Where gods whisper and empires rot.
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On the shadowed slopes of the Tenebris Mountains, shrouded in eternal mist and thick, ancient forests, lay Shaer’Zanir—a village hidden from the curious eyes of the world. There, the dark elves kept to their ancestral traditions, guarding their secrets and their bloodline with rigid discipline and silent vigilance.
To Sylrith Naerthil, the mountains were both a home and a prison.
Tall and slender, with skin like polished obsidian and silver eyes that gleamed like stars in a moonless night, she was the youngest daughter of Loryen Naerthil, one of the clan elders. Since childhood, Sylrith had felt the weight of her family’s expectations pressing down on her true self like chains woven in silence.
Shaer’Zanir was a place of merciless order, where every gesture and word was governed by laws as old as the mountains themselves. The elders ruled with iron restraint, and Loryen’s word within their household was law.
“You carry the blood of the Naerthil,” he would often say.
“That means honor, duty, and obedience.”
But to Sylrith, it meant only suffocation.
She had grown up on stories of sacrifice and ancestral duty—but never found them inspiring. To her, they were tales of blind obedience and wasted lives, repeating like a cursed litany through generations.
Her arranged marriage to Zaleth Moirn symbolized everything she despised. Zaleth was the perfect embodiment of a noble dark elf—disciplined, respectable, unwaveringly loyal to tradition.
“Our union will strengthen the clan,” he said with a polished smile that never reached his eyes.
“You should be proud.”
But Sylrith saw only a life of forced submission and silence.
The Naerthil household in Shaer’Zanir was carved into the mountainside like a wound hidden beneath snow and ivy. There, affection was a myth, and childhood was a rehearsal for servitude. From the age she could walk, Sylrith was measured, trained, and shaped—not into a person, but a reflection of her lineage.
“A Naerthil does not ask why,” said her tutors.
“She endures. She perfects. She obeys.”
Each day was divided into lessons and drills. Morning rituals on the old laws of clan governance. Midday combat training with blunt-edged spears and choreographed footwork. Afternoon sessions with scholars on history, genealogy, and the unending politics of elven nobility.
She hated them all.
The books she longed to read—treatises on wild magic, scrolls on forgotten places, maps of the ruined roads of Astravara—were forbidden. The bow she carved in secret at age ten was found and broken in front of her, her father’s voice cold as marble.
“You are not a ranger,” Loryen said.
“You are Naerthil. Do not lower yourself with peasant tools.”
There was no space to fail. A wrong answer meant isolation. A misstep during training meant public reprimand. And when once, as a child, she dared to speak her dreams aloud—to explore the world beyond the mountains—her father’s response was silence. Not anger. Not disappointment.
Just silence.
It was worse than punishment.
The house was full of people, yet she had never felt more alone. Her sisters whispered of suitors. Her brothers competed in tournaments for favor.
Sylrith… watched the horizon.
It was Old-Shadow who saw her, not as a disappointment, but as a flame.
In the stillness of his cottage, where moss grew like velvet on the stone and runes glowed faintly with old power, he spoke not as a teacher, but as one who had already been broken—and rebuilt.
“Do you think this is the life your soul was meant for?” he asked one evening.
“There is a storm coming, girl. The mountains are whispering again. And you… you are listening.”
When she asked what he meant, he only smiled.
“The blood in your veins may be Naerthil. But the wind that stirs it comes from older places.”
“You feel it too, don’t you? Something is waking. Something buried. And it will want a voice.”
Sylrith never forgot those words.
One night, while escaping yet another of the family’s endless formal gatherings, she found refuge in the presence of Old-Shadow, an elder who lived alone at the edge of the village. Unlike the others, he did not judge her unrest.
“You remind me of a flame trying to survive the wind,” he told her, his voice gravelly and thick with old secrets.
“But beware, girl. Flames draw both light—and shadow.”
Old-Shadow spoke to her of the Shadows of Tenebris, a secretive order of spies and assassins who lived beyond the laws of the clan. Free from ancestral expectations—but at a high cost: isolation, suspicion, and the burden of doing what nobles would never admit must be done, at least for a hundred years before they could be free.
To Sylrith, it sounded not like a warning—but a promise.
When she finally refused to marry Zaleth, Loryen erupted in fury.
“You have no choice!” he roared, his voice echoing through the halls of the Naerthil estate.
