The road to the capital unspooled like a ribbon of gray beneath the Aldery carriage. Banners snapped above the walls in the morning wind, the city's hum growing louder as cobbles replaced dirt and stone towers rose like spears into the sky. Inside the carriage, the air smelled faintly of oiled leather and lavender. Duke Reinhardt sat opposite his son, arms folded, jaw set; Lady Isolde's hands rested lightly on Ernest's shoulders as if she could anchor him with touch alone.
"This is where you prove yourself among heirs," Reinhardt said at last. His voice was steel filed to an edge. "You will not falter. You carry Aldery."
Ernest looked up; his posture was perfect, his pale hands folded neatly in his lap. "Yes, Father."
Isolde leaned forward to adjust the black velvet collar at his throat, the silver trim catching a shard of light. "And remember what I told you," she murmured. "Smile. Even if you do not mean it. Nobles love what they think they see."
Ernest's mouth curved—precise, controlled, gone in a heartbeat. "I understand, Mother."
Outside, the city surged past—market stalls clustered under striped awnings, chimneys coughing white breath into the air, children running with kites that tugged against strings like desperate birds. Beyond all of it, the Academy rose on its hill: a crown of towers and bridges etched with runes, banners of the kingdom rippling along ramparts. Bell chimes drifted on the wind—clear, orderly, imperious.
Masks upon masks, Ernest thought, watching the spires grow closer. Another battlefield.
The carriage turned through wrought-iron gates engraved with the sigils of every high house. Servants in dark livery drew the doors open, bowing low as Reinhardt stepped out first, the Aldery crest flashing on his cloak. Isolde followed, her hand extended back toward Ernest.
He took it because it was expected. A picture framed in propriety: duke, duchess, heir.
The courtyard thrummed with voices. Students clustered in small knots, silks and leather and polished boots, laughter a little too loud, confidence painted on like lacquer. House standards fluttered in ordered rows—crimson wolves, golden hawks, a serpent biting its tail. Instructors moved like shadows at the edge of the crowd; priests in white watched with the stillness of statues, eyes half-lidded and measuring.
Whispers met the Aldery advance as inevitably as tide met shore.
"That's the Aldery heir—"
"Too pale. Look at those eyes—"
"Prodigy, they say. Or cursed with no childhood at all."
Ernest kept his expression smooth. He bowed, precisely the correct angle, when introduced; he said thank you at the expected rhythm; he let the hint of a smile flare and die on cue. He offered nothing more. He never offered more.
The restraint unsettled them more than arrogance would have.
Reinhardt's hand gripped Ernest's shoulder—firm, final—when they reached the base of the central steps. "Do not shame Aldery," he said quietly, for his son alone. "Strength and composure. Nothing less."
"Yes, Father."
Isolde brushed his hair back once more, as if the gesture could linger here when she could not. "Write to me," she said, and then softer, "Shine."
Ernest bowed to them both. The mask was flawless. Inside, the words slid across his mind like blades across whetstone.
Your world is power. Mine is command.
When he straightened, the carriage was already turning away. The courtyard swallowed him.
He looked, as he always did, before he moved. The Academy was a map of intent: young lordlings arrayed like banners, cliques knitting and unknitting with each laugh and glance; instructors shepherding, assessing; priests drifting toward groups with the slow certainty of tide. He catalogued posture and distance, the angle of chins, the heat of glares. Arrogance bared its throat in careless boasts; insecurity smelled like too-sweet perfume.
A boy with a signet ring too large for his hand laughed loudly near the fountain, pointing out a lanky student whose sleeves were frayed. "Look—country cloth at the Academy!" His friends dutifully brayed. The signet boy's wrist trembled when he gestured; his cheeks were mottled with heat. Overcompensating, Ernest noted. Soft under the noise.
"Look at him." The signet boy's friend tipped his chin toward Ernest, lowering his voice without lowering it enough. "The Aldery one. The… glass-eyed one."
"Don't stare," the first hissed, immediately staring.
Ernest didn't alter course. As he passed, the signet boy glanced up; their gazes touched for a single beat. Ernest did not glare. He did not sneer. He simply looked—flat, steady, unblinking—as if he were taking a measure and laying it aside as unworthy.
The boy's mouth opened. No sound came out. He turned back to his friends too quickly, words tumbling over themselves, the laughter now thin.
Throats exposed everywhere, Ernest thought. And none of them know it.
The crowd shifted. Sound narrowed. Even from across the courtyard, he felt it—a subtle pressure, a silence that wasn't silence at all, but the precise absence of noise where too much noise had been.
Celina Gold stood apart from the press of students, a bright seam of sun caught in her hair. The wind teased it into a halo; the silver-white of her dress made the emerald of her eyes startling. The curse wasn't visible, not as chain or brand. It lived in the air around her—in the way children's footsteps slowed near and then veered away, in the quick sideways look adults pretended they didn't cast before their faces settled into polite masks again.
"That's her," someone breathed. "The gods-marked."
"They say her magic bucked the leash. So the leash was tightened."
"Beautiful as a blade, cursed as a tomb."
