Chương 12: Chapter 11 – No Record of This

The voice wasn't the dark. He needed that to be true before he'd let himself believe anything else, so he tested it the only way he had — against what he already knew. The dark had moved without sound. It had struck once, clean, without warning, and it hadn't spoken a single word while it did it. Whatever intelligence lived inside it, talking to him had never been part of the plan. This was warm. This was certain.

And it hadn't come from out past the gap — it had come from right here, from the chamber, from somewhere close enough that he could feel it the way he felt the stone against his spine. Two different things. He held them apart in his mind like he was holding two ends of a rope that wanted badly to knot together, and he kept them apart because the alternative — that the thing that cut him and the thing now inside his skull were the same — wasn't one he could survive thinking about right now.

He wasn't losing his mind. He pressed his palms flat against the cold stone floor and made himself focus on what he could verify. The cut on his arm, still bleeding, warm under his palm. The floor, cold through his trousers. The dust in the air, dry and old, catching at the back of his throat with every breath. Real things. If the wound was real and the stone was real, then whatever had just spoken into him was real too, sharing the same room as the two of them instead of living only inside his own breaking head.

I have been waiting a very long time. The words sat there, finished, belonging to no mouth he could see. He didn't move. Didn't trust himself to. His arm still ached, but duller now than before — the hot line under his hand had settled into a low, steady pulse, more his own than anything else in this chamber and easier to hold onto for exactly that reason. Whatever had passed into him back where the shell broke hadn't finished with him yet.

He understood that without being told, the same instinct that told him not to ask it to explain itself before it was ready. The quiet held longer than any quiet had a right to, out here in the dark. Then it changed — not with sound, but with the sense that it was no longer only going to talk to him. And behind his eyes, uninvited, a screen. He knew what these were supposed to look like.

Every child in the city grew up knowing — a chip went in the day after your ceremony, it calibrated over the following week, and once it settled it turned the bond into numbers anyone could read. Clean. The same format for every person who'd ever had one, because the chip didn't care who you were or what had chosen you.

He had spent five years staring at other people's screens from the outside, memorising the format from secondhand descriptions and market gossip and the one time a boy two streets over had shown off his stats to a crowd like it was a magic trick, showing off in the way boys with something to prove always did. He'd built the whole thing in his head, brick by brick, never once expecting to need it for himself. This hadn't come from a chip. There'd been no calibration. No week of settling.

It arrived complete, at the exact second the bond took, the way the voice had arrived — not delivered through anything, just present, like it had been waiting under the floor of the ordinary system the whole time and had finally been given a reason to come up through it. He read it twice, looking for the part where it stopped making sense, and didn't find an edge to it either way.

Whatever explanation existed for a system that skipped the steps every other bonded person had to sit through, it wasn't going to arrive tonight. He set the question aside with everything else he'd set aside since the storm — somewhere he'd get to eventually, once staying alive stopped taking up all the room. User: Anthony Byrren Kithren:???? User Level: 1 Evolution Stage: 1 Kithren Level: 1 Kithren Str:?? Kithren End:?? Kithren Magic:?? Kithren Agi:?? Kithren HP:?? /?? Kithren Mana:?? /??

The categories he understood fine — level, stage, the four attributes, all standard, all things he'd read about a hundred times in secondhand descriptions. It was the question marks that didn't fit. A chip screen after calibration gave you real numbers straight away. This one was telling him the bond was too new, too raw, to read what it had actually caught. It would resolve. It had to. That was how bonds worked — the numbers came as the two of you got to know each other, not before.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. The name sat as four question marks and refused to be anything else yet. He turned his attention toward skills, mostly out of habit, mostly because it gave his shaking hands somewhere to point, and the screen answered — slower this time, the way a joint answers a motion it hasn't made in a long while, stiff before it remembers how. Skill 1 — Flame Breath The Kithren produces a breath of fire, burning anything caught within range.

High chance of inflicting burn. Mana Cost: 30 Skill 2 — Enhanced Vision The Kithren can significantly enhance the vision of the bonded user. Mana Cost: 5 Skill 3 —?? Mana Cost:?? Skill 4 —?? Mana Cost:?? He read the mana cost on Flame Breath twice. Thirty. A level one Kithren's pool ran around ten, twelve on a good day, in every documented case he'd ever come across. Thirty wasn't difficult.

Thirty was three times what the creature actually had to spend, a skill that existed on the screen and nowhere else, not for a long time yet. Two slots sat locked behind it, level requirements he couldn't see, whatever they held not ready to show itself. He let the screen go, and it went without complaint, leaving him with the glow and the quiet and his own ragged breathing. He turned around. The light had a source after all.