“Do you think the clan exists to cater to your whims? Our blood is our legacy. You have a duty to preserve it!”
“And what about my duty to myself?” she retorted, her eyes burning with resolve.
“I won’t be a piece in the clan’s game. I want something more.”
“Something more?” Loryen laughed bitterly.
“You are nothing without the clan, Sylrith. Remember that.”
The confrontation ended with Sylrith locked in her chambers under guard.
But that night, she made her choice.
Under the pale gaze of the moon, Sylrith gathered what she could: a dark cloak, a dagger that had belonged to her mother, and a pouch of supplies. With Old-Shadow’s help and a half-formed plan, she slipped through the hidden paths that wove through the roots of the mountains.
“If you truly wish to live beyond your father’s shadow,” Old-Shadow whispered as she left,
“go to Kaer’Thalor. It is where the Shadows of Tenebris train those who seek freedom.
But know this—they accept no weakness.”
Sylrith’s journey through the mountains was a trial in itself.
Icy winds cut like knives. The dark forests moved with unseen things. The cliffs seemed to whisper curses in the old tongue. But she pressed on, driven by something far deeper than rebellion.
The fortress appeared only at twilight.
Hidden in the crags of the inner Tenebris range, Kaer’Thalor did not reveal itself to the uninvited. To find it, one had to be shown, or be chosen. Sylrith was both—barely.
Its walls were carved directly from obsidian rock, veined with silver ore and ancient wards that shimmered faintly under starlight. No banners flew above its gates. No torches lit its passageways.
It was a place where silence was not absence—it was command.
Inside, the fortress spiraled downward like a blade plunged into the heart of the mountain. Cold corridors twisted through chambers echoing with the footfalls of those too burdened to speak.
Every surface was cold stone. Every scent was blood, dust, and iron.
It was here the Shadows of Tenebris trained the broken, the outcast, and the dangerous. Not to redeem them—but to weaponize them.
The recruits of the Shadows were a broken mosaic—hardened warriors and lost souls, each tested by the world and shaped by failure. In their eyes, Sylrith was nothing but a pampered noble, far from her depth.
“You think you belong here?” mocked one recruit, Tyran Velk, his voice sharp with disdain.
“Your high blood won’t help you when we’re knee-deep in rot.”
The entry ritual was simple: survive the first night.
Seventy recruits were left in the lower chambers without light, food, or guidance. Some went mad. Others attacked each other. Sylrith waited in silence, listening, unmoving, until the others had screamed themselves into sleep or death.
When the iron doors opened at dawn, only sixty-one remained. She was one of them.
“You are not welcome here,” said a voice—Voridan Thalrak, the master of Kaer’Thalor, whose very presence seemed to bend the air with pressure.
“But you are necessary.”
He did not speak again.
The training began immediately.
Kaer’Thalor did not break her on the first day.
It broke her slowly. Deliberately. Without even trying.
Gone were the silken robes and measured routines of Shaer’Zanir. Here, dawn meant cold water thrown onto her face and the rough voice of a handler dragging her out of a stone cell too narrow to stretch in.
The corridors stank of sweat, blood, and burnt oil. Food was served in wooden bowls that reeked of rot—if you met your quotas. Fail a drill, and your rations were halved. Fail again, and they were gone entirely.
“You’re not in your father’s house now,” one of the recruits whispered to her on the second day, just before slamming a boot into her ribs during sparring. “Here, no one bows to your name. Only to your bruises.”
The instructors—if they could be called that—watched from above, cloaked in shadows and silence. They rarely spoke. When they did, it was only to name the fallen.
“Another weak one.”
“Clean the floor.”
“Next.”
There were no rewards. Only punishments. When Sylrith faltered during a climbing drill and failed to scale a jagged wall, she was stripped of food for two days. When she hesitated in combat against a larger recruit, she was whipped across the back with a wet rope laced with glass chips.
And yet, none of it stung like the absence of Old-Shadow.
In Shaer’Zanir, even in the coldness of her father’s rule, she had known one voice that spoke with warmth. One elder who treated her not as a vessel of expectation, but as someone worth seeing.
Here, there was no warmth.
No kindness.
No softness.
And gods—how she missed her younger brothers.
She remembered how little Thael used to sneak into her room after evening drills, bringing small stones he’d carved into animals.
“So you don’t forget the wild places,” he’d whisper.
And now, in this place of cold blades and colder hearts, there were no carved stones. Only bruises.
