The Sanctum woke up before the sun did.
A bell clanged somewhere deep in the tower's gut, sharp and insistent. Cassian's eyes snapped open a moment before the sound finished its first swing. The room was still dim, dawn no more than a gray smear around the window's edge.
Lyra groaned from the bed opposite.
"If this is a dream," she muttered into her pillow, "it needs editing."
"You're breathing," Cassian said, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. "It's not a dream."
"Yes, but I was also breathing in the Nightmare," she countered. "Low bar, Cass."
Tess rolled off her bed and hit the floor with a thump, then popped back up with surprising energy for someone who'd just failed to stick a landing. "First drills," she said. "Combat yard. Registrar Hale said if we're late, we run laps until we puke."
"Motivational," Lyra said.
She got up anyway.
They dressed in the trainee uniforms: dark trousers, light shirts, the Sanctum coats. Cassian's ribs twinged as he pulled his on, a dull ache under the sharper prick of the morning's first breath. The healer's work and the Path's Ashen Adaptation had taken the worst of the damage, turning what should have been crippling breaks into sharp complaints instead. Pain as reminder, not limitation.
He could live with that.
The corridor outside the dorm was full of other Cohort trainees blinking sleep from their eyes. Voices overlapped in a low murmur. Somewhere, someone laughed too loudly. The smell of porridge drifted faintly from the direction of the kitchens, but their slate schedules had "DRILLS" stamped in the first slot of the morning.
Food could wait. Or not. The Sanctum didn't care.
The training yard was a high, roofless space enclosed on all sides by stone and ward-lines. The air was cold enough to sting. Breath steamed. Torches burned in bracketed glass cylinders. A rack of practice weapons lined one wall—wooden swords, staves, dull-tipped spears.
Radiant Wardens waited for them.
The instructor in charge was a broad-shouldered woman with hair braided tight against her skull and a breastplate etched with the sunburst. A thin scar ran across her nose, giving her a perpetually unimpressed look. She watched the trainees file in with the air of a butcher inspecting livestock.
"Form lines," she barked.
They formed lines.
Cassian ended up between Lyra and a tall boy with a shaved head and the kind of shoulders that came from hauling things for a living. Sade stood in the line ahead, Tess farther down, bouncing on her toes.
"I am Warden-Captain Hesh," the Radiant said. "You will address me as Captain. You are here because you have done something most citizens never will: you've walked into the Shroud and back out again. That doesn't make you special. It makes you… trained meat."
A few tired grins appeared. She didn't return them.
"Nightmares don't care that you fought in one once," she went on. "They care that you are there now. They test weakness. We remove weakness. You will run, you will fall, you will hit things until you learn to do it properly. When you complain, I will add more running."
She clapped once.
"Warm up," she said. "Three laps."
The yard wasn't big, but it felt larger with twenty-plus bodies trying to move at once. Cobblestones beneath their boots, walls too close for comfort on all sides. Cassian set a pace that kept his lungs working but didn't strain his ribs. The ache in his side settled into a rhythm: pain on the inhale, release on the exhale.
Lyra huffed beside him. "I didn't sign up to run in circles," she muttered.
"You signed up to survive," Cassian said.
"Semantics," she said. But she matched his pace.
By the third lap, sweat prickled at his spine. His breath came shorter. The Ashen Adaptation in his body—still new, still tasting the shape of his injuries—adjusted, spreading a dull, numbing warmth over the worst spots. It didn't erase pain. It changed how his body read it.
Information, not alarm.
After running came drills.
They began with stances: feet, hands, weapon alignment. A Radiant Warden walked the rows, correcting grips with brisk taps. When he reached for Cassian's hands to adjust his sword, his fingers hesitated a fraction, as if some part of him didn't want to touch Cassian's Mark.
Cassian didn't move.
"You fight like someone who expects the floor to vanish," the Warden said, after watching him shift through a series of cuts.
"It often does," Cassian said.
"Here, too," the man replied. "Just usually less literally."
They moved from forms to partner drills. Cassian found himself paired with the shaved-head boy—name, he remembered belatedly, was Harun. Their wooden swords clacked together, the impact jarring his still-healing ribs. Harun was stronger, but he struck too hard, overcommitting to each swing.
Cassian let him.
