Vessel Of The Sorcerer Queen

[Celerius]

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Chapter 1: Rain And Gold

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It all began with her death.

Water came down through the night in a light drizzle, slowly kneading the streets outside into mud. Aksel stood in the orphanage's kitchen, right against the window, knowing everyone else would be too busy with dinner to pay any attention to his absence.

Outside, lights flickered around the village by the dozen. The sounds of music, laughter, and clinking metal broke the usual evening silence.
Mirren was a border village. Visitors were rare, and for the most part, openly unwelcome. So when a hundred soldiers had marched in that morning, led by a sorcerer of the Order of the Sword, the panic had been immediate and short-lived.

They'd come from the capital, they said. Headed for the outpost two days west, simply as a precaution. And with Regenia on the other side of that border, a country so backward its name made the villagers spit, nobody had questioned it for long.

Now their tents and supplies lined the outskirts, as if Mirren had suddenly grown a massive limb that twitched and spasmed with the contagious energy of human activity. It was a night of abundance and celebration, for a decade of peace well lived, and the next one they had yet to live.

And Aksel stood, in silence, behind the window, and worried.

"Hey."

Selenne had entered the kitchen with the casual grace of a black cat. Her familiar voice almost made him jump.

"Thinking about going out?" She sat down on a barrel, right by his side. "I told the Mother Superiora you've been on the shitter all day, and that I was going to check whether you were still alive… that should keep them off your ass for a while."

Aksel's eyes remained on the window.

"Any good news?" He finally asked. "It's only been two weeks; they might still summon us."

Selenne gave him a defeated smile. "If our invitation was supposed to arrive at all, this marching band would have been the perfect way to deliver it."

Aksel took a deep breath. "You turn sixteen next month. They've been trying to get rid of us for years and—"

Selenne hugged him, pressing her head into his back. "Of me. They've been trying to get rid of me for years. But you weren't this worried last night…" She whispered. "Talk to me, Aksel."

He leaned back into her, fingers still white against the window's frame.

"When was the last time we saw so many soldiers march into the front?"

"Never?"

"Exactly. You don't mobilize this many people unless you are expecting something, and you don't give them enough food and wine and coin to share with half the village unless you need those men to stay wherever you send them until they learn to call it home."

Selenne grabbed his face, forcing him to look at her, and lowered her voice. "What are you saying? An invasion?" She looked deeper into his eyes. "…war? Aksel, there has not been a single war since before most people in the village were born, and you're telling me everything is going to shit now, the exact same month we are supposed to leave for the capital?"

Aksel stared back at Selenne, at the only person who had been there as long as he could remember.

And he saw it.

He saw the fragile, not-quite-there smile. The clinging, dying hope she tried to pass as optimism, and below it all, he saw the slight cold on her shoulders pressing down on any spark of that characteristic fire that usually defined her.

She was scared. He'd never seen her so scared.

"No, of course not," he said, turning around to hug her properly. "I'm just nervous, that's all. Never thought the masters of magic would have trouble delivering an admission letter on time… but I guess that's what we get for living in a shithole."

Selenne laughed. "It's just two weeks. Who cares? We're going to be sorcerers. That's already more than most people can say. We shouldn't be crying rivers because our invitation got a little tardy. Half the bathroom is flooded already."

Aksel gave her a kiss on the forehead and did his best to smile, then pushed himself away and grabbed his already dirty cloak from the table.

"Still going out?" Selenne asked, wide-eyed.

"I won't do anything stupid. I promise."

"Fine…" She whined, turning around the same way she came. "Just… be back before midnight, okay? And… don't take any risks. I don't need money, I need you here, with me."

Aksel just nodded, putting on that cocky expression he wore when he wanted her not to worry.

It never worked.

❖

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Walking down the street was about as pleasant as shoveling shit with your feet.

Aksel had never seen so much water. The rain had settled in about ten days before, and he had seen it grow sharp and violent and then quiet and pleasant, but not for a moment had it stopped.

Standing there, still in front of the orphanage's street, he took off his hood and looked at the sky for a moment. There was no moon or stars, only clouds that momentarily flashed with soft bursts of white or purple light.

He had always liked the rain.

When he breathed there, with the water running down his face, it felt as if the moment expanded along with his chest. It centered him, gave him focus, each drop washing away any semblance of doubt or worry.

He put the hood back on and kept walking down the street, his boots sinking with each step.

Aksel had never seen a hundred men pass through Mirren in a single night, but he had seen far more pass by through the course of his life, enough to recognize the nature of man.

The laughter carried far in the rain. Every door he passed was open, every hearth shared. A generosity that, any other week, these same people would have called stupidity. But nobody could keep their guard on forever, and deep down, every human soul wanted to believe in tales of knights in shining armor.

The next time the boy stopped, he was in front of a vertical ladder hidden between two of the village's larger houses. He climbed, the wood groaned, he cursed, same thing every time.

On top of the ladder, above one of the houses, there was a little camp. Four planks of wood holding a heavy rug high enough for you to sit under it, the perfect middle point between having a big tent and being bare naked.

And that night, as every night, sitting there among empty cans and sacks full of whatever caught his attention that week, was a man. A tanned, sickly thin old man, someone who had lost most of his rotten teeth before Aksel was born.

"Uncle Itch," Aksel called, approaching the vagabond. "May I?"

The veteran turned around, panicked, pretending not to have heard the boy at all.

"Aksel! Winds! Give an old man a warning, you're going to kill me one of these days!"

"If you don't put on a shirt, this damn rain might beat me to it."

Aksel crouched near the edge of the house, his eyes following the older man's stare down the block and right into the center of the party. Midnight was still far away, and wine had a way of keeping the bodies warm, even in the rain, so the dance hadn't stopped at all. The same soldiers who had come to seek some refuge from the open sky now invited girls to join them, as if defying the climate to stop this simple night.

"They look happy."

"Because they are, some people are good at that." The old man, Itch, said. "You could join them."

They both laughed.

Itch grabbed a can of the few that were full. "Smoked pork?"

"…how?"

"Men either have fun or keep an eye on their stuff, but never both. And you know every rat in this village owes me a favor, so things have been… rollin' off the table tonight. In fact, you're the only one so far who has come empty-handed."

"What do you mean?" Aksel smiled. "I brought someone useful."

"Anyone can be useful…" Itch reached out with one of his long, thin arms, bony fingers closing atop Aksel's head. "If they just know where to look."

There it was.

A single man, sneaking deeper into the village through the back of a poorly lit garden, doing his best to hug the walls. Amateur. Heels too heavy, head turning too often, constantly looking over his shoulder as if waiting for a wolf to pounce, the kind of caution that draws the eye rather than avoiding it.

Aksel tracked him to the corner where the shadows pooled together, watched the man's shoulders drop as he convinced himself he was invisible in front of a closed window.

"I'll take care of—"

Before the boy could finish that phrase, the old man held onto his arm, pulling him back down firmly.

"No. Sit down. Watch. Learn."

The thief, a soldier most likely, who had decided to leave behind his armament when trying to blend in on a village where most people could identify their neighbor by smell alone, stood around for another minute before forcing the window open.

Aksel's blood boiled, but he did not let it show. Instead, he said nothing, and watched.

Annie came through the front door not a minute later. The girl was a card shark, and a good face in a pinch.

And that was not her house.

The kid who actually lived there, Tomas, appeared only a moment later, along with five other guys who had, of course, been close enough to hear Annie scream and immediately came to her aid.

"Been runnin' that scam all night, that bunch," the old man said through a proud grin. "Talkin' up the soldiers, getting them drunk and stupid, whispering about some family heirloom made of gold. They're smart kids, you could make a lot of money with a crew like that."

Aksel frowned. "You know I can't."

"Yes, I know, I know. You and that girl of yours…" Itch leaned back, sighing tiredly. "She's gonna be the death of ya."

"It's not her fault half the village hates her."

"Maybe," Itch shrugged. "Life doesn't really care one way or the other; it's not about looking for someone to blame. Eventually, you've just gotta learn to close your mouth and take care of… whatever the winds brought that day. Beggars can't be choosers."

Itch grabbed another can, extending his free hand to let the rain wash it for a moment before scraping the bottom clean with his bare fingers.

"Look," Aksel shook his head tiredly. "I appreciate you trying to look out for me, but what I need is-"

"Yes, yes. I know what you need. That little escape plan of yours failed, and now you're trapped in the same hole as the rest of us." The old man made a pause, mulling over his words. "I'm just sayin', kid, maybe you should get used to the idea of not having a miracle waiting around the corner to bail you out. I don't care what color blood you got or what you think you're owed, until any of that starts putting food on the table, you need to stop dreaming and start living like the rest of us, boy."

Turning around, Aksel walked his way back to the stairs.

"Fine, fine!" The old man yelled. "If you still want to risk it all on faith… I might have something for you."

 

[Celerius]

It is said that everything, eventually, must meet itself at the point where it started.

So Aksel stood in front of a closed window, head turning too often, convincing himself he was invisible.

The rain helped. The drops came down hard and cold, punishing the orphanage's thin roof like a thousand tiny fists. Enough noise to cover a lot of sins.

He grabbed the window frame from the top and bottom and pulled.

All the orphanage windows opened the same way, but this one hadn't been opened in a long time. The latch was designed to bend inward, not outward, and the metal was thick enough to fight his grip. But the wood around it wasn't. A sad, dry crack, a breath of dust and old splinters, and the two panels tilted forward just enough for him to reach through, find the latch, and unlock the whole thing from inside.

He was through in ten seconds.

The Mother Superiora's studio looked different at night. Smaller. The once-white rug had gone grey years ago, and the chandelier above the desk held candles that hadn't been lit in longer than that. During the day, when you were summoned here to be sentenced for something fairly stupid, the room carried a kind of borrowed authority. At night, with only the rain and the faint glow from outside, it was just a room where a tired woman did her paperwork.

Aksel moved behind the wide desk and opened the last drawer in the cleanest-looking wooden cabinet. Itch had told him exactly what to look for, and Aksel had an instinct for knowing where people kept their secrets.

The old man had told him, with that grin of his, that the orphanage had a long history of forgetting certain documents existed by the time their owners came of age. A convenient way of turning inheritances into donations and children into unwitting benefactors who didn't know they were owed anything at all.

Inside the drawer were the records of every orphan in the house. Most were little more than a single sheet of paper, half a page of text if that. There were very few matters of importance in the origin of a child abandoned by everyone but the winds.

Unless its parents were sorcerers.

Aksel found his file and Selenne's immediately, for they were the only ones relevant enough to merit an envelope. He set his own aside for a moment, unsure he wanted the weight of knowing, and opened hers instead.

It was lighter than he expected. A single formal report, the handwriting small and rigid, the kind of script that the sisters used when they wanted the document to feel official, when they knew it would be copied and mailed and read and evaluated by their higher-ranking peers in the capital.

The official seal of Solstice marked the bottom, signaling everything on the page as truth.

Selenne had been delivered to the orphanage fifteen years before, on the second night of the Third Wind Month, by a Regenian woman who had not given her name to the sisters before abandoning the village.

A Regenian woman.

Aksel read the word again.

Regenian.

He sat down slowly in the Superiora's chair, the parchment flat on the desk in front of him, and for a long moment he didn't move.

He thought of Selenne at seven, coming back from the market with a bruise on her jaw and no explanation. He thought of her at ten, sitting alone in the dining hall because the other children had been told she was not to be spoken to. He thought of her at twelve, standing in front of this very desk, being told she would not be joining the others on the harvest hunt, for her own safety of course, always for her own safety.

Alone, always alone, pressing her face into his back, trying to sound brave.

Fifteen years of silence. Fifteen years of hatred that felt, to them, as random and senseless as weather. And the people who had the answer, the one sentence that would have at least let her understand, had kept it locked in a drawer.

Her mother had been born on the wrong side of the border, and as she passed through on some desperate attempt at an escape, she had left Selenne behind.

Aksel folded the parchment carefully, slid it into his coat, and stood up.

The report also mentioned a fund, left for Selenne's coming of age. Ten Golden Suns. Supposedly, gold was the least valuable thing a sorcerer could leave their offspring. Aksel tended to disagree.

He opened drawer after drawer until he heard it, the dull rattle of metal against leather. A small pouch sat at the back of a compartment deep in the desk's belly. He loosened the cord and counted. About twenty-five Golden Suns, seven Silver Clouds, and a handful of Copper Drops. More money than what the orphanage would see in a very generous year, the savings of every orphan who had come of age and left without knowing they were owed a thing.

Aksel took Selenne's ten.

He had the pouch halfway back into the drawer when the door handle rattled.

Everything moved at once. Pouch in, drawer shut, Selenne's file back in his hand as if he'd been reading it this whole time, and then the Mother Superiora was standing in the doorway with lamplight behind her and a face that cycled through surprise, recognition, and exhaustion in about two seconds.

"Should have known," she said.

She closed the door behind her and walked to the desk lazily, already having decided this wasn't worth her energy.

"Found what you were looking for?" She settled into the authority of the room the way she always did, even at this hour, even in her night clothes. "If you think there's anything I am hiding in order to keep the two of you stranded here, I can assure you, nobody would want to see that girl finally leave this place more than I do."

"Mother." Aksel nodded, keeping his grip on the parchment visible, making it look important by context alone. "I'm only looking for what's rightfully ours."

And it was true.

For the most part.

The Mother Superiora studied him for a moment, then rolled her eyes. "Like I said. I have very little interest in either of you, and even less in trying to appropriate whatever your sad lives could offer. All I ask is that you take said lives far away from me. Which is not an unreasonable price for all my years of effort."

She extended one of her calloused hands.

Aksel looked at the parchment. He had already memorized the only part that mattered, but he attempted to hold onto it anyway, acting as if the simple note was his only source of warmth, making sure he pinned her attention there and no further. Then, with a carefully exaggerated sigh, he finally handed it over.

His feet wandered towards the door, then stopped. "Why didn't you tell us? That she's a—"

"I know what she is."

The words came clipped and final, as if she had rehearsed them, or maybe she'd just been waiting years for someone to ask.

"Maybe I should have told you," she continued, her voice lower now, almost private. "Might have kept you away from that animal. But winds forgive me… sometimes I can't help being kind. I really did try to give that damned girl every chance I could to be something else, but at the end of the day, a Regenian is always a Regenian."

The Mother Superiora took a deep breath.

"Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I was too kind with you lot. If it were up to me…" She paused, chewing on her words. "Straight as an iron bar, I would have forged you."

The room went very quiet.

Aksel felt something rise in his throat that wasn't words. He thought about what it would feel like to say what he wanted to say. To ask her what kind of kindness lets a child grow up hated for something she doesn't even know about herself. To ask what kind of woman takes a girl's inheritance and calls it charity. To ask whether she had ever, even once, looked at Selenne and seen a person instead of a pitifully unaborted monster who had managed to crawl its way across the border.