Her fellow recruits mocked her. Some out of jealousy. Others out of instinct. She was taller, better-spoken, and bore the old markings of nobility in how she carried herself.
So they beat it out of her.
“Hey, princess,” said Tyran Velk, the brute with a broken nose and a smile like a cracked blade. “Still waiting for your butler to bring your bow?”
The others laughed.
She did not.
When they hit her, she hit back.
When they stole her blankets, she trained longer in the cold.
When her rations were taken, she scavenged roots from the moss gardens that grew wild on the outer paths.
She endured. Because to give in meant returning. And returning meant never seeing the world beyond Tenebris.
Sometimes, late at night, when sleep came like a thief and her muscles throbbed with exhaustion, she would lie awake on the stone floor and remember stories.
Stories the servants told when they thought the children were asleep.
Tales of Valthenor, the city of a hundred bridges. Of the floating lights of Olyndros. Of ancient ruins deep in the jungles where ghosts still sang in forgotten tongues.
Or the voice of Old-Shadow, murmuring half-dreamed truths about the edge of the map—
“There’s more than this. More than duty, more than clan, more than shadows. But to find it, girl… you have to survive long enough to get there.”
That was it.
That was her reason.
Not pride. Not legacy. Not even revenge.
Curiosity.
Hunger for a world she had never touched.
And a terror more profound than death itself: that she might never live to see it.
Time ceased to have meaning in Kaer’Thalor.
There were no calendars, no celebrations, no seasons. Only progression through pain.
After the first winter cycle, Sylrith survived the physical trials that culled nearly half of the recruits. The bruises faded. The broken bones healed.
What followed did not.
This new phase was quieter. Deadlier.
“You have bones now,” Voridan Thalrak declared, during the first gathering of the survivors. “Let us see if you have marrow.”
The psychological phase began with disorientation.
Recruits were scattered across the northern ridges—blindfolded, half-starved, and hunted by instructors wearing the faces of monsters. Some were dragged from their sleep by nets. Others were buried alive and forced to claw through earth to breathe. Every test was a simulation. But the terror was real.
Sylrith spent five days hiding in the roots of a frozen pine, her body wrapped in snow-drenched cloths to avoid detection by trained ice-hounds. She learned not to breathe. Not to twitch. Not to blink.
“If the beast sees you,” her handler had whispered, “you are already dead.”
The second layer of torment was silence.
They were trained to move, kill, and endure without a single sound.
Combat drills took place in chambers lined with obsidian—any noise above a whisper echoed violently, alerting the instructors stationed behind false walls.
Failure meant lashes across the soles of their feet. Enough to make walking agony.
But limp, and you were dragged back to start.
Repeat enough times, and you were dismissed.
Dismissal meant exile into the mountains, naked and unarmed.
One recruit screamed during a nerve-twisting joint dislocation exercise. He was never seen again.
Then came The Cipher Trials.
Each recruit received a secret code—a word carved into memory through pain and repetition. If spoken aloud under torture, they were marked unfit and expelled.
Yet, each recruit also knew: acquiring another’s code earned rations, warmth, and even praise.
They watched each other constantly.
Who was cracking?
Who might betray their secret in a moment of weakness?
Sylrith endured seven days in the dark, suspended by iron hooks from her shoulders. Every hour, she was asked for her code. She refused.
Once, a girl named Senra tried to befriend her. Shared stolen fruit. Then, whispered:
“Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
Sylrith only smiled.
Senra disappeared the next morning.
Not all torment was cruelty.
They were trained in how to disappear in a city. How to forge a face from nothing. How to enter a fortress and leave no trace. How to seduce, mislead, poison, vanish.
They were taught how to erase a life so cleanly that not even memory would mourn it.
During this phase, instructors were no longer distant shadows.
They were present. Brutal. Omnipresent.
Voridan broke a recruit’s leg for flinching during a mock interrogation.
Mistress Yrlissa made another drown a mouse in bare hands for failing to extract information cleanly.
Sylrith’s reputation changed.
She was still a target—still too proud, too composed—but some now respected her. Others feared her.
Tyran Velk, the brute from her first days, kept his distance now.
Krill Dravos, always watchful, offered no comfort, but sometimes nodded when she succeeded.
And Irilsa Venor…
…she simply watched, like a viper judging when to strike.
