Elias waited until the dormitory wing settled into its version of sleep.
Not silence — Mirage never offered that — but the softened rhythm of doors no longer opening, footsteps losing purpose, conversations fading into murmurs that would not be remembered by morning. Lamps dimmed themselves by habit. Shadows grew longer, deeper, more confident in their shapes.
Only then did he move.
His room was expanded with his shadows. It was quite a bit bigger than the shed they fixed the wagon with Rellin. He intended to make use of the space. Make separate rooms for his crafting and perhaps library perhaps something else.
None of it happened, he hadn't even made his small bed bigger, it was equally misplaced looking as was the big empty room. Utterly pointless now that he knew he wouldn't be staying here. This wouldn't be his home he envisioned just few months back when he gotten accepted to the shadow path.
Elias stood in the center of the floor and removed his cloak.
He did not fold it.
He laid it out carefully, spreading the fabric so it rested where the light did not reach — not because the light was dangerous, but because shadows here were undisturbed. Untasked. Old.
Then he placed the mask atop it.
Bone-white, unfinished in places where it did not need to be finished yet. The mark at its brow — the quiet interruption in symmetry — caught no light at all. It did not demand attention. It waited for it.
Elias knelt before them, darkness of the room enveloping him and the objects in front of him.
For a long moment, he did nothing.
This was not ritual. There were no words to say, no gestures to perform. He had learned the hard way that meaning forced too early fractured things that might otherwise have settled naturally.
Instead, he listened. Felt the atmosphere of the room.
The shadows in the corners of the room did not move toward the cloak.
They did not reach.
They did not respond at all.
Good. He made sure his own shadow didn't touch the objects either.
Elias stood and stepped backward — slowly — into the shadow cast by the wardrobe.
There was no sensation of sinking.
No pull.
No shift.
His outline softened.
Then forgot itself.
The room remained.
The cloak and mask lay untouched on the floor.
And Elias was no longer occupying the space between them.
Inside shadow, there was no darkness in the way people meant it.
There was depth — negotiable, patient, layered.
Distance behaved differently here. Not farther or closer. Just less relevant.
Elias did not move immediately.
He let himself exist without choosing a direction, without pressing intent into the space around him.
From within that half-state — neither absent nor fully present — he observed the room.
The cloak.
The mask.
The way the shadows beneath them pooled slightly deeper than the rest.
He understood then what had been wrong before.
He had always tried to bring shadow to things.
He should have been letting things remain where shadow already was.
Carefully, he withdrew.
Not forward.
Not back.
Elias stepped out of the wardrobe's shadow and did not reappear in the room.
The space where he had been remained empty — properly empty, not disrupted.
The cloak and mask were still alone.
For a time that could not be measured properly, Elias stayed away.
The shadows beneath the fabric thickened, not in shape but in presence — like something much larger was affecting the shadows of the objects, indirectly changing them.
The cloak drank nothing, yet the fabric seemed to darken even more, like the shadows underneath were partially bleeding into the fabric.
The mask suffered the same fate, and on the surface of the bone white mask the changes were much more pronounced and noticeable. Mask seemingly dimmed. Then like a drop of ink was dropped on its surface, it began to darken. Everything except the mark on the forehead.
They simply existed long enough for shadow to accept them as part of the room's memory.
Only then did Elias return.
He emerged quietly, reforming where he had stepped away from, breath steady, heart calm. No rush. No strain. No lingering disorientation.
He knelt again and lifted the cloak.
It felt the same.
And not the same at all.
It didn't feel like it weighted anything.
Elias draped it over his shoulders, and could barely feel it there.
Then he picked up the mask.
He did not put it on.
Not yet.
Instead, he held it in both hands and waited.
This time, he did not step away.
He let his shadow rise naturally — not stretching, not deepening, simply aligning itself with his shape the way it always had.
The shadow touched the mask first. Then reached toward his shoulders and the cloak.
Not as an extension of Elias but like a new piece of furniture still seeking its place in a home, if furniture were inclined to do so.
There was no surge.
No thrill.
