The courtyard was silent.
Not out of reverence, but because no one dared move.
Guards stood frozen. Mages held half-formed glyphs. Professors whispered behind veils of barrier wards. Even the wind seemed to pull back.
At the center, the two of them stood like echoes made flesh.
Caelum, half-wrapped in his infirmary cloak, sweat clinging to his brow, barefoot and blinking against the moonlight.
And Serapha—cloaked in shadow-dyed robes, her veil lifted halfway. Not enough to show her full face, but enough for her voice to carry like thunder carved from glass.
"You opened it," she said again. "Didn't you?"
Caelum didn't respond right away. His pulse was a drumbeat, and the resonance inside him twisted like a storm waiting to rise.
He knew her voice.
Even if he'd never heard it like this before.
"Who are you?" he finally asked.
She tilted her head. "You don't remember."
"No."
"Good," she said, and her voice cracked.
A few paces back, Rheia arrived breathless—shoving past a stunned lecturer and two guards. When she saw Serapha, her entire posture shifted.
"Caelum," she whispered, "that's—"
"I know," he said.
Because now he did. Not everything, not her name, not her past. But he knew her.
In the way you know a melody before hearing it.
In the way fire recognizes smoke.
Serapha took one step forward. The academy guards flinched, raising staves. She ignored them.
"I felt your Naming Point," she said. "I felt it all the way across the sea."
"So did half the continent, apparently," Caelum muttered.
"You don't understand," she said, voice sharp. "No one should've been able to form a conduit like that. Not now. Not after the Choirs were dismantled."
He blinked. "You know what I saw?"
"No," Serapha said. "But I know who you are now."
Professor Verrian arrived at that moment, flanked by four elite ward-binders. Her eyes found Serapha instantly.
She froze.
Then whispered, "…Serapha of Hollowtrace."
Gasps rippled through the courtyard.
One of the ward-binders stiffened. "That can't be. She vanished—"
"She was disavowed," said another. "The Forgotten Choir…"
Serapha didn't flinch.
"I came of my own will," she said. "Not to threaten. Not to fight. But to see him."
She gestured to Caelum, and he felt everyone's eyes pivot again.
"He's just a student," Verrian said. "A boy with unstable potential—"
"He is not unstable," Serapha snapped. "You're just afraid. Afraid of what he might become."
"Because what he might become," Verrian growled, "is what we once sealed away."
Rheia stepped forward now, gently placing a hand on Caelum's arm. "You're shaking."
"I'm not scared," he said.
"I know," she replied. "But she is."
He looked back at Serapha.
She was scared. Not of them. Not even of Verrian.
She was scared of him.
Because she knew something he didn't.
The echo in his veins was building again. Quiet at first, like wind brushing over reeds. Then louder. A humming, a resonance.
His Naming Point still burned in his soul. Not painfully—but alert.
He didn't want to call on it.
But it was listening.
Serapha took another step. "Caelum, what name did you give?"
He hesitated. Then said: "Skybound Ash."
She closed her eyes.
And breathed the word like a prayer.
"Then it's true," she whispered.
That night, they held the emergency council in the upper sanctum.
Ten senior scholars. Five warders. Two Crown liaisons. And Verrian.
Serapha was allowed into the chamber only under binding seals. Caelum stood beside her, flanked by Rheia and two watch-mages.
The Head Chancellor—a stooped woman of pale, ink-lined skin—cleared her throat.
"Let us speak plainly," she said. "The reactivation of a Boundless-style channel through the Naming system is… unprecedented."
"Unacceptable," one mage growled.
"Uncontrolled," muttered another.
"But it happened," Verrian said. "And Serapha's presence confirms what I've suspected."
"That the Choirs never truly died."
Serapha didn't smile, but her voice was dry. "The Crown disbanded them. Scattered their disciplines. Cut their names from the Weave. But echoes leave stains. Especially when blood is involved."
Caelum glanced at her, confused. She didn't meet his gaze.
The Council debated for hours.
In the end, they reached no conclusion.
Because none of them could explain how Caelum, with no pedigree, no core stability, no crest, and barely a recorded output of Weaveflow, had become a conduit for something ancient and sovereign.
None of them could explain the tremors.
The flickering in the sky.
The way their scrying mirrors cracked when they looked too close.
None of them could explain why Serapha had returned.
But they all knew this:
The world was changing again.
And it was too late to stop it.
That night, after the meeting dispersed, Caelum stood alone on the north balcony.
The stars were out. A rare sight above Aetherveil. And he could hear something strange in the wind—a tone, faint and fluttering, like a song caught between storms.
"You should be resting," Serapha said behind him.
He didn't jump.
"Hard to rest when everyone's arguing about whether to kill you or study you."
She stepped beside him.
"They won't do either."
"No?" he asked.
She smiled faintly. "Because they're terrified of me now too."
"I figured you liked that."
"I hate it," she said. "I didn't come here to intimidate. I came because I felt you."
Caelum swallowed.
"Why do I feel like I know you?" he asked.
Serapha looked up at the stars.
"Because once," she said softly, "you saved me. Or maybe I saved you. We were children. And they took that memory away."
"Who did?"
She didn't answer.
Just reached into her sleeve and drew out a shard of pale metal.
It looked like a piece of a crown.
"This is what they're afraid of," she said. "The Echo Crown. Not just a relic. A name. A will. A thread of the Weave that can't be cut."
He stared at it.
Then at her.
"Are you here to give it to me?"
"No," Serapha whispered. "I'm here to warn you. If you follow the path your Naming gave you… this will find you."
"And if I don't?"
"Then something worse will."