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.

Aramith, however, did not want the waking world.

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 people who pretended to care.

He wanted answers, and so he stayed.

The realm did not force him.

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 hollow.

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, for sleep didn't exist with him in this realm of his.

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.

She watched him carefully and 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 hting 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 sounds around him.

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. But he had yet to test it.

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. Instead, there were only depths to master and widen.

"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 bodies 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 came to be not as a part of his repeated dream, but something he could control now.

His lessons were not only practical.

She spoke of politics and fear and the economy of terror. She showed him how kingdoms buy compliance and how priests carve obedience into holy law.

Aramith listened the way he had never listened.

She had been alone for a very long time. "A hundred and more," she murmured.

"Three?" He had not remembered anything that early.

"Time is different here," she replied. "It never tells the truth the way the world does. For me, a year is a breath. 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."

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.

He practiced the reassembling of his life—sitting on a broken pillar while She fed him slivers of his stolen past, piece by piece.

Sometimes learning hurt. Finding his true self was a struggle, but slowly...He was becoming a cold monster that the world would come to fear.

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 darkness.

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

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.

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

Aramith stopped. He had thought of the question before, once or twice.

"What would you be called?" he asked, because asking was itself a way of measuring the future.

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

He looked at her then. He chose without ceremony.

"Mai," he said.

She turned at that, 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." She looked at her hands. "Though I have no skin..."

When the last lesson closed over them and the ruin fell into that stillness that comes after the storm, Aramith stood on a spindle of black rock and looked toward the horizon that existed, but at the same time, did not exist.

He felt her at his shoulder, steady and smaller than he had once thought. He had learned control; he had learned names; he had learned the geometry of conquest.

"When will you go back?" she asked softly.

He did not turn. He had plans that were sharp and clean in his mind, like knives lined and ready.

But he felt, faint and sudden, a catch in his chest that he had not expected—the small tenderness he had once pushed away. He felt her loneliness in the space.

"Soon," he said. "I will go back. I have things to demand. I will make them answer."

She bowed her head, and for a moment the ruin held them both like two stones in a river. "Do not forget me," she whispered.

He answered, but the word was not a promise. It was a fact. "You are me. How could I forget?"

Her eyes lit for a breath with something like hope and then settled into the long patience that had been her companion for ages.

They turned from the horizon together and walked deeper into the ruin once more—not to hide, not to rest, but to continue the shaping of a weapon the world would later call a man.

When he returns, he will become a creature that will be feared by many.

Aramith had plans.

Plans to find those he had been separated from—Lia and Kesha.

And he wanted to know what kind of person Mozrael would have been had she not been shackled to him.

In all this, he learned one great weapon he would have to wield carefully—pretense.

People sometimes feared those who knew too much, and he wasn't going to let that be his ruin.

But he didn't fear anymore.

He had power.

And power was all he needed in this world that devoured the weak and respected the strong.

As he prepared to leave the realm, he wondered how strong he truly was in that moment, compared to those bound by gates.

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