Lu'Ka had barely returned to his office when the summons arrived.
There was no preamble. No Council seal. Just the Chancellor's private crest, pulsing softly across his terminal screen.
REPORT TO THE UPPER SPIRE – PRIVATE. IMMEDIATE.
He stared at the message for a moment, unmoving, then closed the display with one tap. The room returned to silence.
This wasn't unexpected. Just sooner than he'd hoped.
He rose without speaking, adjusted the cuffs of his coat, and stepped toward the transit lift outside his chamber. The air in the corridor felt heavier than it should have. Or maybe that was just his pulse catching up with his thoughts.
He entered the lift alone.
As the chamber ascended, the transparent outer panels gave way to a rising view of Meridi Axis. The capital sprawled outward like a radial engine—domes, towers, archives, and orbital terraces gleaming under filtered sunlight. The curvature of the upper district glinted gold, and far beneath him, the lecture halls where students still debated the echoes of his question.
If one survived… what would you do?
He watched the city blur beneath him—towers of glass and alloy, long spines of solar reflectors, hover lanes blinking with distant motion. But the higher the lift climbed, the less it felt like any of that mattered.
Here, at this height, the Academy was silent.
Even gravity hesitated.
He studied his reflection in the polished wall—blue skin, rigid posture, but eyes darker than usual. The kind of darkness that came from doubt. Not in himself. But in the system he served.
He hadn't slept since the lecture.
And not because of the Council.
Because of her.
The girl.
The one who had sat through the storm in silence, watching chaos erupt around her. The one who read glyphs that hadn't been spoken in cycles. The one who didn't remember who she was—because her people had been erased so thoroughly that even memory had abandoned them.
Niri.
The lift slowed.
The platform adjusted to the atmospheric shift as they passed the gravitic threshold into the spire's high-altitude vault. Light bled inward through refracted crystalline panels, soft and shifting like liquid starlight.
The doors opened.
Lu'Ka stepped into the sanctum.
The Chancellor's chamber had always reminded him more of a reliquary than an office. Ancient galactic maps adorned the walls. Neural data sculptures hovered silently above sealed platforms. A living perch—part throne, part organic command core—floated at the center of the room, anchored by woven alloy and bioengineered vines.
And perched atop it: Chancellor Yvith Korr.
She did not greet him.
She never did.
But she was already watching.
Her four eyes—two violet, two gold—were fixed on him, motionless. Her feathers were sleek, precise, as if ironed into blade-sharp symmetry. Nothing about her posture hinted at rage. Only readiness.
"Lu'Ka," she said.
Her voice was smooth as always, but it had the weight of a blade being drawn.
"You caused an incident."
He inclined his head. "I gave them a word. They gave it power."
"One word," she said, "and half the lecture hall went into panic protocol. Do you know how many security nodes flagged aggression spikes? Five. In one cycle. We haven't seen that since the Greywing Riots."
Lu'Ka stood still. "Then the fear is real."
Yvith rose—not abruptly, not with hostility—but with the elegance of a sovereign descending from orbit. She stepped off her perch and walked toward him, long and slow, feathers trailing behind her in delicate folds.
"You knew what you were doing," she said. "And you chose to provoke them."
"No," Lu'Ka replied. "I chose to measure them."
Yvith narrowed her gaze. "You're too careful to be reckless, Professor. You've never asked a question without a reason."
"I still don't."
She circled him now, steps soft against the glowing floor. "You scrubbed your logs. Every trace of your departure. Every fragment of the Kaleid-One's journey. You buried your landing coordinates and sealed the field data behind encryption filters we haven't used in a decade."
Lu'Ka didn't answer.
"And yet," she continued, stepping back into view, "you forgot something."
She turned slightly, and a new projection shimmered into the air between them. A flight log. A waveform. A sequence of system handshakes from a ship returning into Ascendancy space.
"Council protocol," she said. "The Kaleid-One is still tagged as an institutional asset. And when it re-entered protected airspace, it sent a full diagnostic ping. Including a compressed mission capsule. Directly to my private channel."
Lu'Ka's breath caught.
Yvith didn't gloat. Her voice remained flat.
"I know everything."
For the first time, he faltered. Just for a heartbeat. His posture held, but his hands tightened behind his back.
"She—" he began.
"I know about the girl," Yvith said.
Silence.
