The Dominion Academy of vereth was carved into the cliffs of Tel'Nirath like a crown above the world. Here, the sons of kings and daughters of dead empires studied alongside fire blooded prodigies and sigl born orphans. It was the one place power mattered more than lineage —unless, of course, you had both.
Lady Saphine Ka'tarel had both.
Daughter of house Ka'tarel.
Blood-linked to the vanished Peak of Ka'Rinoth, the Silent Blade.
She wore her uniform sharp and her words sharper.
Everyone knew she was important.
No one knew how dangerous her life had become.
Saphine turned sixteen last month. And with that, tradition demanded she be assigned a personal bodyguard — someone her house has chosen long ago. Someone who would not speak of the duty. Who would walk among the students unseen. A ghost with a name.
She had her guesses.
But one name returned to her mind too often for comfort.
Eris Vale.
He sat in the back of Class 3A, near the window. Quiet. Average.
Too average.
No House crest. No guild pin.
No known Echo. No classification. No resonance flare during aptitude trials.
Technically, that should've made hime useless.
But Saphine had seen him move once — just once, when she dropped her pen and he caught it before it hit the floor, from across the room.
No Echo flared. No sigil burned. No reaction time made sense.
She had grown up among Echo-bearers. She knew what power felt like.
And Eris Vale felt empty — in the way a black hole felt empty. Not powerless. Swallowed.
That morning, as professor Solen lectured about Echo theory — the way certain mind could "resonate" with forgotten truths left behind in the world — Saphine caught Eris staring out the window again.
"Echoes," Solen said, scratching the chalk furiously, "are not nearly powers. They are fragments of meaning, of intent. The world remembers more than we know. A true Echo-bearer listens. Resonates"
Eris didn't look impressed.
She followed his gaze again.
There was nothing but the sky
And yet the back of his neck prickled, as if someone were watching him from the stars.
Later, during Echo drills, a classmate's unstable resonance burst — a spiraling flare of uncontrolled heat sigils — and it spun widely towards Saphine.
Students grasped. Instructor shouted.
Saphine did not move.
Because the flare never hit.
It simply vanished, mid-air — like a thread pulled from a weave.
No warning. No sound. No ripple.
The instructor called it a null- surge anomaly.
But Saphine saw one thing no one else did.
Eris blinked.
That night, in her dorm chamber overlooking the Abyssal star, Saphine stared into the fog below.
| "Two peaks are gone" she whispered, "and now I'm assigned a ghost in student's skin."
Behind her, the curtains stirred — though no wind blew.
She turned. Nothing there.
But below, deep in the academy's forgotten levels, a sound pulsed.
Not a voice. Not a song.
An Echo.
And someone — something — was listening back.
Elsewhere, beneath the great library, in a sealed vault long since erased from the records, a scroll was unwrapped. Dust curled off it's surface like smoke. A figure traced the ink, eyes glowing faintly.
|. Another Echo awakens... but this one watches instead of calling.
A pause
|. Could it be him?
And from the darkness, two ancient eyes opened.
To be continued....