2025-07-09 18:15:39The silence in the Council chamber was so sharp it could’ve carved through bone.
Kai stood at the center of the obsidian circle, the weight of every stare pinning him down like iron chains. Twelve crimson-robed mystics loomed above him, each seated on thrones sculpted from jagged black stone. Some wore literal masks,iron, bone, glass. Others wore expressions far worse.
No warmth.
No welcome.
Just scrutiny.
The air felt thin. Too thin. His lungs fought for breath.
“Explain,” Councilor Dareth growled. His voice scraped like gravel in a blade sharpener. “You shattered a Class-Five training chamber. No enchantments. No runes. No focus seals. What, precisely, did you invoke?”
Kai’s throat worked, but the words tangled.
“I didn’t…” he started, then stopped.
What was the point of lying?
He forced himself to meet their eyes. “I don’t know.”
Councilor Mireya leaned forward, emerald irises glowing like cold flame. “You don’t know? Are we to believe you stumbled into a destabilization wave capable of splitting reinforced arcanite stone?”
Kai gritted his teeth. “I said I don’t know what I used. I didn’t even mean to do it!”
Whispers slithered between the seats above. A few heads shook. One mystic laughed under her breath.
Councilor Dareth stood. “We’ve lost battalions to uncontained magic. Bloodlines wiped out. We cannot afford another uncontrolled variable. And you… expect leniency?”
“He doesn’t need leniency,” a calm voice said behind them.
Every head turned.
A new figure stepped into the chamber,robes not crimson, but pale silver and white, the markings of a Healing Hall mystic. Her presence was quiet but striking.
Seria Vale.
Kai blinked in surprise.
He knew her name. Everyone did. She was the best healer in the upper ranks. A prodigy of restoration and soul-weaving. But they’d never spoken. Never even shared a class.
Why was she here?
Dareth’s frown deepened. “This is a closed session.”
“I invoke Section Twelve,” Seria said softly, yet clearly. “Intervention Accord. Witness testimony under arcane identification.”
Mireya scoffed. “Identification of what, girl?”
Seria didn’t flinch. She moved forward until she stood beside Kai, then lifted her gaze toward the Council.
“His face.”
Later, in the still, herb-scented corridor of the Healing Hall, Kai sat across from her in a quiet chamber.
The lights were dim. The windows open to let in a summer breeze. Neither of them touched the tea she poured.
He finally broke the silence.
“You said you knew me,” he said. “How?”
Seria folded her hands. “Not you. Not exactly.”
He tilted his head. “Then what?”
“I’ve seen you,” she said. “Or… someone who looks like you.”
Kai frowned. “Where?”
“There’s a wing beneath the Academy,” she said. “Most don’t know about it. Even many healers haven’t passed through. But I… study soul fractures.”
Kai raised an eyebrow. “Okay… and?”
“There’s a sealed floor. Deepest level. Pre-Fracture relics. It’s not supposed to be accessed without a Grand Master’s approval.” She hesitated. “I broke the rules once.”
Kai leaned forward. “What did you see?”
Her voice dropped. “A painting. Old. Cracked. Hung behind three layers of wards.”
“What kind of painting?”
Seria reached into her sleeve and carefully pulled out a small, creased piece of parchment.
“I sketched it. Roughly. I wasn’t supposed to, but…”
She slid the paper across the table.
Kai picked it up slowly. His eyes widened.
It was messy,charcoal lines, uneven shading,but the resemblance was undeniable.
Same jawline. Same hair. Same eyes.
His face.
Staring from a painting centuries old.
And behind him… darkness. Chains. Shattered links. A storm boiling in the sky.
Below the image, barely legible:
“The Boy Who Breaks the Seal.”
Kai’s voice dropped to a whisper. “This has to be some kind of mistake.”
“I thought so too,” Seria said, her gaze steady. “Until the Council summoned you. Until I saw it again.”
He looked down at the sketch, suddenly cold all over. “Why… why are you helping me?”
