"To awaken is not to remember. It is to endure the silence between the self you lost… and the one you might become."
—Fragment from the Codex of the Riftborn
Three days after their hasty retreat from the Crystalline Wastes, the academy's southern courtyard lay silent under the breath of a waning moon. The second wave of the Rift tide, that periodic surge of otherworldly energy that warped reality, had come sooner than expected, forcing Vesperian and Sereth to abandon their journey to the Verdant Boundary. Now, shadows wove through the cracked stone paths, their movements subtle, almost reverent. Not a footstep disturbed the ancient silence. Yet beneath it, an unsettling unrest pulsed: a pressure against eardrums, a metallic taste on the tongue. Above the arching trees, something ancient stirred.
A scarlet glint pulsed faintly in the depths of the forest beyond the walls, bleeding color into the night like an open wound.
Hidden within the underbrush, two sets of eyes watched. One pair burned violet, a hue that shimmered like oil over water. The other, pure obsidian, watched with cold precision. Both wore the insignia of the Council's Seventh Ward, though the symbols had been deliberately altered, edges blurred and centers hollowed.
"He's changing faster than we anticipated," said the violet-eyed observer, voice a whisper swallowed by leaves. "The silver lines, those mysterious Rift-born marks that spread beneath his skin like living veins, have already reached his heart."
The second figure, cloaked in a veil of spiritual mist that tasted of ancient winters, nodded. Frost formed around their fingertips, then sublimated. "He remembers nothing, yet the hollow grows hungry."
"And the Void Wardens?" asked the first, fingers tracing patterns in the air that left momentary glowing trails, patterns that mirrored the transformation beneath Vesperian's skin.
"Let them hunt their ghosts," replied the obsidian-eyed figure. "They cannot see what truly approaches. The Council must not know of this yet." A faint smile curved their lips. "They still believe the boundary holds."
Crimson light flared once between them, then vanished, a silent communication to unseen others. A promise. A warning.
The violet-eyed figure raised a hand toward the Academy, where stone walls loomed against starlight. Ancient. Unyielding. Cracked. "It begins today. Send word to the Enclave. The vessel is nearly ready."
The dream came first, if it was a dream at all.
Stone spiraled downward beneath a skyless void. Each step was cold and slick beneath his feet; darkness pressed against his chest, turning breath into struggle. His lungs burned with the effort, each inhalation a battle against the pressure that narrowed his throat with invisible fingers. The air tasted ancient, like dust from forgotten tombs, like blood from battlefields long buried beneath mountains.
Voices emerged from the walls, whispers that bypassed his ears and vibrated directly through bone. A heartbeat throbbed within the stone itself. Ancient. Patient. Each pulse sent tremors through his borrowed flesh, as if claiming him beat by beat.
Then came the whisper, resonating painfully within his skull:
"You are not whole."
Not his voice. Not the voice of the boy whose body he wore.
But his own.
Vesperian woke with a sharp inhale, his borrowed body drenched in cold sweat. The dormitory walls seemed to pulse with shadows that shouldn't exist, shadows that moved against the light, that breathed when nothing stirred. Pale dawn light filtered through crystalline panes, warping across the chamber like liquid silver. For a moment, he thought the dream might cling to him, stubborn as fog.
But no.
The mist outside the windows writhed like a living thing, sketching frost patterns on the glass. With every breath he took, those patterns shifted, mimicking the latticework beneath his skin—a network of pathways for something not meant to travel human veins.
Each breath tasted of metal and ozone, the air itself charged with potential. His hand twitched toward the blade beside his bed, then froze when he met Sereth's watchful eyes. She sat in the corner, still as a statue but for her fingers, which tapped restlessly against her knee: tap-tap-rest, tap-tap-rest – a rhythm Vesperian recognized from his dream.
"You've been unconscious for nearly a day," Sereth said, her voice deliberately neutral. "The healers couldn't find anything wrong with you."
Couldn't? Or wouldn't? The thought slithered unbidden through his mind.
He remained silent, watching instead as the water pitcher beside his bed suddenly cracked with a sound like splintering ice. Water trickled out, following an impossible path upward, suspended in midair before freezing into crystalline shapes that mirrored the transformation beneath his skin. Vesperian stared, transfixed by this rebellion against natural law. He blinked, and the water fell normally, splashing across the floor with a sound too loud in the pressing silence.