He stepped aside at the last instant, turning Harun's force into wasted motion, letting the other boy's own momentum carry him just out of line. Small corrections. Economy of movement.
"You're not really fighting me," Harun panted after the third exchange. "You're… editing me."
"Edit yourself," Cassian said. "It's faster."
They finished drills with shield exercises. Cassian took one briefly, then handed it off.
"If I use it," he told Lyra, who arched a brow, "I have to trust whoever holds my flank not to open my side. I do not."
"As someone who might be holding your flank," she said, "I feel strangely offended."
"As someone who has watched you trip over flat surfaces," he said, "you shouldn't."
She aimed a half-hearted kick at his shin. The Captain saw, of course, and barked them back into line.
By the time the final whistle blew, sweat soaked Cassian's shirt. His muscles hummed—not just from exertion, but from the fine trembling that came after pushing against pain long enough.
Warden-Captain Hesh gave them a once-over.
"Those of you who thought walking out of one Nightmare made you invincible," she said, "should now know better. The rest of you will learn. Dismissed for now. You have lectures in fifteen."
Lyra staggered back toward the dorm wing with the others, grinning weakly.
"I hate this," she said. "I also like that my legs still work. Mixed feelings."
"You'll get used to it," Tess said, falling into step beside them. "My aunt joined a Militia once. Said the first week she wanted to chop her own feet off. Then it got easier."
"Did she quit?" Lyra asked.
"She died on patrol," Tess said cheerfully. "But she said it got easier before that."
Orrin made a strangled noise.
Cassian's slate buzzed faintly at his hip, a sigil lighting up: NEXT: SHROUD THEORY / DOCTRINE – HALL OF VEILS.
He followed the others up through winding corridors until they emerged into a long chamber lit by stained glass.
The Hall of Veils lived up to its name.
Tall windows ran along one wall, each pane a different palette of blues, grays, and whites. They depicted stylized scenes of Nightmares: figures walking through shadow, standing against monstrous silhouettes, radiant suns driving back darkness. Dust motes spun in the colored beams slicing the air.
Rows of benches filled the floor. At the front stood a lectern, behind which Sister Elane sorted a stack of thin slates.
Cassian took a seat near the end of a row, where he could see both the lectern and the door. Lyra slid in beside him with a soft grunt. Tess plopped down on the other side, eyes bright, hair still damp from sweat.
"Today," Elane said, once the room had mostly settled, "we will be covering the basics of Shroud theory. What you have experienced directly is… one version. There are others. The Church, the Consortium, and various cults all have their own… interpretations."
She drew a small sunburst on the lectern with a stick of chalk. Around it, she sketched a clouded ring.
"The Church," she said, "teaches that the Shroud is a wound in the world. A corruption that descended when humanity turned from the Final Dawn's light. Nightmares are… symptoms. Fever-dreams. In this view, the Shroud is a disease to be cured, burned away so that the world can be whole again."
She added a second circle, this one segmented, around the first.
"The Magus Consortium," she continued, "describes the Shroud as a system. An environment. An Engine built into reality's bones. It is not 'evil' by intent, merely a mechanism. Nightmares are… testing grounds. Training rooms. Places where rules are more visible, if less forgiving."
She glanced at Varin, who stood leaned against the wall near the door, arms folded. He inclined his head slightly.
Elane hesitated just a breath before drawing a third, jagged shape beyond the circles.
"And there are others," she said. "Groups who see the Shroud as a god, or a god's corpse. As an ocean to drown in. As a prison to break. These interpretations tend to lead to… shorter lives."
Lyra whispered, "Or longer, if you're made of teeth."
Cassian's lips twitched.
"The Sanctum of Concord," Elane went on, "exists where the Church and Consortium intersect. We treat the Shroud as dangerous, yes. Possibly purposeful. Possibly not. We do know that it follows… patterns. That those patterns can be observed, catalogued, sometimes predicted."
She began listing on the board:
• Recurrence: Nightmares repeat scenarios with variations.
• Extraction: Shards. Echoes. Relics.
• Resonance: Certain souls align with certain Paths.
• Response: The Shroud… reacts to anomalies.
Her chalk paused a second on that last word.
Cassian felt her eyes flicker toward him. Just once. Just enough to confirm she knew the whispers on his file.