Celina neither smiled nor frowned. She held herself in easy stillness, hands folded, attention neither inviting nor rejecting. When her gaze moved, it did so like a sword—unhurried, sure, alive. For an instant, it found Ernest.
Emerald met obsidian.
No nod. No smile. No startle. Recognition only, clean and wordless, like the feeling of a blade sliding into its sheath because it belongs there.
She wears a mask, Ernest thought. Hers forged by survival. Mine by will.
The headmaster's arrival broke the thread. Bells tolled again—closer, sharper. A man in runed robes mounted the dais, the afternoon light turning the threads of sigils along his sleeves to ink-fire.
"Heirs of the realm," his voice carried effortlessly without shout, "welcome."
The courtyard stilled. Even the banners seemed to breathe with attention.
"This Academy is our crucible. Here, strength is tempered by wisdom; here, alliances and rivalries are forged that will shout down years." A brief pause; the faintest smile that wasn't quite kindness. "You are not children here. You are futures. And futures, if they are to endure, must be sharpened."
Applause scattered like pebbles tossed into water and turned to a wave. Ernest did not clap. He let the words settle against him and fall away. Futures, yes. Pawns to futures, more often. But pawns are pieces I command.
They were sorted by age in the shadow of the west tower, names unfurling from a scribe's scroll held by a woman whose spectacles glowed faintly with runes. Servants hurried back and forth with trunks; instructors ticked boxes with quills that whispered like insects. The scribe's voice rose and fell, rising to the same cadence regardless of the house attached to the name.
"Aldery, Ernest—Class C, West Wing."
The signet boy from the fountain—Rival Heir, the label affixed and set aside—snorted just enough to be heard. "Class C," he said to no one, to everyone. "Interesting."
"Gold, Celina—Class C, West Wing."
Silence again. Not neglect now—attention sharpened to a knife point. A girl in blue whispered; her mother's hand closed around her shoulder until it whitened.
Ernest stepped aside as Celina passed to claim the slip of parchment that named her dormitory and schedule. She did not look his way. He did not look at her. The awareness between them stretched taut as a bowstring, and then they let it go with the same lack of fuss they would have given a breath.
The West Wing swallowed Class C like a calm mouth. Stone steps curved upward; windows caught late light and threw it like coins across the floors. The dormitory hall smelled of beeswax and old books. Servants bowed; a steward recited rules: curfew bells, practice yards, the locations of the kitchens for late meals if you thought yourself hungry and your tutors did not.
Ernest's assigned chamber was spare and clean: a bed neatly made, a desk, a wardrobe with his uniforms folded into obedient squares. He set his small trunk on the stand; a young valet hovered with a polite wariness that read, to Ernest, as stay long enough to be useful and short enough to be forgettable.
"Shall I unpack for you, my lord?"
"Yes. Thank you."
The boy exhaled almost-not-relief and set to work. Ernest walked to the window.
The Academy spread outward beneath him like a board. Training yards stitched into rectangles of bruised grass. A dueling circle inscribed in white chalk. The library's long spine of glass and stone. The priest's chapel a clean square—tooth-white, perfectly proportioned, smug. Students trailed along paths in bright threads of color, tugged into clumps and let go again; laughter rose and frayed, rose and frayed.
His reflection ghosted the glass—pale face, dark eyes, the curve of a mouth that almost never reached his eyes. In that double world, he looked like a boy made of quiet water and knife edges.
"The Aldery heir?" a voice hissed outside the door. "They say he doesn't blink."
"That's absurd," someone else replied, only to add in a whisper's whisper, "Did you see him not blink?"
"Nonsense. And yet—Celina Gold is in our class. The priests will be all over—"
"Don't say her name so loud!"
They drifted away. He didn't smile, exactly. The gladness that moved through him wasn't joy. It was the click of a piece into place.
On his desk, the schedule parchment lay like a game opening: morning lectures in magical theory, afternoons divided between sword forms and mana control; history and law threaded through; etiquette and diplomacy set like traps.
They will measure breath and call it mastery, Ernest thought. They will trace circles and call it control. He imagined the Voice of God sliding beneath their metrics like a current under ice. Let them teach me their shapes. I will use their shapes to cut them.
A bell tolled—one, two, three. The courtyard's voices softened into something like anticipation's hush. Down in the shadows between buildings, a priest paused and turned, as if he had heard something no one else had. His head tilted. The moment thinned to a wire. The priest's lips moved; a bead of light kissed his tongue and vanished. He moved on.
Endless Veil settled around Ernest's shoulders as lightly as breath.
He drew the curtains closed. The valet finished with the last shirt, bowed, fled. The room's silence steadied. He sat at the desk and pried up the false bottom of his small trunk; slid his notebook into the drawer with the school-issue quills; capped the ink bottle with a careful turn.
The forest had given him teeth. The noble halls had taught him masks. The Academy would give him an audience.
He lifted his gaze once more to the window's dark, to the faint reflection there that wasn't quite a child's and wasn't quite not.
"The forest bent," he said softly, so softly the words barely made sound at all. "Nobles bowed behind masks. The Academy will kneel."
His lips curved, just once—a small, precise wound in the calm.
"I am the Voice that commands," Ernest whispered to his own eyes in the glass, "even in silence."