No sudden understanding.
Just a quiet click, like a thought finally finishing itself as he was fully enveloped in the darkness with his cloak and mask in his hands.
Elias exhaled.
"…There," he murmured.
The mask felt heavier now. And it was weird in a way since the cloak did the exact opposite.
Masks weight hadn't increased, yet it sat more heavy in his hands. He shrugged his shoulders and let the cloak slip from his shoulders to the ground where it pooled, like a puddle of ink. Dark against even the darkness.
Satisfied, Elias set the mask down directly on too of the cloak. Feeling it proper, that they'd stayed together.
He would not wear the mask tonight.
It would be impolite to use something so significant on an insignificant night.
You did not rush things meant to last.
He stepped back, returned to his bed, and lay down fully clothed, eyes open, watching the ceiling as shadows shifted gently with the movement of distant lamps.
His room looked exactly the same.
That, he thought, was the most important part.
Somewhere deep in the building, a door closed, someone else dreamed of endless roads and in a room that would never be marked on any map, Elias Marlow completed his outfit, by leaving it behind in the shadows long enough for the world to agree it belonged.
—————————————————————
Hours went by slowly
Elias did not sleep much. He had noticed,that he never really got tired enough that he felt the need to sleep.
He rested — sure which was different, but no real sleep, since he has been dabbling with shadows more than a regular mortal should.
Sleep pulled him away from thought. Rest allowed thought to loosen its grip and drift where it wished. He lay still until the room's darkness settled into a shape that felt complete, until even his own breathing stopped announcing itself.
Then he moved again.
This time, he did not leave anything behind.
Elias slid into shadow the way one steps off a familiar stair — without looking, without doubt. The edge of the bed lost relevance. The wall did not present itself as a boundary. The floor became suggestion rather than surface.
Inside a shadow, his room shadows were something he could perceive fully without ever seeing anything. His cloak and mask on top of it were still where he left them, in the middle of the shadowy version of his room.
Elias hovered there — not floating, not standing — simply imagining his movement made them happen somehow, so he focused extra hard. He turned his attention outward, toward the wall opposite his bed.
Stone. Mortared. Reinforced.
Academy construction. Meant to endure. To be malleable to magic's of all kind.
He felt no resistance from it.
That was… new.
Elias frowned slightly, concentration sharpening.
He had always assumed shadow followed shape — that it clung to the surfaces the world insisted upon. Walls cast shadows. Doors divided them. Corners pooled them.
But from here…
He reached — not with his body, not with intent, but with awareness — toward the shadow at the base of the wall.
It was continuous.
Unbroken.
The wall existed in light.
Shadow did not recognize it at all.
"…Oh," Elias murmured, the sound barely forming even inside his own head.
Carefully — cautiously — he shifted his sense of position.
The stone wall did not yield.
It was never consulted.
In an Instant, Elias simply was on the other side.
He stood in the narrow service corridor that ran between dormitory wings, the lantern at the far end flickering softly. Dust lay undisturbed on the floor. No alarms sounded. No wards flared.
Nothing reacted.
Elias froze, pulse quickening despite himself.
Not fear.
Recognition.
He turned slowly.
The wall was behind him — intact, solid, unquestioned.
He placed his palm against it.
Cold stone.
Real.
He stepped back into shadow again.
The corridor faded.
The wall ceased to be meaningful.
He emerged back inside his room, exactly where he had left.
Elias exhaled shakily and pressed a hand to his chest.
"…That shouldn't be possible," he whispered.
And yet.
He sat down hard on the edge of the bed, mind racing — not wildly, but deeply.
Doors.
Locks.
Cells.
Vaults.
All concepts built on the assumption that space mattered.
That separation was enforceable.
That absence had to go around obstacles.
Elias swallowed.
Shadows were everywhere.
Under doors.
Behind walls.
Beneath floors.
Above ceilings.
In the thin, neglected gaps architects never thought to defend because light could not reach them.
He stood again.
This time, he practiced.
Not rushing.
Not testing limits.
Just… mapping.
From wardrobe shadow to bed-shadow.
