The Prussian succession had been a slaughter dressed as politics for five years.Twenty princes and one princess fought for the throne, and the only rule that mattered was brutally clear: win the support of five out of eight dukes, and the crown belonged to the winner.Brothers who had once trained together now hired knives in the dark. Factions formed at dawn and shattered by dusk.One prince would swear eternal loyalty to another over wine, then send poison before morning.The royal palace in Königsberg had become a graveyard of ambition.The first prince and the second prince had each secured two powerful dukes early. Their alliances were the standard everyone measured themselves against.Then, Sofina changed the game completely, backed by the influential dukes who had chosen to support her.The first duke to pledge his support was Duke Winter. He stood by Sofina, alongside his daughter Renata Winter—her best friend since childhood and the one who had carried her darkest secrets for

Duke Eisenwall's gaze dropped to the floor. To Dornwald's body.                                                                                                                                                         

The wormhole tasted like lightning and old copper. Alex felt it before he understood it — that electric wrongness on his tongue, the metallic pull at the back of his throat, as the old man carried him through the tear in space. Ragnar was there too, limp and silent, the old man bearing both of them through the fold in reality as though he'd done it a thousand times. Alex had no idea where they were taking him. He knew only one thing with terrible certainty: he would not survive the journey's end. Whatever mercy had kept him breathing until now would end the moment they stepped through the other side. Move. His nascent soul power surged from that buried place, and Alex threw every fragment of it against his own chains. His muscles screamed. His vision strobed white. And then — the

The Rydell family home was the kind of place that had been designed to make visitors feel small.Three stories of pale stone, iron-latticed windows, a gate that required a mana-key to open — the kind of gate that announced, before anyone inside had spoken a word, that the people within considered themselves a different category of person than whoever was standing outside it.Alex stood outside it with Feby and noted all of this without comment.She had told him on the tram ride over. Her father — Edmund Steinmeyer, dead four years now — had left behind a fortune so substantial that the precise number had never been discussed in polite company.What had been discussed, extensively and behind closed doors, was the question of what happened to it.Edmund had died without a will that satisfied everyone.His money had passed into a family trust administered jointly — which in practice meant administered by the Rydell side, her mother's family, who had been living off the interest since the

Feby leaned in until her shoulder nearly touched his. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted it to."Do I sign this?"Alex didn't look at the paper. He looked at her, and something in the steadiness of it made her breath catch — like he'd already read the whole document and half her life besides."Which one gets you there faster?" he asked quietly. "Reaching magician level three, or landing a manager's position at the Reagent Group?"She almost laughed. Level three. As if the words alone didn't sting.She'd spent years pressing her palm to testing stones that stayed dark, years watching other students light them up like sunrise while hers gave back nothing but her own reflection.Talent wasn't something you could bribe, borrow, or earn. You either had it or you spent your whole life pretending the ache of not having it didn't exist."The manager position," she said. "Of course."Alex tilted his head closer, and his whisper dropped so low it was almost just breath. "Then here's a th