P.S.: Contains a lot of info dumps and me trying to sound poetic. ○|￣|_

You can just skim the parts that feel too flkajndfalfnl;fnkalf;aldjk....(I know you get it. o_o)

[Actually, forgive me. Please skip this chapter. The next one is the actual one. I reformed it.]

He did not leave at once.

When the seed cracked inside him and the blade of shadow formed in his hand, the world outside had not yet recovered from the lightning.

People whispered. Someone bent over him. Pain and cold and the small, brittle sounds of the waking came like a gentle drizzle.

For indeed, the rain poured after the lightning.

Aramith, however, did not want the waking world with its complexities.

Not yet.

He wanted the ruin. He wanted the silence that had always hummed beneath the clatter of living things. He wanted the place that had first whispered to him in childhood and then been stolen away by lies and lids and soft hands that pretended to soothe.

A world that was his, but had been cut off.

He stayed.

The realm did not force him.

And she didn't suggest it.

Days bled into each other, but what was a day when the sun neither rose nor fell in this realm?

In a world where time was a concept that failed to exist, it felt slow.

A single hour could fold into weeks, a week into a year, and the world outside would not notice the same measures. The girl moved through that desolation like a shadow with no need for rest.

She never became tired.

Neither did he—sleep had been a habit of the half-remembered boy; the man that grew in the ruin had no need for its crutch.

At first he wandered.

He walked the swept hollows and stepped across broken plates of land that floated like the ribs of a fallen beast.

Fire licked the gaps and hissed, but it did not burn unless he asked it to.

She watched him with eyes like dusk and dawn mixed into one. She spoke when her voice pleased her—never too much, never too little. She taught first with small tasks.

"The darkness here belongs to you," she said once, amused, as he watched a flare leap and die. "It is an unstable thing that resides within you, but it obeys you. Give it shape, tell it to be what you want."

Aramith did.

He learned to twist shadow into a seam of rope that held like iron. He learned to pull a curtain of shade over his path and make footsteps vanish.

He learned to press the abyss against his teeth and make his breath a cold fog that could silence the cry of a bird.

He remembered the names of his dark abilities when he dreamt.

Tenebrous Breath became something less random and more a crafted weapon: a pillared sigh that could choke a man without touching him.

He took the wildness of his darkness and taught it discipline.

The realm taught him other things. It taught him that his attribute was not like others. Where most followed gates, where the path forward was a predictable ladder of steps and signs, his hunger did not ask for gates. It was a sink, an ever-growing well. There were no thresholds to break and ascend.

There were only depths to master and widen. The girl made him look at that fact until he could hold it without flinching.

"You will not climb," she said once, at the edge of a sea of ash.

"Gates mean restriction. They made ladders for themselves because their bones could hold a ladder. You are not built for steps, Aramith. You are a law that teaches the world itself how to bend. That is why they feared you." Her voice was calm; there was no triumph in it—only the patient truth she had held for so long.

Aramith learned to manipulate the darkness into destructive forces. It was a strange thing.

For so long, he'd tried hard to grow stronger, but then all of it was but a lie.

Eclipsed Binding—he liked the name the moment it fit his palm—came to be not as a trick but as a law. When he threw it, fingers of his abyss entered the body of a thing and tightened with the patience of a serpent until the prey could not move without tearing itself.

His lessons were not only practical. She spoke of politics and fear and the economy of terror which ruled the peiple.

She showed him how kingdoms buy compliance and how priests carve obedience into holy law. She mapped the market of attributes: where necromancers traded their souls for flesh, where beast-wielders learned to taste fur and fang until the beast became the man, where elementalists angered spirits.

"There are men who harvest," she said in the slow hours when the ruin was only a pulse.

"They move like the weather—gentle in one season, voracious in the next. They plant their hands in realms and reap what they want. Your fragment is a field. They took pieces, but they did not take the whole. They could not."

Aramith listened the way he had never listened. Knowledge of this sort was new to him; a tool sharper than any sword because it could be used before the battle began.

He learned to regard people as maps: follows, lines, bearings—where pressure must be applied and where a cut would be decisive.

And she who was his and not his—grew into more than a teacher.

She had been alone for a very long time. The way she said it, the years folded into the words like rings in bone. "A hundred and more," she murmured.

"Time is different here," she replied. "It never tells truth the way the world does. For me, a year is a breath and an age is a look. For you, the world will unravel slowly. That is the bargain: this place will teach you quickly what the world would take decades to show. But the cost is distance. When you leave, your heart will be farther from them than it was before."

And he could already feel it.

She always folded herself into such confessions with a careless grin that did not reach her eyes. He saw then, in the softened lines of her face, a loneliness that made him want to do something for her—a small, useless tenderness.

That feeling surprised him. He felt it and pushed it down like a splinter.

He built shadow-doubles that moved with his mind, proxies that could be sent like spies to feel warmth or listen for noise.

He learned to make hollow masks of darkness that he could slide onto his face to hide his scent, his voice, his presence—tools for infiltration rather than brute confrontation.

He taught himself to layer thought and shadow so that his own mind became a maze; to the probing of another, the maze offered false exits and dead ends. And this would be one of his defenses against the man he once called father.

He learned how darkness could be memory. He learned to extract a fragment of a scene and hold it like a lantern, to replay it in perfect fidelity for himself until the memory was so clear it burned.

He practiced the reassembling of his life—sitting on a broken pillar while she fed him slivers of his stolen past until, piece by piece, a face or a laugh stitched back into place.

Sometimes learning hurt. When the old seals in him tore free, it was as though fingers reached inside and rearranged his bones.

He would writhe, not with pain that could be named, but with the wrench of identity finding its edges. It left him hollow and whole at once; he tasted iron and old childhood bread at the same time.

He did not weep. He did not let her see him soften beyond the smallest moments.

But there were nights—if nights could be spoken of there—when he would stand alone on a cliff of shattered stone and whisper names into the wind until the memory howled back. Those names—Mozrael, Lia, Kesha—came to him with an ache like a newly opened wound.

The naming came the way a blade finds a sheath: inevitable and sudden.

But in the end, distance was what he felt.

They had been walking the glass-plain—an expanse where the ground reflected a sky that did not exist. She moved quietly, her shadow hair fanning like smoke.

For a long while, she had been quieter than her usual barely-contained murmur. Loneliness sat in her like a second skin.

"You have not named me," she said at last, without turning. It was a small thing, but it carried a weight.

Aramith stopped. The air around them shivered. He had thought of the question before, once or twice—the rightness of it, the depravity of denial.

He had felt gratitude to the voice that had kept his mind whole, and irritation at the stupid tenderness he sometimes felt toward her. He had also felt the dangerous hunger to make everything that mattered to him into something he could command.

"What would you be called?" he asked, because asking was itself a way of measuring the choices one could or could not make.

"Name me anything that suits you," she answered. "You birthed me. I will wear whatever you give as if it were a second skin."

"Mai," he said.

She turned at that, and for the first time, she was unguarded. Something like a star broke in her gaze, and a sound that might have been laughter or a sob slid from her. "Mai?" she repeated. "Mai…"

She tested it on her tongue and smiled. "It fits," she said simply. "It fits like skin."

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