The book opens to a page Eira doesn't remember turning.
It doesn't creak. It doesn't sigh. It doesn't resist the way old bindings should. It yields—warm beneath her fingertips, as if the cover has been sitting in someone's hands for hours, absorbing heat.
She tells herself it's just leather.
She tells herself she's awake.
The first page is blank.
The second is too.
Then the paper tightens—subtle as skin reacting to a cold touch—and ink threads itself into letters as if it's coming from inside the page rather than onto it.
YOU ARE STANDING IN RUINS.
Her stomach drops with the kind of wrongness she can't argue with.
The room tilts. The air thickens. The taste of ash and iron blooms under her tongue like an old bruise pressed too hard. She blinks and the space around her becomes something else entirely—no walls, no ceiling, only open sky bruised purple-black with smoke.
Stone spires loom, broken at the tips, jagged as snapped teeth.
Masks lie everywhere, face-down in pale dust—porcelain cracked like eggshell, bone splintered, obsidian shattered into knife-edged crescents. There are too many to count. Too many for an accident.
Her hands are wet.
She lifts them and sees red clinging to her palms in thin strings. It doesn't drip. It clings like ink. It glistens as if it's trying to spell something.
A voice speaks behind her.
Not familiar in her mind. Familiar in her body—like warmth against the back of her neck, like the instinct to flinch before a blade even moves.
"Don't turn around," the voice says.
It's steady. Tired. The kind of steadiness that isn't calm so much as contained.
She turns anyway.
A boy stands on the steps of a shattered altar. He wears an onyx mask that drinks the light, split down the center by a seam so fine it could be a scar. No crest. No ornament. Just blank blackness and the idea of eyes behind it.
In his hand is a crown.
Not gold. Not jewels.
Thorns. Bone. Mirror shards.
When the wind moves, it sings through the cracks like distant human screaming—soft enough to pretend it's only the weather.
He lifts the crown slightly, as if offering it. As if daring her to take it.
"Say it," he tells her. "Say you remember."
Her throat closes. Her lungs forget how to be lungs.
She can't remember her name.
But she can remember his.
She doesn't know how. She doesn't know why. The knowledge is already inside her, old as hunger.
The page writes again. It doesn't ask permission.
L U C I E N
The letters brand themselves into her vision. Heat pulses behind her eyes. The world narrows until there is only the seam in his mask and the crown in his hand and her hands—her hands—
Her palms itch.
The red on them begins to move.
Not dripping. Crawling.
She stares as the blood-ink pulls itself into shapes.
Words.
She doesn't write them. Her skin does, as if it has practiced.
THE QUEEN HAS CHOSEN.
A laugh cracks through the ruin. Distant, wrong—like a child mimicking grief because someone taught them the sound without the meaning. The stone beneath her feet shifts, not physically but remembering, rearranging itself like tiles sliding into a ritual pattern.
Lucien's head lifts.
It lands on her like a hand at her throat—not squeezing yet, just measuring how easily it could.
"Close the book," he says.
It doesn't sound like a command.
It sounds like a plea he hates himself for making.
She tries.
She tries to tear her eyes away from the page, to shut the Codex, to claw her fingers out of whatever this is—
—and the world jerks hard, like a hook yanked at the base of her spine.
Cold air floods her lungs.
Real air.
She's sitting upright in a moving carriage, the interior lit by a single lantern that throws gold across red velvet. The wheels crunch over gravel and frozen ground. The carriage rocks gently, like it's trying to lull her back into a lie.
Her heart is pounding as if it ran somewhere without her.
She looks at her palms.
Clean.
No ink.
No blood.
But the sensation of it is still there, faint as a bruise.
Across from her sits an attendant in dark formalwear, posture too perfect. Their mouth is covered by a thin strip of silver cloth. Their eyes remain lowered as if looking at her counts as a crime.
On the seat beside them rests a black wooden case sealed with wax stamped in a crest she doesn't recognize: a crown crossed out with an X.
She doesn't remember when the case arrived. She doesn't remember when she arrived.
She remembers ash.
Her name, as far as she knows, is Eira Wynter.
It's on the papers. It's on the admission letter. It's what the attendant called her when they offered their gloved hand earlier and helped her into this carriage like she was precious cargo.
She repeats it silently now.
Eira. Eira.
It sits wrong in her mind—too smooth, too practiced, like a dress borrowed from someone prettier.
The lantern swings. Light skates across her lap.
A mask lies there, wrapped in silk the color of dried roses.
She doesn't remember placing it there.
Her fingers move anyway, careful, almost reverent. She unfolds the silk and lifts the mask.
Silver half-mask. Mirror-polished. Edged in red so thin it could be a trick of the lantern's flame.
Her reflection wavers in it.
For a moment, she thinks she sees a different face.
Not older. Not younger.
Just… not hers.
The attendant speaks softly, as if the gentleness is part of the performance.
"Noctis Academy is near."
Eira swallows. Her throat feels tight in a way that isn't fear exactly. It's the sense of a door closing behind her while she's still trying to decide whether she wanted to walk through.
"Rules?" she asks, because there's a part of her that needs the shape of the cage before she can pretend she's free inside it.
The attendant inclines their head.
"Wear your mask outside your quarters. Always during ceremonies."
A pause, like they're listening for something that isn't sound.
"Do not remove another student's mask. Do not touch it. Do not ask what it means."
Eira nods once.
"Do not enter a Spire without clearance. Do not wander alone after curfew. Do not follow voices."
They stop again—just long enough to let the next line land like a knife laid flat.
"Do not fall in love."
Eira's breath catches, small and involuntary.
The attendant's gaze lifts slightly. Not fully. Just enough to suggest they noticed.
"Obsession is tolerated," they correct. "Attachment is not."
The carriage slows.
The forest thins.
Outside, the fog parts like something being pulled aside.
And there it is.
Noctis Academy rises from the mountainside like a black star forced into the world.