The first thing Lyara felt was the arrow.
Not the pain — the pain came later, like a delayed thought. What she felt first was the impact: a violent pressure in her left shoulder that tore her from wherever she had been before and threw her, without ceremony, into a body that was not her own.
She was on her knees.
That she realized next — the cold of the stones through the thin fabric of her clothes, the rough texture of rain-darkened granite, the smell of wet earth and something her brain catalogued as sulfur, which made absolutely no sense until she lifted her eyes and saw the sky.
The sky of Solenne was purple.
Not the timid purple of a summer sunset — deep purple, almost black at the edges, ripped by horizontal bone-colored lightning that did not thunder, only pulsed, like exposed veins of some enormous creature asleep above the clouds. Two moons. One large and pale, one small and reddish. Constellations she had drawn from memory on an October afternoon, sitting on the floor of her apartment, surrounded by sketches and cups of cold tea.
This isn't real, Lyara thought.
The arrow in her shoulder disagreed enthusiastically.
— She's still standing.
The voice came from somewhere to her left — male, young, with that particular quality of someone who is surprised but trained never to let it show completely. Lyara turned her head slowly, as if sudden movements might shatter the illusion, and saw an audience.
Hundreds of students arranged in perfect rows in an open-air amphitheater, wearing uniforms in shades of gray and petrol blue, capes fastened on the right shoulder with brooches shaped like stylized feathers. Young faces — fifteen, eighteen, twenty years old — with expressions ranging from open shock to poorly disguised terror. Some held notebooks. A boy in the third row was clearly about to faint.
At the center of the amphitheater, her.
At the center of the amphitheater, Lyara, kneeling in the Circle of Ashes — a ring of black stone engraved with symbols she recognized because she had spent three weeks trying to replicate them with India ink in a sketchbook — with an arrow embedded in her left shoulder and the poison already beginning to do its work, a tingling rising up her arm in regular waves like a tide.
The Trial of Ashes, identified some part of her that had read the book five times and memorized chapter structures involuntarily. Chapter four. Elara is struck by the poisoned arrow during the endurance test. The poison is the Gray — without antidote, progressive, fatal within twenty minutes for anyone without innate magical resistance. Elara does not possess it.
Elara dies here.
I die here.
Lyara looked at the arrow in her shoulder — in Elara's shoulder, in her shoulder, the distinction had collapsed in a way she was not prepared to process — and did the most rational thing she could think of.
She took a deep breath.
The smell of sulfur was stronger near the ground. The stone was cold. The poison tingled up to her neck now. The audience watched in absolute silence, the kind of silence that happens when hundreds of people hold their breath at the same time.
Twenty minutes, she thought. I have twenty minutes before the Gray paralyzes the heart.
What would Elara do?
The problem was that she knew exactly what Elara would do. Elara, as described in the book, would panic. She would try to pull the arrow out. She would scream the name of the nearest professor. She would lose consciousness in twelve minutes, earlier than average, because the narrator had specified that Elara's accelerated metabolism made the poison work faster, not slower. It was a cruel detail Lyara had underlined in her copy of the book with red ink and written in the margin: why???
What Lyara would do was different.
Lyara had studied biochemistry for two semesters before switching to Visual Arts. She knew that poisons that progressed in waves — and the tingling was clearly in waves — generally worked through neural interference, not direct tissue destruction. Which meant that slowing circulation would slow progression.
She placed her right hand over her left shoulder, pressing her fingers into specific points a physiotherapist had taught her years ago to relieve muscle tension, and began breathing deliberately and slowly. Six counts in. Six out.
The tingling slowed.
Not much. But enough for her to feel the difference.
In the audience, the silence changed texture. It was no longer the silence of those waiting for a death. It was the silence of those who could not classify what they were seeing.
— What is she doing? someone murmured.
— I don't know, another voice answered, closer. I've never seen anyone do that after being hit by the Gray.
Well, Lyara thought, slightly delirious. Progress.
She lifted her eyes and scanned the audience in a systematic search, looking for what she knew had to be there. The professor supervising the Trial, positioned at the highest level of the amphitheater — capes different from the students', embroidered in gold. She found them: three figures. Two men and one woman. The woman was standing, which meant she had probably risen only seconds ago. The two men observed with expressions she could not read from that distance.
Except one of them.
One of them was looking directly at her.
Lyara knew who it was before processing the visual details. It was the kind of recognition that happens before thought, straight to some place in the sternum — the absurd sensation of seeing for the first time someone you have known for years.
Caelum Drav was taller than she had imagined. Younger, too, somehow — the perception she had built from years of reading had added a gravity the real one did not carry in quite the same way. He wore the professor's cape with the carelessness of someone who does not care about symbolic hierarchies, one shoulder slightly lower than the other, the brooch loosened. Black hair. Eyes that, even at a distance, she knew were amber.
He was looking at her with an expression she did not recognize from any of her five readings of the book.
It was not concern. It was not calculated indifference. It was not the veiled interest the narrator had described in chapter six when Caelum first notices Elara.
It was recognition.
The same kind she had felt upon seeing him — but coming from the opposite direction, which made no sense at all.
He can't recognize me, Lyara thought, with the poison rising up her neck in waves she was managing to slow but not stop. He's never seen me before. He's seeing Elara. I am Elara now.
