The marrowstone came free with a crunch, pulsing faintly in Thorne's palm. He slipped it into his pouch, wiped the blade on the troll's hide, and glanced up at the figure still lingering in the crater's edge.

"You've seen what you wanted to see," Thorne said, crouched low, voice even. "So why are you still here?"

The hooded man chuckled softly, folding his hands behind his back. "Because I'm curious. Because we don't often get the chance for… conversation." His head tilted, eyes gleaming faintly in the shadow. "Tell me, why do you hide what you are?"

Thorne laughed under his breath, turning back to cut another strip of hide from the troll's massive chest. "Because I have to."

"Do you?" The man's voice was smooth, unhurried. "Here, in Aetherhold, perhaps. Yes, the academy is a nest of knives, and you've already drawn more attention than is comfortable. But outside these walls? Why bother? Few could oppose you if you walked the world as you truly are. Elderborn."

Thorne rolled his eyes, flicking ichor from his blade. "You're spouting bullshit. Everywhere you look there's someone stronger. In the city. In Caledris. In the fractured Kingdoms. You think I'd last a week if I went about glowing and breaking the world with my bare hands?"

For the first time, the man hesitated then laughed, low and pleased. "Perhaps. But you overestimate the number of people who even know what you are. How many truly understand the Elderborn, their nature, their… hungers? Very few. Fewer still can recognize it for what it is."

Thorne stilled, knife pressed against the troll's thick hide again. He looked up, narrowed eyes cutting across the crater. "Do you hide it?"

The man paused. A long silence, broken only by the hiss of steam rising from the troll's ruined body. Then, simply: "No."

Thorne smirked faintly, turning back to his work. Nice to have it confirmed, he thought. So he is one too.

The man stepped closer, boots crunching glassy earth. "Tell me, Thorne. Do you believe strength is truth? That the strong shape the world while the weak are simply shaped by it?"

Thorne snorted. "That's a convenient philosophy for people who can win fights."

"Is it wrong?"

"It's incomplete." Thorne carved loose another shard of bone, sliding it into his pouch. "Strength shapes the world, yes. But so does fear. So does knowledge. So does luck. You can swing your strength all you want, but if you don't see the dagger in the dark, or the poison in your cup, you're just another corpse."

The man chuckled, warm and approving. "You think like a fox, not a lion."

Thorne smirked. "Foxes live longer."

They let silence stretch again, the weight of the forest pressing in, before the man spoke once more. "Do you ever wonder if you're wasting it? The gift you have. Binding yourself to lies, to masks, to petty games of students and nobles. You could be more. Much more."

Thorne straightened slowly, eyes glowing faintly in the moonlight. "I'm alive. That's more than enough."

"But is it living?" the man asked, tilting his head. "Hiding forever. Waiting forever. Pretending to be less than you are. When do you stop surviving and start… being?"

Thorne's lips curved faintly, but the smile never reached his eyes. "When I decide. Not when someone else tells me to."

The hooded figure studied him quietly, the faint gleam of his eyes betraying nothing.

The man's voice stayed calm, but there was an undercurrent to it now, a faint pulse of something deeper, heavier.

"You could be so much more," he said softly, almost regretfully. "If you weren't shackled inside the walls of an academy whose only purpose is to feed naïve minds with incomplete truths. You're a wolf being fattened on breadcrumbs."

Thorne straightened slowly, wiping his bloody hands on a rag pulled from his bag. "You do love your animal metaphors." He muttered with a small smile. The cloth came away dark, sticky, his knuckles raw. He stepped over the troll's ruined carcass, closing the distance between them by a pace.

"I'm not going to the Empire," he said flatly.

The man's hood dipped, amused. "I'm not talking about the Empire's offer..."

"This is the place I have to be right now," Thorne cut him off, voice hard but even. "Maybe you don't think it's ideal. But I think it is. For the first time in my life, I'm not stumbling blind. I actually have people willing to teach me things I'd never touch otherwise. The progress I've made in the past few months is more than I managed my whole life."

His eyes glinted, blue-white fire under the moon. "And the weird thing? Even with Purifiers around every corner, people who'd gut me at the first whiff of my core, I still feel safer here than anywhere I've been. And I'm not planning on leaving any time soon."

He tossed the rag down, the sound sharp in the quiet crater.

"Until I'm strong enough," he continued, "until I've learned enough to be what you're talking about, strong enough that I'm not threatened by some random guy who somehow managed to reach level one hundred, I'm not going anywhere."

The man tilted his head, the shadow of a smile flickering at the edge of the hood. For a heartbeat, the only sound was the hiss of steam rising from the troll's corpse and the slow, deliberate rhythm of their breathing.

The man's head tilted, his eyes glinting faintly in the dark. "And then? What happens when you are strong enough?"

Thorne froze for a beat.

"What will you do with all that power?" the man pressed, voice mild, almost curious.

Thorne started pacing slowly along the edge of the crater. Truth was, he hadn't thought that far. His life had always been one desperate step at a time, one scheme, one dark day, one bloody fight. But now… now he had something he had never possessed before: time. The safety to imagine a future.

