From the topmost level of the crystal tower, Marian stood in stillness, watching the boy vanish into the twilight.

Thorne's shoulders were hunched, his gait less sure than usual. There was no stealth in his steps now, no grace, no veil of calculation. Just a young man walking as though the sky might fall on him at any moment.

Her fingers gripped the window ledge.

She wasn't sure if she'd done the right thing. Dropping that much truth on him, about the system, about the cores, about Aetherhold's hidden purpose. Perhaps it was too much. Too soon. He was still a student, barely through his first week. A boy.

But then again… was he?

No, she thought, not truly.

He had lived through things most adults would not survive. That much was clear in the way he moved. Like someone trained to disappear in plain sight. A boy, yes, but one honed into something far sharper than anyone should be allowed to become at that age. Still, for all that careful control, Marian had seen it, the flashes of pain behind his cold exterior. The way his voice caught when he mentioned his sister. The way his hands clenched when he remembered.

He hadn't cried. Not once.

Most students would have wept if they learned half of what she'd told him.

But not Thorne.

And that, perhaps, worried her more than anything else.

She exhaled, brushing her palm across the glass. The tower responded, dimming the walls around her as the sigils folded into silence.

What are you, boy?

He wasn't just Elderborn. That much was certain now. She had felt it in his presence, his core humming like a second sun. The ambient aether clung to him as though desperate to be used, reshaped, reborn. Even among the elder races, that sort of reaction was rare. Alarming.

He didn't even realize how strange it was. How… singular.

Most Elderborns could command ambient aether with time and training. Thorne? It answered him on instinct. It bled toward him as if remembering something from a forgotten age.

She turned from the window and walked back toward the center of the room, her thoughts circling restlessly.

She had seen powerful students before, prodigies with rare talents, high-tier cores, legacy lineages, special sponsors. But Thorne didn't just feel powerful.

He felt like a relic. Or worse… a key.

The boy was walking chaos.

And still, there was something else. Something she hadn't told him.

Marian moved to her desk and opened a weathered tome with silver bindings. Inside were names. Dozens of names. Hundreds. Records of Elderborn across the continent. Some she had known, some only rumors, others etched into history through fire and blood.

She flipped to the marked page where she had written his name.

Thorne Silverbane.

The son of Alera, last of her kin. Possible high-bloodline origin. Confirmed ambient draw. Unknown species.

There was something different about him, something primal.

Unknown.

That was the part that chilled her the most.

Most elder races were categorized, studied, recorded, at least in whispers and fragments.

She had pored over every text. Scoured the private archives Aetherhold kept sealed even from its own faculty. The bloodlines of the elder races had been fragmented by time and war.

Some species were known, documented, named. Others... others were myths. Shadows. Creatures that walked before the sun had matured in the sky. Maybe, just maybe, Thorne was one of them, he didn't match anything. No known features, no ancestral records, no confirmed ties to any of the established bloodlines.

Which meant one of two things.

Either he was something new.

Or something so old it had been forgotten by the world entirely.

She closed the book and pressed her hands to her face.

She had sensed it the moment she saw him again in her class. It wasn't just the pendant she had crafted, or his eclipsed core. It wasn't even the glowing eyes, or the pressure that clung to him like static.

It was the aether itself.

The way it reached for him.

The way it clung to him.

It shouldn't have. Even among elder races, ambient aether was notoriously difficult to command. Mages bent refined aether to their will. Ambient aether belonged to the wild. But Thorne? Thorne was the first person she had ever seen who drew it in unconsciously, like a planet pulling moons into orbit.

He didn't even know it. Gods, he had no idea.

He had no idea what lived inside him. No idea what his core could become. No idea what would happen if he were ever pushed, truly pushed, to his limit.

And if that day ever came...

He could become unstoppable.

He could become something the world hadn't seen since the first cities fell and the sky split open.

But only if he lived long enough.

Only if he stayed hidden long enough.