He didn't say any of it.

Instead, he offered a small, polite smile, and nodded.

"Good night, Mother."

He closed the door behind him.

❖

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"Selenne!"

Aksel pushed the door open, breath heavy. It hit the wall with a soft thud. Good, that meant she wasn't behind it. Wouldn't be the first time.

He fell to one knee and checked under the bed.

Where could she possibly—

A sharp weight crashed onto his shoulders and they both went down, Selenne rolling off him before he'd even hit the floor, already laughing.

Confused, he looked up at the top of the wardrobe and realized a person could, in theory, fit up there, as long as she was thin on her side and didn't have much going on upstairs.

"Why?"

"Why? It's past midnight, Aksel. And I'm not getting punished because your dumb ass forgot the way home." She was already picking herself up, circling toward their bed with that strange elegance she knew how to slip into even right after acting like an asylum patient. "So I figured I'd get some practice in."

"Practice."

"You never know."

She sat on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, expectant. She already knew he had something important to say. Of course she did.

"We need to leave."

"Leave?"

He reached into his pocket, turned it inside out, and let the coins fall. They hit the stone floor one after another, heavy and deliberate, each one catching the low light from the window.

Selenne dropped to her knees. Her fingers moved with inhuman speed, sorting, stacking, counting. The playfulness bled out of her face one coin at a time.

"Aksel… this…" She picked one up, turned it over. "Gold." Another. "Gold." Her voice climbed. "Nine… ten… Aksel, this is all gold."

Then she went still, quiet.

She looked up at him, and all the warmth was gone.

"Who did you kill?"

"What?"

"How many? Are they buried? Is someone coming for us?"

He laughed. He couldn't help it, the sound broke out of him before he could stop it, and he shook his head, pressing a hand over his face.

"I should be asking you that." He let himself fall forward onto the bed, face-first, then turned just enough to see her still frozen there, kneeling among a small fortune. "Apparently, that's what your mother left with you, in case you ever needed it. The sisters just… forgot to mention it."

Selenne blinked. "My mother."

"Whoever she was, she left ten Golden Suns with your name on them. The Superiora's been sitting on it for fifteen years, you know how she is, likes to keep things safe." He propped himself up on his elbows. "Who knows? You've got the temper of a noble. Maybe you're the daughter of a king, some lost dynasty nobody remembers. Most families of sorcerers are important, I'd imagine. Even the Regenian ones."

Selenne's mouth opened, then closed. Her eyes moved sideways, fast, the way they always did when she was doing math that didn't add up yet.

"Winds…" She pressed her palm against her forehead, still kneeling. "Do you have any idea how much money this is? We could…" She stopped. "Regenian?"

"We could find someone to take us to the capital and never look back." Aksel sat up, holding her gaze, focusing her. "And everything we don't take with us dies here."

The silence that followed was different from every silence that had come before it. For the first time, they were looking at a door, and it was open, and the only thing on the other side was whatever they chose to make of it.

Selenne stood up slowly, coins still in her hand.

"Help me pack."

 

[Celerius]

The rain had dwindled, which was a relief. Without a case to pack, bedsheets had made for bags.

They ran down the street as if someone was chasing them, which was both probably not true and the only proper way in which they could process the situation. Selenne laughed first, jumping over a puddle. At the absurdity of it, of not having to care about a single thing in the world, of knowing that they could go as far as they wanted and the only thing that could stop them were their own aching legs.

She was fast, too fast, even for Aksel. A fact they both commonly forgot and did their best to keep hidden. But for once, he simply coasted behind and allowed her to run free, watching as the lights of the ongoing celebration inched closer with each muddy step.

Aksel felt the half-drunk voices filter in one by one.

"Oi, Greg! Bring me my good boots, the cards are speaking to me tonight!"

"Has anyone seen Billy? That pisspant was supposed to be watching our wine."

"Ah, let the lad go. With a bit of luck, he'll be emptying more than his pockets right now."

The party hadn't shrunk, nothing even close to that, for it wasn't even midnight yet and there was nobody hoping the night would be short. But it had settled, the wonder starting to fade as the people grew tired and rounded, comfortable enough to let themselves rest against each other with the intimacy of any well-fed animal.

Selenne slowed to a walk as they reached the edge of the crowd, pulling the bedsheet higher over her shoulder.

"So," she said, not even winded. "What's the plan? Please tell me you have a plan."

"We need a ride east. Someone heading for the outpost only for the day, or not even that. Supply carts, higher officers, squires, a blacksmith, anyone who doesn't plan on sticking around after the soldiers are settled on the border."

"A ride. From these people." She looked sideways at a soldier who was teaching a village girl how to throw a knife at a barrel, too drunk to aim. Selenne took a step back. "Wonderful."

Something small and fast darted across Aksel's boot. He glanced down in time to see a Stormisk, one of the cloud-furred little bastards that came out whenever there was too much noise and not enough supervision, sprint under a bench with a candle in its mouth, its tail dissolving into mist behind it, a brief crackle of purple light marking its path like a tiny, self-satisfied lightning bolt.

Another one sat on top of a wine barrel nearby, watching the crowd with the focused intensity of a creature trying to decide what to steal next.

Past them, a cluster of Eye Drops had gathered near a rain barrel at the corner of the street, rolling over each other in the downpour, their wide glassy eyes blinking at anyone who stepped too close. Selenne accidentally pressed one with her foot. The elemental gurgled and rolled away, offended.

"Cherubim are out tonight," she muttered, looking down the street. "That's a lot of them."

"Free food, free warmth, free chaos. I guess we're not so different after all."

Aksel scanned the crowd. Most of the soldiers had settled into clusters around fires and card games, their weapons leaning against walls and fences, close enough to reach but far enough to forget. Some villagers moved between them like the rain itself, refilling cups, laughing too loudly, enjoying the one night of the year when strangers were useful. Others, younger ones mostly, had settled among the trained warriors as if they had all arrived together and had no intention of saying goodbye.

Aksel looked deeper.

Somewhere in this mess there had to be a soul who wasn't enjoying itself. A diplomat sent to oversee discipline. A courier. Some commander assigned to personally deliver a letter to the outpost captain, who could not imagine spending another week in countryside mud after a lifetime in the capital. Anyone going back east who could be convinced, paid, or tricked into taking two extra passengers.

"We're looking for someone who's already thinking about tomorrow," Aksel said. "Someone who wants to leave this place at least half as badly as we do."

He found it almost immediately.

In theory, any armed fighter who served in the kingdom militia was a knight.

This man was a Knight.

He sat alone at a small table, comfortably surrounded by people who did not pay him any mind. There was a bottle on that table, but he did not drink. There were cards, but he did not play. His hands were focused on the massive blade across his lap, polishing the metal with the mindless precision of someone who simply needed something to do with his fingers while his mind was somewhere else entirely.

He wore a heavy furred cloak over ornamented armor pieces that made him seem larger than anyone around him. Almost bulky, present in a way that made the space around him feel like it belonged to him even though he would not bother to claim it.

Aksel's feet slowed before his mind caught up.

Something about the man's stillness. The way his posture carried no tension, no vigilance. He wasn't watching the crowd. He wasn't watching anything. He sat in the middle of dozens of armed soldiers the way a wolf might rest among dogs. Not because he didn't notice them, but because noticing them had never been necessary.

"Follow my lead," the boy said, and walked forward.

There was a moment, not of silence exactly, but of eyes pretending not to look, as he sat down across the small table. Selenne stood behind Aksel, close, back to back. They were still very much surrounded by strangers.

The Knight looked at them both, without impatience or surprise. Then he slipped a silver gauntlet inside his coat and set two coins on the table.

"Two Silver Clouds?" Aksel asked, genuinely confused.

"One for your time, and one for mine." The man appeared to be in his early thirties, though the silvery, almost pearly locks around his cheeks made it difficult to say for sure. His voice was quiet, unhurried. "I've seen some of your peers working the crowd tonight. Surprisingly talented. But I'd rather save myself the effort, so take this as a token of my appreciation. You're the first one who's dared to approach me, which tells me you might need the money rather desperately."

The man smiled, and his face, stone-cut and cold until that moment, softened into something honest and exhausted.

Aksel opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

And did something rare for him. He looked again.

Whoever this man was, his eyes carried something heavy, the kind of weight that doesn't come from a single wound. The armor Aksel had initially read as full was less than he'd thought. Plates along the chest and limbs, gauntlets and boots, each decorated with intricate carvings molded into the platinum, the occasional flash of a crimson gemstone, each piece carefully settled into the pristine, heavy outfit beneath. Enough protection to get in the way. Not enough to get in his way.

The thought formed without a single shadow of doubt.

This man was a Sorcerer.

"We need your help," Aksel said, too quickly, honesty bleeding through before he could shape it into anything more careful. He reached into his pocket and placed two Golden Suns on the table. "And we won't waste your time."

For the first time, the Sorcerer's attention shifted fully. The polishing stopped. He looked at the pair with as much concern as interest.

"My name is Aksel. I am sixteen years old, and both of my parents were, as far as I know, of magical lineage."

The man lifted his eyes, past Aksel, beyond him, to Selenne. A question.

Aksel nodded, placing his few belongings on the table so that the sheets wouldn't meet the ground. "Her mother. She'll be sixteen next month."

"Sorcerers," the man said, his voice clear now. "The both of you."

"Yes."

"Orphans."

"We are."

"And you're here." He gestured vaguely at the celebration around them, at the mud, at the rain. "Instead of there."

"Our admission letters never arrived. We were told to expect them before the Second Wind Month. It's been—"

"Over two weeks." The Sorcerer's hand stopped mid-polish. He set the cloth down slowly. "Yes. I imagine they would be late."

Something in his voice had changed. A door, closed shut.

"My name is Altair. I am a Royal Captain among the Order of the Sword. And my job, as it stands, is to escort these men to their destination safely, before making my way back to the city of Solstice."

"Then you can take us with you," Selenne suddenly stepped in.

Altair looked at her for a long moment. Then past her, at the soldiers, at the fires, at the village pretending to celebrate.

"Tell me," he said. "What do you think all of this is for?"

"The border," Aksel answered. "Regenia. A show of force, precautionary, in case—"

"In case of what?" Altair's voice was patient in the way a teacher's voice is patient when the student is close but not there yet. "What would change, after three… mostly uncontested decades of peace, to make a hundred soldiers necessary where yesterday there were none?"

Aksel felt the ground shift under him. Not physically, but in the way a conversation shifts when you realize the other person isn't asking questions, they're leading you somewhere.

"Something happened," he said slowly. "Something in the capital. You don't think they'll attack, you're sure of it."

Altair said nothing. He picked up the cloth again, ran it once along the flat of the blade, and set it back down as if he had only needed the motion to buy himself a breath.

"The Academy has no director," he said. "The kingdom has no queen. Lady Adeleide Elissandre Silvermoon is dead."

The words arrived simply, almost gently, the way Altair did everything. But they landed in Aksel's chest like a rotten stone in a frozen lake, and for a moment the ripples were all he could feel.

The queen was dead.

Lady Adeleide Elissandre Silvermoon.

The most powerful user of magic the world had ever known, a woman more ancient than Fiore's ancestral bloodlines, a being so primal she'd had the time to fund a city and then watch an entire kingdom blossom around it.

Was dead.

"She died in her sleep. Peacefully, they say, though I'm not sure what that word means for someone who had been alive for two hundred and twenty-three years." Altair folded his hands on the table. "There has been no official announcement. There won't be, for some time. The people making those decisions are very busy making other decisions first, as you can see."

He gestured at the soldiers. At the border. At the careful, quiet machinery of a kingdom trying not to fall apart.

Aksel's eyes moved across the night violently now, flashing inside their orbits. The hundred men weren't passing through. The wine wasn't generosity. The whole thing, the march, the party, the warmth, was a bandage pressed against a wound the village didn't even know was there.

"Here."

Altair took the bottle and poured a glass. Aksel was not a big fan of alcohol. He drank it in one go. The liquid just disappeared, he couldn't tell the taste.

"I do wish I could simply take you east," Altair continued, watching the color come back into the boy's face. "But if what you say is true, someone should already be assigned to collect you. It is not my place to intervene and taking you with me could cause problems you don't need on top of trouble you already have."

"More trouble than standing next to what's about to become an active warzone?" Aksel had managed to wipe the sweat from his brow, and his eyes were sharp again, sharper than before, as if the news had burned away the last of whatever softness had been slowing him down.

Altair tilted his head, conceding the point. "I would need to ask the orphanage for your files, although given the circumstances…" He closed his eyes and took a long breath, his composure settling. "Prove it, then."

"Prove it?"

"Some people believe magic is something you are born for, something the world owes you simply because of who your parents were." His gaze hardened, just slightly, just enough. "I disagree. Prove to me you have even the faintest glimmer of potential, and I will make sure to deliver you to your destination."

Selenne and Aksel looked at each other.

He saw it immediately. The shift in her stance, the weight dropping into her heels, the thumb drifting toward her open, tense mouth. She could do it. Right there, right then, less than a second, and this man would have all the proof he needed.

But what if she had the wrong magic?


Regenian magic.


Aksel did not know what sorcery was supposed to look like, but hers was violent, and raw, and he had spent his entire life watching people look at Selenne and find reasons to be afraid. Her magic was just like the rest of her, fast and fierce and unmistakably other, and showing it to a soldier of the crown, here, tonight, surrounded by a hundred armed men already on edge about the very border she had been born across…

He caught her gaze and held it. Her face contorted with frustration. She stopped.

"I'll do it," said Aksel, with all the determination of a man who learns to swim or drowns.

He placed both hands on the table and closed his eyes.

The sounds came first. Voices, cups, drums, footsteps, laughter. Each layer pressing in on him like hands trying to hold him still. He pushed through them, peeling the noise away one thread at a time until all that was left was the rain. The rain and the strange, stubborn silence underneath it, the one he'd felt his whole life but never been able to name.

He reached for it.

It was like trying to grab water. Every time he thought he had it, it slipped between his fingers, formless and indifferent. He pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and felt nothing but the growing certainty that nothing was going to come, that he was exactly what the world had always told him he was, a boy with borrowed dreams and empty hands.

He pulled harder.

Something flickered. Deep, impossibly deep, like a light seen from the bottom of a well. He couldn't tell if it was real or if he wanted it so badly that his mind had invented it. But he reached for it anyway, because reaching was all he had ever known how to do.

And then.

"Fire!"

The screams came from far away, and then quickly grew closer.

Aksel opened his eyes as if breaking surface, gasping, the world rushing back in a flood of cold air and noise. He turned toward the village, and it only took him one glance to find the source of the flames.

The orphanage was burning.

 

[Celerius]

The orphanage burned as if it had been built for that.

