Aurelia hugged her knees, letting the soft silver light of her Aether pool around her.
Was Lucifer truly behind the destruction of the Spire? she asked herself, the question echoing in her mind as if the night itself were listening.
Her Aspect had shown her fragments of ruins, of fire and falling stone, of people fleeing in panic, but never the face of the one responsible.
And yet, the whispers in her dreams, the unsettling certainty that came with each vision, made her wonder if it had always been Lucifer's hand guiding the chaos.
Or am I reading it wrong?Maybe it wasn't them at all… perhaps it was a memory twisted by time, by my Aspect, or by something else entirely.
Her fingers brushed the edge of the bench, and a shiver ran through her.
The uncertainty gnawed at her, sharper than any fear she'd felt when standing before a blazing echo of the past.
If it wasn't Lucifer… then who? And why does my soul answer with echoes I shouldn't be seeing?
She closed her eyes, drawing a slow breath, willing the Aether around her to settle.
The silver glow steadied, and for a moment, the chaos of her thoughts quieted.
Yet even in that calm, the question lingered, impossible to shake.
Was the one I've been chasing in dreams and memory truly the destroyer… or am I chasing shadows of something I cannot yet comprehend?
Aurelia kept the name to herself.
She moved alone through the Spire's sunlit halls, marble polished.
Students passed in murmuring groups, but she drifted like a solitary moon in slow orbit, distant, thinking, remembering.
Her fingers brushed the cool stone of the nearest column, feeling the quiet hum of history beneath it. Too much history.
A voice broke through her haze.
"Ah. You must be the Arcane student who bested my pupils."
Headmaster Agnes stood beneath a carved lintel as though he'd simply materialized from the architecture itself, dignified, robes trimmed with silver, eyes sharp with humor rather than reprimand. He looked…pleased.
Aurelia gave a polite bow, preparing a safe response, but the question that had been gnawing at her spilled past restraint.
"Has the Spire ever been laid waste?" she asked abruptly. "Burned, shattered, rebuilt from ruin?"
Agnes blinked. Then chuckled, warm, bemused. "No. No sieges that felled the Spire. No fires that reduced it to ashes, no great reconstruction efforts." He contemplated her. "Storm damage, yes. A collapse here or there in the old foundations. But nothing as dramatic as you describe." His head tilted with genuine curiosity. "Why do you ask?"
Aurelia's throat tightened.
She managed only a slight bow of thanks, a quiet dismissal. I can't tell him. I can't tell anyone outside of Arcane.If word spread that I could peer into lost eras, into truths buried and protected…I would become a tool. Or a threat.
She stepped back, ready to leave, but Agnes's voice followed with an easy laugh,
"All geniuses have a screw loose somewhere."
He sounded amused, not unkind. Yet Aurelia walked away faster than was polite, the unspoken question folded tight inside her chest, like a secret map no one else must ever read.
Outside, the Spire's mechanisms thrummed and steam sighed through the pipes.
No record. No elders who whisper of ashes and rebuilding. If the city remembers, it remembers a steady thread, not ruin. The thought sat in her like a splinter.
She walked until the crowd thinned and found a quiet bench beneath a tree.
Then what did I see? The memory, or vision, had been vivid enough to make her stomach drop, flames, a sea of embers, the Spire collapsing into a night that tasted of metal and smoke.
Could my Aspect be reading paths instead of facts?
Perhaps she had learned to listen to echoes of possibility, countless forks of what might have been, and one of those forks ended in ruin.
But why the figure at the center? Why a shape that wore my face?
The idea that her soul might be unconsciously dressing the destroyer in her own image made her shiver.
I would never wish that. I would never imagine it.
A dreadful thought crawled in before she could stop it.
What if my Aspect isn't confined to the past? What if it can look forward into futures that haven't happened yet? What if that woman… that Lucifer… wasn't someone else at all? What if it is actually me?
Her throat tightened. The idea felt wrong, impossible, and yet the memory had been sharp enough to brand her. Flames. Collapse. A figure who wore her face like something sacred or ruined.
"No," she whispered to herself. "No. That isn't who I'll become."
Still… I have to confirm it... Real proof.
Aurelia closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, summoning her Aether.
Moonlight shimmered faintly beneath her skin as she pulled it into focus: the technique she used for the past, Harmonize, then listen.
She turned the direction of her Aspect forward instead of back.
Show me the future…
A tremor rippled through her senses.
For a moment, something vast shifted, like a door she didn't have the key for brushing briefly against her hand.
Then—
Echoes. Only echoes.
Images burst behind her lids, a coronation from two centuries past, the forging of the first brass sentry, a forgotten architect sketching designs for the Spire's lower rings.
Then came the softer vision, a child laughing in a market that no longer existed, its sound bright and fragile, a reminder that even joy could be swallowed by time.
