Caelum pushed open the door to their shared quarters and for a heartbeat the place held its breath. Elias and Seren were there...together, bent over a small map that seemed to mean nothing and everything at once. For a moment they looked like kids with a secret, the kind that should have included him; for a moment Caelum felt hollow, as if he'd walked into a joke in which he was the punchline.
Then their heads snapped up.
"Oh." Elias tried to make his smile easy, the way he always did when any awkwardness needed flattening. "We were—uh—just about to come get you."
Seren's calm matched him, but an edge of worry softened the corners of his mouth. "Today's lecture is special," he said. "They're discussing the awakening in depth. We thought you'd want to go—together."
Caelum studied both of them. Up close, he could see what he had seen from the river. The salt-tracks on his own face, the way his eyes had gone red from crying. Elias noticed first. His grin faltered; concern leapt into his expression like a flame. Seren moved closer without fuss, as if proximity alone could steady him.
"Have you been crying?" Elias asked, almost too quick.
Seren's voice was softer. "What happened, Caelum? Are you—are you all right?"
He hesitated. The words he'd heard.Brinet's voice, the Patriarch's plan still rattled inside him like a stone in a hollow. He had wanted to deny it, to tell himself he'd misheard, that it was some other conversation, that his mother only meant some distant child or some long-forgotten text. But every shard of evidence led him home.
"I—" He stopped, swallowed. The three of them had been children together so long that unspoken things had become almost spoken between them. Maybe that was why he felt the pause. He worried whether he should let them in, whether the secret would ruin more than his heart.
Elias dropped his playful tone and sat on the edge of the bench, elbows on his knees. Seren settled opposite, hands folded as if in thought. "Tell us," Seren said simply. "We're here. We'll listen."
It was the simplest invitation. No alarm, no immediate horror and it made Caelum's throat close. He took a breath and let the pieces tumble out, halting and raw. The pill, the missing herbs, Brinet's bright voice in the quarters, the Patriarch's measured words about binding and contracts, the phrase that had lodged like a shard in his chest....'mosquito's meat is still meat.'
Elias's usual color drained from his face until it was pale. Seren's fingers tightened once around his own wrist, the calm there became something else. Focus.
"Are you sure?" Elias said finally, as if asking might make the thing evaporate.
"Yes," Caelum answered. The word tasted like ash. "I heard them. I… I must have overheard, by mistake. I nailed my ear to the door."
Silence sat between them. It was not the stunned hush of disbelief but the steady, shocked quiet of friends that had been handed bad news and were already calculating how to respond.
"You shouldn't tell anyone," Seren said at last, low and firm. "Not yet." He looked directly at Caelum. "Not the Masters, not the elders. Not until we know for certain."
"Would you keep it?" Caelum asked, searching both faces.
Elias did not hesitate. "Of course. What good would blabbing do? We'll find a way."
Seren's gaze moved to the window, distant for a moment. "At the ceremony you'll be… vulnerable," he said. "If they try anything, we'll stand by you. We'll be near you at all times." He spoke with a stillness that wasn't bravado. It was promise.
The promise..simple and human hit Caelum harder than the Patriarch's cold calculus. He breathed, a long heavy thing, and felt something inside unclench for a second.
"You would do that?" His voice broke on the last word.
Elias slapped the bench with a grin that was mostly relief. "What are brothers for, if not to stop evil fathers from pinning soul-chains on us? Besides, I'm not letting them touch my best sparring partner."
Seren's hand reached across and squeezed Caelum's palm. "We'll protect you," he said. "We'll find a way. Even if what you heard is true, even if they try to bind you… we will not let them do it in secret."
They sat a while longer and said the small things. What they'd eat that day, a joke about an instructor who still trained like a windmill and those tiny ordinary pieces of life smoothed the raw edges of Caelum's fear for a few minutes. But the words he'd heard at the door crawled behind his ribs like a slow, stinging vine.
Finally Elias rose, stretching theatrically. "All right," he declared. "Special lecture on awakenings. Don't nod off. We'll go, learn a few secrets of the universe, come back masters, and then you'll be set for the Academy." He threw a conspiratorial look at Caelum, the same one that had gotten them into more trouble than either cared to count.
They left the quarters together and the air outside felt like it always did. Thin, bright, and bearing the scent of training grounds. But Caelum could not shake the feeling that everything was different now, a dome of fragile glass over the world.
*****
The lecture hall smelled of dust and ink and old wood. Scrolls sat stacked by the pillars; an elder had placed a large crystal at the center of the room that pulsed faintly with stored mana. The Master, an austere woman named Daereth who handled the students' awakening lectures moved with measured grace through the crowd. Today the hall felt closer, as if the walls leaned in to hear.
