”

  “Wind that has forgotten the names men give it,” Maerath said. “Stone that remembers. And a path that opens only for one who comes without a crown.”

  “So not for nobles,” Maya decided, pleased. “Finally, a door with taste.”

  They reached the river meadow: a sweep of dark grass broken by pale stones and the silver thread of water tugging moonlight along its back.

  The night seemed to listen.

  Elder Maerath stopped in the center of the field and lifted his free hand, as if greeting a friend from very far away and very long ago.

  The first sound was not sound at all but pressure—a hush that deepened until crickets forgot their song.

  Then came a long, falling note, thin as ice and clear as a bell ringing under water. It stitched itself to the sky and pulled something down.

  Wings.

  They came like a thunderhead made of silence—white on white, silver on silver—each feather wide as a fan, each pinion strong enough to lift a barn.

  The bird’s shadow drifted over the meadow before the bird itself arrived, and when it landed, the grass bowed as if to a royal procession. Talons like ivory scythes touched earth with surgeon’s caution; a beak of moonstone turned, very slightly, toward Maerath.

  On a far branch, Duskrim flattened its wings and watched, unafraid, as if the sky had sent kin to carry its chosen man.

  “Ah,” Maya breathed, awed in spite of herself. “Look at him. He’s beautiful. And big. If you fall, brother, you’ll land in the next season with a story.”

  Kael froze, breath caught in his chest.

  The size of it broke something in his understanding of the world—

  as if the sky had been lying about its limits until this moment.

  He had seen birds before—but nothing like this.

  This wasn’t a creature. This was the sky made alive.

  For a moment, he forgot pain, fear, everything. He just stared, wide-eyed, like a boy seeing the world for the first time.

  Maerath bowed, palm over his heart. “Thank you for coming, old friend,” he said. “We have a long flight and an early dawn.”

  The eagle kneeled. The subtle shift of its body lowered a back broad as a barge.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Twenty men might have ridden there with room to spare; for the two of them, it felt like a small island.

  Kael climbed carefully, his heart racing—not from fear, but from a wild, rising joy that had nowhere to go.

  One hand firm in the great neck feathers, the other pressed over the pendant where Maya hummed like a harp string.

  Duskrim fluttered down from the branch and, after a moment’s indecision, settled neatly upon Kael’s shoulder—head tucked, eyes bright as coins of thought.

  “Hold on,” Maya advised, voice bubbling. “Not too tight, or you’ll braid him.”

  Elder Maerath joined him with the ease of a man who had done this more than once. “Ready?”

  Kael nodded before the part of him that doubted such things could catch up long enough to say no.

  The eagle unfolded its wings, and the night changed shape.

  A push. A sweep.

  Grass fell away in a wave; the river leapt once and slipped back; the line of the palace trees flowed past like a dark parade bowing.

  Kael’s stomach tumbled, then steadied, and then there was only wind—and the feeling, impossible and clean, that gravity had briefly remembered it could be kind.

  The warmth under the great feathers surprised him—alive, steady, ancient.

  They climbed.

  Eryndor spread under them in slow revelation: farms turned to patchwork; farmhouses to candle-pricks; roads to faint scars stitched across the land.

  The river carried the moon along its curve, a silver blade that knew no blood.

  Clouds arranged themselves like slow, drifting islands.

  The twin moons wore softer faces from up here, less like coins and more like old guardians who had served long beyond their promised watch.

  Kael laughed.

  The sound slipped out of him before he could stop it—small, unguarded, real.

  He hadn’t heard that sound from himself in years.

  For a moment, he wasn’t a fighter or a survivor or a name the world was trying to break.

  He was just a boy in the sky, and the world was suddenly bigger than his fears.

  “There it is,” Maya said, thoroughly pleased. “A real laugh. I was starting to think the arena took them all and traded them for scowls.”

  “Do not mock scowls,” Maerath said dryly. “They are the currency of courts.”

  “See?” Maya whispered to Kael. “The old man has jokes. We’re going to be fine.”

  They flew for a long time in the company of their shadows, which floated like loyal hounds down across the sleeping fields.

  The eagle’s wingbeats settled into a measured thunder that Kael felt through his knees and spine. The air at this height had teeth. It bit at his cheeks, made his eyes water, then numbed them into wide clarity.

  He saw farther than he had ever seen; the night tasted like pine poured over metal, like stone that had learned to breathe. From treeline to treeline far below, a small dark stitch kept pace; Duskrim did not tire.

  “Master,” he said when he trusted his voice, “the Five Oaths. If they are doors… what rooms do they open?”

  Maerath’s beard lifted in the wind.

  “If you must steal a glimpse, then this: first, Balance with Nature, that you do not fight the river and call it heroism when you drown. Second, Courage for Life, that you do not love safety so much that you mistake it for goodness. Third, Purity of Soul, which is not a saint’s boast but a craftsman’s habit: you keep your tools clean because lives will turn on the edge of your work. Fourth, Clarity of Mind, for the world answers the questions you do not know you are asking. Fifth…”

  He paused.