From bed-shadow to wall-shadow.
From wall-shadow to corridor.
Corridor to stairwell.
Stairwell to storage alcove.
Each movement, as effortless as the other .
He was not really moving but just being in another location. In a sense,shadows were all connected so it was more like focusing from left hand to the right one while being aware of both since they were connected to your torso.
He was choosing where to be again and again in a rapid pace.
Elias stopped in the stairwell and leaned lightly against the stone railing, breath steady but eyes wide.
No fatigue.
No strain.
No backlash.
Only the faintest ache behind his eyes — like light remembered, not endured.
"…I could leave," he realized.
Not dramatically.
Not with escape.
Simply… stop appearing here.
The thought sat with him.
He did not pursue it.
Instead, he returned to his room one last time and closed the door properly — out of habit, not necessity.
He sat at the desk and picked up his charcoal again.
This time, he did not sketch masks.
He drew lines.
Simple ones.
Intersections.
Shaded spaces between shapes.
Places where walls existed only because someone insisted they did.
He marked them carefully.
Then he wrote a single note beneath the sketch:
Shadow does not move.
I do.
Elias leaned back, eyes closing.
This was not power.
Power was loud.
This was masterkey to freedom
And that, he knew with quiet certainty, was far more dangerous than any fireball could ever be.
Somewhere down the corridor, a student shifted in their sleep.
Somewhere above, a lantern guttered.
And between them, Elias Marlow practiced being exactly where he was not supposed to be — learning, one silent step at a time, that the world had never truly closed itself to him.
—————————————————————
Very soon Elias learned where the shadow of the package fell.
It was not always in the same place.
The red-wrapped bundle sat on the small table beside his bed, unmoving, patient in the way only things that do not belong to time can be. Yet its shadow shifted even when the lantern did not — stretching longer than it should, pooling slightly deeper than the surrounding dark.
Sometimes, Elias found himself standing near it without remembering the decision.
Not reaching.
Just… close.
The breath of Summer did not call to him.
It did not pulse or beg, but he was always aware of it. Like a constant humming in the background.
That, he had learned, was worse. It kept him constantly on the edge. Like gnawing hunger that never let's up.
He stepped into shadow and let the room dissolve around him, reforming half a pace away — close enough to feel the warmth through absence. It was not heat like fire. Not even like sunlight.
It was the memory of heat. Like summer-day you remember so vividly, that when you close your eyes you can feel the sunlight and hear the birds singing.
The certainty that warmth would exist again.
Elias folded his arms loosely and regarded the wrapped essence.
"If I took you now," he said quietly, "you would fit."
The shadows did not argue.
They shifted subtly, acknowledging the truth of it.
Summer would balance them.
Anchor the cold edges.
Make them less… inward.
He could feel it already — how the warmth would flow through the negative spaces he occupied, how it would soften the places shadow tended to collapse into themselves. How it would make him easier to exist around.
More tolerable.
More human.
Elias exhaled slowly.
"That," he admitted, "is exactly why it would be a mistake."
He stepped closer.
The frost-threaded ribbon stirred faintly, as if recognizing him — or perhaps recognizing the possibility.
"If I bind you here," Elias continued, voice thoughtful rather than tempted, "then Mirage becomes part of the equation."
The city.
The Academy.
The Council's walls.
Their attention.
Their definitions.
He imagined stepping through shadow with Summer braided into him — imagined warmth leaking into stone corridors, light following where it was not invited, people noticing the wrong things.
Aster would notice.
The Fey child would laugh.
The road would close before it opened.
Elias turned away from the package and leaned his back against the far wall, letting the shadow take him halfway — not leaving the room, just easing the weight of being present.
"Summer is for movement," he said. "Not for waiting."
The thought settled easily.
When he took the breath of Summer, it would happen underneath the open sky. On a road that did not care who he was. Somewhere shadows and sunlight argued freely and neither won.
Somewhere between.
He glanced back once more.
"Soon," he promised — not to the package, but to himself.
The shadows shifted, accepting the delay.
They had learned patience from him.