Something had changed within him since the encounter in the Crystalline Wastes. His body felt different, lighter yet somehow more substantial, as if his bones had been replaced with something denser than marrow. Strength surged like liquid fire through his veins, but beneath it flickered a restless flame: anger without source, memories without context, a craving that had never been his.
The silver patterns beneath his skin both fascinated and terrified him, living scars that were at once chains and medals. Part of him wanted to claw them out, to be free of their alien presence. Yet another part, growing stronger daily, felt a strange pride in them, as if they were badges earned in some forgotten battle.
A voice brushed against his consciousness, distant but terribly familiar. We are close now. Soon, we will remember together.
He jerked his head toward the sound, but there was nothing. Only the shadows playing across the wall, stretching impossibly long in the weak dawn light, reaching toward him with fingers too thin to be real.
"What happened after I collapsed?" he asked finally, his voice rough from disuse, tasting of rust and old stone.
Sereth's eyes narrowed slightly. "You started speaking in a language I've never heard, ancient and terrible, like stone grinding against bone." She gripped the chair tighter, knuckles whitening. "Silver light poured from your skin." She hesitated, then added, "You've been keeping things from me. About Lyra. About what's happening to you."
Guilt twisted in his chest. He had promised her in the ravine that he would tell her if he started slipping away, that he wouldn't hide his changes. And already he was breaking that promise. His hand moved instinctively toward hers, then faltered midway, withdrawing as if burned by the thought of connection.
Sereth noticed. Her eyes followed the aborted movement, something like hurt flashing across her face before she masked it.
A sudden wave of dizziness swept through him. He clutched the bedpost, steadying himself as the room swayed. Beyond the disorientation came a pull—not words, not thoughts, but a calling from somewhere beneath the Academy. It resonated not just with his mind but with the void inside him, no longer merely empty but transforming into a vessel for something ancient and ravenous.
The certainty of it terrified him. If whatever's inside me breaks free, it won't just hurt Sereth. It could shatter the seals beneath the Academy itself. It could wake what sleeps below.
"I'm not keeping—" he began, but the lie died on his lips, replaced by a sudden memory that wasn't his own: stone corridors beneath the Academy, runes pulsing with a living light, a chamber where something vast and ancient stirred in half-sleep.
Sereth rose, breaking the moment. The corner of her eye twitched almost imperceptibly. "Master Kaelith expects you in the Hall of Blades within the hour." She paused at the door, a hint of a grimace crossing her features. "Control yourself today. Whatever's happening to you…"
She faltered, fingers curling into fists at her sides. "Don't let it win." Her voice dropped to a fragile whisper. "And I can't lose another. Not like this."
A pause.
I'm still here, he wanted to say. But the words died before reaching his tongue. Was he still himself? Would he know when that changed?
Then the corner of Sereth's mouth twitched upward, though it didn't reach her eyes, eyes that held too much memory, too much loss. "Or not. Perhaps it's time someone shook the foundations of this place."
Sereth was gone, leaving him alone with whispers that clung like shadows. Only after she left did he notice the knife she'd placed beside his bed, not her ceremonial blade, but a simpler one. Personal. He recognized the worn handle, the notch in the steel.
Kalen's knife. Not a gift, but a warning etched in steel. A promise or a threat?
The Hall of Blades stood at the eastern edge of the Academy grounds, a massive stone chamber hewn from the mountain itself. Ancient runes carved into every surface pulsed with pale blue light, enchantments designed to simulate combat environments from across the known world. As Vesperian entered, a strange resonance hummed through the silver lines beneath his skin, as if recognizing something or someone present. The ancient runes seemed to respond differently to his passage than to the other students, shifting subtly from blue to violet as he moved past.
The stone floor hummed beneath his feet, vibrations traveling up through his bones like music too deep to hear. The air shimmered with mana, thick enough to taste, like the weight of untold battles lingering in stone. Each rune carved into the walls pulsed with its own signature, growing brighter when his gaze lingered too long. Some flickered erratically as he passed, like heartbeats suddenly irregular.
His own transformation answered, a silent song beneath his skin.
Students gathered in a wide circle at the center of the hall, their faces a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Magic sparked in the air like distant thunderclouds, the scent of ozone hanging heavy. The morning session had been canceled without reason, replaced by what the instructors called an "observational exercise."