Aksel was running before he understood why, his legs cutting the air faster than his mind could follow. He caught something sharp and chemical beneath the rain, something that did not belong to a night of bonfires and celebration. Selenne kept pace beside him, the bedsheets gone from her arms, dropped somewhere behind them, he didn't know when. And her face had already changed, the playfulness wiped off it by whatever instinct ran deeper than thought at that moment.

The crowd thickened as they reached the main road, bodies pouring in the same direction, voices climbing over each other in confusion and alarm. The smoke came next, a dark column that leaned sideways in the wind, too large for a cooking fire or a clumsy accident.

Then they turned the corner, and there it was.

They smelled it before they saw it, pooling in their lungs. Flames poured through every window, bending outward like fingers reaching for the rain, each one hissing where the water reached them but never retreating. The roof had already caved in on the eastern side, sending a spray of embers into the sky that hung for a moment among the clouds before dying.

The sisters stood in a loose cluster near the road, nightgowns soaked, arms wrapped around children who clung to them with the blank, wide-eyed stillness of creatures who had not yet learned what to do with fear. Most of them were young. Three, four years younger than Aksel and Selenne at least. He counted heads without meaning to, the way he always counted things, and came up short.

He counted again, slower.

Everyone was there.

Then his mind went back to the fire.

Nothing could be done anymore. And this had not been an accident.

The building had walls of stone, heavy and wet from ten days of uninterrupted rain. The hearths were shallow, the candles few, the wood old but damp. A log rolling away from the fire or a tipped lantern could singe a curtain, blacken a corner. They could not do this. They could not make a fire that swallowed stone.

Whoever had done this had nursed the flames with patience, feeding them something they could grow on, something that burned regardless of water, regardless of weather, until the fire no longer needed help.

"You!"

The Mother Superiora parted the crowd with a painful, wounded shout. Her face was wet, but not from the rain. She was crying, openly, loudly, her chest rising with the effort.

Aksel watched her approach the way a rabbit watches a hawk.

He had lived with this woman for sixteen years. He had seen her bury two sisters, handle three floods, and turn away a starving family at the door without blinking. He had never, not once, seen her cry.

She was pointing straight at him.

"I knew it." Her voice cracked, expertly. "I knew it the moment I saw you in my office. Those eyes… I should have called for help right then, I should have never let you walk out of that room!"

She turned to the crowd, arms open, palms up, as if offering herself to their judgment. The rain ran down her face and she let it, let it mix with whatever she had managed to squeeze from her eyes, let the cold and the fire and the night do the work of making her look like a woman who had lost everything.

"This boy broke into my office tonight." She pressed a hand to her mouth, steadying herself. "I found him rummaging through the files. I barely managed to stop him from burning them then. And when I confronted him about it?"

Nobody moved.

"He smiled at me. All teeth and pride."

The crowd, which had been murmuring, went quiet.

She reached into the group of children and pulled Eliot forward by the arm, roughly. The boy's left sleeve was gone, the skin beneath it an angry pink, already blistering. He was shaking. He was six years old.

The Superiora knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the other still pointing at Aksel.

"I pulled this child from the fire," she whispered, loud enough for the first three rows to hear, loud enough for everyone. "I pulled him out, and I thank the winds that I reached him in time. But I cannot... I cannot understand..." She bowed her head. "What kind of soul would do this to a child, just to hide the fact that his precious little creature is a Regenian abomination?"

The word arrived the same way it always arrived. Placed, carefully, where it would do the most damage.

It passed through the crowd. Bouncing, mouth to mouth, each repetition a little louder, a little less like a word and a little more like a sentence.

Selenne's hand found his. Her fingers were freezing.

"She is not one of us." The Superiora stood again, slowly, weak, tired. "She has never been one of us. And I have spent fifteen years, fifteen years of my life, trying to love that girl as if she were my own. Trying to see past it. Trying to believe that maybe, if I was kind enough, patient enough..."

She stopped. Shook her head. Let the silence do the rest.

That was the worst part. The silence she left for the crowd to fill with their own conclusions. She didn't need to say and I was wrong. She didn't need to say she's dangerous or they're monsters or do something about it. She just needed to stop talking, and look defeated, and let every person in that crowd find the version of the story that made them angriest.

Aksel had never hated anyone the way he hated her in that moment. The cold, measured clarity of understanding exactly what someone is and knowing that nothing you say will make a single person see it.

Because she was good at this. She was better than he was.

The crowd shifted. Not all at once, it started at the edges, where the faces were hardest to see, where anonymity made courage easy. A step forward here. A clenched fist there. The circle tightening the way circles do, the old instincts of pack animals flaring inside human brains.



"Lenne," Aksel whispered, reaching back for her hand. "Can you?"

She was already trembling, and he could feel it, the thing she kept leashed, the warmth that pulsed beneath her skin when she was scared or angry, the thing that had no name and no permission to exist. It was screaming inside her mind, clawing at the door and telling her to act.

"I could," she said, barely a breath. "If he wasn't here."

Aksel looked past the tightening ring of bodies.

Altair stood thirty paces back, at the edge of the firelight. He had not moved. He had not spoken. His arms were folded across his chest and his face carried the expression of a man watching something he had seen before, and learned that watching was sometimes all you were allowed to do.

His hand, though. His hand had drifted to his side, to the handle of a weapon Aksel had failed to notice up until now, hidden, so out of view he could not really tell if it was really a blade.

Selenne could. That was enough.

Aksel's mind clocked the way it always did when the world closed in, fast, sharp, mechanical. Options. Possibilities. Variables. Outcomes. They had ten seconds, maybe less, before the murmuring became shouting, before the first rock left someone's hand, before any movement they made was read as aggression and answered in kind.

Run, and they were guilty. Fight, and they were monsters. Stand still, and the crowd would do what crowds do when they've been told who to blame.

And Selenne would fight.

If they kept pushing, if the pressure kept building and he could not find an exit, she was going to give them the monster they all came looking for.

Because that was the thing.

In some dark, twisted version of reality, they were right. They were absolutely right. And the only thing they needed to do was put enough effort into it, into shaming and spitting and screaming and kicking.

Until eventually Selenne would open her jaws and snap back.

And that's when they could point at her and yell monster.

So he grabbed her hand and pulled her back from the edge.

"I'm going to need you to get us to the rooftops, both of us."

She was grabbing her head in pain. "I… It's bad. You're going to have to guide me."

"Always."

They both took a single second to prepare, the first signs of movement blooming in the crowd, steps about to rush them from all sides.

And then thunder struck, not from the sky but from the street, from the earth itself, and with it, the sound of hooves.

A chariot rolled out of the dark. Slowly. Calmly. As if whatever drove it had never once been late for anything.

The beast at the front of the impeccable vehicle was no animal and no cherubim. Something third. A creature caught between ram and stallion and larger than both, all long horns and muscle stretched too thin over protruding bone. Each breath it took pushed dark mist from the gaping holes in its hide, pooling low against the mud and not dissolving at all.

Then the chariot's door opened, and somehow everything got worse.

Out came a creature like a man, standing on two long legs that made it look far too thin and tall. It was dressed in impeccable attire, a formal vest so elegant it could have belonged to the head of a noble house, and moved with enough grace to do the cloth justice. Usually, every single person in the crowd would have been immediately charmed by such regal presentation.

But then there was that face.

It was like a mask of pure alabaster bone in the shape of a beaked, avian face. And although there was a single hole where the right eye should have been, what peered out was a flickering red light.

"I must apologize for the interruption." The creature folded into a bow so deep its beak nearly touched the mud. "But I am afraid I have been instructed to take these children with me."

Nobody could find a single word.

The stranger approached, taking a knee in front of Selenne, and produced an envelope from inside his vest.

"My master would have preferred to have me delivered sooner, but the winds of change have been difficult to read, and even the most careful hands cannot sort a storm of this magnitude."

Selenne's hands were shaking, but she managed to cling onto the envelope. She did not open it, could not. Her body was still frozen in that halfway state between panic and anger.

And so, the creature just walked back to the chariot and sat on the driver's spot, waiting.

Aksel moved first, as fast as he possibly could, pulling Selenne along.

And then, finally, that woman found her voice.

"What do you think you're doing?!" The Mother Superiora screamed. "They're criminals, thieves and arsonists, and she… And she! She is a monster, and he is the wretched idiot who would choose a Regenian over his own people! Over actual people!"

The driver simply tilted its head, chillingly calm. "Miss, while I do thank you for your service, as of this exact moment I must regard it as concluded. These children have been accepted into the Silvermoon Academy of the Four Winds, and are, as of right now, considered Aspirant Sorcerers for the kingdom of Fiore. Any attempt at argument against this fact would simply be irrelevant."

As the woman mumbled, stumbling upon her own astonishment, Aksel guided Selenne away from the crowd and into the box.

He placed a foot on the step and turned, just once, just long enough to see the Superiora's face as she lost them. Some villagers gripped stones and torches. Some soldiers held onto their weapons. But nobody, not one of them, would raise a hand against an envoy from the capital. Least of all one that looked like this.

He closed the door behind him, and the wheels started moving.

"Come back here!" The Mother Superiora was running now, nightgown dragging through the mud. "You disgusting, traitorous—"

"I should have drowned you both the day I found you!"

Her voice was breaking from effort, from the simple physics of a middle-aged woman sprinting after a chariot in the rain.

"You can run, but you cannot run from what you are! May your empty souls never know peace!"

She fell. Hard, into the mud, and did not get up immediately.

The chariot kept moving.

 

[Celerius]

The interior of the carriage was unlike anything either of them had ever touched.

The seats were cushioned, properly cushioned, not stuffed-rag-over-a-plank cushioned but the kind of soft that made you wonder which animal had been killed and then harvested for it to be possible. The floor, too. Even the walls had a layer of padding behind the wood, hidden, which Selenne only discovered because she immediately started pressing against everything that could possibly prevent her escape.

The windows, massive panels of glass they had seen from the outside, were blocked by wooden shutters that could be pushed down and out of the way.

Neither of them did.

There was no need. A small circle on the roof filled the carriage with light that didn't fall the way light was supposed to. It spread, clinging to every surface like mist, soft and even, as if the sun had been asked to behave itself for once and it had actually listened.

And then there was the warmth.

Every wooden thing Selenne had ever slept inside had been cold. Carts, sheds, the orphanage's basement on a bad night. Wood did not keep the world out. It pretended to, and then the wind found the gaps, and you woke up shivering and wondering why you'd bothered with walls at all.

But not this one.

The air inside the carriage sat perfectly still, warm without a source, comfortable without explanation. As if the box simply did not care what was happening outside of it or if the sun was high or low.

Selenne pressed her fingers flat against the wall and dragged them, trying to catch a splinter, but the surface was so unnaturally smooth it might as well have been carved from a single log, pulled whole from some giant tree that no longer existed, then bent into the perfect shape.

"Here."

Aksel threw her the pouch. Tossed it. Because of course he couldn't just hand it over like a normal person; that would mean admitting he considered everything they owned in the world to be something worth being careful about.

Boys.

It landed on her lap, somehow heavier than the last time she'd held it. Ten Golden Suns. Two Silver Clouds.

One Silver Cloud was enough for a proper meal and then some. Drinks, bread, something sweet. So roughly, if she was doing the math right, they had about five months covered.

Aksel would disagree, of course. He always did when it came to money. He'd start doing that thing with his hands, talking about how everything cost more where they were going, all blobery without meaning she knew he had to be making up half of the time.

And if she ever asked about it, he'd find a way to make all that gibber jabber crash into itself until the numbers meant nothing and everything was fine again. Then he'd insist they needed to be extremely careful in the future, as if economics was a ghost that could attack at any moment but somehow never did.

She finished counting the coins and offered the pouch back, confused.

"What?"

"Keep them. It was your inheritance."

Her brow furrowed in that way it always did, the way that looked angry even when she wasn't, which was a problem because right now she wasn't sure which one it was.

"What are you talking about, Aksel?"

He took a deep breath. "I guess I just… it felt like shit, hustling with your money. Thinking about losing it."

Selenne said nothing for a long moment. A headache passed through her skull like a slow cloud. Then she smiled, and the smile had teeth.

"Oh, poor little you. To carry the heaviest of burdens. What soul could possibly endure the pain of GAMBLING FOR FREE?"

"Selenne."

"DON'T SELENNE ME." Her voice climbed. "You always do this. Every single time things start to look even a little bit good, you find some reason to sit in a corner and mope. What about every time you made money and I spent it on something stupid? Why does it only matter now?"

"It's not the same."

"Why not? Because it's mine? Because it's more?" She slapped her own forehead, hard. "Aksel, I just realized something. Making more money also means we can lose more money. So what if we just stay poor forever instead? Is that what you want? Should we buy two cows and twelve chickens and go back the way we came?"

He rolled his eyes and said nothing, which was his way of choosing not to fight. Which was, of course, its own kind of fighting.

Selenne sat back against the cushion, shoulders tight. She was being unreasonable and she knew it.

Why?

She wasn't mad at him.

No.

She was. She was mad at him.

It was something he said.

Which part?

Selenne picked up the pouch and threw it back. It hit his chest with a dull thud.

"It's our money."

"What?" Aksel rubbed his chest the way you do when a sack of coins hits it, which is to say, like it hurt more than he wanted to admit.

"It's not my money and it's not your money. It has always been our money. Don't change that now. Don't make it weird." She held his eyes. "I don't know what you're thinking about right now, but I can see it starting to form, and I don't like it."

Aksel smiled. That smile. The one that lifted his eyebrows and said you're out of your mind and meant you've got me and I'll never admit it.

She could see the shape of it. Not the details, he'd never give her those, but the outline. Options. Independence. Room to grow, now that they could afford it. This wasn't just about him feeling guilty for spending her money. He wanted her to be able to handle things on her own. Just in case.

In case…

She placed that aside, for now.

"You never told me about yours." She let the words sit for a moment. "Your records. What you found."

Aksel shook his head. "There was no time. Itch wanted me to take all of them, expose everything. I think the Superiora had been afraid of something like that for a while. She didn't even hesitate."

"There was no time?" Selenne asked, slower now. "For your own papers?"

"I own them. I could have asked for them whenever I wanted, so I didn't see the point in rushing for them. Maybe I should have."

Selenne pressed her lips together. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. The academy should have copies. It's everyone else who got screwed." He closed his eyes and sighed. "I just don't care much for whatever a piece of paper says. And I don't think you should either." He opened them. "And since we're talking about it, you should probably start getting used to the idea of using your magic. A lot."

The pain in her head pulsed again, like something pressing against the inside of her skull. "In the academy full of experts who would recognize it in a second?"

"If they can recognize it, all the more reason to let them see it early. We'll be living at the academy for at least three years. This isn't something we hide anymore. It's something we manage, and how we manage it depends on their reaction."

"And if they tell us to leave?"