Elias stepped fully back into the room and extinguished the lantern. Darkness claimed its proper shape again.
Tomorrow, he would practice farther from his walls.
Tomorrow, he would learn how shadow behaved in places that did not know him.
And when the road finally claimed him, when the city loosened its grip without realizing it had ever held one at all—
Then he would open the package.
Then he would let Summer into his shadow.
Not to become stronger.
But to become balanced.
For now, the breath of Summer remained wrapped, warm and watchful.
Elias Marlow decided to try and sleep,not because he was particularly tired, but because the world, for once, could wait. Besides he was curious if he was still able to
And for his delight, he indeed could. As he noticed in the morning.
—————————————————————
By day, nothing changed.
That was the lie Mirage preferred.
Elias rose when the bells rang. He ate with Rellin when food was offered. He carried planks, measured joints, argued mildly about axle width and the unforgivable crimes of poorly cured resin.
The wagon advanced.
Slowly. Properly.
Rellin complained as he worked — about roads, about merchants who thought comfort was an indulgence, about the fact that no one appreciated a well-balanced suspension until their spine survived a journey intact.
Elias listened.
He learned where weight wanted to settle. How wood remembered stress. How iron accepted burden differently depending on how it was asked.
All of it was useful.
None of it was urgent.
When the sun grew sharp and Mirage turned glaring and white, Elias drifted instinctively toward shade. Not hiding — just aligning. Rellin noticed, of course.
"You're getting pale," he muttered one afternoon. "That's not healthy."
Elias blinked. "I'm not ill."
"I didn't say you were," Rellin replied. "I said you look like the sun has personally offended you."
Elias considered this. "…It has."
Rellin snorted and went back to work.
Aster watched from her corner, said nothing, and wrote more than usual.
By night, everything changed.
Elias did not announce his training.
He simply… stopped sleeping altogether.
One night of restlessness. Then two. Then several where he lay on his bed, eyes closed, waiting for exhaustion that never quite arrived.
Instead, he felt clean.
Not energized in the way coffee or adrenaline provided — no sharp edge, no restlessness. Just a steady clarity, as if the weight of the day had been rinsed away somewhere between dusk and midnight.
The shadows were deeper at night.
Kinder, somehow.
Elias slipped into them cautiously at first — stepping from one corner of his room to another, then farther. Through walls he knew intimately. Along corridors where guards walked without seeing.
It was not difficult.
That was what frightened him.
Doors were irrelevant.
Walls were suggestions.
Shadow did not respect architecture.
If darkness touched darkness, Elias could pass.
He found himself standing in places he had never entered physically — storage rooms, unused stairwells, forgotten alcoves where dust gathered in peace. He lingered, learning the texture of shadow in each space.
Some were thin.
Some were deep.
Some felt… old.
When he returned to his room near dawn, he realized something unsettling.
He was not tired.
Not even a little.
He sat on the edge of the bed, thoughtful, and pressed his palm into the shadow pooling beneath it.
The darkness accepted him readily — cool, stabilizing, almost gentle.
"…So that's how," he murmured.
Sleep was for bodies.
Rest was for minds.
Shadow, it seemed, provided both — if one stopped fighting it.
Elias tested the theory carefully.
The next night, he did not lie down at all.
He spent hours moving through shadowed spaces, practicing transitions. Learning how far he could stretch before the edges of himself began to blur. Learning where he could pause — half in, half out — without consequence.
By the time the morning bell rang, he felt no worse than he had the night before.
Better, perhaps.
Sharper.
That was when he grew cautious.
He resumed sleeping — deliberately — if only for a few hours. Not because he needed it, but because not sleeping would be noticed.
Rellin already watched him strangely when Elias showed up to work alert despite long nights.
"You're going to burn yourself out," Rellin warned.
Elias smiled faintly. "I don't think I burn the way you do."
That earned him a look.
Aster noticed too.
She always did.
"You're reducing sleep," she said one evening, not looking up from her report.
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because shadow restores me."
A pause.
"That is not how it is supposed to work," Aster said carefully.