"In this course," she said, recovering, "you will learn the signs of Shroud seep, the basic structures of low- to mid-tier Nightmares, and the safe—or safer—ways to engage. You will also receive doctrine instruction."
She glanced at the rows of slouching trainees.
"Yes," she said dryly. "You will need both."
Nero, sitting near the back with his ledger, raised his stylus. "For the record," he said, "if you remember none of the doctrine and most of the patterns, your survival odds go up."
Elane sighed. "The views of Journeyman Nero do not reflect the Church's official position," she recited.
"They do reflect the casualty reports," Nero murmured.
Cassian listened, not for comfort or reassurance, but for structure.
Elane spoke of Shroudfall: the daily seep at the city's edges, the way wards pushed it back. She explained terminology: breach, incursion, saturation. She diagrammed basic Nightmare types—static, mobile, nested.
Cassian mentally underlined certain words:
Recurrence. Response. Anomalies.
"The Shroud… adjusts," Elane said, choosing her words carefully. "When someone behaves in a way the pattern did not… anticipate, the Nightmare can tighten, twist, or… escalate."
"Meaning it punishes cleverness?" Lyra muttered.
"Meaning it notices deviation," Elane said. "And we must assume it learns from it."
Cassian felt the Loop-Shard in his chest grind, just once.
He raised his hand.
"Yes?" Elane said.
"What happens," he asked, "when the Shroud's adjustment… fails? When the anomaly persists?"
The room quieted slightly.
Elane's mouth pressed thin. "Then," she said slowly, "the Shroud rewrites more of the pattern. Or it reaches for different… tools. Sometimes it kills the anomaly. Sometimes it makes them into something else. Sometimes it leaves them alone until they cause a bigger break, at which point…" She lifted a shoulder. "That's one reason you're here. To watch, and learn."
Varin's gaze weighed Cassian from the wall. Nero's stylus scratched faster.
After lectures came a short break. Enough time to gulp lukewarm porridge in the mess, wash down the taste with weak tea, and listen to Tess recount some Gutter Spark myth about a magus who had tried to "marry the Shroud" and ended up as a screaming crystal.
Then the slate chimed again: ECHO EXPOSURE / FEAR RESPONSE – LOWER HALL THREE.
"Sounds fun," Lyra said. "And by fun, I mean exactly the opposite."
Lower Hall Three was buried deeper in the tower. They followed a spiral staircase that seemed to twist more times than the tower's physical dimensions should allow, then emerged into a long chamber with no windows and too many sigils.
The walls were lined with etched patterns. The floor bore faint circles faded by use. At one end of the hall, a glass partition looked into a small observation room where Varin and Nero stood, along with another Magus Cassian didn't know.
Sister Elane waited for them with a cluster of assistants.
"This exercise," she said, "is to establish a baseline for your fear responses. Echoes will be used to project controlled nightmare stimuli. You cannot be physically harmed by what you see in this hall."
"Key word 'physically,'" Nero said through a small speaking tube. His voice carried oddly, soft and sharp at once. "If your mind breaks, fill out form C afterward."
Orrin made another strangled noise.
Elane gestured to a series of circles on the floor, each with a faint sigil scratched into the center.
"Stand on a mark," she said. "When you are told, you will close your eyes. The Echo will do the rest. Try to remember that what you see is a pattern drawn from your own mind. It is… not always accurate. We are not here to judge you for what frightens you."
"That comes later," Nero added.
Cassian stepped onto one of the circles.
The sigils under his boots tingled faintly. He felt the Mark on his arm respond, lines warming. The ember in his chest shifted, like a coal stirred.
"Close your eyes," Elane said.
He did.
The hall dissolved.
He stood in the Outer Wards again.
Rain fell in fine, cold threads, soaking his shirt. The alley was the same one he'd walked a hundred times to get from Mara's door to the tavern and back. The bricks were familiar. The cracked ward-sigil over the corner shivered with mist.
Mara lay in the mud at his feet.
Her braid had come loose, hair splayed around her head like spilled ink. Her eyes stared past him, unseeing. A gray smear clung to her face, seeping from her mouth and nose—the Shroud's residue. Her hands were empty. The little ward charms she wore on a thong around her neck were cracked, their glow gone.
"You weren't there," a voice said.