The gathered students fell silent, their conversations cutting off mid-sentence. A ripple of tension moved through the hall as heads turned toward the far entrance. Vesperian noticed a shimmer of violet light near one of the high windows, gone in an instant, but familiar. The same hue as the observer from the forest.
"The Boundary Walker," whispered a student, the name spoken like a prayer or curse for those who crossed between worlds and survived.
Another nodded solemnly. "They say those scars aren't from any worldly blade."
"The masters fear her," added a third voice, barely audible. "Even Archivists won't speak her true name."
"That pendant she wears, it bears the Sundered Seal," murmured another student, eyes wide. "Those marks are forbidden knowledge from before the First Breach. How does she wear them so openly?"
A senior student silenced them with a sharp gesture, eyes darting nervously to the approaching figure. The whispers died, yet something lingered in the air, the aftertaste of fear.
At the far end stood a figure he hadn't seen before, tall, lean, with a face marked by three parallel scars that ran from temple to jaw like claw marks against alabaster. Her eyes were the color of burnished bronze, watchful and calculating, reflecting too much light. Her hair was silver ash, braided with black thorns that seemed to shift when unobserved. Her robes shimmered with faint sigils, wards, seals, old magic made living ink that crawled across fabric when she moved. Around her neck hung a pendant that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, a Void Warden's mark of office, though altered in ways subtle and disturbing.
She moved with a predator's grace, her gaze sharp enough to carve through stone. The air around her carried the faint scent of metal and winter, like blood on snow. Her presence alone made the air heavier, as if gravity itself bent toward her. The marks beneath Vesperian's skin tingled with something between recognition and warning. The sensation intensified as she drew closer, like a dormant memory stirring.
"For those who haven't had the pleasure," her voice sliced through the murmurs, cool as steel tempered by years of warning, "I am Master Kaelith. Today's exercise will be simple in concept, painful in execution." She swept her gaze across the assembled students, pausing briefly on him, something like recognition flickering in her eyes.
Her eyes found his, and for a moment, something ancient stirred inside him. Recognition. Or warning. He couldn't tell which. The hollow pulsed once beneath his ribs, as if it too had been summoned. A wave of vertigo crashed over him, the room spinning briefly as a fragment of memory, not his own, surfaced: Kaelith, younger, her skin marked with brilliant silver lines, standing at the edge of a terrible breach in reality, her voice raised in a language he shouldn't understand but somehow did. Blood on her hands. Tears on her face. A knife that cut more than flesh.
He gasped, tasting copper and ozone, his knees nearly buckling beneath him. His stomach lurched, bile rising in his throat. The vision faded as quickly as it had come, leaving him unsteady on his feet, heart hammering against his ribs as though trying to escape.
"You will face an opponent crafted specifically for your weaknesses," Kaelith continued, her gaze lingering a moment too long on Vesperian. "Not to exploit them, to expose them."
A brief shadow crossed her face, old pain, perhaps, or something closer to regret. She touched one of her scars absently, a gesture so fleeting most would miss it. For the briefest moment, the skin beneath her fingertips seemed to shimmer, revealing faded patterns like ghostly echoes of what now crawled beneath his own skin.
"I once stood where you stand," she said, quieter now, her words meant for him alone though they carried to every corner of the hall. "Believing mastery meant conquest." The words seemed meant for herself as much as them, the confession of someone who had learned too late.
With a gesture, Kaelith summoned a shimmering construct, a warrior made of light and shadow that moved with impossible grace, its form resembling a swordsman but constantly shifting, adapting, becoming more and less than human with each movement. The air in the chamber grew noticeably colder, frost creeping along the edges of the stone floor. Several students stepped back, muttering protective incantations. The construct's form shifted subtly, reflecting different aspects of fear in each observer's eyes, becoming taller, broader, sharper-toothed, hollow-eyed.
Vesperian felt his pulse quicken as the construct turned toward him briefly, its featureless face seeming to ripple into a familiar pattern, silver lines briefly appearing beneath its translucent skin before dissolving back into shadow. Its eyes, momentarily too human, reflected his own face back at him, but changed, older, marked with silver lines that had consumed him entirely. His own markings burned in response, a silent recognition that sent a chill up his spine.
