The mountain had no name on any modern map. Draven checked Elysande's coordinates against the maps they carried twice before they left the camp. The mountain existed on the older maps, the ones copied from pre-imperial surveys, but the name had been removed deliberately at some point, scratched out on every copy as though someone had gone through the archives specifically to erase it. What remained was a location and a shape and the word *temple* written in script so old it had almost lost legibility. They reached the base by midmorning. The steps were visible from a distance, cut into the mountain's face, rising at a pitch that looked wrong from below, too steep, the kind of angle that the eye said was impossible before the body proved otherwise. A thousand of them. The stone was old enough that the center of each step was worn smooth by the passage of people who had come before, though not recently. The worn patches were ancient. Nobody had climbed these in a very long time. Jin

The spring's surface was still moving.Draven stood at the edge with his hand over his chest where the pendant sat and the presence looked at him and the chamber held the silence of something that had been waiting for this specific moment for a very long time. "Stop," the presence said. Not to Draven. To the situation. To the argument that had been filling the chamber for the last several minutes. Jin stopped. Draven stopped. Sera, at the far edge of the pool, went still. The presence moved to the center of the pool's edge and looked at all of them in turn, unhurried, with the patience of something that existed outside the pressure of three weeks and cultivation damage and a tournament being built to kill a generation. "This was the test," it said. Draven looked at it. "The spring never wanted cultivation," it said. "It has never wanted cultivation. In three hundred years, in every case that has come to this chamber, the spring has never taken cultivation as payment." It looked

They stopped at a village two hours from the academy. Not for rest. For the conversation. Draven had been carrying Garrett's name for two hours of riding and he needed somewhere with walls around it before it went any further, somewhere he could say the rest of what needed to be said and have the four of them process it properly before they rode back into a building where the walls might be listening. The inn had a private room. He paid for it. They went in and he closed the door and he looked at Sera. "Tell them what you told me," he said. "All of it." She told them. She started at the beginning. Xerion, dragon consciousness permanently inhabiting a human body, not a temporary disguise but a true and complete transfer. An empire built on that foundation. Destroyed by Voss and the seven warriors, the body gone, the consciousness surviving, the sect preserving it through three hundred years in an object smaller than a fist, waiting for the right vessel. The vessel chosen by Xerion

The morning after they returned, Jin found Draven before breakfast. "Can I come in," he said. Draven stepped back. Jin came in and sat on the desk chair and Draven sat on the bed and Jin looked at his hands for a moment. "I need to tell you something," Jin said. "Before you notice it yourself. Because if you notice it yourself I'll have to explain why I didn't tell you and that conversation will be worse." Draven waited. "The Wind Kingdom," Jin said. "While you were at the temple with Sera. I didn't go back to the academy." "I know," Draven said. "You said you had a—" "I went to the Wind Kingdom," Jin said. "To one of the formation sites." Draven was quiet. "Zephyr sent coordinates," Jin said. "He'd located one of the sect's sites in his territory and he needed someone who could assess it. He messaged me because you were unreachable and he had my contact through the military provisional contract." He looked at his hands. "I went. I found the site. It was partially activated,

The map went on the table the morning of the second rest day. All four of them around it, the formation site markers in red, spread across the empire's territory like something dropped and scattered. Five remaining after the Wind Kingdom. Draven put his finger on each one in turn and said what he knew about it and Sera corrected or added from the sect documents she'd read and Jin said nothing and Lyra took notes. The flooded valley to the northeast. Three days' travel, the site itself submerged, which meant water and which meant Lyra was both the most useful person to bring and the most complicated one, her water magic interacting with a water-based formation in ways that were hard to predict. The mountain range to the north. Five days at minimum. High altitude, difficult terrain, the kind of site that had been placed somewhere difficult to reach on purpose. The city market district. Unknown depth, s