Lyra's voice. But she wasn't in the alley.
He turned.
The alley stretched. The walls warped, lengthening. At the far end, he saw himself—smaller, thinner, twelve maybe—standing under a leaky awning, watching the Shroudfall seep down the street. His younger self's eyes were empty. He made no move to run to Mara. The Shroud rolled over her and moved on.
Other scenes flared around the edges of his vision.
Leena, the Echo child, fingers slipping from his sleeve.
Kerr, dragged into the fog.
The fused Warden-thing, stuffed with faces, whispering: you left us.
"You weren't there," the alley whispered. "You left. You always leave. That's how you live."
The fear wasn't the bodies.
He'd seen bodies before. He'd made choices that turned people into them.
The fear was the… inevitability. That no matter what doors he chose, he would always end up here: watching, calculating, selecting who walked out and who didn't.
The Echo pushed.
He could feel it trying to spike panic, to twist his stomach, to speed his pulse.
He let it.
His heart rate rose. His breath shortened. He catalogued those reactions and set them aside.
He stepped forward.
The scene tried to lengthen again, to drag out the approach. The ground under his feet repeated one cracked stone three times. The rain fell in the same pattern over and over—three drops, pause, three drops, pause.
Cassian focused on the pattern instead of the corpses.
"Loop," he said softly.
The alley shivered.
He reached down and touched Mara's shoulder.
His fingers sank through her like smoke.
Not an Echo of her. Not really. Just a borrowed image wrapped around his own fear.
"You're not her," he told the illusion calmly. "You're me. Or what something thinks I should be afraid of. Interesting."
The voice tried again, more insistent: you weren't there.
"No," he said. "And if I had been, you might still have died. The Shroud doesn't stop for one person."
He straightened.
The rain's pattern glitched.
Three drops. Pause. Three drops. Stutter. Two drops. Pause.
He grabbed the stutter with his mind and pulled.
The alley peeled away.
He opened his eyes.
The echo-hall came back into focus. The bruising throb of his ribs returned. His palms were sweaty against his coat. His pulse still ticked faster than baseline, but his thoughts were clear.
Across the hall, other trainees staggered on their circles.
Harun bent double, hands on knees, breath shuddering. Tess blinked rapidly, cheeks damp. Orrin had his arms wrapped around himself, lips moving in silent reassurance.
Lyra stood stiff on her circle, fists clenched, eyes squeezed shut a moment longer. When she opened them, they were wet and furious.
She looked directly at Cassian.
"We are never doing that again," she said.
"What did you see?" he asked.
"People," she said shortly. "Dying. Over and over. Same street, different corpses. Fun times."
"The Echo was playing repetition," Cassian said. "It likes loops."
"You think?" she snapped. Then she sighed, rubbing her face with both hands. "I tried to change it. It didn't let me. Just showed me a different way to fail."
"That's the point," Nero said from the observation room doorway. "Fear isn't content with one flavor."
Sister Elane moved among them, checking pupils, pressing fingers to wrists. When she reached Cassian, her hand lingered on his pulse.
"You're calm," she said quietly.
"I'm not," he replied. "I just know how to function while afraid."
Her mouth tightened. She moved on.
They filed out of the hall in a subdued knot. The air in the corridor felt thinner after the Echo's weight. Somewhere above, a bell chimed the hour, indifferent.
On the way back to the upper levels, Varin peeled away from the others and matched Cassian's pace.
"Walk with me, Rael," he said.
It wasn't a request.
Cassian adjusted course.
Varin led him into a side room—a small, windowless space lined with shelves full of labeled crystal shards and sigil-stones. A faint, permanent resonance hummed in the air, the kind that seeped into bone if you stood in it too long.
On a central table lay a series of small, flat stones etched with different sigils.
Varin picked up one and held it between finger and thumb.
"This," he said, "is a resonance stone. It reacts to soul signatures. The color and pattern of its response tells us basic information about your Path alignment."
"I thought the Rite already did that," Cassian said.
"The Rite marked you," Varin said. "It did not… categorize you neatly. I would like more data."
He offered the stone.
Cassian took it.
It was smooth and cool. The sigil carved into its surface looked simple: a ring intersected by a line. It pulsed faintly under his skin.
"Hold it," Varin said. "Let it read you."