The echoes pressed against her mind in fragments, histories layered one atop another.
All past. All history. Nothing forward. Nothing new.
The tension drained from her in a single breath. She opened her eyes, exhaling shakily.
"Just the past," she murmured. "Only the past. Good."
Even as she said it, she tried again, petty, desperate, hoping for any flicker of a future.
Her Aspect pushed back, gentle but immovable. A door that would not open. The echoes remained anchored firmly behind her, not ahead.
Relief washed through her, fragile but real.
"If I ever see something else," Aurelia whispered to the empty path, "something that hasn't happened… then I'll worry. But for now… I haven't."
She let the moonlit hum of her Aether fade, steadying her breath.
Whatever that vision of Lucifer had been,
hallucination, metaphor, a past possibility twisted by fear.
It was not a prophecy of her future.
For now, that was enough.
-
Headmaster Agnes moved through the tent with ease, listening as the conservators and engineers gave their reports, hands clasped behind his back, his smile still lingering from the exchange with the student.
Dareth stood by the projection table, tracing the map of anchors, those rune-clusters embedded in the Spire's bones that tell machines and structures what they should do.
"You found more than wiring," Agnes said, folding his hands.
Dareth nodded. "We did. Come look."
Kestrel crouched and tapped the image until it zoomed. "Look at these notes," he said. "Halvane's handwriting, written into the very runes. Not labels, personal margin notes. He didn't just mark how a thing should run. He wrote little rules, reminders, and even phrases that read like advice. 'Measure and keep,' over and over."
Serel, the senior mage called in to advise, pressed her fingers to the projection and frowned. "If those phrases are actually built into the runes, then the anchors don't only store instructions. They carry a human voice, someone's choices baked into their behavior."
A young conservator in a soot-dark jacket snapped the thought back toward practicality. "You're saying a man basically grafted his thinking into the runes. That sounds like poetry, not engineering."
Kestrel shook his head. "Not poetry, deliberate design. Halvane used personal motifs, like a repeated ring symbol, to stabilize the anchors. A signature used as a technical safety."
Serel's face went hard. "If an anchor contains a human mind's traces and it degrades, those traces can leak out as memory or odd behaviour. That's one problem."
"And if it's not a human mind at all," the conservator said quietly, "what if those runes hold something else, a crystallized will, an idea made real, the leftover thought of something that was once alive? That wouldn't merely leak memory. It could spread its pattern."
Dareth set both palms on the table. "So two simple possibilities," he said. "One: Halvane's notes and personality were woven into the anchors, so the machinery can carry scraps of his mind. Two: the anchors were given a metaphysical core, a seed of force or thought, something larger than a human will that can push its logic through the runes."
There was a beat of silence while the idea sank in.
A systems scientist in the corner rubbed his forehead. "So the Spire's heart, the thing that keeps the whole city steady, might be running on a man's habits…or on the last will of something godlike? I'm not paid enough for this," he muttered.
Serel didn't look up from the projection, "None of us do, lad," he said dryly.
Kestrel made a half-laugh, mostly worried. "Engineers sometimes used personal stabilizers, little marks to make behaviour predictable. Mages have bound concepts into a crystal before. Either way, the anchors aren't neutral."
Serel pointed to a small wrapped object Kestrel had set on the table, an amulet whose etchings matched Halvane's sketches.
She tapped it. The instruments on the table registered a tiny, regular blip.
"That pulsing is strange," she said.
A conservator checked his gauges. "We're seeing a micro-phase shift in the anchor harmonics, a localized change in how the runes are humming. Not catastrophic yet, but it's not normal." He tapped his tablet, and a line of light flashed.
Kestrel's hand tightened on the projection. "If the stabilizer markings are failing or changing on their own, the anchor's behaviour can change. If those markings carry memory or a will, then whatever's inside could start to rewrite how the anchors work."
At that moment, the junior archivist Ralen unwrapped the small ringed actuator they'd pulled from the field.
Under the soft light, it showed an almost polite heartbeat on the instruments, a tiny pulse.
Then, from the tunnel beyond the tent, a single distant alarm echoed.
A routine warning tone from the city systems, faint but definitely there.
Everyone listened. It could have been a stray test; it could have been interference. But the timing made the room feel tight.
Agnes's smile faded. "Run a full diagnostic," he ordered. "Isolate the affected nodes. Bring conservators to tag anything compromised. Keep this report closed to Council eyes only for now." He looked at Dareth. "And keep students away from the maintenance quadrants. No curiosity in a place that may be failing."
They moved with practiced speed: instruments were read, affected anchors were marked, plans for physical isolation and arcane checks were sketched.