She looked away, hands tightening in her lap. “Because I’ve seen what the Council does to students like you.”
“Students like me?”
“Different. Dangerous. Ones they can’t explain.” She swallowed. “They don’t just expel you, Kai. They erase you.”
He stared.
“And I…” she looked down. “I don’t want you to disappear.”
That night, Kai couldn’t sleep.
Not because of the Council. Not even because of the sketch.
But because of her.
Seria Vale.
The girl who stood in front of twelve of the most powerful people in the realm,and said his face mattered.
Why?
She didn’t owe him. She barely knew him. She risked her position, her rank… maybe her future.
Why would anyone do that?
Kai sat up, breath heavy. He opened his palm.
The coin wasn’t there. It never was when he needed it. But the mark…
The mark throbbed.
Once.
Twice.
Then silence.
The window creaked.
He turned sharply. Just the wind.
Then,
A scream.
From the hallway.
Kai bolted to his feet and tore the door open.
Dozens of students were already crowding the corridor near the Healing Hall. Fear clung to the air like smoke.
“Move!” Kai shouted. “Let me through!”
He shoved past them, heart pounding, fear mixing with something sharper. Something colder.
He entered the chamber and froze.
Seria stood in the middle of the room.
Eyes white as ice. Lips moving rapidly,but the words…
They weren’t hers.
Her voice was layered. Echoing. Wrong.
“Sever the coin… or sever the world.”
Kai’s blood turned to lead.
“What…?”
Her arms shook violently, fingers twitching, jerking like pulled by invisible strings.
“One opens the prison. The other becomes it. The choice will find you.”
Then her body was flung backward.
Kai darted forward and caught her before she hit the ground.
“Seria!” he shouted. “Seria, talk to me!”
Her head lolled against his chest.
Her eyes fluttered.
“Did… I fall?” she asked weakly.
He couldn’t answer.
Behind him, whispers stirred again. But none of them had heard what he heard.
None of them saw what he saw.
The faintest glow,black, hairline, forming beneath his shirt.
The mark.
A crack was spreading.
Far beneath the Academy, in the sealed, forgotten chamber Seria had spoken of, the chains within the ancient painting began to shift.
Stone didn’t groan.
It breathed.
And the eyes of the painted boy slowly flickered open.
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010
Kai opened his eyes to darkness.Not the kind that came with night or shadows. This was weight. This was a silence that pressed against the skull, dense, suffocating. The kind of dark that breathed.He sat up slowly, his muscles aching. His mouth tasted like ash and metal. No sign of the candlelit chamber. No sign of Seria. Just cold stone beneath him and a strange pulse in the air, steady like a heartbeat.He wasn’t alone.“Kai,” came the voice. Smooth. Too smooth. Familiar. Wrong.He stood. “Who’s there?”A faint light glowed behind him. He turned and the voice was suddenly behind him again.“You saved her. Now who will save you?”He lunged toward the sound but a hand shot out of the black and grabbed his wrist. It wasn’t solid. It felt like fog and ice and bone all at once.Then “Enough,” barked a voice. Rough. Grounded. Real.The darkness peeled away like smoke blown from a flame. Kai blinked as shapes formed. Bookshelves. Braziers. Carved runes.Riven.The old man stood before h
009
Kai burst into Seria’s room, chest heaving, fingers curled tight around the warning note.Empty.No sign of a struggle. No blood. No overturned furniture.Just stillness.And a glowing glyph on the floor , soft, silver, pulsing like a held breath.“Seria?” he whispered.No answer.He crouched slowly, fingers hovering over the strange rune. It thrummed, a faint buzz rising into his bones. The second his skin touched it,FLASH.The room disappeared.He blinked.Now standing inside a circular chamber lit by floating candles, he spun around. Shelves lined with old books and glass vials stretched toward the domed ceiling. Shadows curled along the edges, curling like smoke.And then,Footsteps.She stepped out from behind a bookshelf.Seria.Alive.But her face was wrong. Pale. Ashen. Her lips trembled, and her eyes,red, wet, hollow.“Kai…” Her voice cracked. “You came.”His breath caught. “You’re safe…”Relief hit him,sharp, fast,but it didn’t last.She wasn’t looking at him.Not directly.
