Kael watches from the shadowed edge of the room window, chin propped on his fist, while the hall below plays out like a quiet, dangerous theatre.
The burdens move across the course, stubborn, ridiculous things made true, and his attention keeps snagging on the girl with the constellations in her eyes.
She steps like someone who has already learned the map of the sky in her body. The relic answers her before she asks.
An Aspect shows itself like a rumor proven true. She will get in.Of that I have no doubt.
Lysandra slips in behind him like sunlight, all trouble and soft laughter. "But for sure, our generation is better," she says, breathless with the excitement you can't fake.
She leans against the window frame and watches the same scene, eyes wide.
Kael only smiles. "Is that so?"
Lysandra's grin widens into a smirk. "Where have you been hiding, then?" she asks, genuinely curious.
"Training with Veyron," Kael answers, and the words seem to surprise her anyway.
She blinks, then laughs, part disbelief, part delight. "With Veyron?" she repeats. "Since when did you accept a headmaster's meddling?"
"Since I wanted to stop being hungry," Kael replies. He watches the constellation-girl finish her line, the burden settling obediently in her hands. "He teaches in a way that makes the Aether feel like something you can organize instead of wrestle. It's… useful."
Lysandra nudges him with an elbow, mock-offended but pleased. "You kept that from me," she says. "You traitor."
He shrugs, watching the next student step up. "I kept a lot from you," he admits. "But not everything." Her laughter drifts back into the room while the course hums below.
Silence settled between them like a held note. Kael's jaw tightened, the rest of the room's noise, the faint scrape of feet, the distant murmur from the hall, fell away for him.
"I want to be stronger," he said at last, voice low so it was almost private. "Not for pride. So that—" He didn't name it. He only let the half-formed thing hang there: the Spire, the core, the cost. "So that it never happens again. So none of us has to carry that."
He turned his head and, before looking directly at her, let his eyes find Aurelia where she stood at the platform with the instructors and headmaster, "If I'd been stronger," he went on, the sentence rough, "you wouldn't have had to… kill him."
Lysandra's smile died a little at the edges, her elbow knocking his knee as if to anchor him back to the present. "Don't," she said, soft but fierce. "You shouldn't blame yourself."
"You were a student," she added, almost arguing with the memory as much as with him. "We all were. None of you was meant to carry the whole world. Aurelia, her Aspect made her the one who could reach it, who could touch that corner of the memories held and do what had to be done. She didn't choose that burden because she wanted to be first. It fit the shape of what she could do."
Kael watched the way Lysandra's hands curled, the small lines at her mouth when she spoke about Aurelia, admiration, but also something like hurt. "Is that really true?" he asked, saying the question as if he feared the answer. "Would she… would she have wanted that?"
Lysandra looked at him, steady. For a moment, she only breathed, counting something invisible, then she leaned in and said, quietly, "No. She wouldn't. She wouldn't want any of us to hold that for her, or for one another. She'd want us to live past it."
Kael closed his mouth. Whatever hunger had been fed by promise and practice tightened into something else: a resolve that smelled less of blame and more of purpose, hard and clear.
Lysandra clapped her hands, determined to pull everyone out of the room's gravity. "Enough gloom. Victoria, come sit. How's the apprenticeship at the Spire been? Tell us something uplifting."
Victoria hesitated on the threshold of speech the way she sometimes did in class, tiny, careful breaths, eyes finding safe phrases. "It's been… good," she said at last, voice low but steady. "Dareth is the new headmaster there. He's been steady, and my primary tutor has been Kastrel. They both threw themselves into the recovery effort."
She folded her fingers in her lap and smiled faintly. "I learned more in those months than I expected. Practical runework that doesn't look pretty on paper, how to stabilize failing lattices, how to patch something without collapsing the rest. And… how to organize people so they don't panic when something goes wrong. It matters—people don't always need a miracle; they need someone who can keep the work going."
Kael watched her closely. There was a quiet pride in the way she listed the skills, as if each was a small victory. "Was it… dangerous?" he asked.
