“You didn’t buy a weapon,” Theron continued, turning back toward the shadows. “You bought a promise to yourself. A lie, maybe. But a useful one.”

Kaelen nodded. He felt no fear. He felt the weight of the dagger, and the weight of the words carved into it.

That night, Kaelen did not sleep. He sat in his rented room above the Drowned Spoils tavern, the dagger laid across his knees. He thought of the Depths—the endless dark, the whispers that peeled sanity like bark from a tree. He had gone down twice before. Both times, he had run.

“No.” Theron reversed the blade and offered it back, hilt-first. “It is short so you cannot keep your distance. So you must step into your enemy’s reach. Into the certainty of being hurt. A champion is not one who never bleeds. A champion is one who bleeds and still moves forward.”

“You hesitate,” came a voice like grinding stone. Master Theron, his one eye gleaming from beneath a weathered hood, leaned on his wooden training sword. “That blade cost you twenty thousand notes. A fortune. Why?”

“Let’s go,” he said.

Theron laughed—a dry, hollow sound. “They say. And you believed them?”

Kaelen stood. He strapped the Champion’s Dagger to his belt—not on his back like a coward, but at his hip, where his hand would find it in a heartbeat.