The training chamber Calvin selected was not grand, nor even particularly impressive. It was one of the innermost rooms in the Arcanum Depths—windowless, silent, and carved from cold basalt that swallowed sound like a living thing. The walls were etched with faint geometric channels of silver that pulsed with a quiet, steady glow, neither bright nor dim—just present, like the heartbeat of a patient creature waiting to be acknowledged.
Leximus stepped inside, the floor humming faintly under his boots.The air here felt different.
Not dead.Still.
Everything here was still.
Calvin closed the door behind them, the metallic latch sliding into place with a soft, final click. That sound alone carried the weight of a ritual.
"You've stabilized your control," Calvin said. His voice was calm, composed, but laced with a scholar's curiosity that he didn't bother hiding. "But control is only the surface. You cannot move forward until your alignment forms."
Leximus exhaled, slow and restrained. He felt the Shadow under his feet stir faintly—a small stretch, like a cat uncurling.
Calvin noticed.He always noticed.
"Sit," Calvin said, gesturing to the center of the room.
Leximus obeyed. The stone was cold beneath him, grounding in a way that made every breath deliberate.
Calvin circled him once, hands behind his back, then came to stand a few paces away. A teacher's distance. A watcher's distance.
"Alignment," Calvin began, "is not a personality. And it is not discipline. It is the lens through which your Ether—your very existence—interprets the world."He paused."Today, you learn what that lens is for you."
Leximus steadied his breathing. He'd faced Hespera Brindle. He'd faced the execution order. He had survived a ritual that had nearly torn him apart. He should not have been nervous.
But he was.
His Shadow flickered—soft, unfurling, retracting—like it was watching him as much as Calvin was.
Calvin knelt before him.
"Look at your Ether," the man said softly. "Not at what it does, but at how it listens."
Leximus closed his eyes.
The room did not vanish. It simply waited.The cold floor grounded him.The silence pressed against him, warm in its own way.
Inside that quiet, he felt the familiar stirring—like dark water shifting under moonlight. His Shadow. His Element. His self.
It moved, not as a force he directed, but as something reflecting him—his breath, his tension, his curiosity.
"Good," Calvin murmured. "Don't force it. Just watch."
So he watched.
He watched as the Shadow responded not to commands but to states. A thought made it ripple. A memory made it tighten. A breath made it spread, thin and soft.
He didn't command it.He observed it.
Slowly, his heartbeat steadied.
Calvin's voice reached him like a whisper slipping into the quiet.
"You aren't Fire. Fire needs conviction.You aren't Water. Water needs memory.You aren't Air. Air needs reason.You aren't Earth. Earth needs resolve."
Calvin let the silence settle.
"Your Element listens to possibility."
Leximus opened his eyes. "Possibility?"
"Your power hasn't taken a defined shape yet," Calvin said. "It may be Shadow. It may be something beyond Shadow. We don't know." There was no fear in his tone—only fascination. "But what is clear is that it reacts to uncertainty. To the open doors in your thoughts. To the things you haven't chosen to accept or deny."
Leximus swallowed.
Calvin's gaze sharpened.
"You think your power is volatile. It isn't. You are volatile. Because you don't know what parts of yourself you're allowing in and which parts you're pushing out."
He felt those words land like a slow, cold wave.
He had been pushing things out.Memories.Questions.Fragments he did not want to look at fully.
A home that wasn't a home.Parents who weren't his parents.A sister torn from him.And deeper—darker—something else. Something from the ritual. Something screaming in light and void and shadow.
His breath wavered. The Shadow stirred.
Calvin lifted a hand. "Let it move. Don't smother it."
Leximus inhaled, then exhaled slowly.
The Shadow rose around him in a faint mist, drifting across the stone like ink spreading on parchment. It didn't lash. It didn't strike.
It simply mirrored his uncertainty.
"I want you to think," Calvin said. "Not about power. Not about control. About yourself."
Leximus frowned. "Myself?"
"Yes."Calvin stepped back, giving him room."Ask yourself something you don't want to ask. Sit with it. Don't answer it. Just let it exist."
Leximus hesitated.
"Why?" he whispered.
"Because your Element answers questions you don't want to ask. It always has."
Leximus closed his eyes again.
