"You would be better off just telling me your first name," the masked man said, leaning back in his chair with the ease of someone who had long stopped caring about table manners.
Kyth looked up from his plate. "Why? What is wrong with my last name?"
"Good for yourself if you figure that out."
"What does that mean exactly?"
"It means it does not sound normal to most people around here." The man picked up his cup. "Leave it at that."
Kyth opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it, and went back to his food. There were more important battles in life than this one, and besides, the chicken was genuinely excellent and deserved his full attention.
They finished their meal as the conversation wound down to a comfortable nothing. The masked man rose from the table, dropped a small pouch of coins into the owner's waiting hand without breaking stride, and headed for the exit. Kyth, who had not quite finished, grabbed a chicken wing off the plate and scrambled after him, still chewing loudly.
"Where are you going?"
"Sleep."
"Sleep where exactly?"
The man pushed through the door and spoke without looking back. "I am a freelancer and I have no permanent home, so the place I sleep is the church down the road. You are welcome to come along if you want. Might even be your chance at something better than starving on a street corner."
Kyth turned this over in his head for a moment. "Well," he said quietly to himself, "I have nowhere else to go tonight anyway." He took another bite of the chicken wing and finished the thought with a small nod. "Sleeping inside a church beats sleeping on cold stone by a considerable margin."
He laughed out loud at his own situation, a short and genuine laugh that rang out into the quiet street. The masked man glanced sideways at him as they walked, said nothing for a moment, then muttered something very quietly under his breath.
"Is this kid actually alright?"
A few minutes later they arrived at the church, and Kyth stopped walking entirely.
Before him stood an iron gate so tall it seemed to have opinions about the sky above it. It was old and grand and covered in carved patterns he did not have words for, depicting figures and shapes from stories he had never been told. It made him feel, in a way he could not quite explain, extremely small and strangely welcomed at the same time.
"Is this what they call the church?" he asked, tilting his head back to see the top of it.
"That," the masked man said, in the careful tone of someone exercising considerable patience, "is what people generally call the gate."
"The gate." Kyth stared up at it with genuine wonder. "This gate alone is bigger than my entire house back home."
The man laughed despite himself, a low and unexpected rumble from somewhere in his chest, and pushed the gate open with one hand. They walked through together, their footsteps quiet on the stone path that wound through the church grounds beneath a wide and silent sky scattered generously with stars. The night air was cool and carried the faint smell of candle wax and something older, like stone that had absorbed centuries of prayer and kept them tucked inside.
Inside, the church was calm and still. The long wooden pews sat empty on either side of the aisle and the candles mounted along the walls burned low, throwing soft shadows across the floor that shifted slightly whenever the air moved. It was the kind of silence that did not feel lonely. It felt, instead, like the silence of a place that had been listening for a very long time and had grown comfortable with it.
"Finally," the masked man said, with real feeling, and lowered himself to the floor near the far wall. He stretched out with the practiced ease of someone who had slept in considerably stranger places than this and found them all perfectly adequate. Kyth dropped down beside him without ceremony, grateful beyond all expression to have something solid and flat beneath him that was not a street corner.
He was most of the way to sleep when the man spoke again.
"What kind of magic do you have, kid?"
Kyth opened one eye at the ceiling. "I have absolutely no idea," he said honestly. "I have never been to a town before. This was my first time inside Vanyer. My first time anywhere, really."
The masked man was quiet for a short moment. Then he sat up. "Well then. Let us find out together."
He rose and disappeared into a dark side room without further explanation. Kyth listened to his footsteps fade and then return. The man came back carrying something cradled carefully in his wrapped palm, and he crouched beside Kyth and held it out between them. A crystal ball, no larger than a ripe apple, perfectly clear, catching the low candlelight and holding it gently like a jar holds fireflies.
"Take it in both hands," the man said. "And hold it tight."
Kyth looked at the crystal ball. He looked at the masked man he had known for all of five hours. Then, without any particular hesitation, he did exactly as he was told.
The moment his fingers closed around the crystal, something in the air of the church shifted.
Color came first, slow and tentative, then all at once in a rush, streams of light in every shade Kyth recognized and several he had no name for curling toward him from the dark corners of the room. The mana moved like it had somewhere to be, and that somewhere was him. It passed through him in a wave that was warm and deeply strange, filling every quiet corner of him before flowing back outward and pouring itself, calm and deliberate, into the crystal ball resting in his open hands.
Kyth watched with eyes that had gone very wide. He felt the way he imagined a person might feel watching the sun rise for the very first time, aware that something significant was happening but too caught up in the experience to properly understand it yet. Amazed and uncertain in equal measure, he held very still and let it happen.
"Open your hands," the masked man said quietly.
Kyth uncurled his fingers.
The ball that had been perfectly clear was now full from edge to edge with deep and unbroken black. It sat in his palm like a captured piece of the night sky, heavy and calm and absolute. Then, rising slowly through the darkness inside it, a symbol appeared at the surface and stayed there, steady and deliberate, as if it had always known this moment was coming.
The masked man stared at it without speaking.
Something moved behind his mask, some shift in expression that Kyth could not read from where he sat. The man's eyes stayed fixed on the symbol for a long moment, and behind them his thoughts moved carefully.
"Assassin. And dark magic. Legendary tier." He turned it over slowly in his mind. "Could this boy carry that bloodline? But something is missing, something that should be present and is not. Perhaps he does not. Perhaps he is something else entirely that I do not have a name for yet."
He kept every word of it behind his teeth.
"The magic you carry is dark magic," he said at last, his voice even and calm. "It sits at legendary tier. Your class is assassin."
Kyth looked down at the living black swirling slowly in his cupped hands. "What can I actually do with all of that?"
"Find out for yourself."
Before Kyth could object to that answer, the crystal ball had already begun coming apart, the black mana dissolving from it in slow threads and drifting back toward him, settling somewhere deep and quiet inside his chest like something returning to the place it had always belonged. He looked at his empty hands. He looked at the ceiling. Then his eyes closed on their own.
He was asleep before another question could form, exhaustion collecting its debt all at once and thoroughly.
The masked man watched him for a moment in the candlelight. Then he exhaled slowly, lay back on the cool stone floor, and allowed his own eyes to close.
The church held its peace around them both.
Outside, the night spread wide and unhurried over Vanyer Town, the stars doing what stars have always done, keeping quiet watch over everything below. Floating in the air just beyond the church wall, perfectly still, was a young man of about twenty. His blonde hair lifted slightly in the breeze. His yellow eyes were calm and unblinking. His long black coat hung motionless around him as though gravity had simply decided not to apply itself tonight.
He had seen everything. The crystal ball. The black mana gathering and pouring. The symbol rising through the dark. He had watched the whole of it without moving and without sound.
He remained there now, eyes resting on the church, expression giving away nothing at all. He did not leave. He did not speak. He simply stayed where he was, suspended quietly above the silent street, and watched the candlelight flicker behind the church windows as the night settled in around him.