"These are illusions with substance," Kaelith said, her voice dropping to a register that seemed to vibrate the very stone beneath them. "They will hurt you. They may break you. But they cannot kill you." Her smile was thin, tight with an emotion the vessel couldn't name. "That privilege remains mine alone." She paused, her gaze sweeping the chamber. "What breaks here stays broken. Your control, your will, your future. Remember that."
Students began to pair off with their spectral opponents, some eager, others hesitant. The air filled with the sound of whispered incantations, the rasp of metal against leather, the shuffle of nervous feet against stone. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Lyra on the observation balcony above. She hadn't spoken to him since the encounter near the Archives, but her gaze flicked toward him now and then, like a compass pulled toward iron.
She stood apart from the other observers, speaking in hushed tones with a hooded faculty member whose robes bore the same altered Council insignia Vesperian had glimpsed in the forest. Her knuckles were white against the balcony railing, her eyes flickering with something unspoken, worry, regret, or something darker. Something that tasted like fear.
She pressed a hand to her throat, as if feeling phantom fingers there.
Her lips parted.
A momentary hesitation.
She bit her lip until a drop of crimson appeared, bright against her pale skin. The single droplet traced a perfect line down her palm, following the curve of her lifeline before falling into the shadows below. It never reached the ground.
"You're not alone," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rising tension in the hall, yet somehow he heard it perfectly, as if she'd spoken directly into his mind.
Her eyes never left Vesperian's altered skin. A brief flash of recognition crossed her face before she carefully masked it behind practiced indifference. When their gazes met, her eyes widened with a mixture of horrified recognition and desperate hope. Her lips formed words he couldn't hear but somehow understood: Not yet. Not here. They're watching.
She knows something. Something about what's happening to me. Something she fears, or desires.
Before he could step forward to receive his opponent, Sereth's voice rang out across the chamber. "Master Kaelith, with respect, I'd like to challenge Vesperian directly."
The hall fell silent. Challenges between students were rare, particularly in Kaelith's sessions. Then came the whispers, rippling through the crowd like wind through tall grass, growing louder, more insistent.
"Did you hear what happened to him yesterday?" a voice murmured.
"They say he was speaking in tongues," another replied.
"Look at his skin, there's something wrong with him."
"Just like what happened to Kalen before the Void Wardens took him," came another whisper, closer to Vesperian's ear, the words barbed with fear.
"Those markings on his skin, they're the same as in the Forbidden Archives," whispered a student with fear in her voice. "The ones from before the First Breach."
A few students stepped back, creating a wider circle. Others leaned forward, eyes gleaming with a mixture of fear and fascination. The Academy itself seemed to hold its breath, the stones beneath their feet growing still, waiting.
The master's eyebrow raised slightly, a subtle movement that conveyed volumes. "Interesting. Your reasoning?"
Sereth's face remained impassive, but Vesperian saw the subtle tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers flexed, seeking a weapon, preparing for battle. A thin sheen of sweat glistened at her temple despite the chill in the air. "No construct can replicate the unpredictability of a real opponent. And I believe we both have… lessons to learn from each other."
She wanted to test him. She needed to see what he was becoming. After witnessing the entity that wore her brother's face in the Crystalline Wastes, after hearing his confession about the Rift "completing" him, she needed to know how far gone he already was. He could see it in her eyes: the fear, the doubt, the desperate hope that he might be different.
She's hoping I'll prove I'm still me, he realized with a pang. That I'm not becoming what Kalen became.
He remembered her words from their journey: "I watched him disappear piece by piece. First his sleep, then his smile, then his kindness. By the end, the brother I knew was already gone before the Wardens ever found him."
Kaelith studied them both for a long moment, then nodded. "Very well. Center circle. Full arsenals permitted, but death is discouraged." Her eyes gleamed with unreadable intent, bronze darkening to near-black. "It creates such tedious paperwork."
As they took positions across from each other, he felt something stir within him, a hunger, a readiness that wasn't entirely his own. The glyphs beneath their feet pulsed. Red light spiraled outward from the circle's heart, snaking through the air like veins filled with fire. Power hummed in the air, old, blood-bound, sending vibrations through the soles of his feet. The stone seemed to remember something, a battle fought long ago, a sacrifice made, a breach sealed.
The same rhythm as in his dream. Tap-tap-rest. Tap-tap-rest.
