The first day began before the sun cleared the canyon rim.

  Lark was already there, barefoot in the dust, rolling his shoulders like a man waking from a long sleep. Kael stepped into the circle still tasting blood from the night before. He raised his fists. Lark didn’t.

  “Attack,” Lark said.

  Kael did.

  Right hand, tight and fast. Lark tilted his head; the punch missed by the width of a hair. Before Kael could pull it back, Lark’s open palm brushed his cheek (light, almost gentle).

  “Again.”

  Left hook. Lark leaned the opposite way, let the fist sail past his ear, then tapped Kael’s forehead with two fingers.

  “Again.”

  They stayed like that for hours. Kael threw everything he had—jabs, crosses, hooks, elbows, knees. Lark moved only enough. A sway, a half-step, a shift of weight. Never blocking, never hitting back hard. Just slipping, always slipping, and every miss earned a soft, humiliating touch: a pat on the ribs, a flick to the ear, a nudge that spun Kael half-around and left him staring at empty air.

  By noon Kael’s shirt was soaked through, clinging to him like wet paper. His breath came in ragged bursts. Lark hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  "Still chasing where I was,” Lark said. “Not where I’m going.”

  Kael spat dust and reset.

  Afternoon was worse. Lark started adding low shin kicks that numbed Kael’s legs the instant they landed. Not hard—just sharp, precise, perfectly timed. Kael’s thighs went dead. He stumbled. Lark tapped the back of his neck like a teacher correcting posture.“Feel that? That’s the moment before you fall. Learn it.

  ”Dusk painted the canyon walls blood-red. Kael’s knuckles were raw, split from glancing off Lark’s forearms. He threw one last desperate combination—jab, cross, elbow high. Lark slipped inside the elbow, caught Kael’s wrist, turned, and suddenly Kael was off balance, arms windmilling, boots scraping for purchase.

  Lark let him go and stepped back.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we do it again. Until missing feels wrong.”

  Day two began the same way, only faster.Kael saw the patterns now—how Lark’s hips lied, how his shoulders told the truth. He started cutting angles, stepping off line, throwing punches a fraction sooner. Lark still never let one land, but the touches got lighter, almost congratulatory. A brush across the chest here, a fingertip along the jaw there.

  By the end of the second day Kael’s legs shook when he walked out of the Pit, but he walked out on his own.

  Day three, Lark finally spoke more than two words at a time.

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  “You’re quick,” he said, circling slow. “Stronger than you look. But right now that light inside you is a drunk swinging a torch in a dark room—dangerous, sure, but it only burns what it’s already standing on.

  ”Kael dropped his fists, chest heaving. “Then teach me.”

  Lark stopped moving. The lazy grin faded into something harder.

  “First you finish learning how to hit a man who doesn’t want to be hit. Then we talk about the rest.”

  He stepped in close—close enough that Kael could see the faint scar that cut through his left eyebrow, the flecks of gold in his irises.

  “Listen carefully,” Lark said, voice low, deliberate, every word carved out of the canyon’s silence. “Everything you’ve ever been told is a lie wearing silk.”

  He gestured upward, past the red stone walls, past the narrow strip of sky.

  Those four brightest points,” he said, voice barely louder than the wind. “They’re dead stars. Long dead. Burned their fuel, collapsed, cooled into iron husks the size of worlds. The gods found them drifting through the dark, empty and perfect. They took them. Hollowed them out like shells. Turned five corpses into five inhabited planets.”

  He dragged the heel of his boot across the stone, scraping a dull spark.

  “Veydris is the fifth corpse. The Veiled Sovereign claimed it the same way the others claimed those four lights you’re looking at. From any one of them, this world looks like a bright star in their sky. From here, they look like stars in ours. Same trick, five times over.

  ”Kael’s gaze stayed locked upward. The light inside his chest pulsed once, slow and deliberate, as if tasting the words.

  “People are born with starlight in their blood,” Lark went on. Most of it is tame. Pale. Weak. The gods bred it that way centuries ago so it would never grow strong enough to hurt them. It keeps the herd alive, keeps it quiet, and every flicker we burn feeds them. That’s all they want. That’s all they’ve ever wanted.”

  He stepped closer, boots silent on the ironstone.

  “Except sometimes a child is born carrying something older. Real starlight. The same fire that still burns in the living suns scattered across the black.” He flicked a quick glance at the true stars glittering beyond the four impostors. “Dense enough, hot enough, that if it ever learned control it could rival a god. That kind of light doesn’t feed them. It scares them. It can kill them."

  He stopped directly in front of Kael and pressed two fingers to the center of his chest. The light answered without hesitation: a sudden, blinding bloom of white that lit the canyon walls and threw their shadows sharp and long.

  “This,” Lark said, voice low, steady, almost gentle, "is the kind that can kill them." The Sovereign felt it the night the sky tore open above Luminar’s Edge. Felt it again when you shattered the Measure in Starhaven. That’s why the Arbiters came. Not for heresy. Not for rebellion. They came to rip a living star out of a boy’s chest before it learned how to burn.

  ”The glow held, fierce and unflinching, humming like a drawn blade.“

  They took your mother and father. They never managed to take you. The hunger’s still there.

  ”He let his hand fall.“

  "Four other dead stars shine up there tonight. Four other gods doing exactly the same thing: breeding tame light, harvesting it, hunting anything bright enough to threaten them. Same story on every world. Same fear."

  The wind swept cold and clean between the cliffs.

  “You’re not chosen, Kael,” Lark said, the faintest, sharpest smile touching his mouth. “You’re a star that learned how to walk. And stars can be smothered… or they can learn to burn everything that tries."

  He turned and started down the narrow path into the Pit’s deeper shadow.

  “Tomorrow,” he called back, voice echoing off black iron walls, “we teach you how to control your light. How to keep it quiet when the sky is watching. How to make it roar when the chains come down.”

  Kael stayed on the rim a moment longer, staring up at the four dead lights and the countless living ones beyond them. The star inside his chest no longer flickered like something afraid.

  For the first time since the night the sky broke, it felt like the beginning of a war.