Only if he didn't lose himself to the ghosts in his blood.

Marian looked again to the far edge of the crystal, where the last shimmer of Thorne's presence had faded into the night.

He will need allies, she thought. He will need protection.

But more than that, he would need purpose.

If the Elderborn were to survive, if magic was to survive, Thorne couldn't just be a weapon.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He had to become a beacon.

And for that... he would have to choose it.

She whispered an old sigil under her breath, watching as the magic faded from the air around her.

Soon, she would begin his training.

And the world?

The world would start to change.

She sank into the armchair by the cold hearth and stared into the unlit grate. Her fingers traced the armrest slowly, mind adrift.

What are you? she wondered again, not for the first time.

Whatever Thorne was, it didn't matter if he was ready. He would need to be. The world couldn't afford to let him grow slowly.

If trained right, if honed into something stable, something focused… he could become...

A source of power, yes, but also a shield. A center of gravity around which the scattered remnants of the elder races could gather.

They had spent too long hiding in corners of the world, fractured and dwindling.

But him?

Thorne Silverbane could offer them something they hadn't dared to hope for in millennia.

A future.

Her hand fell to her lap. Her thoughts burned with all the paths that might open, and all the dangers that still loomed. Thorne was a flame barely contained in flesh and bone. If he lost control, if someone took control of him...

No. She wouldn't allow that.

She would guide him. She had to.

Because if they failed now, there would be no one else.

The aether was fading.

The system was dying.

And he might just be the only spark left.

*

Marian stood in silence for a moment, her gaze lingering on the space Thorne had just left, his silhouette vanishing into the dimming courtyard far below. The stars above were pale echoes compared to the quiet, burning light she had just seen in his eyes. Then, slowly, with a breath both purposeful and strained, she turned.

She moved to one of her portal mirrors, its surface dim and still as frozen glass. She didn't need to speak. With a simple flick of her fingers and a pulse of will through the focus ring at her hand, a polished pearl woven into bands of silver, the aether stirred.

The mirror shimmered. The air hummed. And Marian stepped through.

She emerged into a lower level of her tower. It was a place few knew existed. A sealed, circular chamber hollowed into the foundation of the spire, bare, quiet, ancient. The walls here were smooth crystal, etched with dormant sigils that only flickered faintly under ordinary light. But they weren't dormant now.

As she raised her hand again, her focus thrummed. Aether pulsed from the pearl like the slow beat of a living heart, and the runes embedded in the crystalline walls flared to life, silver first, then violet, then white-hot threads of magic that stitched themselves into the air.

The entire tower shifted.

Reality twisted. The world turned itself inside out. When Marian blinked, she was no longer in Aetherhold proper, but in a fold of space hidden from the world, a pocket of primal energy woven at the edges of reality. A still place. An untouched place.

There were no cities here. No mortals. No kingdoms.

Just the aether. And soon, someone else.

She didn't waste time. She moved to the small stone table at the center of the chamber, its surface already covered in vials, dried herbs, bones carved with tiny runes, blood-sealed phials, and a single white feather taken from a creature long since extinct.

Each piece had been chosen with care. Each one aligned with ancient meaning. One mistake would collapse the ritual. And this spell… this spell did not allow second chances.

She began tracing the lines.

Aether poured from her ring again, thin and silvery, but it flowed easily now, too easily. It coiled around her fingers as she carved lines of light into the air, painting sigils that pulsed with memory and raw power. Ancient shapes. Forbidden ones. Sigils that hadn't been spoken aloud in ten thousand years. And some, perhaps, that had never been spoken at all.

When she had first discovered the tome, buried in the ruins of an abandoned sanctum Aetherhold had sent her to investigate, she'd thought it to be a grimoire of forgotten spells. What she found… was something else entirely.

The Resurrection Rite.