The Cipher Trials blurred the line between torment and revelation. Every glance became a threat, every silence a strategy. But even in the depths of suspicion, the recruits—creatures of necessity—formed instinctive bonds. Unspoken, fragile, but real.
They sat in small circles during mealtime, backs to stone, bowls in laps, eyes always on the corridors. No one spoke of trust. But some began to share rations when the punishments became unbearable. A bruised shoulder might be wrapped. A warning hissed before an ambush. And if one screamed in sleep, someone—anyone—would nudge them awake.
It was not kindness. It was tribalism. A quiet acknowledgment: we are all broken here, but not yet ash.
Sylrith rarely spoke. But the others noticed her stillness. Her precision. And they began to leave a small space open beside them at the fireless meals. That space was not friendship—but it was not exile.
And then there was Irilsa.
Where Sylrith moved like falling snow, Irilsa burned like coals under iron. She did not seek alliances, but they came to her. Her presence commanded attention, a strange magnetism born of cold confidence and eyes that never stopped measuring.
They sparred often—Kaer’Thalor ensured that. Blades, poisons, and words.
In one exercise, they were paired for a night reconnaissance simulation, tasked with retrieving a token from an instructor’s chamber without being seen. They moved like twin ghosts through the obsidian halls, communicating only through breath and glance.
When Irilsa scaled a crumbling wall and her grip slipped, Sylrith caught her wrist.
For a moment, their eyes met—silver against storm-grey—and the world went still.
“You could let me fall,” Irilsa whispered, voice raw from the cold.
“I don’t waste tools,” Sylrith murmured.
And she pulled her up.
Later, when they completed the mission and returned the token, Voridan merely nodded. But Irilsa lingered as the others dispersed, wiping blood from a scratch across her cheek.
“You don’t hate me,” she said flatly. “Not yet.”
Sylrith didn’t look at her. “I don’t have time for hatred.”
Irilsa smiled then—not mockery, but something colder. Recognition.
“You’re not like the others,” she said. “You’re not here for revenge, or redemption. You’re here because you can’t stop yourself. And that’s what makes you dangerous.”
From that night forward, their rivalry shifted. Still sharp. Still brutal. But under it, a strange gravity. When Irilsa caught a fever after a hunt, Sylrith left a sprig of shadowroot in her satchel. When Sylrith returned late from an exercise, bruised and bleeding, Irilsa was the one who left a stolen salve beside her cot.
Neither spoke of it.
They didn’t need to.
Because in Kaer’Thalor, weakness was death.
But knowing who would bleed beside you—who would not look away when the cold came—was survival.
And sometimes, in the moments between trials, in the long silences when breath fogged against stone, Sylrith wondered if this was what passed for friendship among shadows.
Not warmth.
But the absence of betrayal.
Upon surviving the second phase, each recruit received their first tattoo—a jagged spiral marked into the inside of the left wrist with obsidian ink.
“The mark of the Shadow-Born,” said the tattooist, her hands steady. “You are no longer children.”
The pain was sharp. But Sylrith barely flinched.
When it was done, she stared at the ink.
She had not chosen this path for glory.
But it was hers now.
And she would see it to the end.
The air had changed.
It was no longer merely cold—it shimmered with tension, as though the very stone walls of Kaer’Thalor held their breath.
This was not fear.
It was anticipation.
The Ritual Watcher had arrived.
No one spoke his name.
He was not an instructor. Nor a commander.
He wore no insignia, carried no blades.
Yet when he walked the corridors, even Voridan Thalrak stepped aside.
“He observes the soul,” whispered Mistress Yrlissa. “He sees what the flesh hides.”
Sylrith first saw him during a night trial.
She was blindfolded, hands bound, navigating a maze of sound and pressure.
When she reached the center—alone, bruised and panting—he was there. Standing in silence.
His eyes glowed faintly, like coals in snow.
He said nothing.
Only raised one hand, and shadows surged around her like breath.
The third phase of training was the Wroughting — the forging of shadow within the soul.
“You will not learn spells,” said Voridan. “You will become the spell.”
The students were taken beneath Kaer’Thalor, into the Vault of Hollow Flame — a subterranean sanctum carved from black basalt, lit only by mirrored obsidian.
There, under the silent gaze of the Watcher, they learned to manipulate shadow — not as light’s absence, but as a living force.
Sylrith felt it immediately.
The darkness whispered to her.
