"Power, in all its forms, is simply the organized will to impose one's reality upon the world. The question is never whether you have the will. The question is what you are willing to break to exercise it."
They took him to a room beneath the plaza.
This was not, in itself, alarming. Rooms beneath plazas served many functions, and Luceo was experienced enough with the architecture of authority to recognize that going down was not necessarily worse than going up — the underground could mean prisons or it could mean libraries or it could mean the places where the real conversations happened. It depended entirely on who was waiting for you.
The man waiting for him was not a threat. Luceo recognized this within four seconds of entering the room, which was about as much time as the man's posture required to communicate: scholar, middle-aged, currently excited in the carefully restrained manner of people who have trained excitement out of their public presentation but cannot quite complete the suppression. He had a recording stone on the table in front of him and ink on his fingers, which in any world is the uniform of a person who cares more about information than power.
"Please sit," the scholar said. He was not an assessor — he had arrived too quickly, which meant he had been waiting for something like Luceo, or had been summoned very efficiently. "My name is Elder Theron. I oversee the Academy's Rare Affinity Division."
"Which means you handle the unusual cases," Luceo said.
"I handle the extraordinary ones," Theron corrected, without vanity, as a matter of precision. "What you displayed on the Resonance Pillar is—" He stopped, searched for the appropriate word. "I've been an assessor for twenty-two years. I have seen every major affinity and most minor ones. I have never seen Void Resonance in a living cultivator."
There it is. Void. Seris said it first. The world keeps saying it back.
"Void Resonance," Luceo repeated.
"The capacity to interact with Aether through absence rather than presence," Theron said. He was watching Luceo with the bright, careful attention of a man trying to memorize something he suspects he will not see again. "Conventional Aether affinity is additive — you gather, you channel, you project. Void Resonance is subtractive. Where others fill, you create hollow. Where others emit, you absorb." He paused. "The theoretical implications are—"
"Extraordinary," Luceo supplied.
"Unprecedented in recorded Academy history," Theron said. "There are texts — very old, partly redacted — that describe Void cultivation in the ancient era. Before the Pantheon's consolidation of Aethermoor. The Void Shapers, they were called. They didn't fight power. They negated it."
Seris said the same. Banned three hundred years ago. The Pantheon made sure. Of course they did.
"I'm told the Resonance Pillar went black," Luceo said mildly. "I assume that is not the standard result."
"The pillar did not know how to interpret what it found," Theron said. "It reads Aether presence. What it encountered in you is—" He made a small, helpless gesture. "An architecture it wasn't built to read. The black is the absence. The red fractures within it are—" He leaned forward. "May I ask about the weapon you carry?"
Luceo considered for a moment. Then he set the blade on the table between them.
Theron leaned over it with the reverence of a man who recognizes something he has only read about. His hands hovered without touching.
"Voidtouched," he said quietly. "Bonded and active. I haven't seen one of these either." He straightened. "Where did you get it?"
"It was with me when I arrived," Luceo said.
"Arrived how?"
He met the scholar's eyes. "I transmigrated."
A very long silence.
"From another plane," Theron said finally.
"From another world. Yes."
Another silence, shorter this time, during which Theron appeared to be performing significant internal calculations.
"Then the Voidtouched bond makes sense," he said finally. "A transmigrant soul carries the resonance of the Veil — the boundary between planes. A Voidtouched object resonates with the same frequency. They would have—"
"Found each other," Luceo said. "Yes."
"And your core is forming around a fracture." Theron sat back. "You understand what that means for your progression, theoretically?"
"Seris explained the basics."
"Seris." A slight tightening around Theron's eyes. "The girl with the brand. Your travel companion."
So they know about her already. Of course they do. The gate stones. The Order's report of the incident in the Ashenreach. This man was not waiting for just any unusual result. He was waiting for context, and we walked in wearing it.
"She's not my anything," Luceo said. "She's someone I met."
"The Academy cannot officially—" Theron began.
"I haven't asked for anything official regarding anyone else," Luceo said pleasantly. "I'd like to stay in that lane, if possible."
Another pause. Theron seemed to be reassessing him — not with hostility, but with the specific recalibration of a scholar who has encountered data that requires a new category.
"We would like to offer you a place at Kael's Spire," Theron said.
Luceo waited.
"The offer comes with conditions," Theron continued. "Your Void Resonance will be classified as a rare earth-affinity variant in the official records. The distinction matters — Void is not currently recognized as a legitimate affinity by the Pantheon's certification body. Officially calling it Void would attract attention we would prefer not to attract."
He is protecting me. Or protecting his access to me. Possibly both.
"You're asking me to be a secret," Luceo said.
"I'm asking you to be a quiet one. There's a difference." Theron folded his hands. "At the Spire, you will have access to resources, instruction, and time. Things you need. In return, I ask that you allow me to observe your development. To document it. Not to exploit it," he added, with the emphasis of a man who has been accused of exploitation before and found the category offensive. "To understand it."
Luceo looked at the blade on the table between them.
A place with walls. With rules. With structure. With people who will eventually try to use you, restrict you, or eliminate you when they understand what you are. And also with: food, knowledge, and the time to become something capable of surviving the three former categories.
"I accept," he said.
✦
Kael's Spire was twelve days north of Varenith, which gave Luceo twelve days to find a solution to the problem of Seris.
The solution he found was pragmatic, and she agreed to it with the focused practicality that was, he was discovering, her primary mode of engagement with inconvenient reality.
The Spire had a support district attached to it — a town called Ardenveil, which existed in the economic ecosystem of the academy the way remora exist around sharks: attached, useful, technically independent. In Ardenveil, Seris had contacts through a network she referred to obliquely as the Unmarked — cultivators who existed in the spaces of the official world without acknowledgment. She would be in Ardenveil. He would be in the Spire. The distance was fifteen minutes of walking.
"This is not ideal," she said, when they stood at the crossroads where the main road diverged — one path climbing toward the Spire's towers, visible now above the treeline, the other descending into Ardenveil.
"Most things aren't."
"You'll have limited autonomy inside the Spire. They'll watch you."
"I know."
"The Void Resonance will progress whether or not you have instruction tailored to it. It might be volatile."
"I know that too."
She looked at him. The morning light made her silver hair look like hammered metal, and there was something in her expression that was doing the same thing it had done since the Ashenreach — measuring, calculating, arriving at conclusions she didn't fully share.
"Be careful," she said, and then seemed briefly annoyed with herself for having said something that generic.
"Seris," he said.
She looked up.
"You'll be careful too," he said.
It was not, on its surface, much of a thing to say. She nodded once, with the efficiency of someone who has decided the moment is accounted for.
She went down the road toward Ardenveil.
He went up toward the Spire.
Strange. To care whether someone is careful. The equipment for that is older than this world.
He kept walking.
Kael's Spire rose before him: five towers of dark stone connected by bridgework and walls, the uppermost tower crowned with an Aether-beacon that pulsed slow blue in the morning air. Around its base: training grounds, gardens, student quarters in long stone rows, the whole complex organized with the disciplined efficiency of a place that had been producing cultivators for centuries and had optimized the process accordingly.
At the gate, he gave his name and papers to a gate official who checked a list, found him on it, and looked up with the specific expression of someone who has been told to treat a particular arrival with interest but not to let it show.
"Welcome to Kael's Spire," the official said.
Home, then. Temporarily. Until it becomes something else, or until I do.
He walked through the gate.
Above him, the beacon pulsed.
Below his sternum, something answered — a deep, slow resonance, barely perceptible, like the first drawing of breath after too long underwater.
The Void, learning it was somewhere new.