The festival banners came down four days after the vault. Workers pulled them from the rooftops the same way they'd hung them — quick, practiced, indifferent — and by the end of the week the capital had folded the whole celebration away into memory, the streets scrubbed back to their ordinary rhythm like ten thousand screaming people had never once filled that arena at all. Lucian watched it happen from the training yard behind the inn, one banner at a time, and felt something in his chest tighten a little further with each one. He trained until his hands split and kept training after that. Isabel had stopped asking him to eat properly around the second day. She still brought food, still set it within reach, still watched him from the doorway with an expression he refused to look at directly but she'd learned, faster than he wanted her to, that the version of him standing in that courtyard right now didn't respond to gentleness the way the version from before the vault had. He d

Two mornings after the vault, before a single festival banner had come down, Lucian stood in an audience chamber he'd never once set foot in during a lifetime spent being wheeled past its doors. The room was smaller than he'd expected. No throne, no towering pillars — just dark wood, a long table, and windows shuttered against a sun the Emperor of the Valerian Empire had apparently never much cared for either. Garrett stood at his shoulder, close enough to matter, far enough to let Lucian face this alone in every way that counted. The Emperor was already seated when the doors opened. He did not rise. "Take off the blindfold," he said, before Lucian had crossed half the room. "I want to see what my son actually looks like." Lucian reached up and untied it. His silver eyes met the Emperor's directly for the first time in longer than either of them could probably calculate, and for a moment neither man said anything at all. "You've grown," the Emperor said finally. Not warm. Not co

The Royal Academy sat on a hill above the capital, walled in white stone that had gone grey at the base from three centuries of rain. Lucian had expected something grander. What he got, walking through the front gates with Garrett a step behind him and a trunk of borrowed clothes riding in a cart somewhere further back, was mostly just noise — students crossing the courtyard in loose clusters, arguing about class placements, comparing wristbands that marked their bloodline and rank for anyone who cared to look. Nobody looked twice at him yet. That would change within the hour, and he knew it, and he'd made his peace with it somewhere on the road south. "Registrar's office is that building," Garrett said, nodding toward a squat stone hall near the courtyard's edge. "I'll see your trunk to the dormitory. You go make yourself official." "You don't have to walk me there like I'm still six." "I'm not walking you there. I'm walking myself somewhere useful and you happen to be going the