Neri's POV

After Elio left, I fell into a darkness I hadn't known existed within me. Days blurred together. I went through the motions of living—working odd jobs around the village, helping at the orphanage, staring at the road leading out of Timbervale as if willpower alone could bring him back.

His letters came regularly at first. I read each one until the paper grew thin at the creases, tracing his words with my fingertips like I could somehow feel his presence through them. The Hero candidate. My Elio, who used to cry when we found injured birds, who couldn't sleep without his favorite blanket until we were ten, who always, always shared everything he had—now the Empire's chosen one.

I wrote back, but what could I say? The village is empty without you. I am empty without you. I failed the test that you passed brilliantly. I'm exactly where you left me, while you're changing the world.

After three months, his letters stopped coming. I told myself they were intercepted, lost, delayed—anything but the truth I feared: that Elio had outgrown me, that our childhood bond couldn't stretch across the divide of our new realities.

It was on my lowest day—when I'd decided to leave Timbervale, to wander until I found some purpose or perished trying—that I met him.

I was gathering supplies at the edge of the Whisperwood when I noticed smoke rising from a clearing not marked on any village map. Curiosity temporarily overcame my melancholy, and I followed it to a small cottage that seemed to have grown from the forest floor itself, its walls twined with living vines, its roof carpeted with moss.

An old man sat outside, tending a small fire. He didn't look up as I approached.

"Either sit and state your purpose or leave me in peace," he said, his voice surprisingly strong for his apparent age.

I sat. "I don't have a purpose. That's sort of the problem."

At this, he looked up, and I nearly fell back at the sight of his eyes—completely black, with tiny pinpricks of light that seemed to mirror the night sky.

"Everyone has a purpose," he said. "Most are simply too afraid to recognize it." He studied me intently. "You're hollow inside. Someone carved out your center and took it with them."

I flinched at the accuracy. "My friend—"

"—became the Empire's latest attempt at a Hero," he finished for me. "Yes, the woods whisper news, if you know how to listen."

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"Who are you?"

He smiled, revealing teeth too sharp to be human. "Names have power, young one. You may call me Mage, though that's only a fraction of what I am."

"Are you going to kill me?" I asked, surprised by my own calm.

He laughed, a sound like cracking ice. "If I wanted you dead, you wouldn't have seen the smoke." He gestured to the fire. "No, I think you might be useful. And in return, perhaps I can fill that hollow space with something worth having."

"What could you possibly offer me?"

"Power," he said simply. "Not the gaudy, light-filled power your friend now wields, but something older. Deeper. The kind the Empire fears to teach."

I should have run. Every story warned about strange mages in the woods offering forbidden knowledge. But what did I have to lose?

"Why me?"

His star-filled eyes seemed to see through me. "Because you're broken in exactly the right places. Because you love deeply enough to hate profoundly. Because balance demands it."

"I don't understand."

"You will." He stood, suddenly towering over me though he'd seemed small moments before. "Return tomorrow if you wish to begin. Or don't, and continue your purposeless existence. The choice, as with all important things, is yours alone."

I returned the next day. And the next. And every day for two years.

Master Vex (as I came to know him) taught me magics I'd never imagined—how to step through shadows, how to speak with the dead, how to bend reality in small, crucial ways. He taught me strategy and patience, how to see ten moves ahead while appearing to focus only on the present.

"The Empire teaches battle magic," he told me. "I teach survival magic. They create weapons; I create whispers."

I never asked what he was, though I knew he wasn't human. Sometimes his shadow would stretch and shift into impossible shapes. Sometimes creatures I couldn't name would visit, speaking in languages that hurt my ears.

"Are you teaching me demon magic?" I finally asked one day, after mastering a spell that let me temporarily stop a heart from beating.

"There is no demon magic or human magic," he replied. "There is only magic, and the intentions behind it. Light can blind as easily as shadow can hide. Remember that when they inevitably call you villain."

Before I could question this cryptic statement, a raven arrived with news: the Imperial Army was returning to Timbervale, led by the Hero himself, to recruit soldiers for the coming war against the Demon Realm.

Elio was coming home.

I looked at my hands, now marked with arcane symbols I'd burned into my own flesh. Would he recognize me? Would he sense the power I now carried? Would he be proud or horrified?

Master Vex watched me with those starlit eyes. "And so it begins," he murmured.

"What begins?"

"The convergence of paths. The balancing of scales." He handed me a polished black staff topped with a crystal that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. "You've learned all I can teach. The rest you must discover yourself."

"You're leaving?" Panic rose in me—another abandonment.

"No, Neri. You are." He placed his hand on my shoulder. "Remember, when the moment comes—and it will—that salvation and damnation are often the same act viewed from different perspectives."

I didn't understand then. How could I? I was eighteen, powerful beyond my years but still achingly young, still desperate to reunite with the only person who had ever truly known me.

I didn't realize I was walking into the first act of a tragedy centuries in the making, or that Master Vex had known all along exactly what role I would play.