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Then we leave. Quietly. No screaming, no making a fuss. We're still in the capital, and two cows and a flock of chickens is a lot more than we had yesterday. This isn't the moment to start thinking about life like we deserve more than tomorrow."

Selenne's eyes fell to the floor, and her muddy shoes traced the carpet. "Sometimes I feel like all you do is plan around me. Like your life would be so much easier if you were by yourself."

"Yes, Selenne, I would love you if you were Regenian. Please, just let me sleep."

She punched his nose.

 

[Celerius]

Aksel wasn't sure when he'd fallen asleep, or how long it'd been.

He'd tried to reach for the shutters once, just before drifting off, but the conductor's voice had come from the front, asking him not to disturb the carriage's momentum.

But now his mind surfaced, heavy and painfully bored, and his eyes drifted naturally to Selenne's sleeping form. Surprisingly delicate, despite the many fistfights and the dirt that clung to her old clothes. He could tell how tired she was by the way she slept, her face slack, mouth wide open, a strand of drool running down the back of her seat.

She slept like that sometimes.

When she was happy, or comfortable, or too tired for her body to remember its way back into the waking world even if he shoved his hand into her mouth.

She hadn't slept like that for a while now. Maybe since his birthday. Maybe since she stopped seeing herself as a person and became the thing holding them back.

"You might want to take a look now." The creature spoke again from the front. "We will be arriving at our destination shortly, and I'd guess you'd value the chance to appreciate it properly."

Aksel's brow furrowed. So the thing could see them at all times. He filed that away, but the promise of sunlight won out, and he reached for the shutter instead.

It went down smoothly.

He didn't breathe.

The sun sat high in the sky, and on that day it shone with a power that made shadows cower across the green fields. The road ahead sloped gently downward, as if gravity itself was pulling the earth toward a single point. And on that point, still at a good distance, past a wide and quiet river, sat a city so vast it borrowed the horizon.

"Selenne." His voice came out wrong, too thin. "Selenne, wake up."

He shook her, and the carriage tilted as the front wheels climbed onto the arched bridge crossing the river. They both tumbled backward off her seat, falling to the floor like clattering baggage.

"Huh. What the…?" Selenne jumped to her feet, fists up, but her instincts clearly lagged behind her drowsy mind. "How long was I…?"

"Six hours, I'd say," answered the conductor.

"Then why—"

Aksel held her by the shoulders and turned her toward the window. "We're here."

"Here?" She looked. "Holy shit, we're here!"

The city grew closer by the moment. The carriage was fast. Too fast. But even that couldn't explain the distance they'd covered. Mirren wasn't just a border village; it was the furthest settlement from the capital in the kingdom. And yet here they were, more than half of Fiore crossed in a single night.

"How?" Aksel asked again. Then a question that now felt painfully late: "What are you?"

"The currents were favorable last night. Calmer, cleaner. Thanks to my master, more than likely. He made it very clear that placing the kingdom's weather back under our control should be the highest priority." There was a small pause, weighted with thought. "And if you're asking for my name, I have been permitted to present myself as Mr. Seven. As for my origin, I do not believe myself a reliable mind for the topic. You should bridge that question shortly, one way or another."

That was, for the both of them, not an answer at all. But then again, there was little room to question a being so eerie yet so polite.

The road that led into the city was wide, wide enough for six carriages to ride side by side, even with the water canal that ran down its center. Marble sidewalks added another lane of space on each side before reaching the faces of the buildings.

And the buildings.

Aksel had grown up in a village where every house looked like it was apologizing for existing. Here, each one stood like it had something to prove. Heavy timber frames in black walnut and cherry and woods he couldn't name held walls painted in colors he didn't have words for, deep reds beside dusty yellows beside a blue so sharp it looked wet. Five or six homes per block, each one different, each one deliberate, two to four floors tall, with glass clinging to every available corner like the city couldn't stand not to see its own reflection for a single moment.

And above it all, a jungle of tiled roofs and working chimneys pressing against one another, fighting for their share of the sky.

Selenne had her face nearly through the window. Aksel wasn't doing much better.

Then the street opened, and the buildings fell away, pushed aside into an open plaza.

It was too large to ever be crowded and too important to ever be empty. A seamless expanse of pale, carved stone that stretched so far the far end of it blurred, crowned at its center by a fountain so tall its peak vanished into mist. Every canal in the city seemed to be born from it, and every single one seemed to come back to die. A thousand people moved through the space without brushing shoulders. A hundred different crowds, flowing past each other like drops in a river, each one impossible to follow, part of something greater.

The carriage wheels rolled on. And then someone, a child, a vendor, it was not relevant and Aksel couldn't tell, recognized what the carriage was and pointed.

The sea of people outside went still.

Then it screamed.

The force of the screams and applause and chants of joy could have shattered a lesser vehicle. If they had rushed forward, no magic would have protected them from the sheer weight of such a rolling, human wave.

But they did not.

Against all expectation, they did not.

Instead, the moment drew and breathed. One woman fell to her knees and wept tiredly, as if suddenly everything was okay.

Selenne opened the door and stood on the threshold, one hand on the frame, her long hair blowing sideways in the wind. Aksel's hand twitched toward her back, but he let it drop. She deserved this.

"Are they… happy?"

"Of course," Mr. Seven answered, tipping his hat toward the crowd. "They are here because of you. The Academy and its sorcerers are the heart of Fiore. Your mere presence brings trade and wonder to these otherwise unremarkable lands. And wonder, Miss Selenne, is worth more than gold."

Selenne snorted, pulling the door shut and dropping back into her seat, though her gaze stayed on the window. "I'd take gold any day."

"You'll hear a million tales of men and women emptying their pockets for a taste of wonder," the conductor said. "But you will never hear one boast of profiting from their own misery."

"But they'll do it anyway," Aksel remarked.

"Indeed. Yet you won't hear about it, for dead men tell no tales. And what is a life of misery but a story of death stretched across many days?" The creature paused, straightening in its seat. "For now, simply allow them to enjoy your arrival. Times of late have been hard on their souls. And do not forget, these people have placed their faith in you. Should any kind of evil ever set its sights upon this city, you would be the ones expected to protect it. After all, those who stand at the top will always be held to the highest standard."

Aksel took one last look at the plaza as they left it behind, holding onto the sound of the whistles and the image of a child jumping into his father's arms.

Then they kept going. Slower now, with the pace of a morning stroll, parting the city leisurely. Until the wide streets fell back and warm sand met them softly.

There was a lake there, immense, regal. Maybe the only lake in Fiore every single child could name. A lake of silver and mist that rose like vapor.

The Glassmother.

Not a single boat dared to touch its surface. But a market still rose at the shore, as far as fishermen were willing to go, because regardless of how sacred the place, the sun kept moving, and lunch would be prepared.

The wheels of the carriage ignored the shore entirely, rolled past it, and met the water.

Aksel's hand found the edge of his seat. Even if the box sank the roof was sealed, that bought them seconds, if they could reach the door before—

But the box did not sink. It moved at the same speed over water as it had over land, ignorant of the surface beneath, uncaring. And so they parted the mists, and the world outside disappeared.

Shapes drifted behind the clouds.

Shadows of creatures both animal and cherubim, some crawling beneath the surface, others watching from just above it. Aksel recognized the Surawes, those long-legged water-spiders that skated across the lake in quick, nervous bursts. But others were stranger, alien. Something he'd mistaken for a swan suddenly unveiled three pairs of wings, each lined with pale, unblinking eyes on the inside, and launched itself skyward in a violent storm of wind and light that rocked the carriage against the waves.

Selenne looked at him. He looked at her. Neither of them had a word for what they'd just seen, so they settled for mutual, silent horror.

Eventually, the mist thinned, and the lake gave way to shore. The transition took less than a second. One moment the island ahead was empty.

Then it wasn't.

A castle of impossible dimensions devoured the view. It was an offense against both logic and architecture, a structure with no regard for gravity or order, that only seemed to grow as one looked up. Towers and wings splitting off each other in such a violent show of force that Aksel tried to make sense of it and found himself dizzy instead, his mind reaching for a shape that simply refused to make sense.

A god crowned in bloody sapphire.

By the time the wheels stopped, the carriage stood before a set of ancient doors. Open, wide open, like a maw.

Waiting.

"I am afraid our journey has come to an end," Mr. Seven said, and suddenly Aksel remembered how to think. "Would you do me the honor of accompanying us for the very last steps?"

 

[Celerius]

Selenne froze.

Aksel could see it, the way she gripped the edge of her seat and refused to leave, as if the cushion had grown teeth and sunk them into her.

"Now? Right now?!" She looked down at herself, pulling at the frayed edges of her dress. "We haven't changed… or bathed, or eaten! You can't expect us to walk in like this!"

Mr. Seven regarded her with the patient silence of a creature that had not considered any of those issues to be issues at all. Its beaked face tilted slowly to one side, the red light in its single eye flickering once, twice, as if processing the concept of human vanity for the first time.

Then it raised a gloved finger.

The stains on their clothes simply faded. Mud, smoke, the grey ghost of ten days of rain, all of it pulled gently out of the fabric like ink drawn back into a pen. The clothes themselves, of course, remained what they were. Worn, thin, patched in places, the kind of garments that announced exactly where you came from and how long you'd been there.

"I am afraid that is as much as I can offer," the creature apologized, lowering its hand. "My orders are to deliver you to your first class safe and whole, and I simply cannot disobey them. Not even for your own convenience."

Selenne stared at her sleeves for a moment, then at Aksel, then at the open door.

Reluctantly, finally, she took Mr. Seven's hand and stepped down.

Aksel followed a second behind. As his boots touched the ground, he noticed the beast at the front of the carriage had detached itself from its harness and now stood perfectly still, watching the group with the focused disinterest of something that wanted to move on.

Mr. Seven led them through the entrance. The hall inside could have housed a throne. The stone was dark, almost black, the kind of grey that swallowed light, and the only warmth came from the blood-red carpets that ran along the floor like open veins. Their footsteps disappeared into them.

Aksel wanted to stop. His mind was already reaching for the shape of the building, trying to map it the way it mapped everything. Watching the way corridors went on to infinity and automatically wanting to find out if there was something on the other side.

But Mr. Seven did not give them the chance. The creature turned into a hallway, stopped at the first door, and gave them a moment.

Selenne looked at him. He looked at her. She was pale, her jaw tight, her eyes doing that rapid sideways thing they did when she was calculating whether to run or fight. He reached for her hand and held it.

She squeezed back once, hard enough to hurt.

Mr. Seven gave one last nod, and pushed the door open.

The first thing Aksel saw was the sky.

The wall opposite the door simply wasn't there. In its place, a panel of glass so clean it was nearly invisible held back the open air, giving the room a full, unbroken view of the green field outside and the dark forest beyond it. For a disorienting moment, it felt less like entering a classroom and more like stepping to the edge of a cliff.

Then the sky became faces.

Twenty or so students sat at wooden desks arranged in curved rows that climbed toward the back of the room like steps in an amphitheater. Every single one of them was staring. Some curious, some indifferent, a few with the barely concealed amusement of people watching someone walk into a room they clearly did not belong in.

"My apologies for the interruption," Mr. Seven said, tipping its hat in that gesture it appeared to favor.

The teacher rose from behind a wide desk that sat on a low stone podium in the corner, though it was clear he did not need the elevation. The man was tall and broad through the shoulders, arms clasped behind his back, dressed simply in dark fabric that fit him the way armor fits a soldier. Blond hair fell loose around his face, wilder than the rest of him suggested.

"Number Seven. Number Four." The teacher's voice filled the room without effort. "I hope your journey was fruitful and uneventful."

The tall creature offered a bow. "More comfortable than I'd expected, Master. I suspect thanks to your influence."

"Indeed. But let's focus on today." The man folded his arms. "As of right now, I have little in the way of orders for the two of you, so take some rest instead. I suspect you've earned it."

And the moment he finished that sentence, Mr. Seven took one step forward, and broke.

There was no warning. The leg that touched the floor simply ceased to exist, crumbling into pale dust that scattered before it reached the ground, and the rest of the body followed in a cascading collapse. Vest, gloves, the long thin frame, all of it dissolving upward like smoke falling in reverse, until the only thing left was a skull. Small, avian, bleached white. It hung in the air for a single, weightless moment, and then flew to the teacher's open hand as if pulled by a thread.

Aksel heard a second, softer collapse behind him. He didn't need to turn around. The creature that had pulled the carriage was gone too. A second skull arced over his shoulder and landed in the teacher's other palm.

He set them both on his desk, gently, the way you'd set down something that had once been alive.

Nobody in the classroom reacted.

Aksel's mind raced. A dozen clues suddenly falling in place without any time in the middle for him to arrange them and follow.

"Well?" The teacher turned to them, and whatever softness had been in his hands was gone from his voice. "Please, do not wait for an invitation. I trust you've come prepared. Take a seat. If you're inclined to follow the lecture, you'll find a binder in the drawer beneath your desk. The instructions should be clear."

The matter of seating was not exactly their choice. Three desks sat empty in the far left corner of the room, the furthest point from the podium, away from the glass. The seats nobody chose unless there were no seats left.

Selenne took the corner itself, pushing her chair back until it touched the wall behind her. Guarding her flank, Aksel thought, the way she always did in unfamiliar rooms, the way she'd done in the dining hall for years when the other children wouldn't sit near her. He settled beside her, close enough.

He opened his drawer. Inside was a binder, thick, leather-bound, with a pen slotted into its spine. The cover was blank.

The first page held a set of instructions, handwritten in a script so precise it might have been printed. Aksel read them twice, quickly, then pulled the pen free and pressed its point into his thumb.

The pain was small and sharp, a bright dot of heat. He watched the blood bead, dark against his skin, and then touched the pen's tip to the drop. The ink drank it in. The color didn't change, the ink remained black, but something in its weight shifted, a liquid warmth.

He signed his name at the bottom of the page.

There was no flash of light, no surge of power. But the ink warmed as it dried, gentle, almost imperceptible, like a heartbeat pressed against the page.

Aksel looked at Selenne. She had already signed hers and was staring at the page with her brow furrowed, fingers hovering above the ink as if she could still feel the warmth rising from it.

Then, and only then, their teacher spoke again.

"Since we are seeing the arrival of our last missing first-year students, I'll make an exception and repeat myself." He waited. Nobody dared to speak. "My name is Amadeo Greco Angelopoulos. I do not occupy a formal position within this institution, but it was the desire of the late director that a great number of responsibilities fell to me after her passing."

He said it plainly, almost carelessly, as if the death of the most powerful sorcerer in history was an administrative inconvenience he'd already processed and archived, unpleased.

"While other, more specialized tutors will handle specific subjects, mine will be the task of your general introduction to magic during at least the first half of this year."

He stopped again, and this time his eyes moved through the room with purpose, searching for something. They passed over the dark-coated students without interest.

