Eclipse: Crest Born

Auxiliary chapter Two

The Eidrix Codex: Volume I, Part II

The Academy and Its Silent Purpose

By Veiran Thale

They call it Noctra Academy, the pinnacle of human knowledge.

A sanctuary for gifted youth.

A monument of order standing above the chaos of the outer districts.

At least, that is what they want the people to believe.

To me, Noctra has never felt like a school. It feels more like a living organism, quietly observing everyone inside it. The walls hum at night. The air smells faintly metallic. Every corridor is lined with sensors disguised as lights. Even silence here feels recorded.

Students come from every district, handpicked after “aptitude tests” that no one outside the Academy truly understands. Most of them think it’s talent that brought them here. It isn’t.

It’s blood.

The Black Vein funds Noctra entirely. Every experiment, every classroom, every lab is theirs. The Academy’s purpose is to isolate children with dormant traces of the Origin Gene, and to watch what happens when that gene begins to stir. The lectures and duels, the honor codes and ceremonies are distractions. Rituals to keep the subjects believing they are scholars, not specimens.

I have read the internal data. More than half of the students who fail their “final examinations” do not return home. Their families receive falsified letters of transfer or early graduation. Their bodies are never found.

And yet the public continues to worship the Academy as a symbol of hope. The lie works because the results are beautiful. Every year, Noctra produces young warriors, engineers, and scientists whose abilities border on the miraculous. The world sees progress. I see the byproduct of selective sacrifice.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the Academy itself can create control so absolute, then somewhere, inevitably, there must come a student it cannot contain.

Maybe one child, one anomaly, will emerge whose Crest doesn’t align with their predictions. Someone whose awakening doesn’t follow their equations. Someone who sees through the illusion and refuses to be part of it.

That thought keeps me awake some nights. I don’t know if it’s hope or fear.

Systems built on lies eventually meet their contradiction. And when that contradiction appears, the entire structure trembles.

Noctra has spent decades perfecting obedience. It only needs one defiance to fall apart.

When that person arrives, whoever they are, they will not be trained by Noctra’s teachings.

They will be born from everything it tried to suppress.

_______________________________________________

***The Eidrix Codex: Volume I, Part III***

The Children of Noctra

By Veiran Thale

Every system has its outliers, even one as meticulously constructed as Noctra.

The Academy keeps extensive records on students with “aberrant Crest resonance”, those whose awakening patterns don’t align with predicted parameters. I have been allowed restricted access to these files, though I suspect the data has been filtered before reaching me.

Still, the fragments are enough to draw certain conclusions.

The children share nothing in common on the surface. They have different backgrounds, temperaments, even districts but their physiological readings carry the same anomaly: an unstable synchronization between neural rhythm and Crest signal. In simpler terms, their Crests respond too personally. Instead of amplifying control, they reflect emotion, trauma, and desire.

The researchers call it corruption.

I call it humanity.

These students display moments of brilliance followed by collapse, as if their minds and their Crests wage silent wars inside them. One moment, they bend matter and energy with impossible precision; the next, they can’t hold a cup without trembling.

The Black Vein considers them dangerous.

I consider them inevitable.

Suppressing emotion in a system built on emotional triggers was always going to fracture something. Each of these children carries the potential to become either a weapon or a revelation. Most will break before they reach either. But if even one endures, the world will change.

I have observed five in particular. Their names have been partially redacted, but I remember fragments. One dreams of burning cities. One speaks to things no one else sees. One feels every heartbeat in a fifty-meter radius. One cannot lie without pain. And one whose file was nearly erased appeared to have no Crest at all, yet still causes resonance in others nearby.

They are the Children of Noctra, living equations the Academy cannot solve.

To the Black Vein, they are failures.

To me, they are the closest proof that something greater than the system still exists.

If the collapse ever begins, it will not come from the laboratories or the Council chambers.

It will begin in the hearts of children who were never meant to survive their own awakenings.