Kae was born into a world where love was as alien as kindness and warmth, and affection was nothing more than a fleeting luxury reserved for the weak. Calder, their father, once a renowned soldier known for his unyielding discipline and brutal prowess on the battlefield, had long since discarded any notion of tenderness. His body bore the scars of countless wars, but it was his heart that had truly been shattered by the brutal realities of survival. Over time, he had come to believe that strength, pure, unrelenting strength, was the only thing that mattered. Everything else was expendable. And love, in his eyes, was a liability, a dangerous weakness that would only drag them down.

From the moment Kae was born, they were nothing more than an instrument, a tool to carry on their father's legacy. There was no joy in their early years, no laughter or comfort. Instead, they were thrust into a world of cold discipline, where emotions were suppressed, and every waking moment was dedicated to forging their body and mind into something indestructible. Kae's earliest memories were not of play or comfort but of grueling physical drills, harsh commands, and endless rejection.

Calder’s vision for them was clear: Kae would become a living testament to his beliefs, a symbol of strength suring even his own. He would shape them into a weapon, a soldier without equal, proving to the world and himself that love was unnecessary and only the strongest could endure the harshest of trials. There was no room for failure, no space for weakness. Each day was a battle against their limitations, and every mistake was met with punishment, not care or understanding.

From the moment Kae could walk, they were subjected to a brutal routine. There were no gentle words of encouragement or soothing caresses to comfort them after a long day. Instead, they learned the language of pain, the biting sting of a whip against their skin, the sharp reprimands of their father's voice, and the overwhelming weight of expectations placed on their tiny shoulders. No matter how small, every error was punished, and the punishment was always severe. The lessons were drilled into Kae's very bones: To be weak was to invite disaster. To show any sign of emotion, or to reveal any sign of fear, was to invite failure.

Training began at the break of dawn when the sun was barely a whisper on the horizon, and it continued until long after the stars had claimed the sky. Each day was a mirror of the last, an unrelenting cycle of drills, repetition, and harsh correction. Kae's body was molded like clay, shaped into the ideal warrior, and their spirit was battered, bruised, and broken. They were taught to push through exhaustion, to ignore the pain, to accept that the world was cruel and would never offer them the mercy of comfort. Kae was taught that love was not a shield to protect them from harm but a vulnerability that would be exploited.

Calder took every opportunity to remind Kae of their place. They were nothing more than an extension of his will, a reflection of his power, his legacy. In the silence that followed each brutal session, Kae was left to grapple with the emptiness that consumed them, a loneliness so profound that it made their bones ache. They were no longer a child. They were a tool, a weapon, and love was something they would never know.

Then, one day, training began as usual. But tonight was different. Kae had failed a simple drill that should have been easy for anyone who had spent their life under Calder’s watchful, unforgiving eye. It wasn't a difficult task, but the exhaustion and hunger that had become their constant companions clouded their mind. Their limbs were trembling, their vision blurred, but the punishment came nonetheless.

Calder’s wrath was always fierce, but it was something darker tonight. There was a fury in his eyes that Kae had never seen before: a dangerous, unpredictable fire that flickered behind the cold exterior of the man who had beaten them into submission for years. Something snapped in their father, a well of anger that had long been building, and he unleashed it with a cruelty far worse than the usual blows.

Kae endured hours of punishment, the lash of a whip across their back, the sting of blows to their face, their body, and their spirit. Each strike was meant to break them, to remind them of their place in this world. But it wasn't just physical pain that cut deepest; it was the gnawing emptiness in their stomach, the hunger that had long been a constant companion, the feeling of being nothing more than a tool in the hands of a monster.

By the time the physical punishment ceased, Kae was trembling with exhaustion, their body bruised and bloody, their mind on the edge of collapse. Calder, standing tall over them, sneered, contempt in his eyes. He muttered words that Kae often heard: words of disappointment, failure, and worthlessness. It all blurred together, like static on an old, broken radio.

At that moment, something inside Kae snapped. The rage, the fear, the frustration; they all fused in a single, overwhelming wave of emotion. For the first time in years, Kae dared to feel something other than submission. It wasn't a conscious thought but an instinctual reaction. Desperation surged within them, filling their chest with a tight, suffocating panic. The world seemed to slow as their heart raced.

Kae's eyes landed on the heaviest weapon in the room: a great axe. It was a tool of destruction that had been hung on the wall for months, waiting for the day when Kae would be strong enough to wield it. They reached for it without thinking, their fingers wrapping around the worn handle, its weight nearly unbearable. They barely ed the dull thud of the weapon hitting the ground as they pulled it from its resting place.