Not in words, but in feelings.
Curiosity. Hunger. Power.
She learned to draw it around her like a cloak, blurring her presence from the sight of others.
To make her voice echo from the wrong direction.
To step into a room unnoticed and leave as a phantom.
But shadow demanded a price.
Each time she touched it, a sliver of her warmth slipped away.
Memories blurred. Joys faded.
Laughter from her childhood felt like echoes from a stranger’s dream.
They were encouraged to compete.
To hunt each other, in structured trials and unsanctioned ambushes.
Instructors no longer punished backstabbing.
They rewarded it.
“Trust is weakness,” said Yrlissa. “To survive, you must be your own blade.”
Some recruits formed pacts.
Others tested poison resistance on each other.
One girl, Deyra Valas, slit a comrade’s throat in his sleep just to avoid pairing with him in the next exercise.
Sylrith adapted.
She became silent as frost, swift as a falling feather.
She no longer slept in the same place twice.
She stopped speaking unless necessary.
But it was not hatred. It was preservation.
By the time the third phase began, whatever threadbare bonds remained among the recruits had frayed to nothing. Trust, once a necessary illusion, became a liability. Kaer’Thalor had taught them to kill in silence. Now it taught them to hunt each other in silence.
The rules shifted. Assignments became covert competitions. The reward for completing a task—be it assassination, sabotage, or infiltration—wasn’t survival. It was power.
More rations. More warmth. More time without pain.
The instructors offered nothing directly. But the implication was clear: climb, or be climbed over.
Irilsa understood this before the others.
She became a shadow within shadows—not just executing orders, but doing so with flair, cruelty, and calculation. Recruits who crossed her found blades near their sleeping cots or traps laid in training exercises. She never got caught. Never left proof. But all of them knew.
She made them afraid.
And that fear was currency.
Sylrith watched this unfold from a distance. Not with shock—Kaer’Thalor had long ago crushed her illusions—but with a quiet, growing detachment. She did not play Irilsa’s games. She did not join the alliances formed in hushed corners or trade favors in blood. She stayed apart.
Where Irilsa ruled through tension, Sylrith dissolved into silence.
They no longer spoke.
In drills, they avoided eye contact.
In exercises, they were placed on opposite teams and never needed to be told to fight as if it were real.
They had become mirrors, cracked and turned against each other.
And yet, beneath the cold indifference and sharpened distance, something deeper pulsed—resentment, unspoken accusation, the ache of something that might have been respect. Or friendship. Or warning.
One evening, after an infiltration run through the mountain’s lower veins, Sylrith returned to find her rations missing and her cot soaked in oil. No proof. No name.
But she knew.
Irilsa passed her in the corridor, brushing shoulders just enough to whisper:
“Next time, don’t come back late.”
Sylrith didn’t respond.
She wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
Later that week, Irilsa returned from a mission with a broken wrist and blood caked beneath her nails. No one helped her. Sylrith walked past her in the infirmary and said nothing.
But she remembered.
Everyone remembered.
Because this phase was not about perfection—it was about being the last one standing.
And though no blade had yet been drawn between them in truth, the wound was already open.
Kaer’Thalor had cut it well.
At the end of the shadow phase, those who survived the Wroughting received their second tattoo:
A flowing pattern like a serpentine spiral across the ribcage, etched in violet-black ink that shimmered under moonlight.
It marked them as Veilborn — touched by shadow, shaped by silence.
“From now on,” the tattooist whispered as ink and pain met skin, “you belong to what cannot be seen.”
Sylrith accepted the pain in silence.
When it was done, she looked at her reflection in a still water basin.
The face that stared back was colder.
Sharper.
Unfamiliar.
Now came the Hunts.
Every week, the recruits were dispatched into the wild — sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs — to hunt beasts of Tenebris.
Not merely to kill, but to return with something untouched by claw or rot: a fang, a hide, a trophy.
Sylrith once tracked a nightstalker, a creature of skeletal wings and hollow eyes, through an icebound ravine for five days.
She used shadow to confuse its senses.
Poison to weaken it.
Silence to slit its throat.
When she returned, the jawbone she carried earned her five days of rest.
Others returned with nothing. Or not at all.
They called it The Hunt, though none of them truly understood what they were hunting.
In truth, it was they who were being hunted—by the cold, the silence, the eyes of the mountains, and the ever-present scrutiny of the Watcher.