His first thought was of Jonah, Ben, Darius, Eliza. His chest tightened. He wanted to learn what had become of them, the truth of their fates. But the idea of going back to Alvar, to that scar of a city that had carved itself into him… no. That wasn't the path.

He finally looked up. "I could travel the world."

The man scoffed, amused. "We both know you're not that kind of man. That's the sort of answer one of your noble classmates would give, the ones who dream of adventure but lack the stomach for it."

Thorne's teeth clenched. Irritation flared. That someone he hadn't even seen the face of could read him so easily, it was maddening.

He exhaled through his nose, then raised his gaze to the pale moon above. "I think… I want to do what the Mirror Witch, as you call her, has been doing all these years. Search for information about our heritage. Maybe finally have an answer as to why we are so broken."

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The man gave a grunt, approving but subdued. Then, in a quieter tone, as if reluctant to give voice to the thought, he said, "You know… if you revealed your true self, the other Elderborn would flock to you. They would follow you. Worship you. Treat you as a god."

Thorne laughed softly, still staring at the sky. "That's a dangerous thought."

"Oh?"

"I've come to learn a little about myself. And what I've discovered isn't pretty." His eyes flicked back to the shadowed hood, a crooked smirk on his lips. "I can be cruel. No, not just cruel, I hunger for it sometimes. For the pain of others, for their suffering. I'm prideful. Ruthless. I like control more than I should. And all that adoration you're describing?" He shook his head ruefully. "It would go straight to my head."

The man said nothing for a moment. Thorne could feel it though, the curve of a smile hidden beneath the hood.

"All I'm hearing," the man finally said, voice carrying a strange warmth, "is the making of a leader."

Thorne laughed, a short, incredulous sound that drifted over the crater like steam. "Leader of what, exactly? My kitchen table?"

The man's hood dipped, as if amused at the image. "Leader of the Elderborn." His voice kept that casual, conversational tone, but there was an edge now, a weight behind the words. "They do not have a head. They never had. They scatter like embers across nations, hiding or dying one by one. Someone could change that."

Thorne snorted. "Why would they follow me? I'm no savior. I've..." He broke off, because the catalog of sins, of selfishness and shortcuts, had been a long one. "There are elderborn stronger than me. I've seen them."

The man conceded with a single, slow nod. "Today, yes. There are many who would cut you down without a second thought. But you have something they do not. Potential."

A million small thoughts uncoiled through Thorne's head: splinters of ambition, flashes of nightmares where he did not pull back from cruelty, vivid images of crowds and crowns and worship. The idea sickened and thrilled him at once. He didn't want to dwell on it. He reflexively shook his head. "Don't," he said, more to himself than to the man. I don't even want to consider that.

The man's eyes, the pale gleams under the hood, regarded him with patient curiosity. "What will you do with such power?" he asked, pushing further. "You speak of learning, of shelter. But if you could become the center of a people, what would you make of them? Protectorate? Empire? A refuge that becomes a fortress? Or would you..." he let the unspoken word hang, "... rule?"

Thorne began to pace again, restless. The question scraped at something he had not granted much room to consider. His life had been survival: an endless chain of small, necessary choices. No master plan, no grand arc. Yet time and safety had begun to change that. He thought, briefly, of his sister, Jonah, Ben, Darius, Eliza, ghosts he wanted answers for. He imagined travel, libraries, hidden archives where truth slept. He imagined a life not dictated by the next squabble or the next debt.

"I want to know where we come from," he said finally, voice low. "That's the start. If I can find that, maybe I can stop more of us from getting crushed. Maybe I can at least buy us a breathing room."

"Protection by knowledge," the man said approvingly. "Practical." He shifted his weight, the hooded silhouette leaning in as if sharing a secret. "But hear me, knowledge alone won't save you. The world's hands are long and sharp. There are those who would not let the Elderborn live because to them we are an abomination, or a resource, or a threat. There are surgeons who see our cores as engines for progress. There are fanatics, Purifiers, who see us as blasphemies to be cleansed."

He did not need a list of names to know the cruelty of the world. He had seen it. He had bled under it. "Then we hide," he said at last. The answer came easily because it had been the answer his whole life. Hide, survive, avoid the whips and the metal cages.

"Hide until when?" the man challenged. He didn't say it as a taunt so much as a question that tested the seams of Thorne's resolve. "Hide forever? Hide until the last of us are ashes and no one remembers what we were, or what we might have become?"

Thorne's jaw clenched. The man pushed on. "Or you could do something else. Organize. Gather safe havens. Learn to fight politics as much as swords. Build sanctuaries that are more than holes in the ground. Train those who are raw. Teach them to think like foxes and strike like wolves. You could try to reshape how the world sees you, not as spare parts, not as prizes to be harvested, but as a people."

