She was supposed to be resting.
Aurelia leaned on the cold stone of the balcony rail, the academy spread out below like a carefully arranged display of lights.
Music and laughter rose faintly from the banquet halls, a night-breeze tugged loose the ends of her hair.
She watched the moon hang above the Spire, pale, patient, and found herself saying the soft, useless thing aloud.
"It's beautiful."
The moon washed the courtyard in a thin coin of silver, and the Aether under her skin thrummed in answer, a minor, private chord that had been quiet for weeks.
Why does everything I touch return to that light?
The moon swelled. Not metaphorically, the shadow that had edged it thinned and folded back until the orb was whole and bright as hammered metal.
With that small change, her Aspect woke like a creature that had been only half-asleep.
A cold, clear spike of awareness lanced through her, images, textures, voices, an echo pulled from deep stone and older rune.
It unfolded like a play behind her eyes.
Centuries before the Spire's polished brass and civic pageantry, a workroom smelled of metal and resin and the faint powdered tang of old lightning.
Lanterns hung from hooks like miniature suns. Men and women bent over plans and crystals, their voices clipped between worry and hope.
At the center of the room, Edrin Halvane stood with his sleeves rolled, hands inked and raw from drafting.
He was everything the ledger hinted at, meticulous, stubborn to the point of grace, the kind of man who calmed impossible problems by measuring them until they fit.
"This fragment could carry a kingdom for centuries," Edrin said, tapping a mounted crystal that sat in a protective cage.
The researchers called it the Fragment of Continuance, crystalline, pale as ice, and housed within a carved frame of old alloy, caught the lamplight, and held it.
Little runes pulsed inside it like a buried constellation.
A younger scientist, hair still singed from an experiment, shook his head. "But Halvane, do you understand what we're proposing? The readings are…anomalous. It answers like a will, not inert matter. We're not just engineering, we're listening to something that wants to be heard."
Edrin's mouth quirked, not entirely a smile. There was a dry humor in him that did not disguise his fear. "If it were a god's will," he said quietly, "we'll make it our contract, teach it pattern and purpose. Power that remembers order is not a menace, it is service made dependable." He looked at the crystal as if it were a child with a temper.
Measure and keep, he might have thought aloud, he always said the hardest things best by breaking them down.
Another voice, older, more wary, offered the bluntness of someone who had read too many histories. "Some forces don't like being harnessed. They re-pattern what binds them to us."
Edrin shrugged. "Then we will pattern them back."
The memory tightened, a sequence of gestures: hands threading a stabilizer motif into the rune lattice, a ringed amulet set beneath a base plate, a margin not, for those who remember, written with a hand that trembled only a little. The room listened.
The fragment responded with a soft pulse, neither quite consenting nor quite a voice.
"It could be enough to power a city," Edrin said, "It could be a promise or a wound."
The vision unraveled as the moonlight in her room thinned back into ordinary silver.
Aurelia's lids snapped open to the dim familiarity of her dorm, the plaster roof above a little too close, the scent of Lysandra's hair at her shoulder.
Lysandra slept curled against her hip, warm and breathing. Mirellie and Victoria lay in their own beds, their forms soft in moon-shadow.
"Wasn't I on the balcony?" Aurelia murmured into the quiet, fingers still tingling where the balcony's stone had pressed. For a moment, she let herself believe she had simply drifted from thought to sleep.
She shook it off like a pointless shiver and closed her eyes again. Weird dream.
The moon outside kept watch, whole and indifferent, and something in the quiet of the dorm said the past had not finished speaking.
-
Professor Dareth stood at the head of the long table while the rune-lattice projection hovered above it like a thin, living map.
He tapped a braid of light until the image tightened, revealing the tiny stitches where engineering lines met protective sigils.
"The inscription repeats across multiple anchors," he said plainly. "Same phrase in the stabilizers, in the maintenance housings, and in the core surround."
The projection highlighted the words.
Measure and keep.
Master Kestrel's gloved hand closed on the table's edge until the knuckles whitened. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, speaking slowly so the students could follow. "This isn't the usual engineering shorthand," he said. "Think of a machine with code comments, someone didn't just write what to do, they wrote why. Personal notes, signatures, even little reminders. That changes how you treat the anchor: it isn't a pure mechanism, it carries a human instruction layered into its logic."
