Chapter 14: The Null Mark
It started with a story.
One told by firelight in a rusted cargo crate two days after the crater.
Lira, the girl with the soot-stained scarf and sunburnt cheeks, spoke in the half-hushed tone of someone repeating prophecy and blasphemy in the same breath. Her voice flickered with the flames. Her words curled in the smoke like they were never meant to be heard aloud.
"They say there was once a card so old it refused to be named," she said. "That it burned its own rune before it could be bound. It didn't want to be touched by Arc, or Glove, or Nation."
Aleister said nothing. He sat cross-legged on a salvaged crate, arms resting loosely on his knees. His eyes were fixed on the fire, but his mind had already left the circle. Every syllable dragged him deeper into the question that had haunted him since the Grove. Since Irikrit. Since the day his card woke up glowing not with light, but with void.
Ten of them now. Maybe more. The fire's glow revealed their silhouettes — rawboned shapes outlined by sleepless nights and hollow victories. They came in trickles. From dead cities. From collapsed Arcfields. From places where the nations had abandoned their reach. These were the children of broken systems. Survivors who did not just lack cards, they had begun to reject them.
Some bore scars where their cards had been violently removed. Others bore tattoos inked across their collarbones, covering the space where a card might have formed. And a few, like Aleister, had never known a rune at all.
They called themselves many things.
Whisper. Ashbite. Nullsoul. Names like blades carved from pain. A boy who had no more than ten winters insisted on being called Fireless. His voice cracked every other word, but when he spoke that night, the fire dimmed like it was listening.
"I saw a man in Kaelshad," Fireless said. "No glove. No card. But when he screamed, the sand caught fire."
Aleister froze.
His ration bread went untouched in his palm. That vision again, the one from the Grove. The child morphing into fire. The shadow crowned in ash. Irikrit had called him a source. The card had asked a question. Now strangers whispered answers before he could.
He did not sleep that night.
Instead, he watched the stars from a busted skylight in the roof of the half-collapsed outpost they had claimed. Every so often, he would glance at his hands.
And by dawn, the marks were there.
They weren't wounds. They weren't tattoos. They didn't pulse like Arc. But they were undeniably real. Faint, elegant lines, barely darker than the skin they ran across. Like someone had traced his veins with ink and then buried the memory under flesh.
He rubbed them.
They shimmered once, briefly, with a silver-black hue that reminded him of Irikrit's chains. Then they faded again, invisible until the next time they wanted to be seen.
The others noticed.
They always noticed.
One girl, pale-eyed and almost mute, whispered, "Null Mark."
Another, a lanky teen with arc-stained gloves and oil under his nails, muttered, "He's becoming Ruinblood."
Aleister didn't know what either name meant. But he knew this: he wasn't like them. And he wasn't like the nations either. He wasn't anything they had language for. And that terrified him more than he was willing to admit.
He spent the next two days fixing what he could. A water condenser with a broken regulator. A half-dead Arclamp that needed rerouting. He taught two of the younger ones how to salvage usable tech from shattered Arccores. He helped Lira redraw the Arcspire patterns she remembered from a ruin called Varrak Hollow.
But the mark grew.
By the fourth night, it had crept past his wrists. Veinlike arcs now reached toward his elbows. It didn't hurt. But it itched in his thoughts. A whisper behind the eyes. Like his bones were trying to remember something his mind had forgotten.
Someone painted him.
He hadn't noticed at first. But the wall near the old comms post now bore a crude charcoal drawing. A silhouette. Hooded. Eyes hollow but watching. Black flames rising from the chest. Beneath it, in letters that looked hastily scrawled with ash:
NULL FLAME
Aleister stared at it for a long time.
His first instinct was to wipe it off. He reached for a wet cloth. But something in him refused. He let it be.
That was when she arrived.
The woman came limping into camp just before dawn. Her cloak was torn and stiff with blood. One hand clutched her side, the other held something half-broken. It took Aleister a moment to recognize the object for what it was.
A card. Split down the middle like cracked bone.
She didn't speak. Didn't ask for help. She simply held out the broken card, eyes locked on Aleister's. No fear. No reverence. Just a grim, exhausted recognition.
He stood.
His fingers brushed the card.
It dissolved.
Not into shards. Not into flame.
It simply unwrote itself. Became smoke. Then silence. Then nothing.
Everyone saw it.
No one dared speak.
Something had changed. Not just in Aleister, but in the world around him. He had not forced it. He had not meant for it to happen. But a thing that should have been eternal, a rune had vanished at his touch.
And they all felt it.
Even the air felt thinner. Like the planet was holding its breath.
That night, no one lit the fire.
They sat in darkness.
And someone. Aleister didn't see who carved a symbol into the center of the floor.
A blank square. No rune. Just an empty box, outlined in quiet defiance.
From then on, they stopped calling themselves strays.
They were Nullborn.
And Aleister? Whether he wanted it or not, he was now their myth.
Their flame.
Their proof that the system could bleed.
He could feel it in the way they looked at him. Not as a leader. Not as a god. But as a crack in the wall they had been told would never break.
And through that crack, something ancient had begun to whisper again.