Sereth drew her blade, a sleek weapon etched with runes of binding and clarity. The metal caught the light strangely, seeming to bend it inward rather than reflect it outward. His own weapon seemed to vibrate in his hand, responding to his accelerating heartbeat, unnaturally warm against his palm. It felt lighter than it should, hungry for what was to come.
A sudden clarity struck him. If I lose control here, if the hollow inside me fully awakens, I might open a gateway the Academy can't close. Like what happened at the First Breach. Like what claimed Kalen. The knowledge settled like ice in his veins, a certainty that transcended mere fear. Everyone in this room would be consumed by what comes through.
The chamber darkened suddenly, the runes along the walls pulsing with an irregular rhythm. Several students exchanged nervous glances. One of the masters stepped forward, brow furrowed, but Kaelith raised a hand to stop them, her eyes never leaving Vesperian and Sereth. The gesture was slight but absolute, a command no one dared question.
The air around them shimmered with barely contained power, distorting their silhouettes like heat waves above desert sand. Vesperian's throat constricted, each breath becoming a conscious effort. His skin prickled with electric awareness, every nerve ending alive with warning signals. The lattice beneath his skin brightened, then dimmed, brightened again, like something awakening, stirring from ancient sleep.
"Begin," Kaelith commanded, the word falling like a stone into still water.
The first clash sent sparks of mana cascading across the stone floor, not orange or yellow, but silver and black, colors that shouldn't exist in flame. Metal met metal with a sound like thunder, but beneath it, a deeper resonance, stone remembering, calling.
The impact reverberated through his arms like a forgotten song, muscles burning with the strain. Sweat beaded along his brow, instantly cooling in the unnaturally chilled air of the chamber. The blade felt like an extension of himself, not separate but fused, as if they had always been one.
The air crackled with electricity, each movement leaving luminous trails in the space between them, afterimages that lingered too long, showing movements not yet made. Sereth moved like water, her strikes precise and measured, testing defenses with calculated pressure. Her eyes never left his, searching for something, recognition, humanity, the boy she had known.
He found himself responding with techniques he'd never learned, parries that seemed to anticipate Sereth's movements before they began, counterstrikes that flowed from memory not his own. A strange déjà vu gripped him as he recognized not just the instincts but the very essence of his movements, echo fragments of battles fought centuries ago by hands that somehow felt like his own.
These aren't a student's movements, he realized with growing horror. They're a conqueror's. They're the movements of someone who has destroyed worlds.
"You're different today," Sereth said through gritted teeth as their blades locked. Metal screamed against metal, the friction sending golden sparks between their faces. Her breath came short and hard, not from exertion but fear, not of him, but for him. "What exactly are you becoming?"
I don't know, he wanted to say. Instead, he remained silent, the words trapped behind teeth clenched against the growing hunger within him.
He didn't answer. Couldn't answer. The battle consumed him, drawing him deeper into instincts that felt ancient and predatory. Each breath brought clarity. Each heartbeat synchronized with something vast and hungry that pulsed beneath the Academy itself. The rhythm grew stronger: tap-tap-rest, tap-tap-rest, like a countdown, like a summoning.
Above them, Lyra leaned forward, half-reaching toward the spectacle below. A tremor ran through her frame, not fear, but recognition. Her sleeve slipped slightly, revealing markings on her wrist that pulsed in rhythm with the silver lines beneath Vesperian's skin. She quickly covered them, glancing around to ensure no one had noticed. But her eyes held a terrible knowledge as she watched the battle unfold. A single tear traced down her cheek, though her face remained a mask of composure.
The violet light flickered again near the window, watching, measuring, waiting.
The duel intensified.
Sereth charged, channeling brilliant arcs of energy through her blade, not the blue of academy training magic, but something darker, deeper, older. Magic she shouldn't know.
He sidestepped, moving through them like smoke, the energy parting around him as if he were hollow inside.
His riposte came swift and merciless, his own attacks growing more ferocious with each exchange. The floor beneath them cracked with each impact, silver lines spreading through stone like roots seeking water.
The blade in his hand felt weightless now. Hungry. It sought Sereth's defenses with predatory precision, singing as it cut the air, a song of conquest, of consumption.