Magus Serel folded her arms. "Exactly. It's like an engineer embedding a diary into the blueprint. Useful, perhaps compassionate, but also dangerous if those personal lines interfere with standard safety marks. We need to know what kind of 'why' is running in that lattice."
Aurelia felt the phrase settle against her like a familiar chord.
Measure and keep.
That was his voice. The echo in my head.
She slid a folded margin sketch deeper into her pocket, Edrin Halvane's cramped signature on the corner.
Then the building's background hum hiccuped, a slight, mechanical stutter that most students heard as nothing more than a dropped note in the projection's speaker.
To the professors, it was different: a technical blip.
A faint dust drifted from a seam near the pillar. On screen, a strip of glyphs winked and then reappeared slightly offset, as if the image had been rescanned.
A maintenance drone on the far walkway flickered in its lamps and briefly spun before steadying itself again.
Kestrel frowned and crouched to inspect the table's projection. "See the braid here?" he said, pointing. "There's corrosion under the finish where you'd expect burnished copper. And this residue—" he plucked at his glove, and a small dark smear came away—"—isn't just grime. It looks like old oil mixed with something that's broken down the ward pigments."
Only now did a few students glance up, noticing the projection's momentary flicker.
Magus Serel's voice sharpened, but still calm. "That offset in the glyph, see how the stabilizer line reinserts itself slightly out of phase? That's not wear. It's active. Either the anchor is failing, or something is altering the anchor's logic in place."
A ripple of confused whispers rose behind Aurelia.
"Out of phase? What does that even mean?" one student muttered.
"Is that… bad?" another asked, uncertain.
Dareth's tablet chimed with a soft alert. He folded it closed and addressed the room with the same controlled tone instructors used to close a class. "We're going to pause here. Conservators and archivists, please convene at the quadrant. Kestrel, run a close diagnostic on the pillar braid. Serel, take harmonic samples. Students, nothing leaves this lab, and no one goes near maintenance without supervision. We'll continue tomorrow once preliminary checks are complete."
Students rose, murmuring about early dismissal or the inconvenience of extra paperwork, some joked about the Spire's temperamental infrastructure.
Aurelia remained a moment longer, watching Kestrel and Serel map a line across the projection.
The aftertaste of the hum lingered at the back of her teeth, metal and rain and a thin, frayed whisper of voices.
Measure and keep… the phrase felt different now, edged with worry. Keep what? And who wrote their reasons so close to the machinery that the machine remembers them?
Her Aspect prickled, not with a neat echo but with static: fragments of memory that were frayed at the edges, voices repeating phrases offset by half a syllable
She reached involuntarily for the pillar, and the brief touch sent a shock of information through her, images that snapped and shredded.
A hand closing over a lever, a child's scribbled prayer torn into a rune, a ward line bleeding like ink.
When she pulled back, the tip of her hand was smeared with the same black residue Kestrel had found.
Victoria moved closer, slate tucked under one arm, watching the small bustle of the lab as conservators busied themselves.
Aurelia shifted instinctively, curling her fingers into her sleeve and lowering her hand out of sight, the dark smear hidden before Victoria could notice.
"Do you ever worry," she asked, voice just above a whisper, "that the Spire is giving you us, its history, too freely? That someone will use it?"
Aurelia let the projection's fading light pool across her fingers for a moment, thinking of the lecture, of the pillar's sickly hum, of the fleeting visions that had no place in the official record.
"No. History is an exchange. We learn from them; they keep their work alive. There's… dignity in that. It isn't a weapon if both sides respect it."
Victoria smiled, small and honest. "You've changed," she said, like an observation rather than an accusation. "When I first saw you at the academy, I thought you'd never bend. Nobles have a way of being… set. I kept my distance."
Aurelia blinked. The words landed warmer than she expected. "You did?"
Victoria nodded. "You seemed sharp, distant. I thought you'd only look at rank and name. But you… you listen. You study people for what they are, not for what they were born into," She hesitated, then added, quieter, "I'm a commoner, I scraped in. No scholarships, no shining talent like Kael. I thought you wouldn't make room for someone like me."
Aurelia felt the blood come up to her cheeks and tried to hide it behind a quiet laugh. "Perhaps losing to Kael taught me something," she said, surprising herself with how easily the truth left her. "It showed me I could be wrong, and that strength doesn't come from a title. I judge by what someone can do, and who they are when they're tested."