The things the man said were large and dangerous and intoxicating. Thorne's mind ticked through the permutations, open war, and the immediate risk of annihilation; clandestine networks and the bitter grind of guerrilla survival; diplomacy, and the humiliation of begging mercy from kings who would pay in poison smiles. He imagined a plan to gather Elderborn in scattered citadels with wards and scholars and soldiers and felt both the thrill of possibility and the cold shiver of how quickly it could turn to slaughter.

"You're romanticizing this," Thorne said finally, but his disavowal sounded thin. "You make it sound like there's a clear choice, stay small and die slowly, or stand and become a god. It's not that simple."

The man tilted his head, not disagreeing. "No. It isn't that simple. All options kill something. Open war kills people and cities. Exodus kills secrecy and invites the world to follow. Concealment kills potential, the births that never happen, the minds that never learn." He let the silence press in, then asked softer, "What do you want, Thorne? Not the heroic chorus. Not the safe answer. What do you want to become?"

Thorne stared at the moon, words stuttering. He had rehearsed answers about revenge, about survival, about being strong enough to turn away the past. But the man's question asked for something meaner: desire. He felt heat at his temples, an ugly honesty stirring like coals. "I want the freedom not to be hunted," he said, surprised at the fragility of even that admission. "I want to be able to walk into a market and not feel someone's blade at my back. I want… answers for those I lost. And yes, part of me, ugly as it is, wants the power not simply to command respect but to bend things so I don't have to be at the mercy of others."

The man's breath made no sound, but there was a hint of approval in the tilt of his head. "You want safety for yourself and… enough leverage to never be powerless. Practical and honest." He fell quiet, then resumed, voice threaded with a dangerous curiosity. "If you could gather the Elderborn, would you protect them, Thorne? Or would you use them as instruments to enforce your will? Would you be a shield or a hammer?"

Thorne's laugh was hollow. The admission he had made moments ago, the taste for cruelty, for another's pain, sat like a stone in his chest. "Maybe both," he said at last, an ugly honesty. "I would protect those who are mine. I would break those who threaten ours. I won't pretend I'm a saint."

"You admit that," the man said, almost gently. "Good. Brutal clarity beats well-meaning delusion. But a leader who gives in only to cruelty will breed rebellion within his own ranks. Power without a moral architecture collapses from within."

Thorne picked at the edge of the pouch, a nervous motion. "What's your endgame, then? You want me to be your puppet-master, or are you testing whether I'd be useful?"

"Neither," the man said. "I want someone who understands both how to survive and how to change things. Not a god, not a tyrant. A mind that can make hard bargains." He fixed Thorne with that unreadable smile. "You could be dangerous in good ways. Or in very bad ones."

They both sat in the ugly hush that followed, the crater around them smoking and settling. The man finally added, almost as an afterthought, "Revealing ourselves outright is suicide. Purifiers, opportunists, emperors with surgical hands, they would swarm. But in time, with careful work, you could build enough strength to force the world to bargain. Or you could corrode it from within, seeding allies, corrupting institutions, so the first blow isn't a slaughter but a negotiation."

Thorne let the options run through his head: negotiation that would demand souls and secrets; subtle undermining that would take generations; a sharpened, bloody revolution that would burn the maps clean. Each prospect tasted like risk and blood.

"How long do we wait?" Thorne asked finally, voice small in the vast quiet. "Until we're strong, or until the last of us are gone?"

The man's reply was simple and terrible. "Until you decide to stop being afraid of being seen. Until you are willing to pay whatever it costs." He pushed off from the crater rim and took a step closer, the moon catching the outline of his face but not revealing it. "Decide well, Thorne. People will follow bravery or fear. Which are you prepared to lead with?"

Thorne's chest tightened. He thought of Marian and Argessa and the strange comfort of tutors and allies. He thought of the deed at Brennak's door, of the necklace that hid him, of the Purifiers' whispered threats. He felt, for the first time, the raw weight of possibility pressing down.

"I need time," he said finally, the truth like a quiet thing. "This isn't a choice I make on a crater floor between fights."

The man inclined his head, the ghost of a smile threading through the shadow. "Time you may have. But not forever."

He lingered a heartbeat longer, then added, "This conversation has been… illuminating. You're still young, raw in places, but you have more to offer our people than you realize. I am pleased, Thorne. Very pleased. We will talk again soon."

He began to turn, the edges of his cloak already dissolving into the treeline, when Thorne's voice cut sharp across the crater.

"Wait."

The man paused, the faint gleam of his eyes glancing back.

"If you are who I think you are," Thorne said evenly, "then why don't you do all these things you expect of me? Gather the Elderborn. Protect them. Lead them. Why push it on me?"

For a moment, silence. The figure stilled, half-shadow, half-light. Then he shook his head slowly, the motion deliberate.

"Everyone has their part to play," he said, voice quieter now, touched with something unreadable. "Mine is not yours."

Before Thorne could demand more, the man's form unraveled, dissolving into smoke and shadow, until the crater held nothing but the hiss of cooling stone and the carcass of a dead troll.

Thorne stood alone once more, bloodied, bruised, and heavier with questions than before.

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