Silas eventually found Kael, but he didn't find the boy he knew.
Kael was standing at the edge of the now-closed rift. The purple glow had vanished, but Kael's left arm—the one with the silver-stitch—was now completely black, covered in shifting, oily runes that seemed to move even when he stood still.
"Kael?" Silas whispered, keeping his distance. "The city... it's gone. People are coming from the neighboring provinces. Heroes, lords, armies. They're going to want answers."
Kael turned around. His eyes were no longer violet or blue. They were a flat, bottomless black.
"Let them come," Kael said. "Harald was a distraction. A petty thief playing in a garden. The real masters are looking at us now, Silas. And they don't see a kingdom."
He looked down at his black, runic arm. Varg had consumed a fragment of the Void-Rift.
"They see a meal."
Kael looked toward the horizon, past the borders of the known map, toward the Forbidden Continents where the mana-trees were said to be black and the seas were made of shadows.
"We need to find the other 'Anchors'," Kael said. "Harald was just one. There are four more Kings like him, placed in the corners of this world to hold the door open. If I don't kill them all, this world will be unraveled by dawn of the next century."