With a cry that wasn't their own, Kae lifted the axe, their body moving on pure animal instinct. The next few moments were a blur, as fear, rage, and panic flooded their senses. Calder’s eyes widened in shock as Kae swung the great axe with all the force they could muster, unaware of what they were doing. The steel cleaved through the air, striking their father with brutal precision.

The world around them was a chaos of pain, blood, and shattered control. Kae's breath came in ragged gasps as they stood over the body of the man who had controlled their life, the man they had feared and now the man they had killed. The moment's weight hit them all at once, like a thousand crushing stones falling on their chest. They stared at the lifeless form before them, their mind struggling to comprehend what had just happened.

Kae's heartbeat thundered in their ears, drowning out everything else, the pulse of adrenaline surging through their veins. Their hands, still gripping the great axe, trembled as they stood over their father's lifeless form. The weapon, so heavy moments before, now felt as if it had grown lighter, as if the act had pulled the weight from it.

The room was eerily silent; the only sound was the ragged, panicked breaths that tore from Kae's chest. Their eyes were locked on the unmoving figure on the floor, the man who had been their tormentor, their cruel trainer, their constant shadow. The blood pooled around him, staining the floor in a dark, ominous red. The weight of what had just occurred crashed over Kae in waves, overwhelming their senses. The cold steel of the great axe still hummed with the echoes of its swing, a sound Kae would never be able to forget as they dropped it.

Fear gripped them first, a sharp, icy terror that pierced their chest like a dagger. What have I done? The question spun in their mind over and over again. They had struck down the one person who had controlled their life and shaped them into what they were. But that thought quickly gave way to another: a strange, almost sickening sense of relief. The shackles that had bound them to their father, the constant barrage of torment and cruelty, were gone. He was gone.

But then, the guilt—oh, the guilt—twisted in Kae's stomach like a serpent, coiling tighter with every breath they took. They had killed him. No matter the reason, no matter the years of abuse and pain, they had ended a life. The enormity of what they had just done threatened to suffocate them. They had been forced into a corner, their survival instincts taking over in a desperate, animalistic reaction, but now, in the cold silence of the room, the reality of their actions settled heavily on their shoulders. Kae couldn't bring themselves to look away from the body as if doing so would somehow make it more real, more final.

The silence, suddenly, was deafening. It stretched on, endless and suffocating. Outside, the world continued as it always had: unaware and untouched. No one came rushing in. No one came to stop them. No one came to punish them. At that moment, Kae was utterly alone, the weight of their father's death hanging heavily in the air like a thick fog that refused to lift.

There was no one there to comfort them or offer a kind word or a glance of understanding. There was only the oppressive silence and the lifeless body on the floor. And for the first time in Kae's life, they were free; free from the relentless beatings, the cold indifference, the unspoken expectation that they would always be perfect. But that freedom came at a terrible price. It came with a death—a death that was all their own doing.

The minutes stretched into eternity. Kae remained frozen, unable to move or process what had just happened. The world outside might never know. Calder’s death would remain a secret, buried in the quiet corners of that empty house, where no one would ever question what had happened. No one would ever ask if Kae had been driven to this point by years of cruelty and neglect. No one would ever care. They were alone with their actions, guilt, and relief, caught in the painful, inescapable reality of their choices.

Kae stood there, breathless and trembling, feeling the weight of what they had done pressing down on them from all sides. The deed was done, and nothing would ever be the same again.

They fled into the wilderness that very night, the blood barely dry on their hands, driven by a wild, desperate instinct to escape. There was no plan, no thought for supplies or shelter, only the raw, overwhelming need to get away from the house, from the corpse, from the ghost of the life they had left behind. The only home they had ever known —a place of cold floors, bruised skin, and a broken spirit —faded into the darkness behind them as they ran, the looming trees swallowing them whole.

The dense forests became their first refuge, the thick canopy overhead blotting out the moonlight, wrapping the world in deep shadow. Every snapped twig and whispering leaf set their nerves on edge. They stumbled through the undergrowth, bare hands clawing at brambles and branches, every muscle screaming with exhaustion and fear. But they did not stop. They could not stop. To stop was to think, and to think was to . And Kae could not bear to .

In those early days, survival was a matter of pure instinct, a battle fought minute by minute. Hunger gnawed at them relentlessly. They scavenged what they could: roots, berries, anything that looked edible, sometimes eating things that left them sick and feverish. They drank from muddy streams, their body slowly adapting to the harshness of the wild. Once trained to wield weapons and absorb punishment, their hands learned new skills: how to dig a shallow pit to trap small animals, set simple snares from vines and stripped bark, and use sharp stones as tools.