  “Many take the first four,” Maerath said, voice dimming. “Almost none return from the fifth unchanged.”

  Kael listened quietly. He didn’t understand all of it—but for the first time, not understanding didn’t make him angry. It made him curious.

  “Yes?” Kael asked.

  “Yielding to Fate,” Maerath said at last, very quietly. “Not as surrender, but as intelligence: the hawk does not demand the wind go where he wills; he learns the wind and arrives earlier by not fighting.”

  Duskrim gave a short, approving cry that cut clean through the rush of air.

  Maya clicked her tongue. “So: don’t drown, be brave, wash your heart, think straight, and don’t become a stubborn hill-pigeon. Easy! Can we go home now?”

  “Three of those,” Maerath said, amused, “you already fail.”

  “Rude!”

  They flew on.

  — PRE-DAWN GLOW —

  Far ahead, where the sky curved into darkness, a faint line of rose and gold bled into the black.

  It was fragile at first, a shy promise on the world’s edge, as though the sun hesitated before lifting the veil of night.

  Shadows thinned in the valleys below as the first light reached them. Forests turned from black to deep green. Rivers caught the glow and wound like molten bronze through the waking land.

  Above, the twin moons drifted westward, their silver crowns dimming as though they, too, grew weary after ruling the night. Selara sank boldly toward the horizon; Varon lingered pale and reluctant, ready to rest beyond the mountains. The stars, so fierce an hour ago, gave up their stations one by one like watchmen relieved.

  Clouds along the east caught fire next, their edges glowing crimson, then orange, then white, until the whole sky seemed to burn in silence.

  The eagle rose on a thermal like a great lamp being lifted; Kael’s hair snapped, and his eyes stung, and he grinned through both. If fear still lived in him, it had turned its coat inside out and called itself awe.

  “Big show for you, brother,” Maya said, softer now. “The world doesn’t wake like this for just anyone.”

  “I’ve never…” Kael began, then let the rest go. There are times speech is a trespass.

  Something in him shifted—not broken, not healed, but opened, like a door he hadn’t known he carried.

  The line of color thickened into a band; the band widened into a breast; the breast of the east swelled until at last the first golden rim of the sun showed itself like a coin edged up from the horizon by an invisible hand.

  The world inhaled.

  Light leapt into being on the high places first: a kiss on a far ridge; a sudden brightening in a cloudbank; a spear of gold thrown across a river; a patch of frost that turned to a shout of white.

  And then, beyond the waking forests and the whispered rivers and the smallness of all human things, Kael saw them.

  The Mountains of Murath.

  At first, they were only a saw-toothed bruise on the pale horizon; then the sun touched their crowns, and the bruise burst into fire. Peaks stepped out of the sky, one behind the other, each taller than the last, until the horizon was a procession of titans crowned in snow.

  Behind them, more rose; behind those, more still; so many that the eye lost count and the mind, which prefers neat numbers for scary things, gave up politely and called it “all.”

  “Teeth,” Maya breathed, delighted and a little frightened. “The world grew teeth.”

  The eagle cut the distance like a needle through silk.

  As they approached, the subtle geometry of greatness revealed itself. What had been a wall became walls upon walls; what had been a line became ridges braided like ropes, valleys folded like the hands of giants at prayer.

  Black rock showed its ribs where snow had slipped; snow poured its long, cold dresses down the shoulders of the peaks and let them drag in ravines.

  Here and there, glaciers slumbered, old and blue in their deep creases, like thoughts a mountain had not finished thinking.

  The sun climbed. Gold deepened to amber; amber warmed to the sweeter color that lives only on high snow for a brief bell of morning; then even that paled as day found its full voice.

  Waterfalls stitched light from ledge to ledge. Eagles cried from somewhere higher than their own cry.

  The air sharpened again, carrying the clean bite of pine, ice, granite, and far-off rockfalls.

  They passed over a dark gorge whose sides were so sheer even the wind seemed to step back. A flock of smaller hawks took alarm at the white sovereign and scattered like sparks from a forge.

  For a frivolous instant, Kael imagined that if he reached down, his fingertips might comb the top of a cloud and come away wet.

  “Don’t lean,” Maya warned, practical at last. “I like drama, not splat.”

  “Hold,” Maerath said, and the eagle tipped its broad wings.

  They descended.

  The world came up to meet them: first the high country where scrub pines learned to bow, then a shelf of meadow bright with hardy flowers that had not yet admitted it was still cold, then the river—a brazen scrawl shining like a sword laid on the mountain’s lap.

  Before them rose a cliff face so tall Kael’s neck protested the truth of it; only the crown of it wore snow like a cap, as though even winter had needed a ladder and had not brought a long enough one.

  The eagle landed with thunder hidden in it. Talons folded into the earth. Feathers sighed. Kael slid down and stood on legs that needed a moment to believe in the ground again.

  He looked up.

  Gooseflesh answered before thought could find a word worthy of it. To be small is sometimes a relief; sometimes a humiliation; sometimes a holiness. Here, it was the last.

