The night in Selun'Thael shimmered with starlight, yet below the veil of the sky, a strange tension quietly brewed. The Festival of Lawful Origins was nearing its peak, but whispers had begun to surface among the elders—of flickers in the ancestral veins, of a presence… unaccounted for.
Beneath the city's grand amphitheater, an ancient testing altar thrummed faintly—almost forgotten. It was a site used in the distant past to awaken or confirm one's resonance with the Celestial Spark, the first threshold in wielding celestial energy through the body.
Only those with even a trace of ancestral bloodline could activate the altar.
---
Scene One: The Call of the Blood
Imius had felt it—that tug at his soul when he looked into the boy's eyes. The boy had spoken earlier with strange, ancient cadence. It was not arrogance, but something… misplaced in time. He didn't beg or tremble when offered food; instead, he accepted it with quiet grace, as if such kindness once flowed like rivers around him.
Imius had thus brought him here, to the sacred chamber buried under the academy's elder temple. The boy stood barefoot, thin yet composed, staring at the altar's cracked core. Its veins, dull and lifeless, hadn't pulsed in over a hundred years.
"Touch it," Imius said softly.
The boy tilted his head.
"What is it?" he asked, voice distant, dreamlike.
"An echo," Imius replied, "of who you might be."
The boy reached out.
The instant his skin brushed the stone, the altar lit like it had swallowed a star. A slow, spiraling glow spread outward as ancient celestial runes danced across its frame. The chamber trembled.
The Celestial Spark had ignited.
A thousand years ago, that would've been enough to name him a noble initiate.
Now, it only proved one thing: he was not ordinary.
Imius's eyes widened. He had expected a flicker, perhaps a Class 6 reaction at best.
But what he saw now were thirty-eight distinct bloodline veins beginning to manifest—visible as radiant, web-like channels just under the boy's skin.
Class 1. Just short of the Class 2 threshold… but not yet noble.
Yet the altar hummed differently. It responded to the boy not with obedience but… awe.
Imius stepped back.
"You're not of the old houses," he whispered. "But something older still."
---
Scene Two: A Thread in the Veil
Later that night, while the boy slept in the quiet dorms reserved for initiates, Imius stood before the council of junior overseers. None could explain how a boy with no clan sigil could rouse an altar that required ancestral purity.
"He might be a fragment," one overseer muttered. "A lost thread of a higher vein."
Another scoffed, "There hasn't been an unregistered Class 1 in decades. If he was stronger, I'd suspect… Class 4 or beyond. But that boy—he looks broken."
Imius didn't respond.
In truth, he wasn't sure what to believe.
But he remembered the eyes. Ancient. Hollow. And then… alive.
He remembered how the air had tasted older when the altar lit up.
This boy didn't just have veins.
He had history.
---
Scene Three: The Winds of Something More
That morning, when the boy awoke, the others avoided him. Not out of scorn—but uncertainty.
He didn't seem to mind.
He sat beneath the cherry-glow trees and drew strange shapes in the dust—patterns of weapons, of floating sky-crafts, of runes far more complex than any initiate should understand.
Imius watched from afar, sighing.
"I'll call you… Nocth," he said to himself.
And somehow, the boy turned, almost as if he heard it.
He smiled.
"Is that who I am?" he asked.
Imius nodded, though uncertainly.
"Yes. For now."
Nocth turned back to his sketches.
And somewhere far in the distance, deeper within the sealed relic halls of Selun'Thael, a long-forgotten blade trembled within its bindings.