Corvin Lasse was the kind of man who organized his thoughts before he spoke them, which Cael respected professionally even as it tested his patience personally. He sat across the table and watched the older scholar arrange his words the way a careful man arranges pieces on a board, not quickly but with intention, and he waited because the journal was warm against his ribs and whatever came next was going to matter.
"You need to understand what Aldric was," Corvin began. "Not who he was to the Academy, not the official record. What he actually was." He turned his ale slowly on the table. "He was one of six scholars the Ashen Conclave tasked with a single question fifteen years ago. The question was this: where did Shadow Threading come from? Not how it works. Not what it does. Where it originated. Who developed it first and why."
"And?" Cael said.
"The answer took Aldric fifteen years and apparently his life." Corvin's mouth tightened briefly. "Shadow Threading did not originate with the Order of the Hollow Blade. The Order discovered it approximately two hundred years ago in a series of pre-Church texts they subsequently destroyed, or believed they destroyed. Aldric found fragments the Order missed, scattered across three different archive collections in two different kingdoms. He spent a decade piecing them together."
Two hundred years. The Order has been running on stolen knowledge for two centuries and calling it their own methodology. That explains the gaps in the training. The places where the curriculum always felt edited rather than written, like someone had gone through it and removed certain pages before handing it to us.
"The original practitioners," Cael said. "Who were they?"
Corvin looked at him over the rim of his spectacles. "That is precisely the question that got Aldric killed." He reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet of paper, which he set on the table between them. It was covered in the same dense handwriting as the journal but this was a copy, the ink fresher, the paper different. "The original Shadow Threading practitioners were not human. Or rather they were not only human. They were individuals in whom Hollow energy was present from birth, not acquired through training or ritual but simply there, woven into their Thread from the moment of their existence."
The fire popped loudly in the grate. Neither of them looked at it.
"The Church calls them abominations," Corvin continued, his voice remaining carefully level. "The pre-Church texts call them something that translates roughly as Hollow Born. Individuals who carry a fragment of the Hollow inside them as a natural condition. They developed Shadow Threading not as a discipline but as an instinct, a way of interacting with a world they already perceived differently from everyone around them."
Something in me knows that symbol. Something in me recognized the Thread diagram the way I recognize breathing.
"How many," Cael said. His voice came out level. He was pleased about that.
"Historically? Perhaps one in several hundred thousand. Extraordinarily rare." Corvin tapped the folded sheet. "Currently Aldric believed three were alive in Valdenmoor alone. Possibly more across the continent." He paused. "He had names for two of them. One died eight months ago, an assassination the Order carried out. The other." Corvin looked at Cael steadily. "The other is sitting across from me in a rather damp coat, drinking ale he hasn't touched in the last four minutes."
Cael looked down. His ale was indeed untouched. He picked it up and drank half of it in one go because it gave him four seconds to do nothing except process what had just been said to him.
I am not entirely human. I have never been entirely human. The Order knew this from the moment they took me. They took me because of this. Fifteen years of training, fifteen years of missions, fifteen years of being the Order's most precise instrument, and the entire time they were running me like a mechanism they had built rather than a person they had found. Because to them that is exactly what I was. A Hollow Born asset they had gotten to first.
He set the ale down.
"They took children," Cael said. "The Order. They didn't take orphans out of charity or opportunity. They were selecting specifically."
"Yes," Corvin said quietly. "Aldric believed the Order had been identifying and acquiring Hollow Born children for at least a century. Most of them." He stopped.
"Most of them what."
Corvin's hands were very still on the table. "Most of them don't survive the training. Not because the training itself is fatal. Because the Order extracts something from Hollow Born practitioners during the training process without their knowledge. A gradual harvesting of the Hollow energy they carry. Small amounts, carefully managed, so the asset remains functional and useful." He looked at Cael directly. "The ones who survive long enough to become fully operational are the ones whose Hollow energy regenerates faster than the extraction rate. Which means the Order has been selecting, without knowing it, for the most powerful Hollow Born individuals in each generation."
They were farming us. The whole time. Not training assets but farming them. Extracting something we didn't know we had and feeding it to something while keeping us functional enough to keep producing it. And I survived long enough to become good at the job, which means I have been their most productive source for however long I have been operational.
Something cold settled in Cael's chest. Not anger exactly. Something more structural than anger. The feeling of a foundation you had been standing on your entire life quietly revealing that it was never solid.
He looked at the folded sheet on the table. "What are they doing with it? The extracted energy."
Corvin hesitated for the first time. It was a small hesitation, quickly controlled, but Cael had been reading people's tells since he was seven years old and he caught it cleanly.
"Corvin."
"The Conclave has a theory," Corvin said carefully. "We are not certain. Aldric was close to confirming it when." He stopped again. Collected himself. "There is something imprisoned in the Hollow. Something that has been there for a very long time. The Church knows about it and has structured their entire theological framework around keeping it contained, though they describe it in rather different terms than we do." He folded his hands. "The Order has been feeding extracted Hollow Born energy to whatever is imprisoned there. Whether to keep it contained or to sustain it or to slowly free it, that is what Aldric had not yet determined."
Something imprisoned in the Hollow. Something the Church and the Order both know about and have built entire institutions around. And the Order has been using people like me as a fuel source for it without our knowledge or consent for a century.
Cael was quiet for a long moment. The common room moved around them. The dockworkers called for another round, the arguing couple had progressed to a tense silence that was somehow worse than the argument, and the landlord wiped the bar with the methodical patience of a man who had seen everything and retained the good sense to be surprised by none of it.
"The journal," Cael said finally. "Fenne's cipher. Can you read it?"
"Most of it," Corvin said. "It took me three years to develop the key. Aldric and I built it together originally, before we understood how dangerous the research was becoming." He reached into his coat again and produced a second folded sheet, smaller, dense with notations. "This is the cipher key. With it the journal becomes fully readable. All of it. Including the sections that describe what a Hollow Born individual is genuinely capable of when they are not being harvested and limited and kept deliberately below their potential."
He slid both sheets across the table to Cael.
Cael looked at them for a moment. He thought about Fenne sitting at his desk in the candlelight, ink on three fingers, already knowing how the night was going to end and arranging his pieces carefully anyway. Sending the journal somewhere it could be found. Sending Corvin somewhere he could be found. Setting the whole thing in motion with his last breath and a dying man's particular brand of stubborn hope.
He did not just leave me a journal. He left me a door. He spent fifteen years building it and used the last minutes of his life making sure I would walk through it.
Cael picked up both sheets and tucked them inside his coat beside the journal.
"All right," he said. "Tell me everything the Conclave knows about what I am."
Corvin Lasse looked at him for a moment with those tired careful eyes, and then he began to talk, and the fire burned low in the grate, and outside the rain finally started to ease, and Cael sat very still and listened to the shape of a life he had never been told he was living.