The dorm was cold, the enchanted lanterns still dimmed with pre-dawn stillness. A faint haze of blue filtered through the frost-streaked window, casting long shadows across the floor.
Arin sat up slowly, his breath visible in the chilled air. His cot creaked under the motion, but no one else stirred—most of the others wouldn't rise for another hour.
He liked the silence. The solitude.
The East Annex meal lounge was almost empty.
Light trickled in through the ivy-covered arches, turning the frost on the window edges into thin veins of gold. Arin sat alone at the far edge of a stone table, quietly eating stale bread and watered-down broth. Mira arrived a few minutes later, cloak wrapped tight, her hair still damp from a morning spell cleanse. She said nothing at first, only nodded and sat across from him. Lucien followed not long after, slipping into the seat beside her, already scribbling something into a leather-bound journal.
They hadn't talked much since the observatory.
A few tables away, students clustered in hushed conversation. Arin heard snatches of their words—names, mostly. Mira. Lucien. The South Wing. Vaults. Their tones flickered between awe and suspicion.
"…Lucien was with her, definitely…"
"…something happened down there, I swear…"
"…why would they be with him?"
That last word lingered.
He was used to it by now.
They didn't say his name. They didn't have to. They just called him by the one thing they all knew.
Valemourned.
Not as a title of respect—but as a warning. A whisper. A curse.
The boy from the disgraced line. The failure cast off by his own blood. The one whose surname sounded like mourning because it was. A family that had turned its back on him long before the Academy gates ever opened.
He was just Arin. Arin Valemourned.
No crest. No standing. No whisper of potential.
Just a shadow in the corner of other people's stories.
And that was exactly how he wanted it.
For now.
"You're doing it again," Mira said softly.
He blinked. "Doing what?"
"Folding in. Like you're trying to disappear."
He glanced around. "It's working, isn't it?"
Lucien smirked without looking up from his journal. "Not as well as you think. But for now? Let them stay distracted."
Arin pushed his plate away. "They're not talking about me. Just about you two."
"Correction," Lucien said. "They're talking around you. It's not the same thing."
Mira reached for a piece of bread, her fingers brushing a rune etched into the crust. Her expression was thoughtful. "We should check the map again. The fragment you touched—it might've left a trace."
"Not here," Lucien cut in. "Too many ears."
She nodded. "Tonight then. East observatory again?"
Lucien gave a slight nod. Arin just listened, uninvited, but not excluded.
Not anymore.
That evening, Arin walked the halls like mist—there but not grasped. A few students glanced up as he passed, eyes flicking to his back once he was beyond them.
"…that's him, right? The Valemourned one…"
"…thought he'd dropped out…"
"…don't make eye contact."
He kept walking.
No retorts. No flinches.
Let them talk. Let them remember only the name. The myth of a failure walking halls he didn't deserve to be in.
It meant no one noticed what really mattered.
That night, they returned to the observatory.
The wards held. Lucien checked twice. The stars shimmered high above, silver and remote.
Mira laid the copy of the vault map across the table, her hand brushing the third marked point. "Here's where we were. The Drowned Ruins were second. That makes this—" she tapped a peak etched faintly in silver ink, "—Ashen Heights. The first."
"Three down," Lucien murmured. "Four left."
Arin leaned closer. The ink pulsed faintly under the mage-light. Seven points. Seven seals. Seven convergences.
"What happens when all seven are broken?" he asked.
Lucien was silent for a long moment. Then:
"I don't think something gets released. I think something gets erased."
"Unmaking," Mira whispered. "Like the phrase."
Lucien nodded slowly. "We're not watching a prison being broken. We're watching reality come undone. One seal at a time."
Silence.
Arin looked out through the fractured dome. The wind carried faint music from the dormitory towers below. Laughter. Someone's violin practice. Distant bells.
All of it fragile.
He pressed a hand to the cold stone edge of the observatory window. That pressure behind his thoughts had returned again, pulsing faintly, like a heartbeat not his own.
A voice stirred in the space behind his mind:
"Keys always bleed."