Then it happened. As Sereth launched a particularly powerful strike, his vision blurred. His breath caught in his throat, the blade faltering in his grip. A flash of memory tore through his mind: a battlefield strewn with bodies, his hands covered in blood that wasn't his own, a sky torn open by forces beyond comprehension. The coppery scent of blood filled his nostrils. Distant screams echoed in his ears. A city crumbling beneath waves of silver fire. Worlds consumed by his hunger. The memory wasn't his, couldn't be his, yet it felt more real than the present moment.
The worst part wasn't the alien memory, but how right it felt, how the taste of conquest sang through his veins like an inheritance finally claimed. He wanted more, and that wanting terrified him.
For a heartbeat, clarity returned. He saw himself as if from outside, saw the darkness gathering at his fingertips, felt the foreign presence surging within him. He fought against it, muscles straining as he tried to force his blade down, away from Sereth's throat where it had somehow found its way.
"No," he whispered, too quiet for anyone to hear, the word catching like thorns in his throat. "I'm not… yours." But even as he spoke, he wasn't certain who he addressed, the Rift, or something deeper within it. Something older than worlds.
Sereth's eyes widened, not in fear of the blade at her throat but at something she saw in his eyes, a flicker of resistance that gave her hope. For an instant, her shoulders relaxed, her guard dropping by a fraction.
But the presence was stronger. It had waited too long, hungered too deeply. The barrier between self and other cracked, and black energy rippled across his skin. The air around him distorted, and for a heartbeat, he saw not Sereth before him but a different opponent on a battlefield consumed by fire, someone who had opposed him long ago, whose name he almost remembered.
The hollow knows its own shape.
Sereth's warning from the Crystalline Wastes echoed in his mind: "Tethering isn't just binding, it's fusion. Your thoughts will braid with something else's. And when you can't tell which are yours, that's when you start to disappear."
Was this the moment he began to slip away? The moment when what filled his hollow began to consume what remained of himself? The moment when Vesperian ended and something else began?
The fog answered for him.
It thickened. Darkened. Became a coil of pressure that clenched the Hall like a fist around a heart.
The ground beneath them trembled, not from impact but recognition. The stonework groaned like a living thing waking from ancient slumber. Every rune in the chamber flickered in unison, a stuttering heartbeat responding to his own. The pattern shifted: tap-tap-rest, tap-TAP-rest, TAP-TAP-REST, growing stronger, more insistent, a calling from below.
The students began to cough. Some fell to their knees, clutching at their throats. Others pressed themselves against the walls, trying to escape whatever power was filling the room. A few of the bolder ones drew their own weapons, uncertainty and fear warring on their faces. One younger student began to weep, blood mingling with tears.
Sereth stepped back, recognition dawning in her eyes, not of Vesperian, but of something she'd seen before. Something that had taken Kalen. Something that now reached through Vesperian like fingers through a torn veil.
"Stop it!" she cried, her voice breaking with raw fear and anger. "Vesperian, fight it! This is exactly what happened to him before—" Her words dissolved into a choked sound as the pressure around them intensified. The air itself seemed to thin, reality stretched to breaking.
From the glyph circle came a sound, stone cracking beneath weight, the floor rippling like water disturbed by a stone. A web of silver lines spread outward, mirroring the pattern beneath his skin. The Academy itself shuddered, ancient foundations remembering what they had been built to contain.
Then he felt it.
The Rift opened.
Not fully, but enough. Enough to leak through the cracks between worlds, between times.
Energy poured into him, uninvited. Uncontrolled. It clawed at his veins, filled his bones, bled through his skin in runes of pale fire. A metallic taste flooded his mouth, ancient and familiar, the taste of stars dying, of worlds between worlds. His ears rang with sounds beyond hearing, whispers, screams, promises older than time. The air around him wavered, reality bending beneath the weight of something pushing through.
His counterattack came with neither mercy nor restraint. The force of it drove Sereth to her knees, the stone beneath them fracturing in a spiderweb pattern. Blood trickled from her lip, her eyes wide with recognition and horror.
The crowd screamed, a sound that seemed to come from very far away, muffled by the roaring in his ears, the voice that spoke with his lips but wasn't his own.
He raised his blade for a final strike, his vision clouded by memories of ash and conquest that were not his own. Yet they felt right. They felt familiar. In that moment, he wasn't just Vesperian, student of the Academy, he was something older, something that remembered power and demanded its return. Something that had been waiting, sleeping, hungry.
