The eyes she held, glistening like polished sapphires in the sunlight, had lost their luster, now appearing dull and distant.
Everyone assembled in the Grand Auditorium, where a thousand candles floated in the air like stars. At the platform stood the Headmaster himself: Archmage Veyron. His robe shimmered with a thousand stitched glyphs, his staff crowned by a crystal that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Some students, unable to bear the weight of the trials, were unceremoniously kicked out, deemed "unworthy" by the relentless judgments of the test.
Aurelia, a noble by birth, navigated the trials with a grace that belied the challenges ahead. Though she ultimately lost to Kael, a commoner, he was still a prodigy of remarkable genius.
She held her own against him, earning the respect of the judges alike, but not that of her peers. Her resilience and ability to stand tall against such formidable talent only reinforced the decision to grant her a place among the aspirants.
"Welcome, official students," Veyron intoned, his voice echoing with ancient power. "Here, bloodline grants no crown. Effort, study, and resolve shall be your only measure. The Arcane Academy will strip away pretense and reveal the truth of your souls."
His words bit into Aurelia like frost.
No crown? No measure of bloodline? Nobility has always guided kingdoms, always led armies, always mastered the greatest of arts.
But hadn't Kael proved him right?
"It doesn't mean he'll always win," she thought stubbornly. "I'll show them."
⸻
Students were carefully categorized into distinct divisions based on their unique specializations and talents:
•The Arcanum: This division is dedicated to the spellcasters who possess the ability to manipulate raw Aether, transforming it into intricate and powerful forms of magic. Here, students delve into the mysteries of arcane energies, learning to weave spells that can alter reality, conjure elements, and bend time itself to their will.
• The Martial Path: This division is reserved for those who excel in physical prowess and martial skill, combining the strength of steel with the inner power of Aura. Students train rigorously in combat techniques and weaponry while honing their connection to their Aura, allowing them to enhance their abilities, channel energy into their strikes, and become formidable warriors on the battlefield.
• The Scholars' Wing: A haven for the intellectually curious and those deeply immersed in the world of theory and experimentation. This division attracts students who are passionate about alchemy, the study of spirits, summoning, and the intricate art of runes. Here, they bury themselves in ancient tomes, unraveling secrets of the past while experimenting with potions and charms that bridge the gap between the physical and the ethereal.
Naturally, Aurelia was placed into the Arcanum due to her talents in manipulating Aether.
⸻
As the dormitory assignments were distributed, laughter echoed among the nobles, their voices dripping with disdain as they flaunted their keys to rich suites adorned with intricate carvings and soft velvet furnishings.
In stark contrast, the commoners grasped their modest keys, which promised nothing more than what was necessary.
I can't stand here glooming over one loss, even if it was against a commoner. I refuse to let everyone's ignorance dictate who I am.
With determination surging through her, Aurelia swung the heavy dormitory door open, only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight before her.
The room matched the description on the assignment scroll to perfection, two towering windows framed with clean curtains, a set of beautifully carved beds that hinted at the craftsmanship of old, and a low table cluttered with textbooks, each spine bearing the weight of knowledge and shared dreams.
Golden sunlight cascaded through the windows, casting a mesmerizing pattern across the wooden floor, creating a dance of light and shadow.
Yet it was the silhouette by the window that truly took her breath away. There he stood, one boot casually resting on the sill, a book held open in his hands, utterly absorbed in the words, as if the world outside had faded away.
Kael Arden looked up as if she were an ordinary interruption. He folded the page and closed the book with the same calm deliberation he'd shown in the arena.
"What are you doing here?" Aurelia snapped before she could temper it. Her voice cut the space between them like a shard.
He blinked, slow and unfazed. "This is my room," he said.
"You're—" She could not finish. Her chest tightened. "This room is assigned to noble wards. Suites like this—" She swallowed a surge of heat she couldn't let show. "—are reserved for those of noble blood."
Kael set the book down, hands open, placid. "I didn't choose the room, nor did I expect you to be here," he said. "Instructor Malrec assigned it. He said the Academy prefers to place promising students where they can rest and study without want. I suppose they thought this one would suit me."
Aurelia stared. The words tasted wrong. "Malrec?" Her tone was incredulous. "He—he put a commoner in a noble's suite? Do you have any idea what that implies?"
"I have an idea," Kael answered softly. "They watched me today. They saw my control. They made a choice." He shrugged, but the motion had no pride, only a measured acceptance. "I'm grateful for the room, of course. I won't squander it."
Aurelia's fingers curled around the strap of her satchel until the knuckles blanched. The blood in her ears drummed like distant war drums. Every whisper she'd been trying to outrun crystallized into one cold thought: the Academy, her Academy, had put him here, within the walls that carried her family's sigils, in the place she had expected to claim as her own.
"You think you deserve it?" Her words were a blade. "Do you think you deserve to sleep where a Caelistra might rest?"
Kael's eyes met hers, and, for the first time, she noticed how quietly tired they were. "Not deserve," he said. "I have potential. That's what they said. Potential isn't a crown, it's work. I don't expect charity. I'll repay the kindness with effort."