And allowed himself to think:
Who am I truly?What did I see in that ritual?What did I refuse to remember about the night my parents died?What am I becoming?
As each question arose, the Shadow reacted.
Not with chaos—but with recognition.With resonance.
It stretched, quietly. Then it retracted.It thinned. Then it deepened.It curled around his feet like smoke embracing a flame without burning.
He felt it.Not as a weapon.Not as a curse.
As an echo.
A reflection.
His reflection.
His breath hitched as a thought surfaced—unbidden, heavy:
Maybe I don't know myself at all.
The Shadow trembled, not violently—but like glass touched by wind.
Calvin's voice reached through the quiet.
"That is alignment, Leximus. Not knowing the answer. Accepting the question."
Leximus opened his eyes again. They stung faintly.
"I feel…" He struggled for the word.Empty?Open?Exposed?
Calvin watched him carefully. "You feel hollow."
Leximus nodded.
"That isn't weakness," Calvin said. "It's the beginning."
The Shadow pooled thicker beneath Leximus now, like a dark mirror forming at his feet. Not expanding outward—only deepening. Becoming denser. Quieter.
Calvin walked around him again, his boots making no sound on the stone floor.
"Most Avatars reach alignment with force—or with clarity," Calvin continued. "Fire burns its way to meaning. Earth carves itself into shape. Water sinks deeper. Air sharpens."
He stopped behind Leximus.
"But yours dissolves."
Leximus shivered—not from cold, but from recognition.
"You are meant to let things pass through you," Calvin said. "To let possibilities exist without collapsing them. To let memory, fear, grief, and potential all breathe in the same space."
He circled back to face him.
"Show me that space."
Leximus took a breath.
And for the first time, he didn't try to shape his mind.He didn't force himself calm.He didn't push away the memories that hurt or drag forward the ones he preferred.
He just opened.
He let the questions sit.He let the uncertainties breathe.He allowed the parts of himself he'd denied to rise—not crashing, not overwhelming—just present, like distant lanterns glimpsed in fog.
The Shadow rippled.
Once.
Then it settled.
A quiet, deepened glow.Not brighter. Not darker.Just fuller.
Like a lake finally reflecting the night sky clearly.
Calvin watched him silently, the scholar in him taking in every shift like precious data.
"What do you feel?" Calvin asked.
Leximus exhaled. "Stillness."
The word didn't feel forced.It felt discovered.
"Yes," Calvin murmured. "That is your alignment forming. The Hollowborn quiet. The place where questions live without screaming. Where emotions breathe without drowning you. Where your Shadow can reflect instead of react."
Leximus opened his eyes fully. "Hollowborn?"
Calvin nodded. "A term used in old texts. One who becomes empty enough to hold everything. Still enough to perceive the things others miss."
Leximus tasted the word.
Hollowborn.
It should have been frightening.
But it wasn't.
It felt like truth. A truth he had been approaching in blind circles since the ritual, since the screaming, since the visions of a life he never understood.
A truth he had feared because it required him to let go of the single certainty that had held him together:
I must get my sister back.
He still believed that.But now he understood:
That belief wasn't his identity.It was his anchor.
He himself was… more uncertain.More fluid.More open.
And the Shadow responded to that openness with a slow, steady pulse—like it was breathing with him.
Calvin approached again, kneeling in front of him.
"Leximus," he said quietly, "alignment isn't something you master. It's something you become."
Leximus nodded.
"Good."Calvin stood, the faintest hint of satisfaction in his eyes. "Then you are ready for the next step."
Leximus looked down.
The Shadow that once terrified him now lay at his feet like a patient dog, unthreatening, unstrained—waiting, but not demanding. Not hungry.
Just aware.Present.Reflective.
He lifted a hand slightly, and the Shadow responded with a faint, fluid curl.
Not power.Understanding.
Calvin's voice softened.
"Next, we see what your alignment allows your Ether to become."
Leximus rose slowly from the floor. His legs were stiff, his body tired, but lighter—like some unseen weight had been redistributed instead of removed. Balance, not relief.
He met Calvin's gaze.
"Next," he echoed.
Calvin nodded.
The training chamber hummed softly in approval, the silver lines in the stone flickering like they, too, had been waiting for him to reach this point.
Leximus took one more breath.
And the Shadow breathed with him.