008
The tunnel collapsed behind them in a roar of stone and fire.Kai and Seria were flung into the forest clearing, landing hard as a shockwave rippled through the trees. Leaves scattered into the air like birds taking flight, and dirt rained from the sky.Kai choked, coughing violently as the air turned to ash in his lungs. “Seria… you okay?”Seria nodded, shaky and pale. “That… that wasn’t just magic. That thing… it wore your face, Kai.”He didn’t answer.His eyes stayed fixed on his trembling hands,fingers curled, knuckles white, veins faintly pulsing.Not from fear.From something deeper. Rage. Shame. Power.He’d felt the pull again. Deep in the ruins,when the shadow whispered, when the air turned black. It had called to him. Tempted him.And he’d run.Just like his mother had all those years ago.“I could’ve stopped it,” he muttered.“No,” Seria said gently. “You chose not to lose yourself.”He turned away.But the worst part wasn’t the shadow.It was what it meant: Jin knew. Faen k
007
Another student was missing.Kai sat on the academy rooftop, legs dangling over the edge as dusk swallowed the horizon. His eyes weren’t on the sky though they were fixed on the darkened window of Dorm 5C. Malric’s window. The curtains hadn’t moved in two days.“Transferred,” the headmaster said this morning.Same word. Same lie.“Transferred to Obsidian Campus for advanced elemental studies,” they said with those fake smiles, like they’d rehearsed it. Like anyone ever came back from Obsidian.Kai chewed the inside of his cheek.That made four students now.Four gone without goodbyes, without luggage, without even a pulse in the rumor mill.And no one was talking about it.Except Seria.“Did you find anything?” she asked softly behind him. She was always soft-spoken, but lately, her voice sounded thinner stretched, like a thread pulled too tight.Kai shook his head. “No bags. No packed uniforms. Just a bloodstain near Malric’s sparring locker. It was half-scrubbed, like someone tried
006
The silence in the Council chamber was so sharp it could’ve carved through bone.Kai stood at the center of the obsidian circle, the weight of every stare pinning him down like iron chains. Twelve crimson-robed mystics loomed above him, each seated on thrones sculpted from jagged black stone. Some wore literal masks,iron, bone, glass. Others wore expressions far worse.No warmth.No welcome.Just scrutiny.The air felt thin. Too thin. His lungs fought for breath.“Explain,” Councilor Dareth growled. His voice scraped like gravel in a blade sharpener. “You shattered a Class-Five training chamber. No enchantments. No runes. No focus seals. What, precisely, did you invoke?”Kai’s throat worked, but the words tangled.“I didn’t…” he started, then stopped.What was the point of lying?He forced himself to meet their eyes. “I don’t know.”Councilor Mireya leaned forward, emerald irises glowing like cold flame. “You don’t know? Are we to believe you stumbled into a destabilization wave capab
005
Kai hadn’t slept.Not after the shadow. Not after the voice.He lay awake for hours, hand pressed to his chest where the mark still pulsed like a second heartbeat,steady, quiet, ominous. By the time the first rays of dawn kissed the eastern spires of Blacksteel, he was already out of bed, boots crunching against gravel as he stormed across the Academy grounds.This time, he didn’t knock.He shoved open the wooden doors of the sealed wing.“Riven!” His voice echoed through the stone corridor like a crack of thunder. “You said the lock is cracking? Then tell me what’s inside it!”The blind man didn’t flinch. He was already sitting cross-legged, as if he’d been waiting all night.“It has begun,” Riven said calmly.Kai’s hands curled into fists. “Don’t give me riddles. A shadow came into my room last night. It spoke. It knew my name. You said I’m a vessel,for what, exactly?!”Riven turned his head slowly. Though his eyes were milk-white, they locked onto Kai like they could see straight t
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