As the seasons turned, the forests gave way to jagged mountains and later to arid deserts where the sun baked the earth into cracked stone and the nights froze the marrow in their bones. Each new landscape brought new challenges and new lessons. Kae learned to read the sky for storms and smell the wind change that heralded danger. They knew which plants could treat infection and which would kill them slowly. They learned to build crude shelters from fallen branches, patch their torn clothes with stubborn, clumsy stitches, and start fires with nothing but dry moss and friction.

But survival was only half the battle. The other half was inside them: a constant, grueling effort to unlearn everything their father had beaten into them. Violence had been their first language, the only solution to every problem. Now, in the vast, empty wilds where no commands barked at them, no whip cracked against their back, Kae had to find another way to live.

There were nights when Kae would awaken with a start, heart pounding, fists clenched, expecting the next blow to fall. Memories of his voice and fury haunted their dreams, clawing at their hard-earned peace. But the wilderness did not strike them. It did not punish them for failure. It simply existed; harsh, unforgiving, but free.

Over time, the edges of their fear dulled, though they never disappeared completely. Their movements, once harsh and aggressive, grew quieter and more measured. They learned to move with the land rather than against it, to listen rather than lash out. And though the lessons their father taught had scarred them deeply, Kae began, slowly and painfully, to carve out a new way of being; one not built on cruelty or dominance, but on survival, instinct, and a quiet kind of resilience.

The wilderness became their teacher now. For the first time in their life, Kae was becoming something of their own making.

One evening, as the sun dipped low and bathed the wilderness in deep gold and violet hues, Kae found themselves wandering through the remnants of an old, abandoned campsite. It was little more than a scattering of rotted wood, collapsed canvas, and the faint outlines of where fires had once burned. Most of the supplies had long since been taken or destroyed by time and the elements, but Kae had learned to search carefully. Sometimes, the land yielded forgotten treasures.

They picked through the wreckage with practiced patience, hoping to find something of use: a scrap of cloth, a rusted knife, anything that could help them through another day. Their fingers brushed against dirt and moss, the brittle remains of broken pottery, and rusted tools. It wasn't much. They were about to move on when something caught their eye: a glimmer, almost imperceptible, half-buried at the base of a gnarled tree whose roots had begun to tear through the earth.

Curious, Kae knelt down and brushed away the dirt and leaves, revealing a small ring. It was simple, made of weathered silver, its surface dulled by time and exposure, but even in its battered state, it seemed to catch the dying light and hold it, almost as if the ring itself refused to be forgotten. It was delicate, impossibly small, too small to fit Kae's calloused, worn fingers, and clearly crafted for someone with hands far finer than theirs.

At first, Kae turned it over in their fingers without thought, treating it like any other discarded object they might barter or repurpose. But as they studied it more closely, a strange feeling began to stir within them, a feeling that was not entirely their own. There was something familiar about it, something that tugged at the deepest parts of them, a faint and distant memory they could not fully grasp. It was a whisper of warmth, a feeling of safety they had never truly experienced yet somehow recognized.

A name they had not spoken aloud in years surfaced in their mind: Selene, their mother. A shadowy figure from a time before the endless training, before the bruises and cold stares, a time so distant it barely seemed real. Kae had no clear memories of her, only fleeting impressions: the faint scent of lavender, the echo of a soft voice humming a lullaby, a hand brushing their hair from their forehead with a gentleness their life had long since forgotten. These memories had been buried under years of pain and survival, but the ring unearthed them, fragile and trembling, like new grass pushing up through frozen soil.

They had never been given anything from her. Calder never spoke of her or acknowledged her existence except with a flash of anger if Kae dared to ask. Yet deep in their bones, Kae felt certain: this ring had belonged to her. It wasn't rational, and they had no proof. But in a life defined by harsh realities and brutal truths, it was one of the few things they wanted to believe in.

A lump rose in their throat as they closed their fingers around the ring, holding it tight against their chest as if afraid it might vanish. It was more than just a trinket; it was a link to something they had thought lost forever. A piece of a life that might have been, a life that hadn't been built solely on pain. At that moment, beneath the vast, darkening sky, Kae allowed themselves to hope, just a little, that they were more than what their father had made them. That somewhere, deep within, there was still something tender and good that had once been meant for them.

The ring was too small to wear properly, so Kae threaded it onto a string they tore from an old, discarded boot. They tied it around their neck, letting the ring rest against their chest, hidden beneath their patched shirt. It became their most treasured possession, a quiet symbol of something they could not name: a longing for family, belonging, and a home they had never known but still yearned for.

From that day forward, Kae always carried the ring with them, not as a weapon or tool, but as a reminder. A reminder that they were not just the product of cruelty and survival. A reminder that there had once been love, however brief and fragile. A reminder that, somehow, there might still be more to life than just enduring it.

