Velcor and Sage – Light Born in Darkness

[tame timber]

It is impossible to know exactly when it began. There was no appointed day, no sign in the heavens. Only that strange, quiet certainty that Sage was always where Velcor was.

They came from the same village. A small place drowned in mist, where people learned early that questions could be more dangerous than a blade. Sage’s father was a hunter, a man of the forest’s silence. His mother was a quiet woman whose life revolved around the hearth. And Sage… Sage was always an outsider. He did not truly belong to the village, but to Velcor.

Velcor was already asking questions when others chose to remain silent. And Sage followed him. He could never explain why. When Velcor set out on a path, Sage stood beside him. When Velcor sought the truth, Sage helped him search for it — even when he did not fully understand the question itself.

Velcor warned him many times:
“Not every road leads back,” he said.
Sage would smile then, in his own light, teasing way.
“But you always find your way home. So I will too.”

And so it happened on the day when Velcor received his commission: to seek out a strange, unknown force among the ruins of an abandoned castle. He warned Sage. He spoke of the dangers. The ruins. The darkness.
Sage only shrugged.
“You’ll protect me, as you always do,” he said with a smile.

The interior of the castle was decayed and cold. The air stood motionless. A heavy silence settled between the walls. Velcor searched, measured, made notes, watched the subtle movements of the force. Meanwhile, Sage moved quietly, kept watch, and took quiet joy whenever he found something that might still be of use.

Then the air changed.

A sulfurous stench spread. The cold seemed to freeze around them. Insects crawled out from the cracks. At first only a few. Then hundreds. Thousands.

The darkness slowly took shape.

Flies and creeping creatures climbed over one another, forming a single, twisted mass. The light of the torches began to tremble. From the shadow, the body of an imp emerged — not of flesh, but of moving, living darkness.

Velcor began an incantation. The words of a spell left his lips — one he would have mastered fully from the inquisitors, had his knowledge been complete. The fire did not obey.

Sage stepped forward and instinctively struck at the forming shape. It was useless. The darkness reassembled itself again and again.

The realization struck them both at once:
this was not a battle they could win.

They ran.

But the foundation of the castle shuddered. The ground split open beneath them, and the world suddenly ceased to exist.

The fall was brief.
The darkness was endless.

They regained consciousness in a deep pit. Stone, cold, and absolute blackness surrounded them. Above, they could still hear the movement of insects, the dull sound of scraping — but the shadows could not follow. They were masterless

creatures. Below, they had no power.

Slowly, the sounds faded.

Only the darkness remained.
And the beating of hearts.

At first, Velcor heard only Sage’s breathing. He was close. Too close to ignore how fiercely the other heart was pounding as well. Fear throbbed within them both — but it was not a lonely fear.

In the dark, hands found each other. Not tightly. Not possessively. Only as those do who do not wish to be alone.

There, beneath the earth, where the noise had died away, where there was no escape and no magic left, only silence —
there two souls found one another, at last.

When later light broke through the cracks, when the surface became reachable once more, it was no longer two people walking separate paths who climbed out of the pit.

It was a bond.

Velcor and Sage.

And from that day on, it was not only the shadows that bound them together —
but also the secret that can only be learned in darkness:
that sometimes the light is not born outside,
but in another human being.