"As you might have already gathered, our new arrivals find themselves among the Nameless."

The word landed softly in the room, but there was some chatter and Aksel saw a few faces turn.

"Meaning we cannot expect them to have received the basic magical education any noble family provides their children. So..." Amadeo's gaze shifted. "Mister Varian. Since you are a Nameless yourself, and since you've had half a month's head start, would you be so kind as to show your peers what progress you've achieved?"

The boy in a mint-green vest rose to his feet.

Varian was tall and thin and formal, confident, dressed in a way that announced nothing about where he came from and everything about where he intended to go. He held his binder in one hand, open, pen already drawn.

"It would be my honor," he said. Not a tremor.

Amadeo flicked his wrist. Somewhere to the left, metal rattled. A cage Aksel hadn't noticed, iron-barred, tucked against the stone wall behind him. And its door swung open.

What came out was not an animal.

A bolt of living lightning erupted from the cage, a cherubim made of chitin and wings and raw electrical fury, the air splitting apart wherever it passed with a sound like tearing cloth. It ricocheted off the ceiling, the floor, the glass wall, each impact leaving a black scorch mark and a smell like burning copper. It was looking for a way out. It was fast enough to find one.

Varian drew.

His pen moved across the page in a single, unbroken line, a circle. And as the ink settled, light appeared above their heads. A ring of pale gold materialized around the cherubim, tightening, trying to hold it.

There was a flash of something else forming, a structure, a cage of light, but before it could solidify, the cherubim dove straight for Varian.

The ring shattered. Varian threw himself sideways, rolling between the rows of desks. The cherubim slammed into the wall behind him and rebounded, already turning for another pass.

Amadeo pressed his palm slowly against his face and sighed. "I am not made of patience, Mr. Varian. Reinforce your constructs, if it is not too much to ask."

Varian, to his credit, didn't flinch. He adjusted his glasses with one hand, flipped to the next page, and drew again.

This time, the line didn't stop.

One ring connected to the next, each one appearing the moment the ink dried, layering around the cherubim faster than it could break free. Every time it shattered one barrier, two more had already formed behind it. The creature fought, arcs of lightning scorching the floor, one bolt cracking close enough to Selenne's corner that she had to drop flat.

Then Varian drew the spikes. One, three, eight, each one sliding into position around the largest ring like teeth closing. The cherubim thrashed, its light flickering wildly, energy discharging in every direction.

And then silence.

The barriers fell, the light faded, and the cherubim floated gently into Varian's outstretched hand. It sat there, still crackling faintly, and the boy let out a long breath that he almost managed to disguise as composure.

Amadeo clapped. Once, twice. The class followed, unevenly.

 

[Celerius]

"As you've just seen," the teacher said, "even those without a name or any inherited talent can earn something here. What Mr. Varian just performed is considered the most basic form of casting: spellwork executed through an aiding focus. But even that is enough to permanently earn anyone the title of first-grade sorcerer."

His eyes returned to the corner. To them.

"Naturally, some of your classmates were born with the ability to cast without a focus, which places them at second grade before they've drawn a single line. And some of them have been refining that ability for years. So the gap between where you are and where they come from is not small. I'd encourage you not to make it larger."

He held the cage door open and the cherubim returned to it, reluctantly, the way a cat returns to a carrier.

Then the lecture began.

The next two hours were a flood.

In theory, basic runes, shapes, and geometric figures could be combined to form any spell. In practice, the combinations were governed by rules that seemed intuitive when spoken and incomprehensible when written, and Amadeo moved through them the way a river moves through a valley: relentlessly, without concern for who was keeping up.

The spell Varian had performed, Silvermoon's Binding Bow, was a capture-and-recruitment ritual designed to forge a willing alliance with a cherubim. It required at least one unbroken, perfect circle, eight radial spikes, and a stabilizing rune drawn in the center, all in a single continuous line.

Other spells were mentioned in passing. The theory stacked. Aksel wrote until his hand ached, filling page after page.

He understood perhaps a third of it. Selenne, judging by the look on her face, understood less and hated it more.

But buried in the flood, certain things stuck. Shapes had meaning. Circles contained. Lines directed in different ways depending on their curves. Triangles stabilized. Runes were language, each one a word.

Then the bell rang, and Amadeo stopped mid-sentence as if he'd been waiting for it.

"Tomorrow. Mana theory, elemental interactions, natural cherubim formation, and the effects of ley lines on the human environment." He gathered his notes without looking at them. "Before you all leave, would either of our new arrivals care to demonstrate that they understood anything I've said today? A single showing would be more than enough. I do hold the fleeting hope that at least half of you are conscious during my lectures."

Aksel understood that this was not an invitation.

He closed his eyes and stood.

The information was there. All of it, swimming in his mind like fish in dark water. He needed only to gather it and give it form.

He drew slowly. Carefully. One continuous line, the pen never leaving the page, his hand steady despite the twenty pairs of eyes he could feel pressing against his back. He'd been practicing the motion all morning, drawing circles in the margins of his notes while Amadeo spoke, learning through repetition that a single unbroken line was far harder than it sounded. His circles wobbled. His curves drifted. But after hours of quiet, stubborn practice, he could make one that held.

He drew a circle. Inside it, the rune for water. Around it, the sigils for round and float, spaced evenly, the way the lecture had described.

He lifted the pen.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the ink ignited with light, a faint blue glow that rose from the page like steam, and ten bubbles were born from the circle, translucent, catching the light from the glass wall as they drifted upward.

They floated for two, maybe three seconds.

Then they burst, one after another, with a sound so small it barely existed.

The classroom was silent.

"Adequate," Amadeo said, with a nod that contained nothing beyond the word itself.

Aksel sat down. His hands were steady. His chest was not. Ten bubbles. After everything, after sixteen years of being told he had magic in his blood, after a life spent believing he was meant for something more than Mirren's mud and the Superiora's contempt, ten bubbles that didn't survive long enough to reach the ceiling.

Adequate.

Then Amadeo's gaze moved past him, and every thought in Aksel's head went quiet.

"Miss Selenne? If you would."

The room turned.

Twenty faces. The teacher. The glass wall. The forest beyond it. The whole world, suddenly, waiting for the girl in the corner to show them what she was.

Aksel looked at her.

Oh no.

Selenne was already gone. Physically she was right there, in her seat, close enough to touch. But the girl behind her eyes had retreated somewhere deep and unreachable, the way she did when the pressure found a crack in her chest and started pressing.

Her feet tapped the floor in a rhythm only she could follow. Her left fang was buried so deep inside her lower lip that a line of blood had run down her chin and was dripping, slowly, onto the desk.

She hadn't noticed.

"Miss Selenne?"

That appeared to be enough. Enough for her hand to move, at least.

She opened her binder and began to draw. Aksel could see her pulling from the lecture, the basic vocabulary was in her mind. But using it all together, in sequence, in cohesion, to create something stable... that was a different language entirely. Her lines shook. Her spacing uneven. Something inside the construction kept refusing to catch, like a spark that flares against wet wood and dies.

She drew once. Failed. Ripped the page out and tried again.

Again.

Again.

Each attempt faster than the last, each one more ragged, and the sound that Aksel had been dreading began to bloom around them. The soft, scattered laughter of people who had already decided what they were watching.

"I think it would be best—"

"No."

Selenne's voice cut the room clean.

She picked up the pen again and drew the sharp point across her right palm in a single deliberate line. The skin opened. The blood came immediately, answering her call. She pressed each finger of her left hand into the cut, coating each one carefully, and then placed them against the inside of her right forearm. Four parallel lines, drawn straight down, meeting at the crook of her elbow. And with her thumb moved close against her skin, hidden beneath her own grip. She traced shapes Aksel couldn't see.

Nobody was laughing anymore.

The change began at the elbow and climbed. The skin on the inside of her arm darkened, something pushing up from underneath like a bruise. The outside went the other way. Pale, then bright, then metallic, catching the light like polished steel.

She flexed her fingers. They responded, but the tips had welded together, now part of that singular blade.

The classroom was silent. The silence of people deciding whether something was safe.

Amadeo stared at her arm for a long moment. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Transmutation," he said. "With a heavy anchor in biological metamorphosis, going by what I see." He lowered his hand. "Is… this something you taught yourself?"

Selenne was still turning her arm in the light, watching the dark and bright halves catch different angles. "Never gave myself much room to try. Scared people off."

"Probably a good thing." Amadeo took a slow breath. "I'm going to ask you one question. Did you consider how to reverse that, or are you planning to go through life as Solstice's most dangerous cripple?"

Selenne's cheeks flushed. A few students actually laughed.

"Oh, please. Don't flatter yourselves. Not one of you thought about it until I said it." Amadeo turned from Selenne back to the class. "Quick question. When is blood more effective than enchanted ink?"

A boy raised his hand. He was round, soft-faced, and sat like someone who wanted to take up less space than he did.

"Becker. Please, surprise me."

"W-When the spell is used to affect the body it came from?"

"That would be a great answer if it were true. Next!"

The next was an older-looking girl. Long brown hair, sharp but delicate jaw. The most beautiful person Aksel had ever seen, like a painting come to life, crafted, designed, layered. It was eerie, perfect in a way people are not. He kept looking at her, at the way the sun caressed her skin with reverence, almost hoping that the next time he turned around she would just be another person. It never happened.

"Viceroy."

The girl nodded, once. "Spells are easier to cast through blood when the mana concentration in the blood exceeds the mana concentration in the ink. Order of Pertenence applies, of course."

"Someone. Order of Pertenence. Now."

A girl near the middle raised a trembling hand. Long, fluffy white hair that fell past her back, a face too young and too nervous.

"What's yours is easy to manipulate." She swallowed. "T-That's why you can always set yourself on fire, b-but you can't just expect spells to work on someone else."

"Elowin. Good job. Now do that every day for the rest of the year." Amadeo closed his own book with a snap. "And that's class. What are you waiting for? Out. All of you. Out. Now."

The room emptied faster than anything in the organized morning would have suggested. A few students glanced at Selenne as they passed.

Then it was just them.

Amadeo walked down the rows of desks, his steps unhurried, his hands behind his back. When he reached them, Selenne offered her transformed arm the way a child offers a pen after ruining the bathroom wall.

The teacher swatted it away with a flick of his wrist.

The spell fell apart instantly. The black receded, the metallic sheen dissolved, and in less than ten seconds the arm was just an arm again, pale and human and slightly swollen.

"Aw." Selenne rubbed her skin, offended.

Amadeo looked at them both. Even leaning down to meet their faces, he still stood tall.

"Listen to me," he said. "They might not look it, but half of your classmates are competent novices. Which is more than either of you can claim. And they will not hesitate to turn those abilities against anything they consider outsider."

Aksel shook his head. "So what? You're telling us to do the same?"

"I'm telling you to train until your hands bleed." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Because they will bleed, so they might as well do so from something productive. I'm telling you to find someone half reliable and ask them for notes, because that gap will not close itself. And if you're not willing to close it, if from the start you've already decided to accept your inferiority, then have no doubt that inferiority will accept you. And the human soul is nothing if not willing to the worship of anything greater."

He turned around without another word, heading for the door.

"For what it's worth, you are not useless. I only ask that you two try and focus those talents in a manner less embarrassing, and that you arrive at eight sharp every morning."

The door closed behind him.

 

[Celerius]

They left the classroom with the silence still clinging to them, Amadeo's words settling into Aksel's bones as cold does when you stop moving.

He needed to walk. His legs to carry something.

"Um… E-eh. I-I'm… sorry."

Elowin.

The girl with the white hair. She was standing right by the door, knees slightly bent, making herself smaller.

Aksel and Selenne stared at each other, untrusting.

Then a second figure walked closer and placed a hand on the girl's shoulder.

Varian.

Their outfits were strangely similar, when you looked at them side by side. Clear green and white. The sleeveless vest over a full blouse for him. A green-to-white fading dress for her, over which she wore the academy's uniform, fitted to sit along her shoulders before falling down the back like a winged cape.

"What my friend is trying to say," Varian continued with an easy smile, "is that we'd like a word, if you have the time. You might call it a welcome, from one pair of orphans to the other."

Selenne hated everything about it.

Aksel wasn't far behind, but he thought about it for a moment. About how Elowin had clapped eagerly after Varian captured the cherubim. About how the two of them had stayed unusually silent when the laughter around Selenne began to build. He thought about their own clothes, their posture, anything an outsider could track.

They looked poor, humble, and beaten.

If this was supposed to be a scam, it was a bad one.

"We could use lunch," Aksel said. "If you could show us around the academy."

Their new friends glanced at each other.

"We were actually heading into the city. We figured there might be…" Even Varian hesitated, his eyes traveling carefully down and up. "At least a number of items you'd want to acquire before settling in. Bags, shoes, something that isn't the uniform…" He paused, searching for gentle words and failing to find any. "Something to perfume the hair."

Elowin slapped his elbow. Hard, fast, and neither of them acknowledged it after.

Selenne's face turned red in what refused to become a pout, equal parts indignation and lack of arguments, which as always left her with little beyond violence.

"That sounds wonderful." Aksel smiled and offered his hand before another word could be said.

There was another reason to accept their offer. More of a suspicion, one Aksel only confirmed after they started walking together.

Every other student who recognized them made sure to stay clear of their path. Not in any obvious way. But it was as if the corridor had decided all four of them belonged in the same margin.

"So," Aksel said as they passed the main entrance. "About getting back to the city…"

"Oh. You're going to love this."

Something was already happening at the water's edge. Before the beach itself, at some unmarked point along the shore where two dozen students had gathered, waiting. The other students stood in clusters of two or three, most of them with the flare of the high-born, talking among themselves with the ease of people who had never questioned whether they belonged, refusing to look around.

Ignoring the sound.

It started as a tremor. Invisible beyond the lake, ripples without a source. Then it grew a shape, the ground beneath their feet quaking until their teeth started to rattle. Something massive and cold broke the surface, unfolding with ordained precision, hundreds of square boulders rearranging themselves into place, some dragging along a thick layer of moss or an already fleeing crab.

A bridge built itself before their eyes.

"Up from midday to well past sundown," Varian said, stepping onto the first stone as naturally as any doorstep. "What you do with your free time is your problem. Just don't touch the water. The cherubim get territorial, and the teachers hate having to pull anyone out."

"S-Someone fell in yesterday," Elowin added.

Selenne looked over the wide edge as they walked. "How do you fall in?"

"You stop looking at who's behind you."

They moved well together. Varian carried the conversation easily, just respectful enough that you never quite knew if he was mocking you, which gave Elowin room to crawl out of her shell one painful inch at a time. By the time they reached Solstice's center, multiple words were leaving her mouth every minute, which by comparison seemed like a lot. And as they closed in on their destination, the shy girl even started walking ahead.

"Nana, we're here!" Elowin pushed the door open with confidence.