Victoria's eyes went soft, pleased. "It's a good way to choose friends," she said. "And to pick allies."
Aurelia watched her for another heartbeat, thinking of Kael's steady presence, Lysandra's messy loyalty, Lucien's infuriating grin.
Maybe I am different.
Lysandra materialized in the doorway before either of them could answer, cheeks flushed from the walk in. "What are you two whispering about?" she asked, dropping onto the foot of Aurelia's bed as if it were an armchair.
Aurelia's face warmed. She opened her mouth, closed it, and offered a slight, embarrassed shrug. "Nothing," she said.
Victoria spoke plainly. "We were discussing the Spire's history, Edrin Halvane, and the anchors we found," she said, pushing a curl behind her ear.
Her slate was tucked under her arm like a talisman. "It's…fascinating."
Lysandra's eyes glittered. She leaned close and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Come on. Be honest, have you been using your Aspect to peek into the Spire's past?"
Aurelia's heart stuttered. She had not wanted anyone to know. "No," she lied too quickly.
Lysandra's grin was merciless. "You're terrible at lying."
Victoria blinked, confused. "Aspect?"
Lysandra gave Aurelia a conspiratorial elbow. "She'll tell you when she's ready," she said, though she sounded as if she thought that moment would arrive within the hour. "Come on, class ended early. Back to the dorms."
They obeyed like schoolgirls, laughter cushioning the edges of the tension until they were slammed shut inside their room.
The door clicked, and the world narrowed to the small circle of pillows and lamplight.
Lysandra flopped down beside Aurelia. "Okay, spill. What happened with the projector and the pillar? Victoria said it was probably a tiny error, but the professors looked like they were in a hurry. You noticed that, right?"
Victoria pushed up her glasses, earnest. "I thought so at first. The harmonics should've been clean, there shouldn't be noise. But the slate showed…offsets. Small, but consistent."
Aurelia stared at the lamp over the bed.
They were calm because they knew the protocol. They were in a hurry because something was wrong, and they didn't want the students to panic. That's why no one else saw it, only the ones trained to look for the tremor.
She kept the rest inside. Saying the word that lived like a splinter under her tongue would change everything. She let the silence be an answer instead.
Victoria hesitated a moment, then asked it plain: "Is it true? You have an Aspect?"
Aurelia flicked a sideways look at Lysandra, who made a show of looking innocent and failing spectacularly, but she let the corner of her mouth twitch into a reluctant smile and nodded. "Yes."
Victoria's eyes went wide. "Really? That's—" She swallowed, then reddened. "I mean, that's rare. What does it do?"
Aurelia sighed, folding her hands in her lap. Once it's out, there's no putting it back. "It's… the ability to read the past," she said quietly. "Echoes. Histories left in people, places, and objects. I can see them sometimes."
Victoria's amazement softened into an embarrassed, guilty curiosity. "So you could look into someone's past?" she asked, voice small, heat creeping into her cheeks.
Aurelia raised an eyebrow. There are lines I don't cross. She met Victoria's eyes. "That's the core of it, yes. But it's not voyeurism. I don't pry into things for sport. I respect people's privacy."
Lysandra's grin split her face like she'd been handed candy. "Oh, no—Victoria must have a secret then. That's why you're nervous." She wagged a finger teasingly.
Victoria swatted her hand away, flustered. "Don't— I'm not—" Her blush deepened. "Please don't peek into my past."
"I won't," Aurelia promised. The words were easy; the restraint felt essential. There are reasons some things are sealed.
Victoria's face went thoughtful. "That file you tried to open in the archives, the one with the high-clearance seal, were you using your Aspect then?"
Aurelia's throat tightened at the memory. "I was."
How the slate had sparked against her hand, how the runes had bit back, not hard enough to harm, but keen enough to warn.
"Those records were warded. The runes prevented Aether or Aura from probing them. Only authorized hands can access them."
Lysandra laughed in mock scandal. "Aurelia Caelistra, thief of histories, what will your house say?" She jabbed Aurelia playfully, but the teasing had an edge.
Aurelia glared, half-amused and half-annoyed. "I wasn't stealing. I was researching. And I won't do it again without permission."
Victoria folded her slate to hide the smile she couldn't entirely suppress. "Promise?"
Aurelia nodded. Some doors should only be opened with a key and a witness. She let the promise settle between them like a pact, quiet, necessary, and, for now, private.