The air inside the Citadel tasted of iron and ozone, as though lightning had died here once and never left.
Sub-Level 9 was a vein buried beneath the world's heart. Violet runes crawled along obsidian walls like dying constellations, pulsing in slow, sick heartbeats. The only sound was the wet click of Garloth Goldenoid's lollipop against his teeth and the metronome of Hanzo's boots.
Goldenoid walked like the corridor belonged to him. Coat half-buttoned, golden hair a storm cloud, he looked less like the second-most dangerous man alive and more like a bored teenager who'd stolen a general's uniform for the aesthetic.
He flicked the candy stick.
"Tell me, successor dearest, when did you decide joy was treason?"
Hanzo's answer arrived cold and precise, the way a guillotine drops.
"The night the curses played my mother's ribcage like a xylophone."
The lollipop paused.
Goldenoid whistled, low and mournful. "Damn. You always did go straight for the soft parts."
He halted beneath a rune-lamp that bled bruise-coloured light. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face until he looked carved from the same stone as the walls.
"Cards on the table, kid."
The clown vanished. In his place stood the man who had once split a mountain with a yawn.
"I dragged an eight-year-old out of a burning village. That child looked me in the eye and asked me to finish the job quickly. Remember what I told him?"
Hanzo's throat bobbed. The words came out scraped raw.
"'Not today, kid. Death's got a waiting list, and you're not even in the queue.'"
Goldenoid's smile was small and terrible.
"I lied. Death had already stamped your ticket first-class. I tore it up with my teeth."
He stepped so close Hanzo smelled burnt sugar and gunpowder on his breath.
"I taught you to kill monsters because it was easier than teaching you how to live afterward. My failure. The King of Curses is waking, Hanzo. He won't be impressed by perfect soldiers. He'll be impressed by the parts we pretend we buried. Hope. Rage. The stupid, stubborn refusal to kneel even when your knees are broken."
Hanzo's voice cracked like lake ice in spring.
"Hope gets civilians turned into red mist."
"And hopelessness gets the whole world turned into a graveyard with prettier lighting."
Goldenoid flicked Hanzo's forehead, hard enough to stagger him.
"Feel that? Still flesh. Still breakable. Don't file the edges off until there's nothing left to bleed."
He spun away, whistling a tavern song that sounded like mourning.
"Come find me when you remember how to want something that isn't vengeance. I'll keep the light on."
Hanzo remained beneath the dying lamp, fist clenched so tight the candy in his palm bled sticky shards between his fingers like coloured glass tears.
Vynex Sky-Port, Dawn
The turbines screamed like the sky itself was being flayed alive. Cold wind tasted of salt, mana-burn, and goodbye.
Lady Elara's fingers shook as she smoothed Kael's collar for the twentieth time, as though touch alone could keep him safe.
"You will eat vegetables. You will sleep. You will not start an inter-house war before breakfast."
Kael's mouth curved, bitter as wintergreen.
"Mom, I make no promises involving fire or nobility."
She cupped his face. Tears glittered like frost on her lashes.
"You were born the night the moon bled silver. The midwives swore the storm itself paused to hear your first cry. Whatever you become, my love, it will be louder than duty."
Behind her, Baron leaned on a cane, still corpse-pale, grinning like a switchblade that had learned sarcasm.
"Place your bets, big brother. Ten thousand credits says you detonate at least one tower before mid-terms."
"Twenty says I take the whole campus."
"Deal."
Lord Roderick Draven stood ten paces back, cloak snapping in the rotor-wash, face carved from a glacier that had learned shame centuries ago. The wind couldn't touch him; grief could.
Elara rounded on him, voice a whip of winter.
"Say something that isn't a death sentence, Roderick, or I swear I'll freeze your heart in your chest and wear it as a pendant."
Roderick's gaze never left Kael.
"He is first blood. The name Draven is older than the System, older than mercy. I will not watch it rot because a boy mistook freedom for spite."
Kael stepped forward until their breaths mingled in the freezing air.
"Funny. I thought names were supposed to shield their heirs. Yours just kept reminding me how brightly I failed to burn."
Roderick flinched, a hairline fracture in the ice.
Elara's voice softened, wind chimes in a graveyard.
"He's different, Rod. There's a storm in him you never learned to read."
"Storms drown cities," Roderick answered, raw, almost pleading. "Come home unbreakable, Kael. Or do not come home at all."
Kael's laugh could cut diamond.
"I'll come home when the world stops asking your permission to breathe."
He boarded without looking back.
The hatch sealed. Engines roared like mourning dragons. Vynex shrank to a glittering wound on the horizon.
Kael pressed his palm to the cold window and whispered to the clouds,
"Watch me outshine every last one of you."
Nexus, Unified Academy of Sorcery
First evening
The city exhaled light and madness. Towers of living crystal bled rainbows into the night. Rivers of liquid starlight coiled between districts. Dragons the size of buses pulled gilded carriages through violet skies. Every breath tasted of ozone, perfume, and impending violence.