But Caelum Drav's gaze said something entirely different.
It said: finally.
The twenty minutes passed differently from how the book had described.
Lyara remained conscious for all of them.
It wasn't easy — there was a point, around the fifteenth minute, when the tingling reached her jaw and she temporarily lost control of her right hand, which interrupted the pressure on the points and made the poison accelerate in a way that caused dark spots to appear at the edges of her vision. But she came back. Found the rhythm of her breathing again. Pressed her fingers harder.
When the internal clock she had started counting reached twenty-one minutes, the tingling began — for the first time — to recede.
The Gray had no antidote. Which meant that either Elara's body was metabolizing the poison in a way the poison did not anticipate, or Lyara had done something with her breathing and pressure that functioned as an improvised antidote, or there was a third option she did not want to consider because it was impossible.
The audience had been in absolute silence for eighteen minutes.
When she slowly, with deliberate movements that tested each joint before trusting it with weight, began to stand — first one knee, then the other, then upright, swaying only slightly, the arrow still in her shoulder because she had decided that removing a poisoned arrow without proper medical equipment was stupidity — the silence broke.
Not into applause.
Into something more primitive than that. A collective, involuntary sound — part exhale, part word, part nameless thing — that swept through the amphitheater like a wave.
The professor who had stood earlier was upright and pale as paper.
A student in the second row dropped his notebook to the ground and made no move to retrieve it.
And Caelum Drav, at the highest level of the amphitheater, had descended three steps toward her without apparently realizing he had moved.
Lyara looked at him because he was the only anchor she had in a world that was spinning slightly — not from dizziness, but from too much, everything too much, the purple sky and the two moons and the smell of sulfur and hundreds of eyes and the memory of an apartment with India ink stains on the carpet that seemed to belong to another life, that belonged to another life —
He said something.
Very low. Probably only for her, considering the distance still separating them — but the amphitheater had grown so silent that the words reached her clean and clear like stones falling into still water.
— You are not her.
It was not a question.
Lyara opened her mouth. Closed it. Thought of at least six different answers, all inadequate. Thought that she had read every page of the book that contained Caelum Drav and none of them had prepared her for what it was like to be within the range of that gaze — amber like burned honey, completely still, completely certain of what he was saying.
She chose the only honest answer that would not completely destroy her.
— No, she said. — But I'm working on it.
Later — much later, after being led by the pale professor to the Academy infirmary, after a doctor who clearly had not slept enough examined her shoulder and removed the arrow with the expression of someone witnessing something theologically disturbing, after someone brought tea that she drank only because her hands needed something to hold — Lyara found a mirror.
It was small, framed in dark metal, hanging above a stone sink in a bathroom adjacent to the infirmary.
She stood in front of it for a long time.
Elara Ashveil had silver hair with black streaks that reached her waist. Lyara had spent four hours drawing that hair one November day, trying to capture how light interacted with its texture. The eyes were storm-gray, exactly as she had imagined. The scar on the left clavicle was there, thin as an ink stroke, exactly where she had placed it in the illustration.
What she had not drawn — because the book did not describe it — was the expression.
The expression was hers.
The way she slightly furrowed her brow when thinking. The line of her mouth when processing too much information. The way her shoulders dropped when she thought no one was watching.
It was Elara's face. It was Lyara's expression.
She placed her hand on the mirror — the left one, the one with the bandaged shoulder — and her palm met the cold glass.
I need to find a way back, she thought.
But there was another part of her — smaller, more honest, the one she preferred to ignore — that had noticed something while she stood in the Circle of Ashes with poison in her blood and hundreds of eyes on her and the purple sky above and that amber gaze from the top of the amphitheater.
For the first time in twenty-four years, she had not been the person observing the story.
I need to find a way back, she repeated, more firmly.
The honest part said nothing.
But it did not agree, either.
That night, before closing her eyes in a room someone had prepared for her — narrow bed, window overlooking a garden she recognized from the description in chapter twelve but that should not be visible from that angle — Lyara opened the small notebook she had found on the bedside table.
Elara's notebook.
The handwriting was different from hers — smaller, more precise, slanted to the right. The last written pages were from two days ago. A list of names with symbols beside them. A sentence in the middle of a blank page, without context: he knows it's going to happen and does nothing to stop it.
Lyara looked at the sentence for a long time.
He knows it's going to happen.
She had read the book five times. She had drawn the characters. She had created theories about the arcs and written long forum posts discussing the motivations of every secondary character.
She had never considered that the book also knew what was happening.
She closed the notebook.
Outside the window, the smaller moon — the reddish one, which the inhabitants of Solenne called the Editor's Eye, she would remember later, because she had always found that nomenclature strange while reading and now it suddenly made perfect sense — was directly above the garden.
Watching.
In the faculty room, three floors above, Caelum Drav stayed awake until dawn with a closed book in front of him and a cup of coffee that had gone cold hours ago.
The book had no title on the cover. The inner pages were blank.
All of them, except for the last one, where there was a single line of text in handwriting that did not belong to anyone he knew:
"She has arrived. What are you going to do this time?"
END OF CHAPTER 1
In the next chapter: Lyara wakes for her first official day at Veyndrath Academy and discovers that Elara's body possesses muscle memories of magic she does not know how to control — and that someone has left a note under her door written in ink that disappears when exposed to light.