She folded her wings more tightly, stepping into the light.
"You thought I didn't already suspect? You thought you could shield her behind an invented status and a falsified intake record? Lu'Ka… I knew the moment you stepped off that ship that she wasn't just some lost scavenger."
He didn't try to defend himself.
She let that sit.
Then added, "We have something very dangerous among us. Something the Council never wanted to face .. And now she's sitting in your lecture hall."
Lu'Ka looked her in the eye. "She's not dangerous."
"No," Yvith said. "But the idea of her is."
A pause.
He spoke again. "What do you intend to do?"
Yvith turned, walking back toward her perch.
"We keep the secret."
His voice sharpened. "That's all?"
She turned sharply. "Rebels are moving on three fronts. Council fleets are consolidating. And now, after cycles of silence, a human arrives here—now—under your care. You want me to believe that's coincidence?"
"She didn't choose to be here."
"No," Yvith said. "But someone chose to send her."
He stepped forward. "You think she's a weapon?"
"I think she's a question," Yvith said. "And questions like this never stay silent for long."
Lu'Ka's jaw clenched.
"She doesn't even remember who she is."
Yvith's tone stayed calm. "That won't matter when someone else decides who she's supposed to be."
Another silence passed.
Then she spoke again, more slowly.
"Keep her in line, Professor. I'll help maintain the cover—refugee status, scholarship, clearance to attend. But her studies must remain unimpeachable. If she falls behind, if she draws attention, or if the Council starts asking questions I can't contain…"
Her voice drifted into something cold.
"…she disappears."
Lu'Ka stared at her, unblinking.
"And what about you?" he asked, quietly. "If you believe she's real—what would you do?"
Yvith didn't answer at first.
She walked back toward the projection panel, paused beneath the pulse of filtered light.
Then she looked at him.
"We survive," she said. "The Council has never met a human. Never confirmed one in our lifetime. And now, after all this time, she arrives here? It's too much for coincidence."
She turned back to him, each word precise. "This isn't just a discovery. It's a secret wrapped in danger. And if we're not careful, it becomes a weapon."
"She already is," Lu'Ka said.
"Then keep her from becoming a threat," Yvith finished, her voice flat as stone.
Lu'Ka exhaled through his nose, long and measured.
"You said we were built on ruins," he said. "That our future depends on understanding the past."
"I said that," Yvith replied. "Before I saw what was buried."
"You sent me to Dakun."
"I gave you silence," she said. "And you filled it with danger."
He stepped forward again.
"She decoded glyphs we've never been able to read. She survived a tomb with no life support. She knew what that beacon meant without a translator. And she didn't run from it."
"She doesn't need to run," Yvith said. "Because she has you."
Lu'Ka didn't respond.
Yvith turned away. "You have two cycle left. Then this becomes a Council matter."
He hesitated, then bowed slightly.
"Understood."
He turned toward the lift.
But before he stepped in, Yvith said one last thing.
"Keep her close," she said. "Not just for her safety. For ours."
The lift closed behind him.
---
The descent was slow. The pressure adjusted around him, soft and silent, as Meridi Axis returned to view.
But the city below didn't feel the same.
The light was dimmer.
The towers sharper.
The Academy quieter than it had any right to be.
Lu'Ka didn't move as the lift sank through the clouds. His eyes tracked the spires of the Archive Dome, the silver curve of the Lecture Hall, the soft pulse of the kinetic gardens where students often studied in the evenings.
Somewhere below, Niri was moving through that world like a ghost.
Invisible. Alone.
Carrying a name she didn't understand.
He reached into his sleeve and touched the crystal embedded there. The backup logs. The original glyph scan. The pulse map from the tomb. It was all still here—everything they had seen. Everything the Council didn't want to believe.
Everything the myths had warned about.
We remain.
She'd read it aloud.
Without hesitation.
The first time he'd heard her speak those words, he'd known.
Not because she looked like the stories. Not because she was human.
But because the signal had answered her.
Not him.
Not the ship.
Her.
The beacon had woken for her voice.
He looked up as the lift slowed, near the mid-tier levels. Light from the lower sky broke into view again, casting long shadows across the hallways and the arching staircases of the Academy's inner ring.
The doors opened.
Lu'Ka stepped out, coat trailing behind him.
But the pressure in his chest didn't ease.
It only deepened.