Cael didn't sleep that night.
The name etched on that blade kept crawling through his mind like a live wire.
Velren.
Liar.
Someone knew. Not just about his alias — they knew who he used to be.
That meant one thing: they weren't from the present.
They were from before.
He spent the morning combing through the newly unlocked Archive of Crows.
The deeper layers didn't house books — they housed secrets.
Walls of magical stone pulsed with trapped whispers, soul-bound records, and dead voices etched into ether.
Cael pressed his palm to the Scion Registry again.
Nineteen names.
All erased from existence after the purge.
Except one.
Scion #12. Status: Alive. Location: Unknown.
No name. No House. No fate.
Just… an echo.
Cael tracked anomalies in magical resonance — things left behind when a Scion activated their glyphs. Every Scion left a unique signature when they drew power.
Most were silent now. Dead. Ash in the system.
But one?
One still sparked — faint, flickering, like a candle in a storm.
Coordinates: The Withered Span.
A ruined border town. Destroyed twenty years ago during the Crown's southern campaign.
Nobody lived there anymore.
Or so they thought.
The moment Cael arrived, he knew.
The air was wrong.
Dead air never carried that much tension.
He moved through crumbling streets coated in ivy and dust, glyphs drawn in his palm, cloak sweeping ash.
At the center of the town: a shattered cathedral.
And within it — light.
Someone was drawing a circle.
"Been a while," the voice called out before he could speak. "Didn't think you'd find me."
Cael stepped inside.
A woman knelt on the cracked marble, sketching radiant runes in the floor with her own blood.
She looked… normal. Dirty blond hair, scar across her cheek, wearing nothing but travel leathers. But her eyes?
Her eyes screamed war.
"You're Scion Twelve," Cael said.
She looked up.
"Was. Name's Eira now."
He felt it — the pulse of dormant glyphs. Ancient. Powerful. Unlike anything he'd felt since his own execution.
"You survived."
"No," Eira said. "I escaped."
She didn't trust him.
Good.
Trust was a trap.
They traded information like weapons.
Eira had been hunted for years. Derian's agents killed three of her safehouses. She moved constantly. Watched from shadows. Watched the world forget she existed.
"They purged us," she said. "But you… You died."
"I got better."
They sat in silence.
Then Eira dropped a bomb.
"I wasn't the only one who escaped."
Cael's spine stiffened.
"You're saying—?"
"There were three of us," she said. "Me, a girl named Sarre, and the boy they called the Crownless Flame."
Cael's blood froze.
That was his name.
Caelum Ardent.
"You knew me."
Eira's expression darkened. "I followed you. You were the firestarter. The one who challenged the High Consul's heir to a duel in the capital square."
"You mean the one I lost."
"No," she said. "You won. That's why they erased you."
The duel had been twisted in memory. In history. The version Cael had believed — that he'd failed — was fabricated.
Derian rewrote the record.
Because the truth was more dangerous than the lie.
Cael hadn't died a traitor.
He'd died a threat.
"Where's Sarre now?" Cael asked.
Eira shook her head. "Gone underground. Last I heard, she joined the Black Vow."
Cael's jaw tightened.
The Black Vow — a rogue order that specialized in forbidden magic, assassinations, and… resurrection.
Exactly the kind of place a survivor of the purge might end up.
Before they could plan further, the wards screamed.
Cael and Eira turned — and the doors shattered inward.
Three masked Tribunal enforcers stepped inside, dressed in shadowsteel and armed with null glyphs.
Cael moved first.
A flick of his wrist sent a razorburst carving the lead enforcer's chest open.
Eira drew her blood circle into a shardstorm, razors of light slicing into the second.
But the third enforcer was fast — too fast.
He tackled Cael, driving him into the floor, blade at his throat.
"You're not supposed to exist," the enforcer hissed.
Cael grinned.
"That makes two of us."
He bit down on the spellstone hidden in his back molar.
Explosion.
When he woke up, the cathedral was fire.
Eira dragged him through the wreckage.
One enforcer still alive, coughing blood, reached for a rune.
Cael kicked his wrist, cracked it sideways, and burned the glyph into the air: Erase.
The man stopped moving.
"You're insane," Eira muttered as they limped into the woods. "That was a self-detonation glyph. You could've killed us both."
"I counted on the walls."
"You're insane."
"You already said that."
They paused at a stream. Eira stitched her own arm with threads made from her hair and magic.
"You're going to go after Sarre, aren't you?" she asked.
"I need to know what they did to us. Why they purged us."
"Then start with this," she said, handing him a chipped emblem: a phoenix wreathed in barbed vines.
"The mark of the Black Vow," she explained. "Last place Sarre was seen was in Veldrath. You'll need to go underground. Real underground."
"Then I guess that's where I'm going."
Eira gripped his wrist suddenly.
"If you find her… don't trust her right away. She's not the same girl we knew. None of us are."
Cael nodded.
Neither was he.
Back at the Academy, chaos brewed.
The headmistress received reports of Tribunal agents killed in the field. Derian's ravens screeched in fury. Threats and sanctions poured in like floodwater.
And still…
Cael returned, bleeding but alive, carrying a single name:
Sarre.
His next target.
His next truth.
Maybe his last ally.
Or his first enemy.