The letter arrived in the afternoon, bound with black ribbon and sealed in silver wax bearing the twin spires of the High Arcanum.
Serapha read it first.
"They've extended an invitation," she said, holding the parchment delicately, like it might bite. Perhaps she thought it may rip, due to the gentle feeling of the paper. "To enroll in the Academy's Outer Disciplines."
Caelum blinked. "Isn't that… a good thing?"
"In theory."
She set the letter down and sighed deeply.
"In reality, it means they've noticed you."
The Outer Disciplines weren't like standard training schools for channelers or soldiers. They were specialized tracks for those who fell outside normal magical lines: artificers, sigil-weavers, resonance scholars, and rare wildcard initiates whose talents defied classification.
It was also where the Arcanum kept its unpredictables—the students too valuable to ignore, but too dangerous to trust.
Caelum fit that mold now unfortunately.
Serapha pressed a hand to his shoulder and looked him deeply in the eyes before he entered the stone gates.
"Don't let them cage you with kindness," she whispered. "Not all chains rattle."
The academy's Outer Hall was a monastic complex wrapped in scholarly robes. Students wore half-capes dyed in their discipline colors. Teachers moved like shadows. The walls hummed with bound mana, and whisperwards listened to every footstep.
Caelum was assigned to Class Nine.
It was a small cohort.
Six students.
And all of them were watching him.
He sat at the far end of the circular classroom. The others trickled in: a pale-haired girl with a piercing gaze and ink-stained fingers; a tall boy whose aura burned red with inner fire; twins who finished each other's glyphwork; and finally—
A figure in obsidian robes who arrived late, silent, with a mask covering half his face.
When the instructor entered, the air changed.
She wore no color—only white—and her presence felt like a blade.
"I am Instructrix Vale," she said. "You are here because the Arcanum cannot place you. That means you are either flawed… or exceptional. We will find out which."
Her gaze fell on Caelum last.
"And some of you are here for reasons more delicate."
She smiled, thinly.
Caelum said nothing.
Their first lesson was in Resonance Tracing—not true magic, but detection. Finding echoes in places where spells had faded, where power had lingered.
It was normally graduate-level work.
Caelum struggled.
He could feel echoes. But shaping them, identifying them—that required training. The others outpaced him easily.
Only the ink-fingered girl said anything encouraging.
"You're not slow," she said after class. "You're listening too hard."
Caelum looked at her. "What does that mean?"
"Echoes are shy," she said. "Push too hard, they vanish. You have to trick them into thinking you're not looking."
"What's your name?"
She paused.
"Rheia," she said. "My family came from the Ash Coast. We don't forget things. Even when we want to."
That night, Caelum sat outside the dormitory's rune circle, watching the lights above Lareth shimmer like trapped souls. Serapha hadn't returned yet—she'd gone to investigate something in the east tunnels.
He closed his eyes.
And the echo came again.
Not the monk.
Not the dream-saint.
Something… else.
A voice like broken glass.
"He remembers."
Caelum turned sharply.
Nothing.
But his sigil burned against his chest.
He pressed a hand to it—and felt a memory not his own.
Chains. Fire. A name torn from the throat of the world.
Elarion.
The vision shattered.
Down in the scriptorium, Rheia was still awake.
She raised an eyebrow as Caelum burst in, pale and panting.
"Let me guess," she said. "You dreamed someone else's dream."
"I need to know who keeps saying his name," he said.
"Whose?"
"Elarion."
She flinched.
"You shouldn't say that aloud."
"Why?"
"Because some names echo back."
Caelum stepped closer. "You know who he was."
Rheia hesitated.
"I know stories," she said. "My grandmother used to sing lullabies about a shadow-child with a star for a heart. Said he could undo fate by walking wrong. Said he burned a city once, not with fire—but with forgetting."
"Is it true?"
"I don't know," she whispered. "But you just made every ward glyph in this library cry out. So maybe you should ask yourself why you remember him."
Up in the skies above Lareth, in a tower warded even against time, an old man stirred.
He was blind. But he saw further than anyone alive.
When the sigil flared in the resonance net, he stood and turned toward the city's heart.
"The echo returns," he murmured.
And somewhere deep below the city, where the roots of the Weave had long gone dark—
A second sigil burned into life.
But this one was twisted.
Cracked.
And it belonged not to a boy seeking answers—
But to something long buried… seeking revenge.