"Sometimes," Victoria admitted. "But we trained for it. We had routines. And a leader—" she hesitated, then named him, "—Eldrin Halvane. He led the repair projects."
The name drew the room's attention then, a small, cold ripple that felt like a draft.
Victoria's voice softened. "He's… reserved. Cold, in the way some people are when the world has already taken everything they love." Her fingers tightened for a moment, as if remembering. "He lost his family in the incident. All of them. But he's driven, so focused on restoring the Spire that he doesn't let grief show. There's a resolve there that… it steadied all of us."
Lysandra's brow knit. "Cold, you say? Like an icicle with a clipboard?"
Victoria gave a faint, wry smile. "Like someone who wears responsibility like armor. It works. People followed him. We finished phases of the repairs that had seemed impossible."
The image Victoria painted was double-sided: competence wrapped in grief, and a kind of clarity that could harden into something else if pressed.
Lysandra reached over and squeezed Victoria's hand. "Well, good. I'm glad you learned something useful."
Victoria nodded, eyes bright with a mixture of fatigue and pride. "I did," she said. "And I'm glad to be back."
As Trial 1 draws to a close, Veyron steps forward with a proud smile, offering hearty congratulations to the students who successfully navigated the challenge while diligently carrying their burdens.
Each of them, with a sense of accomplishment, clutches their precarious relics, ensuring they remain intact.
Selvera then steps forward, observing the impressive sight before her: a majority of the burdens, vibrant and undamaged, gently levitate towards her.
They swirled in a graceful dance before finally settling into a surprisingly compact box in her hands.
Selvara held the box with both hands as the last of the relics floated in: iron ledgers, warm loaves of bread, the constellation globe, and even the twins' hairline-cracked pendulums.
The students' murmurs quieted into a brittle hush, even the air seemed to respect the minor miracle.
The box sat no larger than a shoebox, its lid closed with a soft click, and yet something about the way it held so many lives felt less like trickery and more like testimony.
Selvara stepped back and inclined her head toward Veyron. He rose, robes settling, and the platform straightened as if answering a conductor.
"Congratulations," he said, voice carrying. "To those who carried your burdens across without breaking them: you demonstrated endurance, judgment, and the steadiness we want to cultivate. That was Trial One."
He let the applause fade and folded his hands. "Trial Two is not about objects. It is about flow. If the first trial asked whether you could bear what life gives you, the second asks whether you can become the life you mean to lead."
A dozen students shifted. Aurelia felt the small, precise intake of breath around her as Veyron's words settled.
"You will be asked to manifest an ideal self," Veyron continued. "Not a fantasy, no gods, no impossible feats. Not a costume. An ideal that is an honest extrapolation of who you are and what you can become. You may use Aether, Aura, a crafted tool, or any honest combination of these. How you choose to embody your future is your work."
A student approached, her determined expression drawing Aurelia's attention. She quickly matched the girl's face to the name on the students' paperwork: Klaris Kaiser, aptly known as the "hardworking one."
This was the girl with iron bands fastening her wrists and ankles! She realized.
Klaris lifted her chin. "How will we be graded?" she asked. "It seems…abstract. How can you fail this one?"
The room hummed. It was the question that had been at the back of several throats.
She continued, "The assignment merely requires each candidate to envision their future selves with realistic goals and expectations."
Veyron's eyes softened with the teacher's patience that had guided them through the morning. "A good question," he said. "You can fail this trial in four principal ways."
He counted them off with slow fingers.
"First: Hubris. If you try to manifest a self that demands power beyond the reach of your practised channels, your magic will not sustain it. The weave tears. That tearing is not theatrical, it burns and snaps, and you are left raw and unsteady. Ambition uncoupled from technique is dangerous."
A low rustle moved through the rows.
"Second: Mimicry. If you attempt to be someone you are not, borrowing another's manner, another's signature, you create a dissonance inside. The body and the ideal disagree. You'll find your hands and your heart are never in the same rhythm. The result is a hollow projection that collapses under the smallest test."
Veyron's gaze flicked to the twins' pendulums, then to the constellation girl's steady walk, examples of being and becoming braided together.