"Today," Daereth said, "we will speak plainly about what occurs during an awakening. Many of you will hear stories, tales of prodigies, of bloodline blessings, and of curses. Ignore the spectacle. Listen to the structure."
She spoke of stages and vulnerability, and though the words were not new to Caelum, the way they were arranged cut him. The early stages, she explained were when a child's bloodline, heritage, and latent laws first began to anchor themselves in the mortal shell. The soul became porous for a time, receptive and, yes, vulnerable. That was when a bloodline would either bloom or wither. That was also when unscrupulous men might attempt to coax or trap what the heavens had left exposed.
A murmur ran through the students, but Caelum could only look at the crystal as if it might answer him. He thought of the Patriarch's voice, the calm planning tone and imagined contracts written in ink woven with magic that could not be removed by ordinary hands.
Daereth's voice sharpened. "Protection is crucial. But don't worry, that's why you have a family. They'll protect everyone of you during the process. The ethical line between protection and control is thin. Study it. Learn to detect intrusion by foreign sigils and contracts. Know your own soul."
Seren leaned close to Caelum and whispered, "We'll learn that. We'll learn how to spot a binding."
Elias' elbow pressed into his ribs. "And if they try any funny business, we'll tear their scrolls into confetti."
The humor should have made Caelum smile; instead he felt a hollow laugh trembling at the back of his throat. The knowledge from the lecture settled over him like a second skin, tight and immovable.
After class they were allowed to practice counter-rituals, simple opposition charms that could shiver a thin enchantment. They ddn't teach them much because the caln is going to protect their kin anyways. Elders supervised, correcting posture and intonation. The exercise should have been clinical, the kind of training that made muscles memory of words and signs. For most of the students it was that. For Caelum, it was an exercise in the most dangerous thing he knew: pretending.
He mouthed the counter-phrases, braided his fingers in the way the master instructed, felt the warm tingle of controlled mana move through him like a river redirected. His hands answered, precise despite the tremor in his chest. At one point the master gave him a nod. You were taught well.
But as the practice went on a curious thing happened. A boy across the circle mispronounced a line and the elder corrected him with a soft rebuke. The boy's panic made his pulse quicken; his blood glowed faintly in a way that was striking to watch. For a blink Caelum's vision tunneled; the scent of adrenaline and panic smelled not unlike blood. Images flickered, noises, hunger, teeth, the edge of a mouth so swift he had to catch them before they became full pictures.
His friend's breath hitched next to him. Seren's hand brushed his shoulder. "Focus," Seren mouthed silently. Elias gave his elbow a squeeze as if to anchor him.
Caelum forced the present back into place; he smiled when called upon, when the elder praised his form. He moved with discipline. He did not give them reason to look twice in the wrong way.
Still, when the day's training ended and they walked back through the yard toward the quarters, Caelum's feet felt leaden. He kept thinking of the phrase mothe- No, Brinet had said 'mosquito's meat is still meat' and how fitting, gruesome and pragmatic, that tone had been. It was as though plans and ethics had been reduced to bookkeeping. Profit and loss in the same ledger.
That night the three of them sat under their tree again. The evening air felt thin and sharp. Stars pricked through the velvet dome above; their light was cold and indifferent.
"Promise me one thing," Caelum said finally, voice small.
Elias snorted. "Another thing? I promised the moon I'd buy it coffee this morning, what's one more promise between friends?"
Seren smiled, easing the humor away. "Tell us."
"If—if anything happens at the ceremony," Caelum said, "if they try to bind me, don't let them. Hold me if you must. Protect me. Even if it's dangerous for you." He knows it's selfish but...he mustn't let their plan work.
They were quiet; the gravity of the request settled on all of them like a stone. For a long moment there was no bravado, no jokes. Just the three of them and the weight of what they might have to do.
Elias reached out, gripped Caelum's shoulder, and his voice was low, something like a vow. "We'll stand with you. No one touches you without a fight."
Seren added, "We will learn everything we can about contracts. If they try to force anything upon you, we will break it or break ourselves trying."
They spoke until their voices grew hoarse with promise and the stars wheeled above like indifferent witnesses. Caelum let their words bury the aching inside him, if only for a few hours. He dozed at last with the feel of their hands still warm at his sides, and the terrible knowledge of what he'd overheard pressed into his dreams like a cold iron.
When dawn came it would bring preparations, the hush of the clan's ritual, the drumbeat of the awakening everything they had trained for and everything that might unmake them. He had friends; he had a plan thin as paper but there. That tiny filament of hope was both comfort and terror.
He slept, then, with a finger on the chord that might snap everything: hope tethered to betrayal.