Morning light spilled across Keystone like a blessing it had long forgotten to give. The inner districts gleamed in glass and polished stone, a city carved by wealth and washed in magic. To Jayden, each step toward its heart felt like trespass.
His clothes still smelled faintly of smoke. His boots were borrowed, two sizes too big. The crowd moved around him like a current — merchants in embroidered coats, students in fresh robes, guards whose armor shimmered with faint elemental runes.
The Unlocked Academy stood at the city's edge, where all the great canals met — a nexus of silver bridges and floating towers that seemed to hum with restrained power. Water flowed through glass conduits along its walls; spheres of fire burned without smoke. Air stirred without wind. Even the stones breathed.
Jayden paused beneath the gate. The sigil etched above it burned with five rotating glyphs — Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Lightning. Together, they formed the mark of the Convergence Provinces.
He swallowed. So this is where they make heroes.
A voice drawled nearby.
"First time seeing the Capital, huh?"
Jayden turned.
The boy leaning against the marble gate wore the kind of smile people were born rich enough to afford. Pale blond hair, faint sparks coiling across his fingertips, posture easy and careless. The faint hum of lightning hung around him like perfume.
He wasn't dressed like a student. He was dressed like a storm trying to pretend it belonged indoors.
"Name's Kael," the boy said, extending a hand. "Kael Ardent. And you're…?"
"Jayden."
"Just Jayden?" Kael raised an eyebrow. "No house, no clan, no province, no tragic title?"
Jayden's jaw tightened. "No house."
Kael grinned wider. "Bold. You'd be surprised how rare that is here." He gestured toward the open courtyard beyond the gates — a sea of young aspirants, each surrounded by servants or family banners. "Everyone here wants to prove their lineage. You're the only one trying not to."
Jayden said nothing. His silence seemed to amuse him.
They walked side by side through the marble walkway. Kael talked like the world owed him its attention — about elemental duels, about the taste of stormfruit, about a pet gryphon he'd lost in the Thunder Province. Jayden half-listened, half-measured the pulse of his surroundings.
Everywhere, he could "feel" water. The canals beneath the academy pulsed faintly — veins running through stone. The sensation was both comforting and suffocating.
Kael stopped suddenly. "You're from the outskirts, aren't you?"
Jayden's body stiffened.
"Relax," Kael said with a lazy grin. "I'm not judging. Just noticed the way you walk — like you expect the ground to bite back."
Jayden frowned. "…And you talk too much."
"Occupational hazard. Comes with being brilliant." Kael flicked his fingers; tiny sparks danced across his nails before vanishing. "You'll get used to it."
Jayden wasn't sure if that was a promise or a threat.
The academy's great square opened before them — hundreds of new aspirants gathering beneath banners of their elements. Instructors drifted between groups, robes whispering like the wind itself.
Kael looked up at the towering spire at the center — the Hall of Ascension, where the Codex runes would appear to register each new aspirant's resonance. "Hard to believe all this started with one myth," he murmured. "The Codex, the Veil, the Realms… now we're here pretending we understand any of it."
Jayden studied him, surprised. Beneath the humor, there was a trace of melancholy — an awareness that didn't fit his careless tone.
Then Kael turned, grin back in place. "Come on, Jay. Try not to look like a drowned rat. You'll make the rest of us look bad."
They stepped into the courtyard light.
And then it happened.
As Kael brushed past him, the air between them *hummed*. The faintest tremor rippled through Jayden's chest — a recognition, raw and electric. His left eye burned. For a split second, runes shimmered faintly within his iris — a spiral of blue and silver reacting to Kael's lightning aura.
Jayden blinked, forcing it down. No one noticed. The mark dulled, fading to nothing.
Kael tilted his head. "You feel that?"
"…No."
"Huh." Kael smiled faintly. "Must be the storm season coming early."
He strolled ahead, hands in pockets, leaving Jayden staring after him — heart steady, expression blank, mind racing.
*Lightning again.*
The same element that had destroyed his home.
The same light he'd sworn to overcome.
Jayden lowered his gaze, watching reflections ripple across the marble floor. "I'll surpass them all," he whispered.
Above, the elemental banners swayed — five symbols in harmony, pretending the world beneath them wasn't built on fractures.