The next night, Soren lingered in the corridor long after curfew, loitering near the old laundry chute where the air was thick with the scent of lye and wool. He waited, and the blue glow returned.

This time, it crawled up the stairwell, not down, pulsing more urgently, as though the entire building had started breathing in time with the pulse. He followed, cautious, up two flights and then across a deserted study lounge before stopping at a door he'd never noticed before, plain wood, no marking, set tight in a frame of stone so old the corners had worn smooth.

The blue aura hovered around the edges, then faded.

Soren reached out, expecting resistance, but the door opened without sound. Beyond was a landing, and then, just visible, a steep spiral stair descending into darkness. At the bottom, perhaps four stories down, a faint, almost-imagined light glimmered: the color of freezing water under ice.

He hesitated. Then he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

The chill was immediate, waking every old bruise and scar along his arms and ribs. Echoes built on echoes, his footsteps, his breath, even the thump of his heart, layered atop each other until all sense of direction spun.

He kept descending.

At the bottom, a small stone antechamber opened up. The walls bore old ward-marks, most faded into the mortar. The only thing in the room was a glassy, black slab set into the floor, perhaps two paces across, with a shallow groove running its circumference—a black mirror, absorbing the faint, crawling blue that leaked in from the hallway above.

He stood at the edge, peering into the slab. Surface smooth as oil but deeper than sense. He expected his own reflection, but nothing looked back. Not even a haze, not even shadow or shape.

He crouched, stretched out a hand to the chill an inch above the glass. The old urge to break the surface, to see how far it would let him through. Was this a test, a snare, or just an artifact, forgotten and left to ferment in the tides of the Academy's rumors?

It pulled. Not a voice or vision, but a physical ache along his ulna, a shudder from wrist to elbow that traced upward, a slow braid of heat and frost. The air vibrated in his lungs like he'd breathed a stringed note. The sensation bordered on pain, but was not pain; a call for completion, or connection.

Two steps away and the sensation faded to nothing. He tried again, circling the slab, squinting at the markings along its rim. Familiar, though not from any text. It echoed the traces in Veyra's wards: a spiral, then a series of broken crossings, then the triple-bar that marked boundary. A containment, as Dane and Valenna had both named it.

He knelt, fixed the patterns in memory, and waited for the next signal. But the slab revealed nothing more, not even a shiver when tapped.

When he finally left, the echo of the stairwell seemed to follow him up, lightening only at the first door above. He passed through two more levels and, emerging into the corridor, found the world unchanged.

But something in his chest did not reset. The shard beat out a slow, double-pulse until he was halfway to the dorms, and for the first time Soren wondered if it was something more than a compass or a warning, if the thing in him wasn't just a piece of death, but a key expecting a lock.

He slept poorly, snap-dreaming blue sigils and empty mirrors, and woke before the bell out of stubborn habit.

Dane called an unscheduled assembly the next morning at first light.

The storm had broken, but the city below was still drowned in mist, making the Spire's windows flash and fade with every blink. Two dozen initiates crowded into the lower dueling hall, their uniforms damp and presence uneasy. Even Cassian arrived without his usual retinue, standing alone beside Kale. Seren entered last, face set in a line so precise it might have been drawn with a ruler.

Instructor Veyra stood beside Dane, arms folded, her robe stitched in new runes along the cuff. Her gaze swept the cohort, pausing on Soren a half-second longer than any other. He could not read her expression, but the slope of her shoulders read like readiness.

Dane stepped up to the blade-etched platform at the room's center. "Listen closely," he said, and the words fell with the density of stone. "You will descend, as a group, to the underhalls. You will follow the marked route. You will not stray, or you will bear the consequence. Field examination. Single file, no argument."

Nervous energy crackled through the room. Chorused whispers: "Isn't it off-limits?" "Is this punishment?" "What's down there, corpse vault?"

Soren caught himself clenching and unclenching his left hand. The memory of the black slab radiated down his arm, itching at the scar where the shard had once been pressed into bone.

Veyra led the way, Dane following. The cohort queued according to the rolling list, with Soren slotted immediately behind Cassian and ahead of Seren. They filed down the main stairwell, then through two sets of locked gates before the stones turned from white marble to the iron-veined basalt of the old Academy.

Every step down sounded hollow, the air denser and wetter here, salted with the tang of ozone and faint, metallic decay.

The route twisted three times, then bottomed out at a chamber so large the ceiling lost itself in darkness. Magelights skittered along tracks overhead, blue and gold and pulse-white. The floor here was smooth, save for a single path of chalked line, an echo of the blue sigils, but done in white and with unsteady hands.

Veyra stopped the group at the end of this line, raising a palm for silence. "You will observe. You will not interfere. What you see, you will never discuss outside these walls."

She nodded to Dane. He gestured Soren forward, not as challenge but as demonstration. "Vale, what do you notice?"

He walked the line, let his senses sweep the room. The walls were cut with deep grooves, a latticework of interlocking marks that seemed to vibrate in the slow, sourceless light. At the far end, a ring of iron scoring, the familiar containment glyphs layered and then overmarked, as if some prior attempt had failed to hold.

At the center of the ring, a low pedestal rose from the floor, bearing a glass circle perhaps two paces wide, a window set into the stone.

Below the glass, suspended in what looked like solid air, hung a sword.

No, an impression of a sword, a shadow where metal had once been, its shape torn at the edges and pinpricked with darkness. The hilt was scorched and shattered, the guard jagged, the blade itself snapped off at the midpoint. Yet still, through the fracture, light bent.

Soren blinked, the old shimmer in his sight, the ache at his wrist doubling.

"Look closer," Dane said.

He dropped to one knee, face inches from the glass. Beneath, the shadow blade twisted slowly in a gravityless drift. At intervals, the ghost of a hand would form, fingers outstretched, then dissolve into the blackness. Each movement made the runes along the case shimmer and retreat.

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