  The Murath peaks were not simply tall. They were awake. He felt, in that strange and certain way a man sometimes does when the world allows it, that he stood where the planet kept its bones. And those bones were listening.

  Maerath, who had not spoken for some minutes, planted his staff upright and took a long breath like a singer tasting a note before singing it.

  “Remember this, Kael,” he said without turning. “Power walked us through the halls last night, pretending to be honorable. This—” he inclined his head slightly toward the walls of stone,

  “—is not power. It is a measure. If your strength grows beyond the measure of your heart, you will break in ways the world cannot fix. The Oaths exist to prevent that.”

  “I understand,” Kael said, surprised to find that he did.

  Understanding was one thing. Surviving whatever was asked for, that understanding was another.

  “Good,” Maya muttered. “Now, please tell me we are not climbing that.”

  “Once,” Maerath said, hearing what the pendant said without needing to, “men cut steps. They thought they were improving on the mountain’s patience. It did not end well.”

  “Note to self,” Maya chirped. “Don’t improve the mountain.”

  Elder Maerath stepped forward until he stood a dozen paces from the cliff. He lowered his staff until the wood kissed stone, and then, to Kael’s surprise, he began to sing.

  It was not words he knew. It was not even a language that pretended to resemble human speech.

  The sound moved in circles—three notes up, three notes down, a long, held sigh, then a small, amused twist, as if the singer remembered a joke from five hundred years ago and still loved it.

  The melody did not travel out; it traveled in, into the rock, into the air pressed between the grains of stone, into the dark that had not met daylight since the mountain was young.

  Light woke.

  Lines flowed across the cliff as quicksilver poured into old writing.

  At first, Kael thought it was cracking; then he saw the light threaded the seams that already existed. Something that had always been a door remembered it.

  The seam ran up, then right, then down, the way a careful hand draws the limit of a thing, the way a scribe borders a page to tell the ink, “Here. No further.”

  The mountain opened.

  Kael felt his pulse slow, not from calm, but from a reverence he could not name.

  Not with violence. With permission.

  Rock slid back as if regretful to leave its place. Cold rushed out, carrying the breath of places where the year forgot to turn.

  A passage stood before them, just wide enough for two men to walk abreast and high enough that even a prideful king might find no need to duck.

  Faint light lived there, though Kael could not see its source, as if the darkness itself had agreed to glow a little so visitors would not stumble.

  The meadow fell quiet in the presence of an older quiet.

  Maya, for once, did not joke. “Okay,” she whispered, the word tiny in the wide air. “I… like this. But if something big and stony burps at us, I’m going back to being a flower.”

  Maerath bowed—not deeply, not as to a lord, but as a man bows at the threshold of a friend’s home to whom he owes respect. “Thank you,” he said to the mountain. Then to Kael: “From here, we walk.”

  Duskrim lifted away again, preferring height when the world turned strange.

  On a jut of rock by the meadow’s edge, Duskrim settled like punctuation, watching them go.

  Kael nodded. He set his hand over the pendant, felt the pulse of the Starbloom like a small, steady star against his palm, and took the first step into the mountain.

  The eagle watched with one gold eye, then tilted its head as if satisfied and folded its wings along its back like sails at rest.

  The passage tasted of iron and clean water.

  Their footsteps wrote soft answers to the questions their heels asked of the stone.

  Far within, something moved—not a creature, but a current, the slow circulation of a place that had not been emptied in all the winters since the world learned the word for winter.

  After ten paces, the daylight thinned to a memory at their backs. After twenty, the world of courts and coins and shouted orders ceased to exist.

  Kael felt suddenly that his life had pivoted on a hinge he had not seen until it swung.

  Kael followed Maerath into the hush until the night behind them became only a rumor of light.

  Stone breathed. A thin pulse ran through a silver vein in the wall, thud… thud… thud… as if the mountain kept time with a heart older than crowns.

  Duskrim waited at the threshold like a small black seal on a great white letter. The eagle settled its wings and watched, one gold eye bright as a kept promise.

  Somewhere ahead, not wind, not echo—a listening.

  “Welcome,” Maerath murmured, “to the first door.”

  The air changed; cold laid a careful hand on Kael’s cheek, and the rock answered with a warmth that was not heat. Pressure gathered in the passage, the way weather gathers before it decides.

  Far away, a palace forgot to sleep. Banners hung like held breaths. A man on a throne counted knives he did not admit were his.

  Here, the mountain shaped a question out of silence and set it in Kael’s path.

  Not a name. Not a title.

  The passage tightened around the question, as if the mountain waited not for sound—but for proof.

  Kael drew one steady breath and stepped toward the answer.

  Whatever it asked of him, he would not turn away.

  Not a name. Not a title.

  Who are you?

  I’ll take that as high praise.

  Next time: the mountain opens—and it asks Kael a question only he can answer.

  Scheduling update:

  From now on, new episodes will be uploaded three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 7 PM (IST).

  Thank you for reading, always.