The academy's gates rose like the jaws of some primordial beast, white adamantine etched with runes that screamed silently against the soul. They parted with a sound like continents kissing.
Kael stepped through alone.
The central avenue was a riot of futures. Heirs rode disks of raw light. A girl juggled miniature suns while texting. A boy with antlers argued with a floating sword about existential dread. The air vibrated with mana so thick it felt like drowning in champagne.
Kael kept his head down until the stench hit: raw sewage, desperation, and something metallic underneath.
A boy knelt beside an open storm drain, one arm plunged to the shoulder in filth, golden hair plastered to his skull by gutter water and defiance.
Kael stopped. "Tell me you're being punished for war crimes."
The boy looked up. Hazel eyes blazed with manic, infectious joy.
"Punishment is tomorrow. Right now I'm committing biological terrorism for love."
He yanked his arm free. A drenched sugar-glider clung to his wrist like a soggy victory flag. "Whisk, you absolute anarchist."
Kael stared. "You're nobility."
"Finnly Voss, House Voss, minor branch, major disaster." Finn wiped his hand on snow-white trousers and offered it anyway. "You've got resting murder face. I'm obsessed. Friends?"
"I will dissect you slowly."
"Promise? I like foreplay."
Finn fell in beside him, already talking at light-speed.
Kael lasted eleven heartbeats.
"Stop. Breathing. In my direction."
"Biologically impossible. Also rude."
They walked. Finn skipped.
"Quick questionnaire," Finn said, ticking fingers. "Favourite murder method? Favourite pastry? Ever made a professor cry?"
"Strangulation. Cinnamon. Yes."
"Marry me."
"I will salt the earth where you stand."
"Romantic."
The Grand Amphitheatre rose like a black glass cathedral turned inside out, seats carved from night itself.
Ten thousand futures packed the tiers, a living constellation of arrogance and potential.
Principal Eldia Thorne stepped into the light and reality bent like heat haze.
Scars crawled across his face like frozen lightning. When he spoke, every word was a blade sliding home.
"You are not here to be coddled," he said, voice silk over broken glass. "You are here to be weaponised. Some of you will leave as gods. Most of you will leave as cautionary tales. A handful," his gaze carved straight through the crowd and pinned Kael to his seat like a butterfly, "will leave as something the world has no myth for yet."
Kael smiled, slow, ugly, defiant.
Thorne's eyes glittered with something that might be delight.
"Disappoint me creatively, Mr Draven. I collect rare disappointments."
Thunder cracked as applause.
Finn whistled. "He either wants to fight you or fuck you. Possibly both. My money's on both."
Kael exhaled through teeth. "I need alcohol."
"Minor. Juice box?"
"Whiskey."
"Same thing if you believe hard enough."
Night courtyard, after the herds thin
Kael slipped away, found a shadowed colonnade where even the lanterns feared to tread. He pressed his back to black marble veined with captured starlight. The stone was cold enough to burn.
He spoke to the dark.
"I'm here, Father. I'm here, world. Come take your measurements."
The marble answered.
A hairline crack split upward with a sound like breaking bone. Shadow leaked out, thick as tar, smelling of old graves and older promises.
A voice slid into his skull like a lover's tongue made of rust.
"Hello, little prince. Did you miss me?"
Kael spun, heart jackhammering.
Nothing.
But the crack kept widening, slow as a grin.
Finn's voice echoed, bright and oblivious.
"Room assignments are up, murder-eyes! We're dorm mates! Destiny's got terrible taste!"
Kael closed his eyes.
The voice in the stone chuckled, fond and terrible.
"Let the golden child chatter. His noise will keep you warm while you learn to scream in frequencies only the dead can hear."
The crack sealed without a trace.
High above, on the highest balcony, the bone-masked figure watched.
It raised one pale hand and wrote a single rune in the air with black fire that dripped upward.
The rune spelled a name older than language.
Kael.
Far beneath the academy, deeper than bedrock, deeper than guilt, something vast uncoiled in its sleep.
Chains the width of redwoods groaned.
One link snapped with a sound like the world cracking its knuckles.
A second voice, ancient, amused, hungry, joined the first.
"Patience. Let the boy sharpen his hate on their whetstone. When the edge is keen enough, we'll drink the wound and the hand that holds it."
The bone-masked figure bowed its head.
And laughed a laugh that had no right to come from anything with a throat.
Above, Finn skidded to a halt.
"You okay, roomie? You look like you just got proposed to by a ghost."
Kael's smile was all teeth.
"Something like that."
Finn tilted his head. "Cool. Race you to the dorms. Loser carries sugar-glider poop bags for a month."
He bolted.
Kael watched him go, then glanced back at the pillar.
Flawless again.
But somewhere beneath his ribs, something ancient stretched, yawned, and settled in to wait.
Kael whispered to the night, voice raw, wondering, terrified.
"Bring it."
Far below, the thing with too many teeth smiled wide enough to swallow stars.
"Soon," it promised.
And the chains rattled like applause.