The day after the underhalls, every surface in the Academy seemed glazed: water beading on banisters, tile sweating beneath Soren's bare feet, even the air thickened with a glassy residue that made vision smear at the corners.

The windows offered nothing but a scalded-pale sunrise and the ghost shapes of students traversing the frost-burned lawn. Soren moved through the dorm corridor before first bell, and heard every footstep, every brush of wool, as though the building's architecture had developed a second echo.

Each sound came with the normal report and then a half-beat later, a resonance, as if some new cavity had opened up beneath the world.

He traced the route to the freshly sanded shower room, noting how even his breath produced a faint twin—expelled, then a fainter hiss that burrowed behind the walls.

The city's weather had turned frigid: Soren's first inhalation of steam after the cold walk stung his lips, then the roof of his mouth, then a place behind the eyes he hadn't named before.

"Keep your focus," he murmured to himself, though the shard inside his chest vibrated with a pulse that was almost a counter-rhythm to his own. He pressed fingertips to his sternum, half expecting warmth or pain, but found only the faintest quiver behind the bone, as if his body had become its own echo chamber.

The others noticed it. Even the oblivious ones who'd spent the previous night trading boasts in the lounge moved slower, heads canted aside when they caught the building's new frequency.

At breakfast, the talk moved in waves, first about the "field test" in the underhalls, then about the rumor everyone hated and could not ignore: the artifact, the blade-in-glass, the thing-down-there not being entirely contained.

"They're calling it the Null Spine," someone whispered at the bread line. The nickname spread, morphing into "Voidblade" in the hands of Cassian's crowd, but the original stuck for the ones who'd seen it under glass.

Soren avoided the gaze of the second-year who asked if he'd "felt anything." It was a theory, growing ever more elaborate: that those who descended to the underhalls sometimes came back "marked," though no two initiates agreed on what that meant or why. He accepted his bowl of oat porridge and took the first seat available, joining a cluster of first-years crowded close for warmth.

The conversation circled back to the new schedule: Thale had moved all drills to the upper courtyard, doubling the regimen. Cassian, in the center of his own sphere, now directed his energy not at Soren but at mastering every published nuance of sword theory, he recited fragments of the Silver Code with the speed of a gambler shuffling cards, but each line seemed to land with less certainty, as if the words themselves had worn thin overnight.

What Soren noticed most was not the change in Cassian, or the recalibration of group dynamics, but the solitary figure at the far end of the refectory, rhythmically winding twine around the haft of a practice spear.

Seren Avelle, face set in the calm of someone who'd recently discovered either a new rule or a new wound. Her gaze flicked from Soren to the window, then to nothing at all.

He left his meal half-finished.

The day's drills proved a labor in repetition. Thale demanded not just the form but the theory behind it, every parry and advance had to be explained, elaborated, as though the Swordmaster believed the nullification of the underhalls might be reversed through a sufficiency of logic.

Thale himself stalked up and down the line of sweating students, hands behind his back, correcting not technique but syntax: "No, Vale, that is not a bind, that is an annulment. Use the real language." It was ritualized antagonism, and Soren understood the purpose even as he bristled under the scrutiny.

He sparred with Seren by unspoken arrangement, each round building a pressure that threatened to snap, but neither of them struck through. By the third set, their exchanges reduced to careful, almost ceremonial movements, a process of seeing and being seen, rather than anything so crass as "winning."

After the last round, Seren caught his wrist and tilted her head. "You didn't sleep."

He saw the new knots of muscle along her forearm, the rawness in the skin below her thumb. "You did?"

"I hear the echoes," she said, dropping his wrist and gathering her hair back into its severe knot. "But they don't belong to me."

"What did you see?" he asked, meaning the underhalls, the blade, the thing they were pretending hadn't altered the axis of the Academy.

She shrugged, then, almost reluctantly, answered: "I saw what happens when a sword tries to remember who it was before they made it a weapon."

Soren nodded in silence.

"Are you afraid of it?" she asked, and the question was not about the blade.

He flexed his hand. "I haven't decided."

They watched each other, and the moment lasted until Cassian called over, mocking, but not cruel: "Vale! Your form is melting. Keep up, they'll dock your points."

Seren's mouth quirked at one corner, then she left for the water barrel.

Soren watched the rest of the cohort finish their rounds, but his attention drifted—you don't belong here, you know, Cassian had said. But none of them did, at least not anymore.

The next bell signaled study period, which for Soren meant a return to the library and a race to finish the day's reading before Ohn's seminar on "Doctrine and Social Restraint."

He kept to the old stacks, where even the librarian, an automaton in a faded blue smock, rumored by the older students to be the last surviving relic from the First Sundering, rarely patrolled.

Here, the echo effect was even more intense; Soren found himself doubling back on his own aisle, unable to shake the feeling that another pair of feet was shuffling just behind him.

He selected a volume at random: a treatise on ceremonial disarmament in the pre-Concord era. The edges of the pages were cut at uneven angles, as though the book had served as a makeshift shield against something sharper than ink.

He ran his finger down the columns, seeking patterns, anything that might explain the sense of doubled presence or the increased pressure in the air.

Valenna's voice did not arrive with its usual venom. Instead, it came with the control of a surgeon's hand: 'Don't feed it.' She said nothing more, and for a moment he wondered if she meant the blade, himself, or the echo in the halls.

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