The fire didn't start with flames.
It began with a silence—unnatural and vast—spreading across the eastern wing of the academy just before dawn. The air shimmered, not with heat, but with expectation. Then the screams followed.
By the time the guards reached the dormitories, half the corridor had already been blackened by soulfire. Doors turned to ash. Walls bore claw marks made not by any blade, but by something older. Hungrier. And at the heart of it, amidst the destruction, stood Riven.
He wasn't alone.
His eyes glowed silver-white. The mark on his chest blazed through his soaked tunic, and around him, a halo of fractured symbols hovered like orbiting runes—each one thrumming with forbidden resonance.
Leila pushed through the crowd, her lungs burning. She found him in time to see a tendril of soulfire lash out from his shadow, curling around a pillar and turning it to dust.
"Riven!" she screamed.
His head turned slowly. But his eyes didn't see her.
Not yet.
Professor Kael and two Sentinels stood a few feet away, weapons drawn—not swords, but spell-forged restraints etched with nullification glyphs.
"We can't let him complete the synchronization," Kael warned.
"He's not in control," Leila snapped. "Don't you dare treat him like—"
"He's no longer just a student," one Sentinel cut in. "He's a vessel."
Suddenly, Riven collapsed to one knee, gasping. The symbols scattered like shards of light and the mark on his chest dimmed.
Leila ran to him. She caught his face in her hands. "Riven—look at me."
This time, he did.
His voice was hoarse. "I saw it again... the tower, the door, and behind it... me. But not me."
Kael stepped forward slowly. "You saw Sequence 7 in full. Didn't you?"
Riven nodded. "And I think I opened something. Not just in me. In the world."
Later that day, the sky over the academy shimmered with golden fog. An emergency tribunal was convened in the Arcanum Hall, the highest seat of magical deliberation within the empire.
Riven stood before the council, chains of starlight binding his wrists. But he was calm. Too calm.
The High Chancellor—a woman known only as Lys—examined him with unblinking sapphire eyes.
"You carry an Eidolon Core," she said. "A fragment of a soul that should not exist."
Riven met her gaze. "Then why does it?"
Lys tapped her finger against the marble table. "That's what we intend to find out."
Suddenly, the chains shattered.
Not by force.
By choice.
Everyone froze as Lys stood. "Release him. He will not be tried. He will be tested."
Gasps filled the chamber.
Leila, watching from the gallery above, felt her heart skip.
Tested?
Riven turned to face her. There was something in his eyes now. Clarity. Power. And beneath it, fear.
Because he knew what they all did not.
The real test had already begun. And it wasn't set by the Tribunal.
It was set by the soul that had chosen him.
The Eidolon wasn't dormant anymore.
It was awakening.
And it remembered everything.
Even the first time the world ended.