On a shelf of rough stone maybe three feet off the ground, small enough that he could have wrapped both hands around it, sat something he had no name ready for. Cat-sized, four-legged, a build he half-recognised and couldn't quite place — and red the way nothing in his experience had ever been red, not fox-fur red or autumn-leaf red, red like the colour was coming from inside the fur instead of bouncing off it.

It sat with an absolute, unnatural stillness, its tail curling slow and deliberate at the tip and then starting over. Two dark diamond marks sat on its forehead, too even, too intentional, to have grown there on their own. The dust in the air had a new smell under it now, faint and metallic, and it took him a second to place it as his own blood, cooling where it had run down to his wrist. Its eyes were open.

Amber, deep enough that his gaze kept sliding off the surface of them looking for a bottom that wasn't there. Small ears, pointed, angled toward him without once actually moving — no twitch, no flick, nothing of the restlessness he'd have expected from anything alive and this newly hatched. Everything about it held still except the tail, and even that moved like it had somewhere better to be and was choosing, for now, not to go there.

It wasn't looking at him the way an animal looked at anything — not scanning, not deciding whether he was a threat. It had already finished deciding. It was simply watching now, the unhurried attention of a creature that had been expecting exactly this moment for longer than he had any right to imagine.

"What are you?" His voice came out wrong. Rough, cracked in the middle, a voice that hadn't been used for much beyond swearing at himself in five years. Nothing. The tail kept curling.

"Who are you, then." Still nothing. His arm throbbed under his hand, a slow insistent beat that matched his pulse, and the stone under him was cold enough now that he could feel it through the seat of his trousers, and somewhere past the gap above him, the thing that had cut him was still out there, already proven capable of opening him up before he even knew it had moved.

"I'm asking you a question." Sharper this time, more than he meant to give it.

"The least you could—" I am Mahkir. The words didn't arrive the way a stranger's words arrived. They landed and stayed, settling into a spot behind his ribs like they'd always had a claim on the space and were only now collecting it. The screen came back on its own, without him calling for it, the four question marks in the Kithren field dissolving and reassembling into a single word with the finality of a door closing after a very long time standing open. Kithren: Mahkir He looked at it longer than it needed.

Then it faded, and there was only the glow and the small red creature on the shelf, still watching him like the whole exchange had confirmed something it already knew.

"Mahkir." He said it out loud, testing the sound of it in his own mouth.

"Right. Okay." He didn't know what else to say to that. Five years of imagining this exact moment and every rehearsed line he'd ever run through his own head had evaporated the second it actually happened.

"You could've led with that." You didn't ask nicely. The reply came dry, unbothered, with the specific confidence of a mind that had never once in its life considered the possibility of being wrong. Ant almost laughed. It came out closer to a cough.

"You bled me before you introduced yourself." That wasn't me. The words carried an edge underneath the dryness now — not defensive, not quite, but close enough to it that Ant tucked the reaction away without knowing yet what to do with it. Not my doing. I don't put marks on what's mine.

"Comforting." I try. He should have felt ridiculous, sitting on a cold floor with blood drying down his arm, bantering with a creature the size of a housecat that had apparently existed in his head for exactly ninety seconds. He didn't. Something in his chest had gone quiet in a way it hadn't been quiet in five years, and he wasn't ready yet to look directly at what that meant.

"So what do I—" Mahkir's head turned. Not toward him. Toward the gap. The amber in his eyes deepened all at once, no warning, no gradual build — orange sliding into a red that hadn't been there a second earlier, and every line of that small stillness went taut in a way that had nothing restful left in it.

"Mahkir?" It seems, Mahkir said, and even now, even with his whole body gone rigid and pointed at the dark above them, the dryness didn't leave his voice, that we have company. Ant's mouth went dry. Whatever was up there, it hadn't come to talk.

"Is it the same thing that—" And it isn't friendly. The red eyes didn't blink. Didn't waver. Ant got to his feet, cut arm locked against his side, every ounce of the last minute's stupid, easy warmth burning off him in an instant, and followed Mahkir's stare up into the black above the gap, where the dark itself had gone very still, the way it always does right before it stops being still at all. He'd stood here before. Twenty minutes ago, an hour, he'd lost the count somewhere back in the running and the falling.

He hadn't had anything then but his own two hands and a voice that didn't carry. He wasn't alone this time.