From the outside, the building looked exactly like any other old generational home, if not for the wide display window behind which sat a number of full outfits. Inside, the store stretched larger, taller than it had any right to be, several walls clearly demolished to form one long, overflowing room.

And it was stacked. Floor to ceiling, a hundred different silks and a thousand different garments, making it impossible to tell what was cloth waiting to be cut from clothes waiting to be worn.

The owner took her time walking in from the back, at the pace a full life allowed. She was small, frail, maybe a bit sick, her skin tanned by decades under the sun. But her face showed no pain whatsoever, just warmth, and a pair of eyes so squinted they were barely open.

"Oh, Elowin, my dear…" she crooned, her voice rasping gently. Her gaze landed on Selenne, and she took the girl's hands with an appraising hum. "And where did you find this lovely young lady?"

Selenne tensed, every muscle in her body loading like a cat about to fire, but before she could form a response Elowin leaned in close to the old woman, conspiratorial, careful.

"Her family is from the west, Nana. Near the border."

The old woman clicked her tongue. "Oh, you poor thing." And without another word, she wrapped Selenne in a warm embrace and guided her toward the back of the store. "Come, child. We'll find you something proper."

Selenne threw Aksel one last look over her shoulder. Half a plea for rescue, half a promise of murder. But he let it go, shrugging it off, and walked over to where Varian was leaning against a cluttered counter that doubled as an overused workspace.

Even then his worry must have shown, because the other boy spoke first.

"How much do you have?" Varian asked. Quiet enough.

Aksel turned, surprised. "Enough."

Varian nodded. And that was that.

When the three of them came back, Selenne was unrecognizable.

Not because of the clothes. Because of her face.

She looked confused. The way you look when someone hands you something and you don't know whether you're allowed to keep it.

A small wide-brimmed hat with dark red roses sat on her head, her hair falling beneath it loosely. A white blouse tied with a crimson bow at the throat. A fitted dark corset over a flowing, gold-trimmed skirt. Puffed sleeves. New boots. Everything deliberate, everything chosen for her by hands that seemed to know what she needed better than she did.

She looked like someone who had never been hungry. She looked like a stranger.

"I feel like an asshole."

"Then it must be a perfect fit."

The old woman chuckled. "Oh, sweetheart. Is that your boyfriend?"

"She's still working on that."

"Well, if you're going to be that witty, boy, you'd best dress the part." Nana tugged him toward a rack with a firmness that left no room for discussion.

Aksel sighed but went, moving through the options with minimal interest. He had no love for frills or embellishments. In his world, practicality always won. He picked a deep wine-red shirt, a fitted black vest, trousers that weren't falling apart, and the first decent pair of shoes he could find.

When he stepped back, Varian gave him a lazy glance. "Winds. She wasn't lying. You really have no taste."

Selenne grabbed him by the collar before he could say a word, dragging him toward another rack with the efficiency of someone defusing a bomb.

"Stay here."

"Selenne, we don't—"

"Shut your mouth before I do."

"But—"

"You are the one who said we needed new clothes, so don't try to pin this on me now." It had been a while since she'd raised her voice at him in public, but the day had found every crack she had and pressed. "It's my money anyway. And like you said, I'm not your girlfriend. So stop worrying about me."

He didn't move. She moved around him.

First a coat, long enough to give his frame a shape, something between formal and practical that sat against his shoulders as if it had been waiting for him. Then a scarf, red as her eyes, which she looped around his neck and pulled tight enough he almost choked. She smiled.

Then she paused.

She reached up to her hat, unpinned one of the crimson roses, and tucked it into his breast pocket. Her fingers pressed it flat against his chest, and she held them there for a moment longer than she needed to.

"There." She stepped back. "Now you can try to convince people I like you."

For a beat, they simply stared at each other. Then Varian coughed, interrupting the moment.

"You're going to need these." He was carrying what looked like a bunch of leather wraps bound by metal. "They're holsters, hip holsters, for your binders. A bag isn't half-bad either, but you need something to keep the book at hand during field exercises."

Selenne stepped forward, grabbing the simple contraption and adjusting it around her hip. "Water? Fire? Magic? Me?"

"The tome is already enchanted for durability. I'm not saying you can't break it, but a leather backpack won't keep it safe either."

"That's… actually pretty smart then," Aksel admitted, testing it. It only took a second to pull the book out.

There was a short moment of silence then, barely more than a second, but one everyone who ever counted coins could easily recognize. The moment of payment.

"How much do we owe you?" he asked politely, biting the inside of his lip.

The old woman hesitated, her faded eyes flickering as she deliberated. "For the pair? Let's settle on eight silvers," she said softly, almost to herself.

Aksel and Selenne exchanged a glance, their eyes drifting to the fine golden trimmings on her new dark ensemble. The price wasn't just low, it was insulting. Not enough to cover the cost of the materials, much less the craftsmanship and work put into them.

Selenne's voice broke out, charged with indignation. "We don't need handouts, we—"

"Girl." The old woman's voice was quiet, but it landed. "I'm old. I've been old for a while now. And I've been making clothes in this shop for sixty-five years, and not one of them has walked out and come back to tell me where it went."

She lowered herself into the rocking chair, Elowin's hand finding her arm before she needed it.

"I wanted to be one of you, you know. When I was small." She said it the way you say something you've said before, to yourself, in the dark. "A sorceress. That was the dream. The only one I ever had."

She looked at her hands. Turned them over.

"Didn't happen."

The shop was very quiet.

"So I made clothes. And I kept making them. And every year, new students would come through that door, and I'd dress them, and they'd leave, and I'd never know what became of any of it." She looked up at Selenne, and her eyes were dry but something behind them wasn't. "You're the first ones who looked like they actually needed it."

Selenne swallowed hard.

Aksel placed a Golden Sun gently on the counter.

The old woman stared at it. Then at him. Then she laughed, short and rough, the way you laugh when someone does something stupid and kind at the same time.

"Stubborn boy."

"Thank you," he whispered, the words heavier than they should have been.

A promise, perhaps.

 

[Celerius]

Nobody said a word after they left the store, not for a long time.

The twilight sun had settled over Solstice's streets like a layer of sizzling honey-butter slowly darkening along the pan, starting to burn from yellow into darker tones of orange and black.

And they walked, together, going nowhere and everywhere. Letting the day bleed through.

The capital thrived around them. Merchants calling out their wares in uneven and competing screams, street performers showing of their skills in front of clusters of laughing children, dogs and cats and cherubim chasing each other, the scent of fresh bread and roasting meat peppering the wind until one could not help being hungry.

Everything loud, alive, and completely indifferent to the four of them.

And then.

Bicycles.

Aksel understood the concept, but he had never seen one before. There was little point in taking them out of the capital and into the countryside, where the rough and uneven roads would kill the wheels in minutes. Of course, some enchantments could fix such a minor issue. But the kind of people with access to them preferred better methods of travel.

But here they ran rampant. Here everything ran rampant.

The city could only be described as unapologetic nonsense. Most of what happened did not have a point, nor rhyme, nor reason. People simply sat down and painted, or wove clothes, or stared in awe as something broke the clouds overhead. A man was arguing with a cherubim over a stolen hat. Neither was winning.

Selenne kept stopping to look at things.

Small things. A girl braiding flowers into her horse's mane. A boy asleep on a bench with a cat on his chest and an open book on his face. The simple comfort of children enjoying their lives without a worry, displaying that innocence a soul could only carry once and it would never recover.

She never said anything. She just looked, and then kept walking.

By the time night showed its fangs, they had been wandering for a couple of hours and found themselves back by the lake, settling at a small place near the shore for a warm meal before heading back to the academy.

They shared a menu and fought over it. Selenne took the fish. Aksel settled for soup, which he immediately regretted.

It was only once the food arrived that she spoke.

"What was that back at the store?" Her dark eyes locked onto Elowin. "How did you know we're from the west?"

Elowin went still, her face draining of color until it was as pale as her hair, then quickly going from pink to fully red. Across the table, Varian chuckled.

"She was lying," he said, casually breaking a piece of bread. "Here in the capital, it's common for nobles to say go west and die as an insult. If you ask where the poor and the miserable live, people will point toward the setting sun. She didn't mean anything by it."

Selenne stiffened. The explanation made painful sense, and that only made it worse. After all, Regenia had quite a reputation for violence and savagery, so it was only natural that everyone would want to live as far away from such a border as they possibly could.

She just never had the chance.

Stuck in a place where the oldest orphans acted as if she had murdered their parents herself. As if every war had been her fault.

"Why not just tell her we're Nameless, then? Were you afraid we'd lose the discount?"

Aksel grabbed the bridge of his nose. "Selenne… she could tell. Everyone could tell. That's… that's why we went for clothes first."

"Oh."

Selenne decided to focus on her meal, understanding that keeping her mouth busy and full of roasted meat would never betray her.

Varian, to his credit, did not comment on it.

"Every noble house is based here in the city," he said, turning a spoon between his fingers. "Even the ones without sorcerers. Most people don't mind us, but there are a few places where being Nameless is worse than being a beggar. Best to let people see the clothes and make their own conclusions."

Aksel raised an eyebrow. "You know a lot for someone who's been here two weeks."

Elowin's eyes drifted to her plate.

"We grew up in Solstice," she said quietly. "So once the academy started accepting students and two days passed without any word... we just walked up and presented ourselves."

"Brave," Aksel said, and meant it. Then, because he was Aksel: "So why us? You've had two weeks to find allies. Two weeks to watch who's good, who's weak, who can be useful. But you waited."

The table went quiet.

Varian set his spoon down.

"Because we need something specific," he said, "and I think you two might happen to have it. But even if you don't, we've run out of options."

For the first time, their intention sat at the table. Whatever trick he'd been playing, the show had run out of time.

"But before we talk about that, I need to ask. Do either of you carry an Inheritance?"

The word landed differently when someone said it out loud, in company, at a restaurant table where anyone could hear.

An Inheritance.

Every sorcerer bloodline could and should eventually carry one — sometimes more than one. Magical abilities that passed from parent to child, shaped by generations of training and use. The noble houses guarded theirs the way dragons guard gold.

But not every child inherited. Some bloodlines left no mark despite all their effort. And in many families, if a child showed no early sign of the gift, the solution was simple and ancient: strip the name, discard the child, and pretend they had never existed.

That was how most Nameless were made.

"I do," Selenne said firmly.

Elowin exhaled, full of relief.

Varian just nodded, once, and his eyes moved to Aksel.

The question hung there. Patient. Uncomfortable.

Aksel felt the shape of it press against the place in his chest where ten bubbles had lived and died that morning. He thought about the light at the bottom of the well, the one he still wasn't sure he'd imagined. Maybe there was something there, or maybe he just really wanted something to be there.

He didn't have an answer.

"I don't know."

Varian held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded again with painful sympathy.

"Two out of four should be enough."

Selenne's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "Enough for what?"

Varian leaned back. "There's a trial. After two weeks. Mandatory for every Nameless student and anyone retaking their first year. The academy calls it an evaluation."

He paused.

"The students call it a culling."

He said it lightly, but nobody swallowed for a moment.

"Last week, a student didn't pass. Something in the trial broke both his legs." Varian let that settle before continuing. "They found him the next morning. The other students threw him down the stairs."

"You're allowed to enter in pairs," Varian continued. "You choose your own partner, but it has to be someone you met at the academy. Nobody from before." He gestured between Aksel and Selenne. "Which means the two of you can't pair together."

Aksel's jaw tightened. He hadn't expected the first blow to land this soon.

"And if we refuse?"

"You don't. You saw the empty desk in our classroom."

Aksel had seen it. One desk too many, even after he and Selenne sat down. He'd noticed it before the class started, thought about it for a moment, then moved on.

"Amadeo made it clear that the last two students would be Nameless, so we had nothing to lose by waiting. Elowin and I can't pair together either." Varian looked at each of them in turn. "We can make teams, Elowin with one of you, me with the other. Or we take the trial alone. And alone, in this place, is a death sentence for people like us."

"The other students," Elowin said quietly. "They can be very thorough. If you fail."

The silence that followed had teeth.

Selenne looked at Aksel. He stared back.

He could see it behind her eyes, the resistance, the instinct to say no, to stay together, to refuse any arrangement that put distance between them.

But he could also see her doing the math. Two pairs. Two big chances. Better odds. And Varian and Elowin had spent two weeks in the academy learning the rules, the spells while Aksel and Selenne were still learning the hallways, which door led where. That kind of help was worth more than pride.

"What does the trial involve?" Aksel asked.

"No idea, to be honest. They made sure not to spoil the fun for us." Varian's mouth twitched. "From what I've gathered, you're given a target and told to bring it back before the night is over."

"And tonight is the deadline for us," Elowin added, barely above a whisper.

That night.

Selenne set her fork down. The fish had gone cold.

"Partners?" Varian asked.

The word sat between the four of them like a lost coin, waiting to be picked up or pushed away.

Aksel looked at Selenne one more time.

She gave him the smallest nod he'd ever seen.

"Partners."

 

[Celerius]

"My name is Melisandre Vox Pertuli, and I will be the judge of this challenge."

The young girl standing at the center of the common room didn't need to raise her voice to command attention. Everyone understood that she deserved respect, that she had earned it. Not because of a heavy name, nor the prestige of her ancient lineage. It wasn't the mane of blood-red hair that fell along half her face, covering one of her eyes completely and turning the other half into a painting.

No.

It was tangible, a story written on the scars across her hands and the pain behind her eyes.

Seniority.

Melisandre was only a year older than most of them, it could have been a decade.

Aksel followed her movements as she walked toward the raised table. She was casual. Maybe even too casual about it, confidence bordering on cockiness. It was the same calmness he'd noticed on Altair, worn by someone who actually wanted to be seen. The confident of knowing exactly what your body could do by having tested it against things that fought back.

"I still don't see why we have to do this." Selenne stepped forward, distancing herself from the crowd.

Melisandre regarded her as if a stray dog that had wandered onto a stage, her cold lips clearly wondering whether to remove it now or let it embarrass itself first.

"You are here because the institution requires proof of competence from those who have yet to demonstrate any." She let the sentence settle. "I'd suggest you treat this as a gift. Not everyone gets a second chance to be worth something."

Around them, two dozen students watching not for the sake of tradition.

They had come for blood.

There was a small blessing in watching someone else be judged. Aksel knew that well. The comfort of not being at the center of attention. That feeling of unity that only exists when everyone in the room agrees on who doesn't belong among them.

Varian, however, cracked his knuckles and stepped forward. He was smiling.

"We're ready."

Melisandre inclined her head. "Understood."

She turned, retrieving a small, elegant hat from the table. Simple in design, beautiful, so dark the silk caught light and swallowed it. Unmistakably enchanted.