No announcements were made. One morning, the bells ceased to ring. Rations were halved. Fires were left unlit. And they were sent into the frost-veined wilds, alone.
Each recruit was assigned a beast to track, a location to infiltrate, a trail to follow into the mouths of forgotten things. They were given nothing but a name—cryptic, symbolic, often misleading—and a time to return.
Most did not.
Those who came back arrived changed. Thin. Hollow-eyed. Stained in the blood of things not entirely mortal.
The Watcher never spoke. But his gaze lingered.
He was seen often during this phase—unlike in the earlier cycles. Perched atop ruined towers or seated within the blackened amphitheater, always veiled, always watching. Recruits would find small marks carved into trees along their paths—glyphs only Sylrith seemed to recognize.
They were his.
They were meant for her.
He is watching you more than the others, Old-Shadow had once told her. Not because he doubts you. Because he fears you may one day doubt yourself.
She did not understand then.
Now, as she buried a blade into the spine of a frostlurker and carved out its heart for evidence, she wondered if she ever would.
There was no time for rivalry anymore. The Hunt consumed everything.
Recruits passed each other only in silence—ghosts sharing fleeting glances in the tunnels before vanishing into their own missions. No shared meals. No whispered warnings. Just weeks of isolation and survival.
Sylrith hadn’t seen Irilsa in months.
And when she did—one passing moment in the armory corridor—they said nothing. Irilsa’s gaze flicked toward her, unreadable, then away.
No smirk. No comment. Just indifference.
A quiet acknowledgment: I see you. But I no longer care.
That stung more than open threat.
Sylrith, too, had changed. Her face had sharpened. Her voice was rarely heard. When others spoke to her, they found only a nod, a passing thought, or nothing. The cold had entered her bones and rooted there.
But her precision had grown.
She had scaled cliffs of black ice to retrieve blood-vines from the nests of stormcrows. Crawled naked through sulfur-choked vents to observe volcanic beasts without being sensed. She had stood for three days in a shallow grave to study the patrol of an orcish scout group without flinching once.
She no longer dreamt.
She didn’t have time for dreams.
And somewhere along those months, the word duty stopped being a burden.
It became a shape.
A blade honed in silence.
By the end of The Hunt, only thirteen recruits remained from the original sixty-one.
They returned to Kaer’Thalor without ceremony.
No applause.
No welcome.
Only silence, and the waiting glyphs etched into their beds—new instructions, final tests.
And one message carved in old runes upon the central pillar of the chamber:
“To become shadow, one must bleed for silence. The last flame begins where the last bond ends.”
Sylrith read it once.
Then turned away.
The last phase was near.
And there would be no one left to share the fire.
No more horns.
No morning bells.
No warnings.
The final phase had begun—not with ceremony, but with silence.
One dawn, the recruits were gathered in the Hall of Vanished Names, where the walls bore no banners and the air was always cold.
Voridan addressed them only once.
“From now on, there are no instructors. No lessons. Only judgment.
You are no longer students. You are Shadows being tested by the mountain itself.”
And then he left.
Their first task came without announcement.
They were led into a stone chamber where three prisoners knelt, bound and gagged.
A black-robed overseer stood behind them, silent.
Each recruit was given a blade, a list of names, and a single command:
“Extract the truth.
You are not to know their crimes. Only if they are lying.”
Some hesitated. Others obeyed too quickly.
Sylrith looked into the eyes of her assigned prisoner—a gaunt human man with swollen wrists and a shattered nose.
He did not beg. He simply wept.
She did what was asked. She told herself it was duty.
But that night, she could not sleep.
Next, they were sent into the valleys below the mountains, cloaked in illusion and silence.
There, they watched.
Bandits torching a village.
Slavers dragging children from caravans.
Men with torches setting fire to homes as screams echoed into the night.
Their orders were clear: observe only. Do not intervene.
It was a lesson in control. In detachment.
Sylrith clenched her fists until her palms bled.
She obeyed.
Then came real missions.
First, they were sent against invaders — beastkin raiders that threatened Tenebris’ borders.
Then, low-level criminals. Informants. Traitors.
The kill orders were final.
No room for questions. No time for mercy.
Some targets begged.
Others offered gold.
One simply said, “Thank you,” before the blade fell.
With each mission, recruits disappeared.
Not just the weak.
Failure was not punished anymore.
It was erased.