Aurelia found herself oddly unsettled by the humility, it made the victory in the hall feel sharper, somehow more personal.
Around them, sunlight moved across the floor, and the day carried on. The room was now theirs, assigned, official. She could have left. She could have demanded reassignment, caused a scene, or called for an instructor. Instead, she stood there, mouth set, chest tight as iron.
"Very well," she said at last, each syllable a cold promise. "If this room is yours for now, stay. But understand this, there will be no comfort in victory for you, Kael Arden. I will make sure of it."
Kael inclined his head, expression unreadable. "I look forward to seeing you try," he said, returning to his book as if he had not just been told a threat.
Aurelia shut the door behind her and let it close on the sound of her own breathing. Fury and humiliation coiled in equal measure, an ember that would not be forgotten.
Aurelia set her satchel on the edge of the bed and drew an imaginary line across the woven rug with the tip of her finger, her movements deliberate and precise. "This is my side," she said, voice clipped. "That is yours. We do not cross. This is personal space." Her eyes flicked to Kael. "I'm a girl and you're a boy. Why the Academy decided to put us together is beyond me."
Kael folded a corner of the page he'd been reading and looked at her without surprise. "Probably because they wanted two promising students together, regardless of—" He hesitated, searching for a neutral word. "—gender. They'll keep the best where they can watch them, and if we sharpen each other under pressure.."
Aurelia snorted. "They should have put me with that spoiled brat instead." She jabbed a thumb toward the corridor as if the prince might be listening through the walls. "Prince Lucien. Self-entitled, arrogant, perfect company for the likes of me." Her tone sharpened and, for a heartbeat, something like grief slid through her expression before she smoothed it away.
Kael's face was unreadable, but his voice was quiet. "You don't seem to like him much."
She let out a breath that might have been a laugh or a sob. "Who would? It's not just dislike. Father talks of alliances, of marriages to strengthen bonds. Being a duke's daughter means a crown's interest in your future. A match with a prince is as likely as dawn." Her hands flexed, she did not mean to show how much the thought stung. "I—" She stopped herself. Pride returned like a shield. "Never mind."
Kael's shoulders lifted in a slight, sympathetic shrug. "It's not set. Things change. You'll have time."
"It's not comforting," she said, softer than she intended, then abruptly sharp again. "Also, why is my side bigger?" She jabbed a finger at the carved headboard on her bed.
He glanced over, then at the near-empty shelf on his side. "Instructor Malrec arranged it, based on what he said. He thought you'd need the space to keep your studies," Kael's lips twitched into something almost like a smile. "and also to remind you to sleep."
Remind me to sleep...? Did Rowena tell Malrec about my habits of staying up at night to study?
Aurelia huffed and set about unpacking. Potions clinked as she placed them in neat rows, scrolls rolled into perfect cylinders, and tomes stacked by size and subject until the shelf bowed under their neat gravity. Her movements were efficient, each item a small piece of the self she presented to the world.
When she glanced at Kael's half, the shelf was nearly bare: a single textbook, a few folded sheets of paper, a small kit of writing tools. For a breath, she felt, strange and unwelcome, a shred of pity, a soft tug at something she'd been sure had long hardened. But she straightened her jaw and smoothed the feeling away.
It suited him. Of course it did...
Humility was the armor of the unremarkable, she would not gift him her sympathy. She finished arranging her things with the same cool perfection she had drawn the line across the rug, and the small, civilized room closed around them both.
Aurelia sat on the edge of her bed, the carved wood cold beneath her fingers. The room smelled faintly of ink and wet leather where Kael had been reading, the single candle by his book guttered like a nervous heartbeat.
She had rehearsed a dozen scornful lines in her head, and none of them felt right now. Aurelia clenched her jaw as she gripped her hands tightly.
Damn it...Do I really have to ask this...
Pride sat heavy like a stone in her throat, the words she needed to say scraped raw against it. Still, she forced herself to do the unthinkable.
"Kael." Her voice was small. "How did you beat me?"
He didn't look surprised. He closed the book softly, deliberately, and regarded her as if he were measuring the weather. "Classify," he said after a pause.
Aurelia's jaw worked. "Classify what?"
"How did I win? Or how do you mean, did you mean how in terms of technique, or how as in advantage?" He tilted his head slightly, patient, as if this were an ordinary question.
She gritted her teeth, the words crawling up from somewhere she usually kept locked away. Saying them felt like admitting weakness. "How you beat me," she said finally, each syllable a scraped-off piece of armor.
Kael's face softened almost imperceptibly. He sat on his own bed, toes barely touching the floor, and folded his hands in his lap. "There's no secret, Lady Caelistra. Nothing I did in the arena was outside the rules. I won because I practice differently. That's all."
Her laugh that rose was brittle. "Practice differently. Of course. You have a way with understatement."
He smiled once, no triumph in it. "Watch, then. Not with your eyes, but listen. Most duelists, especially noble ones, rely on spectacle and force. Big gestures, big flames, designed to overwhelm. They assume victory will come from outmuscling their opponent." He looked at her hands, the faint ember still clinging to the skin of her palm where she toyed with flame. "You do it very well."