"Each team will draw three slips of paper. Each slip reveals the location of a classmate's grimoire, hidden somewhere in the academy. For every grimoire successfully retrieved, your team earns forty points. For every minute beyond the five-minute time limit, one point is deducted. Any team that fails to obtain at least sixty points does not pass."

She held the hat forward. Varian took it from her outstretched hand and reached inside. The interior should have been empty, they had all seen her present it. But his fingers found parchment. He pulled two slips free, as many as he could find before the space went hollow around his hand. Selenne followed behind, retrieving the last one.

They held them up. Three small papers, blank, three unknown locations.

Melisandre drew her rapier. A single fluid pull from the clasp at her hip, her skilled hand making the handle spin.

And then the blade moved.

Three strikes, so fast they blurred into one. The papers left their hands before either of them could flinch, pierced. They ignited midfall, taking the shape of burning letters.

Second floor.

Bathrooms.

Livestock.

A wave of whispers rippled through the crowd. Some students sighed, visibly disappointed by the selection. That gave Aksel some confidence. If the audience wanted more, they probably had been lucky.

"You have five minutes to prepare," Melisandre announced, sheathing her sword. "Good luck."

There was nothing left to say. The four of them had spent every spare minute since dinner planning, dividing, arguing. All crucial choices had already been made. Only execution remained.

Aksel wished he had something to offer. A few words, a gesture, anything to mark the moment. But the clock was already moving, and the best thing he could offer Selenne was not to waste her time.

As the final second bled away, Varian took the lead, facing the door with resolve. Selenne gave one last glance back. Her eyes found Aksel's, held them for less than a second.

And they disappeared into the dark.

The door closed.

Aksel turned to say a word, but it was too late.

He closed his eyes. Breathed.

She's strong. She doesn't need you. Not for this. She never did.

When he opened them again, he finally noticed.

Elowin was trembling.

She stood at the edge of the room, arms wrapped around herself.

"Hey." Aksel softened his voice. "They'll be fine. Selenne's strong. She can handle this."

Elowin flinched. "Huh? O-oh! Y-yeah, I…" She pushed a wild tangle of white hair behind her ear, forcing a smile that didn't survive the trip to her mouth. "That's… that's the problem." Her fingers tightened against her sleeves. "Varian is really strong too. I'm just worried about us."

Aksel blinked.

It took effort not to be offended, or at least not to show it.

But she wasn't wrong.

Where Selenne was equally lost in theory, she could compensate with brute force. She had been doing that her entire life, slamming into walls without caring if her head broke. And usually, the wall gave first.

Aksel was different. He was clever, or so he'd told himself, but cleverness only counted when you had tools to be clever with, when you actually knew what you were doing.

He was, by far, the weakest of the four.

And Elowin was stuck with that.

The girl had an Inheritance, just like Selenne. A spark of wild magic. She had no need for grimoires to cast magic, mana flowed through her words like it was her birthright. With that and two weeks of training, Elowin possessed all the tools they needed to succeed.

But he'd have to help her believe that first.

He knelt, lowered himself until his eyes were level with her hunched form. The image of a parent comforting a frightened child on a stormy night, needing them to listen carefully.

"We are not going to fail. I don't care what's out there. I crossed half the kingdom to be here, and I am not letting anyone tell me I've failed. Because Selenne won't fail. And I refuse to be the only thing standing between her and the life she's always wanted."

He held Elowin's gaze, breathing slow for her, showing her how to do it.

"So we are not going to fail, because this isn't about us."

Elowin's eyes were wide, glassy. For a moment, she just stared at him. Then, with effort, she nodded once.

Aksel rose, opened his binder, and went through his notes one last time. The runes from Amadeo's lecture. The basic shapes. The theory on containment, direction, stabilization. The spells Varian and Elowin had shown him in the hour after accepting their deal. Vocabulary. The alphabet of a language he was still learning to read.

It would have to be enough.

He hadn't turned the last page when the door swung open.

Varian stepped inside first, visibly panting, his vest torn along one shoulder. Behind him, Selenne, and she was different. Her instincts were awake, eyes still tracking something in the hallway behind her. She took one last look outside, then slammed the door shut and forgot about it.

She stared at Aksel as she walked. Then she flashed her wrist.

Two marks. Bloody. Bitten. Fangs. She had tapped into her power, but barely, just a kiss, just a taste. Not enough to lose control.

Manageable.

They reached the table and slammed down three grimoires.

Melisandre stared at her wristwatch. Then she stared at the grimoires. Then she stared at Varian and Selenne with an expression that contained nothing at all.

"Ten minutes and thirty-five seconds." She paused, as if confirming the number with herself. "The total is one hundred and fifteen points."

Voices erupted.

"That's impossible!" A second-year, somewhere to the left, his voice already sharp with outrage. "No team has ever broken a hundred! Last year's best was ninety. They cheated! There's no way—"

Others followed, the noise climbing as the tone inside the room shifted.

Melisandre raised her hand to the ceiling and snapped her fingers.

The explosion swallowed everything. A column of fire punched upward from her palm, roaring, expanding, close enough that the nearest students stumbled backward with the heat on their faces. It collapsed back into itself a second later, leaving silence and the faint smell of scorched air.

Nobody spoke.

"Indeed," Melisandre said, adjusting her glove. "We are faced with a grave injustice."

She turned to Selenne and Varian, and bowed. Deeply.

"These students have been deprived of a full night's sleep by a test that had no business with them, caught in the process of rooting out the undesirable. On behalf of this institution, I offer my sincerest apologies. As a gesture of goodwill, please select any room on this floor you desire, whether it is currently occupied or not. I shall personally handle the arrangements."

She straightened before the crowd could recover, and turned to the second team.

Aksel stepped forward. Elowin followed, half a step behind, but following.

She drew two papers from the hat. He took the third. Melisandre's blade sang, and the fire spelled out the words.

Gardens.

Shore.

Basement.

The room filled again, but it was different now. It filled with delight. Whistles, stamping feet and palms, the joy of people who had been waiting for the main show to finally start. The frustration of the first team's success vanished instantly, replaced by animal hunger.

Aksel didn't know what the locations meant, but the crowd did. And their joy told him everything.

Melisandre stepped closer. Quieter now, low enough that only they could hear.

"Each area prepared for this test presents challenges of its own, but both the shore and the basement are notorious for defeating most challengers on their own. In combination, the success rate drops to nearly ten percent." She paused. "Heavy lands, the hand of fate."

Selenne was already moving, charging. "So you give us the easy ones just to set them up?"

Varian took a breath and straightened, already scanning the room for leverage, for an argument, for any crack in the rules that might give them a way out.

"We'll do it."

Elowin.

The room didn't go quiet immediately, but her voice still carried.

"We are Nameless." She was looking at the crowd, and she was not trembling. "Luck was never on our side."

She turned to Aksel and extended her hand.

Selenne's eyes found his. He could read every word she wasn't saying: Don't. Let us think. Let me help. There has to be another way.

He looked at Selenne. Then at Elowin.

Then he took Elowin's hand.

"Let's show them who we are."

 

[Celerius]

They stepped out together.

The academy at night was a different kind of beast. Moonlight poured through the high windows and painted the dark wood in shades of grey, highlighting the curtains of dust that drifted through the open spaces. Every hallway felt longer. Every ceiling felt higher. The building had been large during the day. At night, with the silence pressing in from every direction, it was enormous.

Aksel was thankful none of their objectives required venturing into the upper floors. He'd get lost in minutes and they'd find his skeleton in a decade.

"I-I think we should go to the garden first," Elowin said, her voice barely above a whisper. "If you want! It would be… a good chance to warm up."

Aksel smiled. "Lead the way."

"O-okay! Hold tight, shine bright!" She whispered it like a charm, and then she was moving, her white hair streaming behind her as she broke into a sprint.

The first-year dormitories sat in the mid-section of the building, between the ground floor and the first. They descended a short flight of stairs and turned toward the front entrance, their footsteps echoing off stone that swallowed most of the sound and gave back only the ghost of it.

Even while running, Aksel caught glimpses.

Shapes shifting in the dark between pillars. Shadows pressed against a window at the end of a corridor that led nowhere but into a wall.

He didn't stop. There was no time for that.

❖

​

​

The garden sat hidden to one side of the main building, a tangled nest of vine and stone where columns rose from the earth and flowers spread between them in a blanket of color that the moonlight turned to tones of silver.

It was an art piece more than a place, a space clearly designed to feel wild and untouched, every petal and winding root placed with the careful hand of someone pretending nature had done the work.

At its center, a small fountain murmured to itself, the water catching light that had no obvious source.

And beyond the fountain, sitting on a bench of polished wood, a woman watched them.

She was pale, not like Selenne. Lifeless. Blue-white, translucent at the edges, her outline flickering like a candle behind glass. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her head slightly tilted, the posture of someone who had been waiting long enough to forget what she was waiting for.

"J-just look around," Elowin stammered, already moving toward the bushes. "The grimoire should be hidden somewhere nearby."

She walked straight past the woman without a glance. Past her, as if the bench held nothing but moonlight.

She couldn't see her.

Aksel said nothing. He walked closer, slowly, step by step. His eyes found hers and held. She had been watching him with a kind of lazy mischief, the expression of someone who expected to be ignored and had already prepared a private joke about it. But when his gaze didn't slide past her, the mischief vanished. Confusion appeared first. Then, the sudden focus of a creature buried in loneliness.

She lifted one finger. Moved it left, then right. Testing him. Watching his eyes follow.

Then she pointed at the fountain.

Aksel's instinct told him to be careful. He had hardly heard a story where listening to the dead was a good idea. But the clock was ticking, and hesitation was a luxury he could not afford.

He leaned over the fountain's edge and looked down.

The grimoire sat at the bottom. He could see it clearly, the leather cover, the spine, the brass clasp. He reached in.

His hand passed through the image the way a scythe parts fields of wheat. The water was real, cold against his skin, but the book wasn't there. It existed only in the reflection, a mirror image with no original, sitting in some space just behind the surface that his fingers couldn't reach.

"Elowin." He pulled his hand out, shaking the water off. "You might want to see this."

She rushed over, leaned in, and her eyes went wide. "Oh! We covered this kind of illusion in class. It's a reflection trap, the object exists on the other side of the surface." She was already turning, scanning the garden. "But cherubim... Their bodies don't interact with magic the same way ours do. If we can find one…"

She pushed into the nearby bushes without a doubt, pulling branches aside, making space. Aksel followed, crouching low, and after a few meters of crawling through undergrowth, he saw what she'd been looking for.

A small creature, no larger than a house cat, with two stubby legs and no arms. A single dry leaf grew from the top of its round head like a sad flag. It sat in a hollow between two roots, trembling, its enormous dark eyes already filling with tears at the sight of them.

"What in the winds is that?"

"Shhh!" Elowin's voice dropped to a breath. "It's a Mandragora. They grow around plants, water, and…" She paused. "The remains of the deceased."

The ecology of this place suddenly made a lot of sense.

"Are you going to bind it?"

"Something like that."

She pushed him forward.

Aksel rolled out of the bushes and into the small alcove, landing with his knee in the dirt. The Mandragora took one look at him, opened its tiny mouth, and screamed.

The sound hit him like a physical force, a painful wail that vibrated behind his eyes and turned his thoughts to static. His hands went to his ears on instinct, but the noise was already inside his skull, ringing against his brain.

He pulled the binder from his hip and drew. The motions came from the hours of practice, from memory. Inner circle, tight around the creature. Eight radial spikes, spaced as evenly as his shaking hand could manage.

The ink glowed. Faint, pale blue, barely there. A binding circle, functional, fragile, just enough to hold something that had no real desire to break free.

But the Mandragora didn't stop screaming. The circle held its body, but its voice was free, and the wail was climbing, drilling deeper, and Aksel could feel his concentration starting to crack.

Small hands covered his ears. The sound halved. Elowin was kneeling behind him, her palms pressed firmly against the sides of his head, her own face tight with the effort of staying close to the noise.

She leaned in until her mouth was near his ear.

"Close your eyes."

He did.

"Now open your heart." Her voice was different. Careful, reassuring. "Not to me. To the creature. Let it feel your intention, not your words, not your will. Your care. Ask for help the way you'd ask someone who's afraid. Not by demanding. By showing them you need them."

Aksel's first instinct was to resist. To harden. To burn through the noise with the same determination that had carried him across half a kingdom. That was how he survived, by refusing to be soft, by clenching every part of himself until the world couldn't get in.

But that wasn't what Elowin was asking for. And the Mandragora wasn't the world.

He thought of what it felt like to be small, and scared, and unseen.

And he let the feeling move outward as warmth. A quiet truth, pushed gently through the circle's glow and into the space between himself and the creature.

It's okay. You're safe. I'm not here to hurt you.

The screaming stopped.

The silence that followed was enormous. The spell hummed once, softly, and settled. The Mandragora's trembling slowed to a shiver, then stopped. Its dark eyes blinked up at him, wet, still wary, but no longer afraid.

Aksel felt his body return to him, the cold dirt under his knees, the ache in his hand from gripping the pen, the weight of Elowin's arms still resting on his shoulders. She was warm.

"See?" She pulled back, and the stutter crept into the edges of her voice again. "I t-told you it would be okay. For a good start, lead with the heart!"

"Elowin… could you, maybe…" He gestured vaguely at the arms still half-draped around him.

"O-of course!" She pushed herself backward so fast she nearly fell. "The fountain! Yes. We should… the fountain. Good work, team two!"

Aksel shook his head, allowing himself a small, private smile. He looked down at the Mandragora, still sitting in the fading circle, its leaf tilted sideways.

"Come on, little guy." He scooped it up gently. It weighed almost nothing. "Let's see what the crazy girl has in store for us."

Elowin was waiting by the fountain, bouncing on her heels in a rhythm that was either a nervous habit or a very small dance. "Alright. Now just… you know. Throw it in."

Aksel looked at the Mandragora. The Mandragora looked at Aksel. Its lower lip trembled.

"Into the cold water. After I just convinced it to trust me."

"Y-yes? Cherubim pass through simple illusions! It can reach the book where we can't."

"And here I was, worried you might be too kind."

He held the creature out over the fountain. It began to squirm. He dropped it in.

The Mandragora hit the water with a small, offended splash. Its scream cut short as it sank, and for a long, terrible moment, the surface was still.

Aksel and Elowin stared at each other.

Then the Mandragora jumped from the fountain in an explosion of water and fury, threw the grimoire at Aksel's chest hard enough to hurt, and ran off into the bushes without looking back, leaving a trail of wet footprints and what could only be described as profoundly personal insults in a language neither of them spoke.

Elowin clasped her hands together. "W-we did it?"

Aksel wiped the water from his face and looked down at the grimoire in his arms.

"Let's just… never talk about this."

He turned to leave, and stopped.

The woman was still there. Sitting on the bench, hands folded, watching him the way she had been watching him since they arrived. Patient. Alone. Her edges flickered in the moonlight, barely there, so faint he could see through her.