Over the long, restless years spent wandering through forests, scaling mountains, and crossing lonely stretches of barren land, Kae slowly began to transform. The brutal, fearful child who had fled into the wilds carrying nothing but the weight of their past was reshaped, not by violence, but by the slow, persistent lessons of hardship and survival. Once every reaction had been sharpened to strike, there was a cautious patience. Where once there had only been fear and fury, a deep, abiding understanding of pain grew; the kind that taught not cruelty but comion.

They became gentler, though their core's hardness never entirely disappeared. They understood suffering intimately, having lived it every day of their young life, and that understanding carved out spaces of quiet kindness within them. Kae was quiet by nature; their voice rarely rose above a soft murmur, and when forced into the company of others, they were painfully shy, often fumbling through conversations, uncertain about how to carry the rhythm of small talk. They didn't understand the subtle smiles, the knowing glances, the easy laughter shared between people who had always known safety and warmth. To Kae, the world of human connection was like a foreign language, one they struggled to interpret.

But even so, their kindness was unmistakable, shining through in small, sincere acts that required no words at all. They would pause their journey to help a struggling merchant fix a broken wagon wheel, their strong, scarred hands steady and sure. They would sit quietly by the side of a weeping traveler, offering silent companionship without pressing for explanations. When they stumbled upon abandoned camps or empty villages, Kae often left behind what little they could spare: a hand-stitched blanket, a sharpened knife, tucked carefully where someone in need might find it. They gave without expecting thanks, without ever announcing their presence. It was not for recognition. It was simply for others.

Though Kae's rough appearance, with threadbare, hand-patched clothes, the heavy scars that crisscrossed their arms, back, and face, sometimes unsettled those they sought to help, their actions spoke louder than any reputation or first impression ever could. Over time, people began to understand: the strange, quiet traveler might not offer conversation, but they would lift a fallen tree from a trapped animal's leg, repair a torn cloak with patient, careful stitches, or share the last of their firewood on a freezing night.

Yet despite the life they were building, despite the gentleness they had nurtured against all odds, Kae could never entirely escape the shadow that clung to them. The violence, the deep, instinctive response drilled into them by years of cruelty, still lurked beneath the surface. It waited, silent and watchful, like a wolf pacing the edges of their mind. In moments of danger, it flared up without warning. A hand reaching too quickly toward them could provoke a reaction sharper than intended. A threat to an innocent could awaken a ruthless protectiveness that left Kae breathless and ashamed afterward.

They despised that part of themselves, yet they understood it, too. It had kept them alive. And now, they tried again and again, with aching patience, to turn that instinct into something else, to channel it not into destruction but into protection. They fought others when they had to, but each fight left a hollow place inside them, a lingering fear that they would someday lose themselves to it completely.

Still, day by day, Kae walked a narrow path between who they had been made to be and who they longed to become. They stitched kindness into the torn fabric of their life wherever they could, piece by fragile piece, determined to be something more than a weapon: something human. Something good.

Kae was a force of raw, unrelenting power in battle, a living storm honed by years of brutal conditioning. When danger arose and innocent lives were threatened, the instincts Calder had instilled in them surged to the surface. Their movements were swift and efficient, every strike precise, every blow carrying the weight of hard-earned survival. With a weapon in hand, a hammer, or even a simple branch, but never a great axe, Kae became a figure few dared to stand against, a silent sentinel who defended without hesitation.

Yet even in the heat of combat, Kae never enjoyed the violence. There was no thrill in the clash of blades, no satisfaction in the cries of the defeated. They fought not out of anger or hatred, but from a deeply ingrained sense of duty—an unspoken oath to protect those who could not defend themselves. Each time they swung a weapon, it was an act of necessity, not choice. Every victory felt like a quiet failure, a reminder that the tools they used to save others were the same ones they had once used to survive cruelty.

The aftermath of the battle was always the worst. Once the dust had settled and the immediate threat had ed, Kae would retreat into themselves, their broad shoulders bowing under the invisible weight of their guilt. They would sit alone at the edge of a campfire, their calloused hands still trembling slightly, the taste of regret thick on their tongue. The faces of those they had fought haunted them, blurring and merging with memories they could never entirely leave behind.

In those moments, Kae berated themselves harshly, turning their grief inward. They hated the ferocity that lived inside them, and hated how easily it rose when called. No matter how many times they told themselves it was necessary, a part of them always recoiled at what they had done. At the sheer, devastating power they wielded. They would stare at their bloodied hands and wonder if they would ever truly be anything more than what their father had intended: a weapon, finely sharpened and utterly alone.