Cassian let his fingers settle.
The stone warmed.
Light bloomed within it, pale and greenish at first, then shifting toward blue. Tiny lines crawled along its surface, forming a jagged circle, then a half-sunburst, then—
It stuttered.
For a heartbeat, the light inside went dark. Then it flared brighter, the lines reversing direction, tracing the same pattern backward.
Blue. Pause. Blue.
Varin's eyes sharpened.
"Have you seen that before?" Cassian asked mildly.
"No," Varin said. "You're very helpful. Again."
He plucked a different stone from the table, this one etched with a spiral.
Cassian repeated the process.
This time, the light inside the stone didn't change color at all. It pulsed instead. Steady. Steady. Double-beat. Steady. Double.
Like a heart with a skip in it.
Varin hummed. "You do not simply resonate," he said. "You… re-render. As if whatever you are doesn't complete the first time."
"Feels like that sometimes," Cassian said.
Varin set the stone down.
"What did the Echo show you?" he asked.
"People I could have saved and didn't," Cassian said. "Or couldn't. It doesn't matter to the story."
"And you didn't panic," Varin said.
"I had… a reaction," Cassian said. "I just didn't let it decide what I did."
Varin's gaze flicked briefly to Cassian's Mark, then back up.
"The Shroud punishes rigidity," he said. "And it punishes softness. People who cling to patterns that don't serve them die. People who cannot care enough to shape their choices also die. You seem to be trying to walk the line in between."
"It's a narrow line," Cassian said.
Varin's mouth twitched, almost a smile.
"I suggest," he said, "that you continue to treat fear as data. But do not forget that other people lack your… buffer. Try not to break them while I'm still training them."
"I'll do my best," Cassian said.
Varin was halfway to the door before he answered.
"That," he said, "is exactly what worries me."
Evening settled over the Sanctum like a cloak.
After another lecture and a quick meal, they were given study time. Some trainees went to the library. Others returned to the yard, craving more physical work to bleed out jittery energy.
Cassian returned to the dorm.
He found the room empty. Lyra had mentioned going to "bother some books," Tess to "bother some sparks." Orrin had muttered something about doctrine texts and slunk away.
He went to the window.
Outside, the inner wall loomed. Beyond its curve, he could see slivers of the city: rooftops, chimneys, the faint glow of ward-lines along major streets. Above it all, the sky lay low and stained, the Shroudfall's permanent bruise on the horizon.
He rested his fingers lightly on the stone beneath the sill.
Sound seeped in faintly—the murmur of Sanctum life, the distant clang of metal, a shout from the yard, a bell's far-off tone.
Under it, almost too quiet to hear, something else thrummed.
A low, dissonant hum.
He frowned.
It wasn't the Engine's grinding. He knew that now—that cold, mechanical pressure. This was… warmer, in a way, but wrong. A human voice humming under its breath, but with notes bent just enough to grate against his nerves.
Someone, somewhere in the Sanctum, was singing off-key.
The ember in his chest flickered in irritation. The Loop-Shard, usually a steady grind, caught once, like a cog skipping a tooth.
He listened.
The hum rose and fell.
Not random. A pattern. A short phrase repeated, each time slightly different. The more he focused, the more the air around him felt… oily, like something trying to slip between his thoughts.
He pulled back.
If the Shroud was the Engine, this was sand in its gears. A different kind of wrongness. Not systemic. Infectious.
He filed the sound away in his mind and marked the moment.
Later, when Lyra and Tess returned, talking over each other about some absurd doctrinal contradiction, he sat on his bed and closed his eyes.
He replayed the day.
Not hour by hour. Moment by marked moment.
The contract sigil flickering under his palm. The way Hesh's boot had scuffed a particular cobble in the yard. The exact pattern of rain in the Echo's alley. The color of the light inside Varin's stone when it stuttered. The hum at the window, the way it made the air feel thin.
He could feel himself getting better at it. Sharper.
If fear was the Echo's chosen tool, he would treat it as pattern.
If the Engine insisted on loops, he would learn to trace every turn.
If someone—or something—was singing a different song underneath it all, he would learn the tune well enough to know exactly where to cut it.
Outside, the Sanctum's bells tolled curfew.
Inside, Cassian's mind kept turning.