Aurelia bristled because it hurt to hear the truth framed so plainly. "And you, what? Whisper your spells into the ground and hope I trip?"
"No." He shook his head. "I listen to the Aether and the rhythm of your casting. Aether creates a pattern: breath, stance, and the slack in a wrist. I focus on finding that slack and using a small counter to widen it."
Kael folded the corner of the page he'd been reading and looked up without hurry. He held up two fingers and drew a tiny arc in the air, careful, almost shy. "I don't just watch motions," he said. "I listen to the Aether."
Aurelia frowned, perplexed yet intrigued. He smiled, no arrogance, only an odd, calm certainty that contrasted sharply with her doubts.
"When you throw fire, it doesn't just happen and end. It breathes. It leaves a tiny pulse in the space it crossed, like a bell struck and letting its sound hang. I learned to hear that pulse. The moment the pulse flexes, there's a place where it hasn't quite taken hold. That's where I work."
He tilted his head as if testing the room. "So I don't wrestle your flame. I step into the little silence it leaves for a second and nudge it away. It looks like a small move because it is. But small moves at the right moment stop a big thing."
Aurelia pictured her great arc again, how it had seemed whole and unstoppable until it sagged. He heard the bell, she thought, and the thought was both infuriating and, surprisingly, a little stunning.
Kael's voice softened. "I trained my eyes to watch the tiny hesitations, how a hand breathes before a bigger motion, how a throat tightens before a shout, and my hands to answer the echo instead of the shout. Everyone can practice counters. Not everyone learns to hear the after-note."
He shrugged. "It makes my work feel quiet. It costs less Aether, and it leaves fewer holes in the air. That's the point, do the least and change the most."
Aurelia folded the image of her failing surge into a thin, sudden focus. "You listened to the spell," she said, disbelief mixed with admiration in her voice. "Not just to me."
"Not just to you," Kael agreed. "To anyone. It's the same music, if you bother to listen."
She had expected arrogance, some flourishing about destiny, or cunning mentors. Instead, he had offered an equation: observation + restraint + repetition. It was humiliatingly practical. It made her feel absurdly like a child with a candle in a storm.
"You... had practice outside the Academy?" she asked, because if there were a tutor behind him, a hidden patron who polished this commoner into a weapon, then the lies could be pinned to someone else.
"No," Kael said. "My uncle taught me a little when I was small. Most of it was back home by the river, with whatever scrap of aether theory I could read. And then I practiced. I still practice." He glanced at her, and for the first time in the conversation, there was a plainness that bordered on apology. "I was given a chance here. I didn't ask for it to be easy."
Heat rose in Aurelia's face, shame and something she did not want to name: respect. It was quick and sour, like bile. She had burned with the drama of spells, he had tempered himself with the mechanics of magic, patience, and the grim steadiness of someone who had to make every advantage count.
"You're humble about it," she said, because words had to go somewhere. The observation felt stupid and tiny.
Kael's mouth tilted in a fraction of a smile. "Humility is not the same as weakness. It's just clearer sight. I know what I have, I know what I don't. I work the rest."
Aurelia listened and felt the last of something inside her crack. The crowd's whispers, the sting of the arena, each one pressed a different kind of coal into her chest.
Kael turned another page in his book, the sound scratching at her nerves. Aurelia sat on her bed, arms crossed, back stiff.
How? How did a commoner beat me? It shouldn't have been possible. My bloodline, my training, everything about me is superior.
And yet... he didn't overpower me. He dismantled me. Like he already knew where every strike would land.
Her gaze flicked toward him, studying the calm way his eyes moved across the page.
He doesn't just wield Aether. He reads it. Every shift, every hesitation, every thread in the air, he sees it all. I only ever caught fragments of such precision, but he turned it into an entire art.
Heat crawled across her neck.
Could Lucien match that? The prince throws light like a golden spectacle, but Kael... Kael doesn't need spectacles. He cuts straight to the truth.
Her fingers curled against the bedsheet.
Tch. I almost... admire him. A gutter-born nobody.
She shook her head sharply, refusing to let the thought settle.
No. I won't ask next time. But I'll learn. I'll study, I'll adapt, and I'll surpass him. Next time, I won't fall. Next time, I'll prove that Aurelia Caelistra does not kneel to a commoner.
The silence stretched, heavy with her vow. Then, without lifting his head, Kael's eyes slid sideways, meeting hers just for a moment. His expression was calm, too calm, like still water that might hide unknown depths.
Aurelia snapped her gaze away instantly, heat rising in her cheeks.
Damn him. He knows. He knows I'm thinking about it.
Kael hummed softly, turning another page. Then, almost absently, he said, "You'll figure it out... eventually." His tone was light, encouraging on the surface, but beneath it, Aurelia heard the quiet edge of challenge, as though he'd already placed her on a path she had no choice but to follow.
Her heart skipped, then twisted with irritation. She scoffed, folding her arms tighter.
Arrogant... smug... infuriating.
Aurelia turned away sharply, clutching her pillow like a shield.
And yet, in the dark between them, his words lingered.
Eventually.