Caelum stood in the center of the Trial Yard—bare stone, scarred by generations of arcane impact.
Above him, floating rings etched with evaluation glyphs spun slowly, each one burning with different resonance: mind, body, mana, soul, memory, will, and… something unnamed.
Rheia sat cross-legged just beyond the ring's edge, translating the glyph-sequence into diagrams, paper pinned down by stones and starlight.
"Don't focus on performing," she said. "The Trial isn't about passing. It's about revealing."
"That's not comforting," Caelum muttered.
"It wasn't meant to be."
Serapha stood at the archway, arms crossed, watching every movement.
He could feel her Weave signature from here—coiled like lightning in a bottle.
She said nothing. But she was ready to catch him, if the Trial went wrong.
The glyph-rings spun faster.
The first lit up: Mind.
Caelum braced.
A memory-flash hit him.
Not one of his own.
A classroom. A hand raised. A girl whispering words she wasn't allowed to know. A teacher turning, afraid.
He gasped, staggering.
"That wasn't mine," he said.
"The Trial pulls from all linked threads," Rheia called out. "Even echoes."
The second ring lit: Body.
Fire surged through his limbs.
Not burning—shaping.
His stance adjusted, spine arching like a warrior trained in a style he'd never studied. Swordless, but balanced.
Serapha's brows rose. Rheia's pen paused.
"Did you just—"
"I don't know," he gritted.
The third ring: Mana.
His sigil flared.
Light erupted from his palm, then turned inward, forming a sphere. It cracked. Failed. Reformed.
No spell took.
But the glyph did not extinguish.
Instead, it lingered—recording.
Lior stood in the forbidden archives beneath the Arcanum's eastern wing.
He had bribed a lower Keeper. Slipped past a glyphward.
And now stood before a sealed tome etched with rune-steel: The Elarion Protocols.
His hand hovered.
"You died trying to save them," he whispered. "Or did you die to erase them?"
He opened the book.
The first line:
"To unmake the world is not evil. It is simply unsatisfied memory."
The fourth glyph: Soul.
Caelum dropped to one knee.
His vision tunneled.
And in that tunnel, he saw someone.
A boy. The one from before.
Not Elarion.
But himself—young, before the Arcanum, before the sigil, clutching his sister's broken ribbon in the ash of a burned village.
He blinked.
The vision didn't vanish.
It bowed its head.
And vanished.
The fifth glyph: Memory.
It didn't test him.
It asked him.
"Do you wish to forget?"
He thought of the pain. Of loss. Of waking with power he didn't earn.
He answered: "No."
The glyph burned gold.
The sixth: Will.
A storm rose.
But not wind.
A spiral of pressure—thoughts, doubts, every voice that had ever called him weak or unwanted.
"You can't be him."
"You'll break."
"You're not chosen. Just left behind."
He clenched his fists.
The sigil on his chest pulsed.
Then responded.
The glyph cracked.
And acknowledged him.
The seventh ring lit.
But no word appeared.
Rheia stood.
"That ring… it's forbidden."
Serapha stepped forward, hand at her blade.
"No one has survived the seventh."
The glyph flashed once.
Caelum raised his eyes.
And saw a girl.
Standing in flame.
Hair like pale silver.
Eyes like Rheia's.
But not.
She looked through him.
And whispered:
"Find me. Before they do."
Then the ring shattered.
Caelum fell to the ground.
The Trial ended.
Rheia ran to him.
Serapha followed, slower.
He was breathing. Awake.
But not alone.
He looked up.
"The last glyph showed me something."
Rheia whispered, "A vision?"
"No," he said.
"A warning."
Far below, Lior turned another page of the forbidden tome.
His eyes widened.
A sigil drawn not in ink—but in blood memory.
Matching Caelum's perfectly.
Below it, scrawled in Elarion's hand:
"Only the Scars remember her."