"Third: Ethical dissonance. If your ideal requires harm, if it depends on coercion, deceit, or diminishing others, then the manifestation will destabilize. The world resists those forms. Aether and Aura both recoil when intent is corrupt."
A few faces paled. The rule landed like a threshold.
"And lastly," he said, "Unsustainability. This is the quiet one. You may conjure something beautiful and true for a breath, but if you cannot inhabit it, if your muscles, your channels, your will do not have the hours to match the image, then the created self falls away the moment pressure comes. Authenticity is not a single bright performance, it is a pattern you can live in, day after day."
He let the four points sink in. "You pass by showing coherence between your present and your ideal, skill matched to aspiration, ethics aligned with action, and the endurance to hold that shape beyond a single display."
Aurelia watched Klaris as the girl took this in.
Klaris's life had already been a discipline of repetition. If anyone could translate a workmanlike future into a sustainable ideal, she thought, it would be her.
Veyron inclined his head toward them. "This trial will not be comfortable. It will ask you to stand where you are vulnerable and to remain there long enough for a truth to settle. You may shape your ideal with a rune, a steadying Aura practice, a small instrument, whatever lets you inhabit that projected self with integrity."
As the room fell into a hush, Veyron glanced around, his eyes scanning the faces before him. "Are there any final questions before we commence?"
A young man with flour still in the crease of his sleeve, the baker's apprentice from the first trial, pushed forward, voice wavering. "Um—what exactly do we need to envision?" he asked. "Is it a projection of who we'll look like when we're older? Or… is it showing the kind of magic we'll have someday? I mean, do we show a face, or a power, or both?"
Veyron's smile was small, almost private. He cocked his head and answered, "It's up to you." He let the words hang less like guidance and more like a decision returned to its owner.
Feeling the weight of his unanswered question, the baker's son turned away, trudging back to his spot among the others, disappointment evident in the slouch of his shoulders and the downcast look in his eyes.
Veyron gave the room one last, patient look. "Any other questions?"
There were none. He folded his hands and spoke with the same calm authority that had steered them through the morning. "Begin."
Marlec snapped open his pocket watch with a sharp click that carried through the hall. The chain glinted as he lifted it, eyes flicking once around the room before settling back on the face.
"One hour," he said plainly. "No more. No less."
The weight of the words landed hard.
At once, the chamber stirred. Students broke from their stillness, instinctively carving out space as if afraid their thoughts might collide.
Some closed their eyes and drew Aether inward, currents bending toward them like held breath. Others grounded themselves, Aura tightening along muscle and bone, stance widening as they searched for something solid to stand on.
A few reached for tools, charms, lenses, half-finished constructs pulled from satchels, anything that might anchor an idea before it slipped away.
Light flared in brief, uncertain pulses. Sigils sketched themselves into the air, then dissolved.
One student knelt, palms pressed to the floor, breath syncing with a low hum of power. Another paced in tight circles, muttering, trying to decide which version of themselves felt honest enough to survive being seen.
The girl pressed her back to the cool stone and watched the room tilt with possibility. Across from her, her twin brother was all nervous energy, shoulders loose, grin too bright as if it were a game.
"It'll be fine," he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet, grin too loud for the quiet. He sounded like someone trying to will courage into being.
The girl didn't mirror him. She watched the emptied box where Selvara had gathered the relics, a small, impossible container that held what had weighed them, and felt a small, hollow opening where the burden had been.
The pendulums were gone, the lesson remained. Without the physical thing between them, the question was sharper.
"Are you all right?" he asked, at once solicitous and impatient.
She paused, then answered in the measured way she used when they were little and needed instructions that didn't sound like orders. "Hikaru…" she said.
Hikaru stopped, attention clipped by the sound, "Yeah?" he threw back, surprised into softness.
She told him, slowly, about the first trial, the way the pendulums had chimed when they were apart, the way they had splintered when they touched. "Our burden wasn't just glass," she said. "It was that we were always together. It's what we carry."
