Kaien did not know how long he had been sitting.
Time moved strangely inside Chamber One. Without the sun, without the sound of bells or birds, the minutes stretched into something weightless. People were still being called forward. The process remained slow. Precise. Each name spoken felt like a thread being pulled tighter.
No one spoke above a whisper. No one dared break the pattern.
Three more candidates had disappeared into the light since Kaien last blinked. One boy hesitated before stepping forward. Another crossed the room with the confidence of nobility and vanished the moment he reached the center. The last girl barely seemed awake, eyes half-shut as she moved, yet the sigils responded to her presence with a low pulse of golden light.
Kaien remained still.
He felt the cold behind his ribs deepen. It had a rhythm now. Faint. Distant. Like the echo of something breathing far beneath the ground.
He ignored it.
He focused instead on the quiet sounds around him. The scrape of someone shifting on a stone bench. The flicker of glyphs dimming along the upper walls. The soft click of a scribe's pen.
It was easier than thinking.
A part of him wanted to leave. Not out of fear. Not exactly. It was something harder to name. He felt like an intruder in a place built for people who believed they belonged.
But he didn't move.
He was not the same boy who ran errands through the alleys. Not anymore. Something had already begun to change, and he knew enough to understand there was no going back.
Across the chamber, someone whispered something too soft to hear.
The ring above continued to turn.
And then it stopped.
Kaien felt it before it happened.
His name had not yet been spoken, but the cold inside him pulled tight, and the silence grew heavier.
The next name would be his.
He closed his eyes for a breath.
Then another.
And waited.