He held her gaze for one more moment. Then he turned and followed Elowin back to the academy.

❖

​

​

The interior of the academy had grown darker in their absence, as if the building had been slowly swallowing its own light. Not a single candle burned in the corridors. The windows, which had let in moonlight earlier, now showed only clouds.

"Are you sure the basement is the right call?" Aksel asked, keeping his voice low. Their footsteps sounded too loud.

"N-not really." Elowin hugged her arms. "But the shore… if we end up in the water, it could be morning before anyone finds us. At least the basement has walls."

It was hard to argue with that, so Aksel nodded and kept moving.

They found the stairs at the far end of the ground floor, where two sets of massive steps framed a wide fireplace that held nothing but cold ash. The staircase to the right climbed toward the first floor. The one to the left descended into a darkness so thick it looked solid.

Elowin cleared her throat. Her voice hummed for a moment, finding a note, and then she sang.

"Little light, little light, keep us whole through darkness blights."

It was a lullaby, maybe something she'd heard as a child, and as the last syllable faded, a small sphere of pale gold light bloomed on her fingertips, pushing their shadows against the walls.

She held it forward like a lantern, and they went down.

The basement was a corridor. Long, narrow, lined on both sides with iron doors, each fitted with a barred window at eye height. The air was colder here, and damp, and smelled of dust and mold, stone that had been wet and dried and been wet again more times than anyone had counted.

Aksel looked through the first window. A broken piano, its keys scattered across the floor like teeth. The next held a machine he couldn't name, all brass gears and cracked glass. The third looked empty, but it didn't feel like it. The fourth held dolls. Life-sized, dressed in clothes that might have been fashionable at some point, their painted eyes staring at the door with an attention that felt less like craftsmanship and more like patience.

He kept walking.

They ignored it all and pushed deeper, until they reached the final door.

 

[Celerius]

Eventually, they reached the last door.

This one had no window, no barred slot for the eyes. It was solid metal, cold to the touch, more wall than door. But when Aksel pushed, it gave way, and the weight of it surprised him, heavy enough that the hinges groaned.

Elowin stepped in first, her light drifting ahead of her to mark the way.

The room was grey. Stone floor, stone walls. No furniture or decoration to suggest it had ever been used for anything. Just a square space, maybe ten paces wide, and cold enough that their breath showed.

Until the light found them.

They were pressed to the walls, cornered by their own search for safety. Small, shapeless, barely there, creatures made of shadow and static, their bodies flickering between solid and smoke. Aksel had seen them before, all through the academy, in the periphery of his vision, in the dark places where the eye slides past without stopping. He had wanted to believe they were tricks of the light, the shapes the mind invents by itself.

They were not tricks. There were dozens of them, and they were panicking.

Trembling. It was the trembling of things that had been shaking for so long they had forgotten how to stop. Small bodies pressed against each other, spasming in bursts that looked involuntary, painful. A few of them had curled into tight balls. Others twitched in place, their dim shapes pulsing darker with each spasm.

The room smelled wrong, full of the scent of dry fungus you'd find in a rotten forest.

The grimoire sat in the center of the floor, five steps away. It might as well have been five miles.

Every creature in there had turned toward the light. They hated it.

"Back up," Elowin breathed. "Slowly."

Aksel's hand was already reaching for her shoulder, ready to pull her back through the door and close it behind her.

"No." Her voice was barely a sound, but it stopped him. "If I move, they'll panic. If they panic in a space this small…" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. "Go. Get help. Not from our class, someone who knows what these are. A teacher. Anyone."

"I'm not leaving you here alone."

"You have to." She killed her light. The room dropped into darkness, and Aksel heard the creatures settle, just slightly. "They feed on fear and distress. As long as I stay still and stay calm, they won't have a reason to—"

A sound like fabric tearing, very small, very close.

"Go," Elowin whispered. "Now."

He gritted his teeth and started to make his way back.

Each step away from her was a negotiation with himself. His legs wanted to run. His mind wouldn't let them. Too much noise, too much vibration through the floor, too close to the room full of things that reacted to fear.

He climbed the basement stairs in silence, one hand on the wall, counting steps. When he reached the lobby, the cold air hit him like a slap, and the distance between himself and Elowin became suddenly, sickeningly real.

She was alone. In the dark. Surrounded by creatures that fed on the exact emotion she had the most of.

The common room was close. He could hear the murmur of students through the walls, the low hum of people waiting to see if someone would fail tonight. If he walked in now with one grimoire and no partner, the trial would end. They would fail. They would be expelled. But Elowin would be safe, because the moment the trial ended, they would clear the challenges and she'd walk out unharmed.

Safe. Expelled. Done.

Not an option.

A teacher, then. Amadeo's office was somewhere on the first floor. If Aksel could find him, explain the situation, convince him the creatures in the basement were abnormal, then maybe, maybe the trial would be suspended. Maybe they'd get another chance.

Maybe.

He stopped in the middle of the corridor.

He didn't know where Amadeo's office was. He didn't know where any teacher's quarters were. He had been in this building for less than a day, and the building changed its mind about its own layout the way weather changed its mind about rain. He could wander for twenty minutes and end up further away from help than where he started.

Twenty minutes that Elowin didn't have.

The choice settled over him like a heavy coat before he finished thinking it through. His legs turned, and he was moving, not toward the common room and not toward the upper floors.

Back to the garden.

❖

​

​

She was still there.

Sitting on the bench, hands folded, head tilted. Patient the way only the dead can be patient, with the stillness of someone who has nowhere else to go and all the time in the world to not go there.

Aksel stopped in front of her, breathing hard.

"I need your help."

The ghost looked at him. The lazy mischief from before was gone. Now it looked confused, untrusting, deciding whether or not what she was seeing was real.

"Help," she repeated. The word came out distant.

But her mouth curled. Just slightly. Just enough. A smile.

She nodded. Aksel understood.

"How?" His voice cracked. "What do I need to do?"

The ghost rose from the bench. She moved the way reflections move in water, not quite matching the motion you'd expect, half a second too slow, flickering in surreal waves. She crossed the short distance between them and raised her hand.

Two fingers. Pale, translucent, flickering at the edges.

She pressed them to his forehead.

They sank in.

The pain was instantaneous, completely different from a headache, the sensation of runes being written inside his skull, lines of heat traced along pathways that had always existed but never been used. His vision went white, then dark, then white again, and for a terrible moment he couldn't remember his own name.

When it cleared, he was on his knees. Dirt under his hands. The fountain murmuring beside him. And inside his mind, a pull, showing him what to do without need for words.

He started digging.

His fingers clawed into the earth beneath the bench, tearing through root and soil and small pale stones. The dirt packed under his nails and the cold bit at his knuckles, but the pull was insistent, unhurried. It knew exactly where to go. He just had to follow.

His hands found wood. A box. Simple, well-made, buried shallow.

He opened it.

Inside, resting on a bed of faded cloth, was a doll. Small enough to fit in his palm. Made of wool, with buttons for eyes and a pointed hat. The fabric was old but clean, preserved by whatever was in the soil or whatever was in the box, and it weighed almost nothing.

But the energy that emanated from it made his hand shake.

He looked up. The ghost was watching him, eyes wide.

"Thank you," she said. The words were clear this time.

Then she was gone, and the garden was just a garden, and the bench was empty, and the moonlight fell on nothing.

Aksel knelt there for a moment, holding the doll, breathing.

And his hand moved, not entirely by his own will. The traces inside his skull were still warm, and they guided his fingers to his binder. He opened the book, set it on the bench, and began to draw.

The rune he drew was unfamiliar. He had never seen it before. But his hand knew the shape the way his lungs knew how to breathe, natal, given, placed inside his memory.

He drew the rune at the center of the page. Around it, triangles. One, then another, then another, until the boundaries blurred and the shape on the page stopped looking like geometry and started looking like architecture. A structure with depth and shadows. A labyrinth drawn in ink.

He surrounded it with a circle and the page ignited with light.

A golden beacon, radiating out from the center like dawn through a window. The binder heated in his hands until it was almost too hot to hold, illuminating the labyrinth from inside, and for one impossible moment Aksel was looking down into something that went further than paper should allow.

And the warmth left him.

A void opened in his chest. A hollow pit, strength that had been there and wasn't anymore. He was tired, fuel empty. The kind of exhaustion that gets under the skin and tries to drag you down.

He closed the binder. The golden light dimmed but didn't die. It pulsed faintly along the edges of the book, warm against his hip, a steady glow that refused to go out.

There would be time to be exhausted later. Right now, Elowin needed him.

He wiped the sweat from his face, picked up the binder, and ran.

❖

​

​

The basement swallowed him whole.

He took the stairs three at a time, one hand on the wall, the binder pressed against his chest with the other. The golden light pulsed against his ribs.

He heard them before he saw them.

A single voice made of dozens, a low, wet hum that vibrated through the floor and climbed into his teeth. The sound of things that had stopped being afraid and started being hungry.

The door was open. He'd left it open.

Elowin was against the wall.

She was standing, her back pressed flat against the stone, her arms out, palms forward, and between her and the room, a barrier of pale light shivered, stretched past its limit. Her mouth was moving, chanting, syllables dropping out, tired.

She was holding. But she was almost done.

The creatures weren't in the corners anymore. They had gathered at the center of the room, pressed together, their individual shapes dissolving into something larger, a single mass of shadow and static that pulsed like a bruise. And every time it expanded, it pressed closer to Elowin's barrier, and the barrier bent inward, and the light got thinner.

It hadn't seen him yet. It was facing her. All of it, all of its attention, focused on the girl against the wall and the fear bleeding from her.

Aksel stepped into the room and opened his book.

The golden light hit the mass and the creature recoiled, its surface splitting, individual shapes peeling away from the main body and scattering. The hum became a shriek, voices disagreeing about whether to fight or flee.

For a moment, the room was his.

Then the mass reformed. Faster this time. The scattered pieces flew back together with a sound like wet cloth slapping stone, and the thing that emerged was taller, denser, and very, very angry.

It charged.

Not at Elowin. At him.

Aksel threw himself sideways. The mass struck the wall where he'd been standing and splattered across the stone, reforming almost instantly, tendrils of shadow reaching for his legs. He kicked one away and felt the cold climb his ankle, numbing, draining.

It lunged again.

This time, Aksel swung the binder and golden light caught the creature across what might have been a face, tearing a gap in the surface that closed nearly as fast as it opened.

But he saw it, the inside. Dark and hollow.

The next blow would have crushed him into the ground, that pulsing mass rising in the air like a hand. He braced, teeth clenched. But a barrier caught it first, this one wrapping his body completely as Elowin chanted through labored breaths.

The monster extended and struck before either of them could react, grabbing the girl by the throat and slamming her into the wall.

Rage flooded his vision.

The moment the shield collapsed, Aksel drove the book into the creature's back, gripping the spine and forcing it deeper, making all those tiny shrieking voices scream and pull away from the light.

He followed through, pressing his full weight behind the grimoire like it was a blade, pushing until the leather vanished entirely into the gaps between the gaps on the monster's skin.

A moment of silence. The light disappeared, swallowed whole by that dark body.

Then it exploded.

Some of the imps went flying across the room. Others, torn to pieces, simply dissolved into ash the way cherubim always did.

Aksel took one deep breath, loud, ragged, then went looking for Elowin.

He found her against the wall, where the creature had dropped her. Alive. Unconscious, but alive. He let out a shaky breath, holding himself together. And only then noticed what she'd been clutching against her chest.

The second lost grimoire.

Exhausted, drawing on the last of his strength, he lifted her and carried her back up the stairs.

He set her down by the fireplace, as carefully as he could, along with the two books they'd managed to recover.

But a question had pinned itself in the back of his mind.

How much time had passed?

It was impossible to tell. Too much had happened.

The two books gave them eighty points, which meant they could take up to twenty-five minutes and still pass. Twenty-five minutes was a long time. Part of him screamed they couldn't have taken that long.

But he wasn't sure anymore, and a single doubt was enough.

He left Elowin there, trusting that if the worst came to pass, they would find her and the two grimoires and accept that as enough.

After all, he was heading for the shore, so he planned to come back with the last book or not come back at all.

❖

​

​

Aksel stepped off the academy's front garden and onto the rocky shore.

The night air smelled of salt and clean water, a strange combination, a marriage of lake and sea. He had never seen the sea, but he took a deep breath and let the smell burn his lungs. After the basement's thick dust, it felt like mercy.

The mist found him first.

It reached, eager. Grey tendrils curling around his ankles, swallowing the shore behind him one stone at a time until the academy was a memory and the world was nothing but water and cloud and the sound of his own breathing.

He stopped. Listened.

The lake was impossibly quiet, filled with the tense silence of a room packed full of hiding sheep. Something large choosing not to speak.

"Where are you?" The question left his mouth smaller than he'd intended. He tried again, louder. "If you've been waiting out here in the dark, looking for children to scare. I'm here. You can stop hiding."

The mist choked his words. He might as well have spoken into his own hands.

Nothing answered.

He kept walking. Five steps. Ten. The water touched his boots now, lapping at the leather. He was cold, and tired, and the void inside his chest ached. He had no magic. He was a sixteen-year-old boy standing ankle-deep in a lake in the middle of the night.

"Turn back."

Deep. A rumbling born from beneath the earth.

"I can't do that," Aksel answered.

Something moved. Heavy. The stones beneath his feet trembled with each step, and the mist parted just enough to reveal the shape. Four legs, broad as tree trunks. Three ridged fins rising along a back that curved like a hillside. A tail, fish-like, long and powerful, dragging through the shallows with a low hiss.

The head emerged last. Wide, flat, armored in plates of dark bone. And in the mouth, hanging between rows of teeth, a single point of red. A serpentine tongue, glowing faintly in the dark, ready to strike.

The creature's eyes found his. They were old. Old the way grief is old. The way pain is old.

"Child," the creature said. "My name is Akh'aha. I have guarded this shore since before the first of your kin drew breath. Whatever your kind has hidden on my beach, it is not worth your life."

Aksel's hand rested on his binder. The golden light was gone. The pages held nothing but ink and theory and power that had already spent itself.

He still had his eyes.

"You served her," Aksel said quietly. "The queen."

The creature went still.

"She is dead," Akh'aha said. The words came the way boulders come out of the earth. Slowly, with great effort, leaving a hole behind. "And I remain."

"I know what it's like to serve someone. And tonight, I promised someone I would not fail."

"Promises," the creature said. "The currency of the living."

"The grimoire," Aksel continued. "I need it. Not to pass a test. There's a girl waiting for me, and she deserves to stay at this academy. So if something has to remain on this shore tonight, let it be me."

Akh'aha growled, then turned and walked back into the lake. Its body fused with the water as it sank, dissolving, pushing the tide up through pure weight.

And a single book washed ashore.