Elias inclined his head. "No. But it is how it does."
She did not argue.
Instead, she wrote faster.
By the end of the week, Elias had settled into a rhythm.
Daylight belonged to wood, iron, and roads not yet taken.
Night belonged to shadows — quiet, patient, everywhere.
And somewhere between the two, Elias Marlow realized something no one had taught him and no book had warned him about:
He did not need less sleep. Sleep was restoration and stillness. Apparently shadows were too. Ever since he started to so completely submerge himself into them he could ignore sleep, if he so chose.
And the shadows were more than willing to provide all the restoration and stillness he needed, while conscious.
——————————————————————
Light is not the enemy, mana is.
Elias learned the difference by accident.
He was on one of his late night wanderings, in the shadow academy, as he had taken to call the other side. Although shadow world would be more accurate since he suspected it would mirror everything and everywhere.
The room was an auxiliary practice chamber — unused most nights, but not sealed. He had drifted there through shadow without resistance, settling into a corner where darkness pooled naturally beneath a hanging rack of scorched practice dummies.
He was not hiding, just kinda sitting inside the shadow of the puppet's
The first hint came as heat.
Not ambient warmth — directed warmth. The kind that carries intention.
Elias stiffened.
A breath later, light bloomed.
Fire mana flared across the room, not as flame but as structured brilliance — a controlled manifestation meant to test projection, containment, focus.
The shadows recoiled in rejection.
Elias felt it instantly — the wrongness of it — like a muscle seizing where it should stretch. Mana-light did not illuminate shadow.
It displaced it.
The corner thinned.
His anchoring point failed.
Elias was forced out.
Abruptly.
He hit solid air in a half-step, weight returning all at once, heart hammering once — only once — before he forced himself still.
Across the room, a trainee frowned at their own hands.
"…Huh," the mage muttered. "That didn't propagate evenly."
They adjusted their stance and tried again.
Elias did not breathe.
He waited.
The second flare swept past where he had been moments before.
The shadows reformed the instant the mana dispersed.
Elias stepped back into them as easily as sinking into water.
No resistance.
No delay.
He did not move again until the room was empty.
When he finally returned to his own space, he sat on the floor with his back against the wall and let the afterimage fade.
"…So that's the limit," he murmured.
Not fire.
Not light.
Intent.
Mana did not reveal shadow.
It overwrote it — briefly, locally, aggressively.
Which meant shadow could not be treated as absolute.
It had blind spots.
That night, Elias did not practice movement.
He practiced staying.
He began methodically.
First: ambient light.
Lanterns. Candles. Glowstones. Sunlight bleeding through high windows.
None of it mattered.
Shadow remained shadow.
Second: reflected light.
Polished metal. Water. Glass.
Still stable.
Third: structured light without mana.
Mirrors, lenses, concentrated beams.
Annoying, but survivable.
Then mana again.
Fire first.
He let the spell bloom, watching carefully from a neighboring shadow — observing how the darkness withdrew not from brightness, but from assertion.
Mana claimed space.
Shadow respected claims.
Interesting.
He tried again — this time anchoring himself not to the absence of light, but to edges.
Under benches.
Behind angles.
Where light ended, not where it failed.
Better.
Then he did something subtle.
He stopped thinking of shadow as darkness.
And started thinking of it as permission.
Mana-light said: I am here now.
Shadow did not argue.
It simply stepped aside.
So Elias did not resist.
He moved laterally within it.
When mana flared, he shifted deeper into connected shadow — not retreating, not fighting — just… letting the light take what it wanted, and occupying what it ignored.
The result was immediate.
Stable.
Reliable.
He tested further.
When mana-light swept the room, Elias flowed around it.
Not faster.
Smarter.
Always in the places light did not insist upon.
Corners of intention.
Blind angles of focus.
Places the caster did not care enough to define.
It wasn't perfect.
But it worked.
By dawn, Elias had a rule set.
Not rigid.
Adaptive.
Stay where the world does not bother to look.
He wrote nothing down.
This knowledge was not meant for others to know.