Hikaru's smile faded in a breath. He had laughed it off then, like a dare that meant nothing, but hearing it named made the floor tilt under him. "We can keep being together," he offered, quick and hopeful. "We don't have to… change that."
Hiyori's fingers tightened on the hem of her sleeve. "Will we be together when we're older?" she asked, the question sharp and honest and small. It was not the same as asking if they'd live in the same house, it wondered whether life's pulls would bend them apart.
Hikaru blinked, then let his mouth form the slow answer she'd never heard before. "I don't know," he said, and the truth in it had weight.
They stood amid the rest of the students' murmurs, others shaping futures, others conjuring selves. Still, here, in the margin, the twins felt the trial inside themselves: not a matter of spectacle but of choosing how to be near without losing the self that needed to stand alone.
Hiyori exhaled, and Hikaru reached out, taking her hand, "If we don't know," he said, "we learn to move apart without breaking."
Hiyori felt the skin of her palm vibrate with his small promise. It was neither an answer nor a solution. It was a plan made of a single, mutable step.
They squeezed each other's hands once and turned, Hikaru to pace, scheming brightest paths, Hiyori to ground herself, measuring the line between present and future.
Both of them were stepping into a trial that wanted not just an image of what they could become, but the courage to hold that image when it demanded they be both separate and whole.
Klaris watched from behind as the twins bickered their way through the hour, their words light as they threw plans back and forth, Hikaru insisting he'd outgrow her by a head, Hiyori calling him an idiot and swearing they'd always be the same height because they were twins.
Their laughter snapped against the hush of concentration, a bright, human sound in a room full of deliberate breath.
They sound so sure, she thought. Like the future is a thing you can argue with and then agree on.
They moved together as if it were instinct, one step forward, the other adjusting without being asked.
When a doubt crept up—"what if we aren't together later?"—they answered it aloud, practical and immediate, and folded the fear into a plan.
A familiar ache crept in, sharp and unwelcome. I wish I had that, she admitted to herself. That kind of ease. That kind of certainty.
The word "talent" surfaced uninvited, carrying all the whispers she'd heard over the years. They say I'm talented, she thought, and the lie tasted bitter. If I were truly gifted, I wouldn't have to work this hard.
Her jaw tightened. Stop that. She lifted her hand and slapped her cheek, harder than she meant to. The sting flared, grounding her instantly.
"Ow—stars," she muttered, eyes watering. Then, despite herself, she laughed.
"Idiot," she told herself fondly, "You don't get to wallow now. Not here."
She straightened, breath steadying. I don't need to be effortless, she reminded herself. I need to keep moving.
The thought settled like a weight she knew how to carry. Practice. Correction. Another attempt. The rhythm she trusted more than praise.
Klaris smiled, bright, a little fierce, and stepped fully back into the trial. Confidence isn't pretending I'm gifted. It's knowing I'll endure whatever it takes to become who I'm aiming for.
From the platform above, Aurelia watched the scene unfold with a faint crease between her brows.
The twins had hesitated only briefly, one quiet exchange, a flicker of doubt, and then something had clicked. Their Aether steadied, their motions aligning again as if the question of the future had already found its answer.
Nearby, Klaris faltered for a heartbeat, struck herself back into focus, and then surged forward with renewed certainty.
That was fast, Aurelia thought.
She'd expected a struggle. Lingering fear. The kind of paralysis she'd seen so often when people were asked to look honestly at themselves. Instead, these three moved through it like a shallow current, acknowledged, adjusted, and continued.
Do they just… have stronger wills? The idea felt incomplete the moment it formed.
Aurelia's fingers curled lightly against the railing. Willpower alone didn't dissolve doubt that cleanly. She knew that too well. Or maybe, she amended, watching Klaris's posture settle into something resolute, they've already lived with these questions.
Not questions of if they would fail, but how they would go on anyway.
The realization left her quietly unsettled. These weren't students untouched by uncertainty. They were students who recognized it on sight and refused to let it stall them.
Aurelia exhaled, slow and thoughtful. That kind of resolve… She wasn't sure whether to admire it or brace herself for what it meant the Academy was becoming.