"Enough!" Kaelith's voice cut through the haze, accompanied by a pulse of binding magic that froze both combatants in place. The hall fell absolutely silent. Even the runes seemed to dim, as though recoiling from what they had witnessed. The air itself held still, time momentarily suspended.
Kaelith stood still, watching, unreadable. But in her eyes, he saw something he hadn't expected, not fear, but recognition. She knew what was happening to him. More than that, she'd seen it before. In herself, perhaps. The scars on her face seemed to shimmer, revealing faded patterns beneath that matched his own transformation.
She approached with careful steps, her robes whispering against the stone floor. "I know that voice," she said, so quietly only he could hear, the words barely a breath against his ear. "I know what speaks through you. It whispered to me, too, until I silenced it." Her fingers brushed her scars in a gesture that now seemed like a warning, a reminder of the price she had paid. "I cut it out of me. Piece by piece."
"You are not whole," she whispered, the same words from his dream, and something inside him shattered.
The power snapped.
He lost time. One moment, standing in the Hall. The next, darkness. Cold. A silence deeper than absence, a void that consumed even emptiness.
Then, warmth.
Fingers touched his forehead. Delicate. Grounding. A touch that anchored him to flesh, to presence.
His vision cleared.
Lyra.
She looked down at him, eyes narrowed, not with pity, but urgency, a subtle tremor in her usually steady hands. Her face was flushed, as though she'd been running, and there was a wildness to her gaze he'd never seen before, the look of someone whose careful plans were unraveling thread by thread.
"You opened something," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "And something looked back."
His throat felt raw, as though he'd been screaming. The taste of ash and old blood lingered on his tongue. "What… was that?"
"Me," he thought he heard her say, though her lips hadn't moved. The thought vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving him uncertain if he'd imagined it, if the voice had been hers or something else's.
She hesitated, gaze flicking to the door as if ensuring their privacy. "Not the Rift itself. Something beneath it. Something older." She swallowed hard, her pulse visibly racing at her throat. "I've seen this before. The patterns are the same."
He tried to rise. Pain pinned him like a butterfly to cork.
Lyra pressed him down, her touch cool against his fever-hot skin. "Listen carefully. You're not just drawing from the Rift. You're calling something. And it's starting to hear you."
The words resonated with the hollow inside him, a truth he'd felt but hadn't been able to name. "The hollow knows its own shape," he murmured.
Her eyes widened slightly. "Where did you hear that phrase?"
"I—" But before he could answer, awareness returned fully to his eyes. He looked past Lyra to where Sereth stood, watching from the doorway, her face a mask of conflicted emotions—fear, anger, but also a desperate hope that reminded him of their conversation in the ravine.
"Promise me something," Sereth said, her voice steady despite the bruises forming on her throat, the dried blood at the corner of her mouth. "If you start to slip away, if you feel yourself… changing in ways you can't control, tell me. Don't hide it like he did."
She stepped closer, her shadow falling across him. A small silver coin – one he recognized from Kalen's collection – glinted between her fingers, catching the light as she turned it. The rare Eldmarch coin with its twin moons and twisted tree. Kalen had shown it to him once, called it his talisman.
"Even if what you're becoming is powerful, even if it feels right," she continued, pressing the coin into his palm and closing his fingers around it, "remember what's being consumed to make room for it."
The coin burned cold against his skin, like a tiny shard of forgotten memory.
Vesperian nodded, though the gesture felt hollow. How could he promise to recognize when he was losing himself, when the very definition of "self" was changing with each pulse of the silver lines beneath his skin?
Lyra and Sereth exchanged a look filled with wariness and something deeper—an unspoken alliance formed in the shadow of a greater threat. Sereth's fingers brushed his as she released the coin, and in that moment of contact, he felt her fear and determination mix with his own uncertainty.
The coin hummed against his palm with the same rhythm. Tap-tap-rest.
A summons. A warning. A promise of what was to come.
Behind them, the doorway shimmered with violet light. For the briefest moment, a figure stood silhouetted there—tall, watching, waiting. The light cast no shadow. Then it was gone, leaving only the taste of winter and iron in the air, and the faintest scent of blood on snow. The Academy's ancient stones groaned once, as if remembering something best forgotten, and then fell silent.