Later that day, Rellin remarked casually:
"You look like someone who almost got caught doing something stupid."
Elias paused, then nodded once.
"That's accurate."
Aster watched him for a long moment from across the shed.
"Been doing some private study?" she said mora than asked.
"Yes."
"And you learned."
"Yes."
She nodded without asking more, as if she learned that she really doesn't want to know. She casually returned to her work.
——————————————————————
That night, Elias practiced again.
More cautiously.
More deliberately.
Light could push him out.
But only if it weren't on guard against it.
Elias was becoming very good at making sure nothing ever caught him off guard.
—————————————————————
Few nights later he noticed someone else doing what he was doing, wandering the halls of the Academy hidden by shadows.
Elias noticed her because she was doing it wrong.
Not badly.
Just… traditionally.
She moved through shadow the way shadow-path manuals described — cloaked in darkness much like he used to. Suppressing breath, minimizing presence through practiced discipline. Her technique was careful, layered, deliberate.
Good enough, but nothing original or exceptional.
He was already between places when he felt her enter the building. A slight tightening of the shadow lattice. A ripple of intention that suggested someone was using the dark rather than simply being overlooked by it.
Elias slowed.Then stopped.
She slipped along the far wall of the storage corridor, cloak of shadow tight on her form. face partially obscured,it seemed she couldn't see in full darkness like he could.
Her posture bent into the familiar geometry of infiltration and sneaking. Every movement was controlled, every pause measured.
She believed she was alone, she wasn't. Elias was next to her, nestled in her own shadow.
Elias watched from above her where lanterns cast her shadows or would have if she'd cast one. Her shadow cloak swallowed her silhouette in the physical corridor, but in shadow-sight her outline still existed—thin, disciplined, pretending not to."
He just stayed there,studying her.
He was simply observing,not affecting.
That was when she faltered.
A breath.
She paused mid-motion, shoulders tightening, head angling slightly — not toward him, not toward any specific direction.
Just… listening. Sensing her surroundings.
Her hand hovered near her belt. Probably hidden dagger there somewhere
Interesting.
She had felt it.
Not him.
But the pressure of attention.
Elias stilled completely.
Even thought quieted.
The shadows did not react — they had learned better by now — but the moment stretched, thin and tense like a thread pulled too far.
"…Nothing," she murmured to herself, barely audible.
She shifted her weight, exhaled, and continued.
But more carefully now.
Her movements sharpened.
Angles adjusted.
She avoided certain shadow-lines instinctively — not because she knew why, but because something in her training told her those places were… crowded.
Elias felt a flicker of something like respect.
Reasonably talented, he thought.
She was cloaked well enough that ordinary wards would slide past her. Her presence dampened efficiently. Her shadow adhered to her silhouette instead of trailing.
But she was still there.
Still a person, hiding inside shadow.
Elias was not.
He was fully in shadow academy, physically in there.
Which meant she could never see him.
But she could feel his attention perhaps..
She reached the end of the corridor and paused once more, glancing back — not at him, but at the space she had just left.
For a heartbeat, Elias wondered what would happen if he stepped out.
Just… occupied a space she expected to be empty. She would most likely get a shock of her life.
Then the idea passed.
He let her go, without doing anything.
She vanished down a stairwell, her shadow collapsing neatly behind her like a curtain drawn with practiced care.
Elias remained.
Still.
Listening to the silence return.
After a long moment, he moved — not following her, — simply resuming his own path through places no one else walked.
"…So I'm not alone," he murmured.
That did not trouble him.
What troubled him — just a little — was how close she had come to noticing something, perhaps connecting to shadows would make one sensitive to their minutiae changes.
——————————————————————
Later, much later, Aster would review a report noting a trainee operative who had paused during an otherwise flawless infiltration exercise.
Reason: unspecified discomfort. Feeling of being watched.
No anomaly recorded.
No presence detected.
Elias would never know her name.
She would never know his face.
But both of them, separately, would carry the same quiet certainty forward:
They weren't alone, or as unique as they first thought they were. Strangely it was source of comfort to both of them.