He could not look away.

A pulse, like a muscle contracting, ran through the sword's fragment. For a moment, its outline sharpened, a line of blue, searing and absolute, snapped through the air. It sought, or called, or perhaps just remembered the shape of its own edge.

He heard, distantly, the gasp from one of the initiates behind him. Most eyes would have seen only the blade. Soren saw the memory of violence, the echo in the glass made visible.

He stood, nodded to Dane.

"That's enough," Veyra said, voice flat. "You see why we contain."

Cassian stepped forward without being prompted. He tried bravado but stopped, arrested by the thing's presence. Cassian's voice, stripped of its usual lacquer, was barely more than a whisper: "It's not dead."

Veyra gestured to the group. "This was Aetherion's first student, and it remembers failure."

The silence that followed was perfect, true absence, not just the lack of sound.

After a minute, Dane ushered the students back to the line. "You forget what's here, or you don't return."

On the ascent, Soren walked with the pressure in his wrist growing hotter, the memory of the blade's pulse syncing to the fragment he wore. He glanced at Veyra, who watched him only in periphery, and at Dane, who did not watch him at all.

In the antechamber, as the group reformed, Seren caught Soren's eye and whispered, "Did you touch it before?" Her inflection made it unclear whether she meant the sword, or something deeper.

He shook his head, he hoped not.

Class resumed as normal, each lesson now slightly more brittle, as if the world might snap under too much force.

Soren sat through lectures and drills without break, absorbing the change in the building's posture. He noticed the initiates clustered differently; some drew away from conversation entirely, while others clung to petty rumors as if to reanchor themselves.

Cassian, no longer preening or arch, circled Soren at a careful distance, each encounter laden with a new, unsaid thing. In seminar, Cassian made a point to agree with Soren's analysis even when he could have mocked it, as if the previous dynamic had been quietly annulled.

At night, Soren struggled to sleep. The image of the blade-in-glass haunted him: the ache in his arm, the echo in the dark. Valenna, for once, kept her commentary slight, almost patient. She felt closer now than she ever had in the Wastes, her presence layered over his vision like a second, translucent body.

"Now you see what lies beneath their refinements," she murmured, clear as speech.

'It's a sword, Valenna. Broken. Contained.'

She waited, then: "No. It is a wound dressed as a sword. And still open."

The next day, the Academy's routine began again, but the tempo had changed. Thale's voice was sharper, the trays at refectory cleared more viciously, the initiates moved as if aware of some new, communal secret.

Soren watched the sky. The storm had scrubbed the air, but haze lingered at the city's rim, as if not quite ready to let go.

He felt it himself: the echo in his bones, the sense that everything here, every duel, every lecture, every word, was orbiting something still unfinished at the bottom of the Spire.

He flexed his hand. The pulse beat there, steady as his own blood.

The rest was just noise, waiting to resolve.

Soren's world narrowed through the week: study, spar, study, observe. More than ever, the instructors watched him.

Thale corrected him with almost parental focus; Ohn called on him daily for tactical insight, never once losing her chill; Veyra glided through the halls like a rumor and never addressed him directly, though more than once he caught her stare flick above his eyes, to his forehead, to his wrist, or, disturbingly, just past his shoulder.

He spent a lot of time in the old library, where the oldest books had not been reprinted on synth-paper but instead kept in slumped, heavy piles smelling of cinnamon mold and neglect. In the farthest corner, he found mention, on a margin, not even in the body text, of a fracture in the Academy's earliest history, something called the Sundering.

The script was illegible in places, but it described a "culling" of students after a forbidden duel left the upper tower melted and the foundations flooded with rootless shadows.

Not dead, Soren thought, but effaced, scrubbed out of memory, just as the runes aimed for in every hallway.

He left the library before dusk, mind still chewing the idea. On the way back, he passed through the east quad and found Seren on the low wall, hands knotted in her braid, attention fixed on the blank space between two colonnades.

She looked up as he approached, no struggle to hide her exhaustion. "You dream of the blade?"

He nodded.

She leaned forward, face close enough to whisper. "The older students call it the 'Null Spine.' Half the staff say it's a myth, but the wards on our corridor got doubled since we saw it."

He kept his voice low. "Dane said it remembers failure."

Seren's lip twisted. "It must remember a lot." She left the rest unsaid, but he caught the drift; even at the top, the Academy was more about what it buried than what it taught.

She pressed something into his hand, a shred of blue chalk, still warm from her palm. "I trust you with this. Figure it out, Vale."

For a moment, neither moved. Then Seren stood and walked off, breaking into a run halfway down the path, as if she needed to put distance between herself and her own choices.

Soren pocketed the chalk, then turned toward the dorms.

That evening, in the corridor, he saw Cassian waiting at the door. Not blocking, but lingering, as if caught mid-thought.

"I meant what I said," Cassian offered. "About this place being a lock, not a school."

Soren replied, "Then what's it trying to keep in?"

Cassian shook his head, a trace of something like empathy mixed into the old calculation. "Not in. Down. Until someone worth unleashing comes along."

He held the look for a fraction longer, then turned and left, walking slow, like a sleepwalker in a shifting dream.

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