There was no official record of the Divergence Core.
No instructors mentioned it.No maps marked it.No bells rang when he returned.
But Callum had changed.
Not visibly. Not in strength or stature.
He had simply stopped asking whether something was allowed.
Instead, he started asking how firmly it had been believed before.
And whether that belief could be made to hesitate.
Because hesitation was the beginning of collapse.
And collapse, carefully controlled, could be beautiful.
In his next lecture, he didn't raise his hand.
He didn't need to.
Instructor Rask was explaining Core Stability—how magic flowed only where principles remained unbroken.
"Aether follows Order," she said, tracing a triangle of runes in the air.
Callum whispered:
"Unless the Order was a suggestion."
The rune flickered.
Half the class gasped.
One student dropped their quill as the diagram warped mid-air.
Rask turned slowly, squinting at him.
"Mr. Vance," she said. "Would you care to explain that interruption?"
He met her gaze, calm.
"I wasn't interrupting, ma'am. I was demonstrating."
Rask narrowed her eyes.
And nodded.
"Very well. Continue."
He stood up.
Walked to the front.
Drew a circle on the board.
Then said:
"We assume magic flows in structured channels. Because we think structure contains truth."
He drew a second circle, jagged and uneven.
"But what if structure is just... habit? A tradition we force onto wild systems until they forget how to disobey?"
He turned back to the class.
"Maybe truth doesn't live in order. Maybe it avoids it."
Silence.
Elly stared, mouth half-open.
Harlan leaned forward like watching a cliff edge from too close.
Even Rask didn't interrupt.
Callum drew a third circle—broken, incomplete, open-ended.
"This is where I'm working now," he said. "Where I've placed the Principle of Maybe."
The name stuck.
By week's end, five students were copying his chalk diagrams into their notes.Three had started experimenting with hesitation spells—concepts that activated only when the caster doubted them mid-cast.One student nearly collapsed after whispering:
"This spell may or may not protect me."
And then getting hit by lightning.
Still, the faculty began to take notice.
Not openly. Not with awards or commendations.
But Callum noticed the change.
Fewer punishments. More sidelong glances. Instructors offering hypothetical questions in class that danced around uncertainty.
One day, Dean Saville herself watched from the back of a lecture.
She said nothing.
But she nodded once when Callum finished speaking.
Jerren wasn't pleased.
"You're drawing attention," he warned, pacing the Null-Null classroom like a storm barely held together.
"You taught me to use this," Callum said. "Why shouldn't I apply it?"
"There's a difference between testing a structure and becoming its opposite."
Callum leaned back in his seat.
"That sounds like something someone would say before losing their position in a system."
Jerren stopped pacing.
His dozen eyes focused, cold.
"You're building a heresy."
Callum raised his hand. The mark on his palm glowed faintly.
"No," he said. "I'm building a contingency. For when the rest collapses."
Elya loved it.
"This is the first thing I've ever halfway believed in," she said, arms crossed, boots up on the table.
Callum handed her a chalk shard.
She twirled it between her fingers.
"If Maybe becomes strong enough," she said, "can it stand against certainty?"
"It doesn't need to," Callum said. "It just needs to make certainty doubt itself. That's enough."
She smirked.
"You're dangerous."
"I'm careful."
"Same thing," she replied.
It was around then the letters started again.
This time not under his pillow.
Carved into places no one else could've written—beneath a teacup, folded into the crease of his coat collar, stitched into the hem of a scroll.
Each one marked with a sigil he'd never seen but always recognized.
And each one asking a variation of the same question:
How far are you willing to go to replace truth with possibility?
At first, he didn't answer.
Then one night, on a page of his journal, he wrote:
"Until the world forgets what it meant to choose only once."
The ink shimmered gold.
And vanished.
Two days later, his dorm room disappeared.
Not the building. Not his belongings.
Just... the room.
He returned from class and opened the door.
It led to a garden of stars.
Not metaphorical.
A literal space garden—soft moss, floating islands, and constellations like fireflies that drifted through the air.
Elya appeared behind him.
"Let me guess. Your bed turned into a metaphor again."
"I didn't do this."
"No, but someone let you."
A single chair stood in the center of the floating field.
On it: a figure cloaked in uncertainty.
Not shadow. Not light.
Just something your eyes refused to decide on.
"Finally," it said.
"You're ready to speak with the Guild."
They called themselves the Guild of Gray.
Not gray as in color.Gray as in condition.Gray as in the state between law and chaos, between belief and denial.
Their purpose wasn't revolution.
It was resilience.
"Systems collapse," the cloaked figure said. "History proves it. Every fixed law erodes under its own weight."
Callum stood straight, unflinching.
"You want me to help take the Academy apart?"
"No," said the figure. "We want you to keep it from crushing itself."
"And what does that take?"
The figure reached out a gloved hand.
"Someone who understands how to write Maybe into the bones of reality."
The agreement was simple.
He'd teach one hidden lesson per week to selected students.He'd write anonymously into the sub-lectures of the Codex, updating definitions quietly.And he'd never, ever, declare a new Principle aloud.
That last one mattered most.
"Because if you say it," the figure warned, "you bind it. You fix it in place. And then it's no longer Maybe. It's just... another rule."
Callum agreed.
And the garden folded into his room again.
Except the bed had become a desk.
And the window now opened to nothing but fog.
He began to notice the world reacting.
Not rejecting him.
Just... compensating.
Spells that had once been absolute faltered around him.Truth stones misfired.A peer's teleportation scroll dropped them three feet to the left of their intended destination.
He wasn't breaking magic.
He was making it second-guess itself.
Even the mark on his palm had started to shift—no longer glowing clean gold, but rippling between hues like it was being repainted constantly.
And with each breath, he felt the Principle of Maybe deepen.
A philosophy.
A weapon.
A sanctuary.
At the end of the week, Instructor Rask handed him a folded page.
No words. Just a rune he hadn't seen before—like an open circle, cracked slightly at the top.
He looked up.
Her eyes were tired.
"This came for you," she said. "They don't say who sent it. But they asked me not to interfere."
He nodded.
Unfolded the page.
Inside:
The Chancellor requests your presence. Bring no truths. Only questions.
Callum exhaled.
Then packed his journal.