A spell so impossibly advanced, so maddeningly complex, that it felt like deciphering a storm. It had taken her years. Years of isolation. Of sleepless nights and failed simulations. Of studying ancient syntaxes, comparing spell harmonics, testing how different cores responded. It had demanded everything of her. And more.

And the price… gods, the price.

It wasn't death. It was never death that frightened Marian. It was the cost of life.

Her hands trembled as she placed the final component, a silver hair wrapped around a drop of blood, bound in a tiny crystal bead, at the center of the circle. As it landed, the sigils flared.

They pulsed once. Then again. Faster. Brighter.

The floating crystal above, her anchor began to glow. A soft, ghostly hum rose from it, vibrating the very air around her. Marian stepped back, heart pounding, breath held.

Here it comes.

The chamber erupted in light.

Bolts of pure aether lashed outward from the sigils, all converging on the crystal. For a moment, the world was nothing but white light and ancient sound. Then, from the crystal, a beam shot downward like a spear of divine intent, hitting the center of the ritual circle with a thunderous crack.

From within the column of purple light… something began to form.

First smoke. Then shape.

A body.

Marian's knees nearly gave out.

She saw the outline of a figure take form, a silhouette she knew so well it hurt to look at. The slope of the shoulders. The curve of the jaw. The fall of hair she remembered brushing from tear-streaked cheeks during the worst nights of their childhood.

Alera.

Not just an echo. Not just a memory. Her.

The aether howled around her, angry at what she was doing, but she didn't flinch. She had done it. Not once. Not twice. But three times now. The spell had worked every time. But the cost...

She wouldn't think of the cost just yet. After... only after.

The body pulsed inside the beam, half-solid, half-light, suspended in the balance of life and death.

And Marian… Marian stood there, trembling, lips parted in awe and grief and terrible, burning hope.

A whisper escaped her:

"Welcome back, sister."

The light pulsed vibrant, defiant, wrong.

Marian stood just outside the circle, her face bathed in the lavender glow of the spell's aftermath, her fingers tight around the folds of her robes. The air smelled like lightning and ozone and something stranger, something ancient. The sigils on the walls throbbed like veins beneath the skin of reality.

And deep beneath her feet, beneath the floating island, beneath the layers of the world itself, something stirred.

Marian ignored it.

She had to.

Because if she didn't, if she let herself feel what the aether was trying to tell her, she might falter. And she couldn't afford doubt now.

If anyone else saw what she had done… what she could do…

They'd tear her apart for it.

True resurrection.

Not a mimicry of life. Not a necromancer's shambling echo. This was not animation, it was restoration. Breath. Soul. Will.

And no one else had ever seen it succeed.

Not like this.

Marian's jaw tightened as the energy from the spell swelled to unbearable levels. The crystalline walls around her groaned, light cracking in wild fractures across their surface. A few of the more unstable sigils sparked with fury, like the world itself was trying to reject what she was doing.

Even now, she felt it in her core. The fabric of nature, the bedrock of aether recoiling. The balance was screaming. Warning her.

She didn't care.

Let the world scream. Let the stars fall. Let the gods rise from their forgotten graves.

She would see her again.

Even if it only lasted a few minutes.

Even if it cost her everything.

And then…

From the pillar of light form gave way to presence.

A silhouette stepped free of the aether, naked but cloaked in light. The spell clothed her in essence, wrapping around her like a second skin.

She was young, seventeen, maybe eighteen, her hair a tumbling fall of black silk, her eyes bright with fury and sorrow and memory. Her features were as Marian remembered them, but etched sharper by death and distance.

Her presence was jarring. The world bent slightly around her, as if uncertain if she should be here.

Alera.

Marian couldn't speak. Could only stare. Could only ache.

Alera's gaze found her immediately. Her bare feet touched the floor, light dimming around her. Her mouth was drawn in a sharp line, her brows furrowed in something that was neither disbelief nor awe but recognition.

Her eyes blazed.

And then she said, voice low and biting:

"Again, Marian?"

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