Those who returned said nothing. No questions were asked.
Sylrith noticed that her own voice had become quieter.
Not out of strategy—but instinct.
She stopped speaking when unnecessary.
Stopped writing her thoughts in journals.
Even her dreams grew silent.
They did not call it graduation. Kaer’Thalor had no room for such luxuries. There were no titles bestowed, no ceremonies, no bonds of kinship sealed in triumph. The last phase was simply known as The Purpose—where shadow was tested by fire, and belief by blood.
The assignments were real now. No longer drills. No longer illusions.
Real targets. Real consequences.
Sylrith was sent to observe a slave ring operating within the southern trade routes. She uncovered everything within days—the route masters, the branded children, the smuggled charms used to subdue magical captives. Her mission was simple: eliminate the ring leader.
But she didn’t kill him in his sleep, as would have been expected.
Instead, she orchestrated a diversion—lighting fire to the outer encampments while freeing the captives under cover of chaos. She then cornered the slaver in a collapsing tunnel, blade pressed to his throat.
She killed him. Swift. Clean.
But it had taken three nights longer than planned. She returned exhausted, wounded, but successful.
Irilsa, on the other hand, completed her assignment in a single night. Poisoned a diplomat and their entire household. Burned the correspondence. Left no survivors. No questions.
She returned bloodstained and smirking.
“They sent you after smugglers,” she said to Sylrith, “and you returned with sentiment. That’s not a blade. That’s a leash.”
Sylrith said nothing.
But she remembered.
Irilsa’s methods were efficient. Clinical. She never hesitated. But she had begun to take pleasure in cruelty. Not the reckless kind—no, hers was curated. Measured. She learned how to break her targets with silence, sow terror before ever drawing a weapon.
And she turned that gift inward.
“Do you think he watches you because he believes in you?” Irilsa asked one night, sitting beside the edge of the mountain overlook after a mission.
“No. He watches you because he wants to see if you’ll break.”
Sylrith did not answer.
She didn’t need to.
That night, she found a mark carved into her doorframe. A single rune, old and barely visible. One of the Watcher’s.
“You chose the longer path. That is not weakness.”
Sometimes she found his signs in unexpected places: etched into a dying tree, carved on the side of a hunter’s trap, whispered in the breath of an executed heretic.
He never appeared.
But she knew.
He was following.
He never reprimanded her. Never questioned her hesitations. But his presence—distant and inscrutable—was a constant pressure that sharpened her resolve more than any threat.
Because he never told her what to be.
He simply reminded her of what she had chosen.
And that was enough.
After completing her third true assassination, Sylrith was called to the Tomb The final tattoo came at the end of winter.
The ink was mixed with ash, blood, and shadowroot. It was carved into the back of her shoulder, spiraling downward in a serpent’s coil—an old Tenebris sigil that meant both Oath and Burden.
The instructor who gave it did not speak.
But when the blade lifted from her skin, Sylrith felt it like a weight pulling her toward something far older than herself.
Her brothers were gone.
Her childhood was a pale memory.
Even Irilsa, now a specter of calculated violence, had become something else.
Only Sylrith remained.
Sharpened. Tempered. And yet, still… not broken.
Then, one morning, a sealed scroll awaited her atop her bedding.
It bore the sigil of Kaer’Thalor and a wax mark in deep crimson—the Watcher’s own seal.
Inside, only a few words:
“You are summoned. You have been chosen. This will be your Severing.”
Below, coordinates.
A name.
A map.
No explanations.
No return instructions.
Sylrith folded the scroll carefully, placed it inside her cloak, and prepared her gear: blades, poisons, binding ropes, a small vial of shadow-ink.
She stood in the mirrorless room, the firelight casting no comfort.
“Whatever this mission is,” she thought, “I will finish it. Not because they command it.
But because I must see what lies beyond this darkness.”
The Watcher met her only once before she departed.
It was at the cliff’s edge above Kaer’Thalor, where the wind howled like forgotten gods.
He did not speak his name.
He only looked at her.
“I have no praise for you,” he said. “Only this: when the time comes, you will remember what others forget.”
She bowed.
Not in submission.
In acknowledgment.
And when she turned away, he was already gone.
And with that, Sylrith left the only home she had ever known since fleeing Shaer’Zanir.
Not as a daughter.
Not as a rebel.
But as a Shadow of Tenebris.
Chronicles of Astravara 