The world moved slower after the trial.
Or maybe Caelum was just finally standing still long enough to notice.
He spent his mornings watching the mist roll in through the academy cloisters, training when Serapha demanded it, reading when Rheia left books by his cot without asking. He'd never thought about things like quiet mornings or the weight of a blanket until he had them.
And yet even in peace, something stirred beneath his skin. A tension. A waiting.
The dream hadn't come again. Not since the silver-haired girl whispered that almost-name—something he could feel at the edge of waking but never hold.
Something not his.
Or not yet.
"Your core isn't fixed. That's why you're unstable," Rheia said over a plate of half-burnt rations. "You're drawing from a Weave source, but you're not built to hold it. Like pouring stormwater into cracked stone."
Caelum raised an eyebrow. "That's comforting."
"I didn't say it to comfort you."
She leaned across the table and tapped a glyph into the wood with one sharp nail. It shimmered briefly before vanishing.
"You need to begin reconstructing your flow. Not like a mage. Not like a knight. Something in between. Something forgotten."
"Is that possible?"
"I don't know," she said. "But you're alive, and that shouldn't be possible either."
Later that evening, Caelum found himself in the west library, an abandoned section filled with dust-choked scrolls and crumbling tomes. The kind of place no student bothered with—unless they were hunting myths, or hiding from themselves.
He was doing both.
He opened an old codex titled The Tenfold Harmonies and read about ancient saints who once crossed the border between Vita and Aetherion. He turned the pages slowly, each one filled with names long erased from modern teaching.
Then one phrase stopped him cold.
"Elarion's Fifth Breath: The Binding of Unnamed Flame."
He traced it with his finger. Below the passage, a diagram. A humanoid figure surrounded by twelve interwoven rings of fractured light.
His scar began to ache.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
Caelum turned fast, ready to strike—until he saw her.
Serapha stood there, arms folded, her gaze softer than usual.
"You found it," she said, not surprised.
"You knew about this?"
"I suspected." She looked over the codex, then back at him. "The academy purged anything connected to the Fifth Breath a generation ago. But pieces survive."
"Why?"
"Because power that doesn't fit the system is dangerous."
She met his eyes. "Just like you."
They sat on the cold floor, backs to a broken pillar, the book open between them.
"There's something I've never told anyone," Caelum said, voice barely audible.
Serapha didn't interrupt.
"When I was small, I used to hear something in my dreams. A voice, just outside what I could understand. It didn't speak words. It sang. Just tones, like something ancient trying to remember how to be human."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"I used to dream too," she said. "But mine weren't songs. Just a single, burning door. And every time I reached for it, I woke up bleeding."
They didn't speak after that. Not for a while.
But they didn't move apart either.
By the time Caelum returned to his dormitory, night had fallen like a heavy curtain.
Rheia was waiting for him inside, perched on the edge of his cot with a piece of parchment in her lap. She didn't look up when he entered, but her voice was sharp.
"You're being watched."
He shut the door. "By who?"
She handed him the parchment. It was a folded note, sealed in the wax of the Royal Academy.
But not addressed to him.
It was meant for Serapha.
Inside, a single sentence.
"The Crown is recalling its dogs."
Caelum read it twice.
Rheia watched his face. "They're pulling her out. Maybe worse."
"She hasn't said anything."
"She won't," Rheia said bitterly. "She was raised to bleed quietly."
That night, the dream came again.
But it wasn't the girl this time.
It was something deeper.
A corridor of stars. A door of light and ash. And a voice, not in his head, but through his bones.
"Do you want a name?"
He turned toward the sound.
"One that the world forgot, so that it might become yours instead?"
Caelum reached out.
And in the dream, the scar on his chest opened—not in blood, but in light.