There were 13 known class designations in Arcanum Academy.
Each aligned with a Principle: Pyromancy for Will, Aethercraft for Vision, Runics for Logic, and so on. They were cataloged, measured, and carefully documented in the Codex Arcanum—the book all first-years were required to memorize.
And yet, buried in the folds of a corrupted attendance record, Callum found an entry labeled simply:
Class Null-Null.
No instructor.
No location.
Just one name beside it.
Callum Vance.
He stared at the page, not blinking.
It hadn't been there yesterday.
Elya leaned against the rusted remains of an old spell forge, watching him process.
"I told you. You're not a rulebreaker," she said. "You're a rule that rewrites itself."
Callum tore the page out and held it up.
"This isn't possible. This was a ledger from twenty years ago."
Elya shrugged. "History is fragile here."
She stepped close, tapping the name.
"Magic is shaped belief. If you believe hard enough that you've always belonged to a class no one remembers… eventually the system agrees."
Callum looked up. "I never believed that."
She gave him a look. "Are you sure? Not once? Not when you didn't fit anywhere else?"
He didn't answer.
Because he had thought it. Long before the mark. Long before the [Lie].
"I don't belong in any class," he'd once whispered to himself on the first night at Arcanum, alone in bed, lights off.
And the world, apparently, had listened.
They traced the listing to a hallway that didn't connect to anything.
It stood behind the Eastern Lecture Tower, next to a wall that was known to shift once a week as part of the Academy's auto-reconstruction loop. No students passed through it. No instructors mentioned it.
Because no one remembered it was there.
Until Callum knocked.
And the door opened.
Inside, the space looked wrong.
Not empty. Not dusty.
Just… new. As if it had been built this morning by someone who had never seen a classroom before but had read about them once.
There were desks. Chalkboards. A podium. All perfectly arranged. But none of them cast shadows. And the air hummed with unresolved memory.
At the far end of the room stood a man in gray.
He didn't turn when they entered.
His hands moved, writing equations on the board with chalk that sparked faintly with every stroke.
"You're early," he said.
Callum frowned. "Who are you?"
"I'm the instructor."
"I don't have an instructor."
"You do now."
The man turned.
He had no eyes.
Not like he was blind.
There were just… no sockets.
A flat stretch of skin where a gaze should've been.
"Welcome to Null-Null," the man said. "The class for those who lie better than reality can catch."
The instructor's name, apparently, was Jerren.
Or maybe it wasn't.
Names didn't hold well in this room.
"Why am I here?" Callum asked.
Jerren gestured toward the chalkboard. "Because you've passed the first Trial."
"I didn't take any test."
"You shaped a Principle. You broke the Thought-Knot. You stabilized a lost concept. That counts."
Callum crossed his arms. "Then what's next?"
Jerren smiled.
"Now you learn how to undo."
The first lesson wasn't a spell.
It was a word.
Retract.
"One of the few utterances allowed in root-logic casting," Jerren explained. "Used when a Belief becomes unstable or misaligned. Most mages never hear it spoken aloud."
He stepped forward, voice deepening.
"But you will learn to weaponize it."
He raised a hand and pointed to a symbol on the board—a diagram of fire magic, showing elemental resonance channels.
Then he whispered: "Retract."
The chalk caught flame.
Not with fire.
With erasure.
The diagram faded. Not burned. Not broken. Unwritten.
Callum felt his stomach twist.
"That's not spellcraft," he said. "That's… conceptual murder."
Jerren nodded.
"The mark you bear doesn't just lie. It rewinds. It creates divergence and expects you to fill the void."
Outside the Null-Null classroom, no time passed.
They tested it.
Elya stepped out and returned. No one had moved. The bell tower hadn't chimed. Her cup of tea was still hot.
Inside, they trained for hours.
Callum learned to whisper lies with precision.
To seed doubt instead of command it.
To build false patterns and watch the world finish them for him.
He whispered:
"This hallway is longer than it should be."
And the corridor stretched.
Not by force. But by implication.
He walked thirty steps and returned to where he started.
Jerren clapped.
"You're not using power," the instructor said. "You're using structure. That's what makes you terrifying."
On the fifth day, the first message arrived.
A letter, folded perfectly, slipped under Callum's pillow.
No name.
Just a phrase on the outside.
Do you remember what the sky looked like before?
Inside, a question:
"If you believe a better world once existed, can you lie your way back to it?"
He read it three times.
Then tucked it into his journal.
Did he want to go back?
Or had he already replaced too much?
Harlan noticed the change first.
"You don't blink as much," he said. "That's how I know you're doing something new. You get still."
Elly noticed next.
"Your lies are quiet now," she whispered. "Subtle. Like background noise."
Even the instructors began to adjust.
Master Argen paused during drills and asked Callum for demonstrations. Not because he understood, but because Callum's methods worked—sometimes terrifyingly well.
He whispered once:
"This weapon has already struck."
And his sparring opponent dropped the sword and backed away, claiming they'd felt the blow.
Elya stayed close.
She didn't attend Null-Null. Couldn't. She wasn't built for it.
But she watched.
And sometimes she asked questions Callum couldn't answer.
"If you rewrite a person's memory of pain," she asked once, "do you heal them or just hide the wound?"
"If you tell a god it never ascended, does it become mortal again?"
"Could you lie to death?"
Callum didn't know.
But he'd begun writing the answers anyway.
His journal now stretched across two volumes.
Each entry more dangerous than the last.
On the twelfth day, the classroom shifted.
Jerren stood silently at the front, unmoving, as the room began to… fold.
Not crumble.
Just rearrange.
The podium became a doorway.
The desks vanished.
And in their place appeared a spiral staircase made of ink.
Elya stared.
"I can't follow you down that," she said.
"I know."
She handed him something small.
A black pin. Shaped like a circle, bent slightly inward.
"What's this?"
"Anchor," she said. "For when you forget who you are."
He took it.
Pressed it to his mark.
Then descended.
The staircase didn't end.
It unraveled.
Each step took a memory.
His first day at Arcanum.
His mother's voice.
The scent of rain on the balcony of Dorm 3-West.
He tried to hold them.
But they slipped.
And at the bottom, a door waited.
Not made of wood.
Not of thought.
Of intention.
He reached for the handle.
Paused.
And whispered:
"I still remember the sky."
The door opened.
And the world blinked.