Kestrel argued for immediate physical isolation of the worst spots. Serel insisted they perform arcane diagnostics first so they didn't unintentionally break a ward. Dareth split the difference, test, tag, then decide.
The wrapped ring in Ralen's hand had gone quiet, and the projection's pulse had dimmed to a minor point.
But the smell of ozone and hot metal lingered in the tent for a heartbeat, and everyone there felt the same slight unease.
Whatever was going wrong with the anchors had found its first twitch.
It wasn't yet an emergency, but it was real, and it needed careful watching.
-
Aurelia followed the sound like a scent.
No one else seemed to notice it — the under-note of a chime, thin and persistent, threading through the stone.
Students laughed in the halls, a group clustered around a fountain, and argued theory and politics.
Aurelia paused, the chime more distinct now, a maintenance alarm's lonely echo. How can they not hear that? she wondered. That was the quadrant where we went for the scavenger hunt.
She stepped away from the crowd and toward the service stair that led back down beneath the Spire.
The closer she moved, the more the tone resolved: a clean, regular ping, threading between the pipes and the metal ribs.
Curiosity thinned into something colder. If the anchors are twitching, I should see. She told herself and turned on the stairs.
At the landing, she nearly bumped into Headmaster Agnes himself, a figure she'd only seen in formal robes, now oddly ordinary, hands tucked into his coat as if he'd been hurrying down to his office.
He looked at her, expression open, and for a moment, she saw no surprise at all that she'd broken ranks.
"Aurelia," he said, with the pleasant lift he always carried for students. "Out early."
She swallowed. "Headmaster Agnes, do you hear that? The alarm? It's coming from the maintenance quadrants." She pointed down the shaft. "I thought—"
Agnes's face froze for the fraction of a breath that meant calculation. Then he smiled, easy as a well-polished coin. "Hear it?" he repeated aloud, but his eyes were elsewhere, on the stair below. "No, the alarm finished hours ago. You hear it still?"
Aurelia's pulse sped. He can't hear it. She felt suddenly exposed, the sound private and bright in her chest. She kept her voice steady. "May I go down? Just to check. I'll be careful. I won't tell the others."
Agnes's smile lengthened into something almost conspiratorial. He placed one finger briefly against the ribbon of his collar, as if straightening an invisible thread. "I had intended we'd keep it quiet for now. A minor nuisance, a false read from an aging stabilizer. The conservators will handle it." He considered her with a measured tilt. "Tell me, can you hear more than others? Are you…blessed by Aether?"
The question landed like a test. Aurelia felt the truth press at the edges of her words. If I say yes, will he let me go? If I say no, will he let me go? She watched the man in front of her and, despite the politeness, something in his posture hinted at the kind of control that liked to keep questions folded away.
"Yes," she said before she had time to overthink it. "Sometimes I… notice currents, small things. If it helps, I can go look."
Agnes's eyes softened in a way that made the kindness feel planned. "Blessed by Aether, then. That's one way to put it," he murmured. "All the better. But no, not this time. The team is already in place. Conservators and wardens. You're a student, your presence is needed elsewhere. Come back to your classmates. Leave this to us, Aurelia."
Aurelia read the promise in his tone, polite, final. She nodded, the alarm still ringing in her head like a secret. "All right." She turned away, footsteps lighter than she felt.
As she moved back into the sunlit corridor, Agnes watched her go until the stone swallowed her figure.
Once she was out of sight, he exhaled quietly, as if letting a chord slip. "Blessed by Aether," he muttered under his breath, the phrase false.
He allowed himself a small, tight twist of curiosity and something like worry.
That was something I made up. I said it to keep her from poking. But how, how can she still hear an alarm that ended hours ago?
He stood a moment longer, hands folded, while the Spire itself exhaled and the distant pipes hummed, as if replying with a note no one else could read.
The phrase Agnes had used, "blessed by Aether," rolled over Aurelia like a pebble in a stream.
Small, smooth, and not quite right. Blessed felt theatrical, gifted felt clinical.
Maybe that's all he meant. People like Kael shape Aether like clay, deliberate, practiced. I… I read it. I can feel the history the current carries. Perhaps he called it a blessing because it's easier to explain than saying 'she can see echoes.'
The idea comforted her and annoyed her in equal measure, "Blessed by Aether, huh?"
Her mind slipped, as it often did, to familiar faces. If Kael and I had a rematch, who would win? The question was almost childish, but it came wrapped in sharper threads.
He's calm, precise, his Aether obeys him like a well-tuned instrument. I have resonance, memory, and the ability to anticipate. In a straight fight, he might out-hold me, in an exchange of timing and read, I might know his next breath before he takes it.
She pictured blades and wind, and the comfortable rhythm of training with him, and the possibility tasted like something she wanted, not victory so much as the proof that she could stand without being simplified.