Days passed without any true leader emerging.
And in the vacuum, power began to take shape.
Aerys watched it happen from the edges—groups forming not around ideals, but around strength, audacity, or simple hunger. Alliances shifted by the hour, fragile and opportunistic. No one spoke of unity without first measuring what they might gain from it.
Lysandra was the first to move decisively.
She forged an alliance with Cipios, a stocky, sharp-tongued boy with tight curls and restless eyes. Together, they assembled two working groups. Armed with shovels and pickaxes scavenged from the castle's lower cellars, they marched out to claim Eimos and Ios.
Aerys had despised her from the start.
Spoiled. Too confident. Too loud.
And yet—he hated admitting it—she was intelligent.
Not strategic in the grand sense, but clever in motion. She understood that territory mattered. That tools mattered. That waiting was another way of losing.
Which made it almost poetic when Titos stole every shovel and pickaxe during the night.
By morning, Lysandra's camps were silent.
No one laughed.
Humiliation carried farther than mockery ever could.
Aerys saw her once that day in the central courtyard. Her jaw was tight, eyes bright with contained fury as she spoke in low, controlled tones to Cipios. She wasn't broken.
She was recalculating.
That alone made her dangerous.
On the evening of the third day, a column of smoke rose behind the eastern mountains.
Aerys saw it from the upper terraces—a thin, vertical scar against the amber light of sunset. It was visible from at least twenty kilometers away.
Too deliberate to be an accident.
A signal.
His Nexus tightened instinctively, a faint pressure forming beneath his sternum.
Enemies, most likely. Scouts, perhaps. Another House probing the borders.
If we were closer…
If we had horses…
If they were united, they could have sent a small group under cover of night. Captured the scouts at dawn. Learned who they were facing.
Instead, distance and discord denied them both options.
Between the castle and the smoke stretched ravines deep enough to swallow patrols whole. Plains wide enough for ambushes. And they would be moving on foot, in pairs at best—while other Houses already possessed mounts.
The danger was not only external.
The castle itself was not safe.
That realization settled in Aerys's chest like cold iron.
The Empire was right, he thought grimly.
Man cannot evolve while fighting himself.
They could not afford to leave Titos unwatched for long.
He had already stolen the berries Lea and Jinn had gathered. That morning, he had tried to use the standard on Jinn—to see if he could dominate her, force her into participating in his hit-and-run attacks.
It hadn't worked.
But the attempt alone was enough.
"We need to find a way to unify the House," Callius said quietly.
They were seated on the second floor of the library, books spread across the table between them.
The seats facing the tall window had become theirs.
Not because they were reserved—nothing in the House ever was—but because for several days now, no one else had dared sit there once they claimed it. The message had spread without words.
At first, a few cadets had approached Callius.
Polite smiles. Careful tones. Thinly veiled curiosity.
Some were drawn by his family name. Others by the rumors already circulating—his familiarity with the Fifth Prince of Celerion. If they could speak with him, be seen near him, perhaps it would matter later.
They were wrong.
"I'm fine," Callius always replied.
No matter the approach.
Eventually, they stopped trying.
Aerys appreciated the silence.
Around them rose quiet towers of books—treatises on elemental resonance, fractured theories of Essence circulation scripture, obscure manuscripts detailing fire-aligned pathways. Enchanted partitions muted the noise from below, leaving only the steady rhythm of turning pages.
He had been coming here every day.
Without exception.
Before dawn, he trained his Essence. Before sleep, he drove his body to exhaustion with the echo of Kael's battle art. Between those hours, he read.
Not casually.
Methodically.
At first, the texts had been hostile—contradictory diagrams, endless branching fire paths, each claiming supremacy. But with Odi's guidance, the longer he studied, the clearer the structure beneath the chaos became.
Patterns emerged. Principles repeated.
Now he could glance at a page and know where it was going.
Odi stirred faintly within him, resonating with certain passages, certain diagrams. It did not speak—only guided, subtly, like a current beneath still water.
You are not choosing a technique.
You are learning fire .
Aerys closed another book.
The sun was setting, light spilling through the window and painting the dust in gold.
So this is how Praetor Leos must have done it, he thought.
Not copying.
Not inheriting.
Understanding first.
He returned each book to its place without hesitation. He remembered exactly where they belonged—shelf, row, angle of the spine.
More importantly, he remembered what they contained.
Still theory, he admitted.
But not for much longer.
Fire was not something to imitate.
Fire was something to shape.
When the time came, he would not merely wield flame.
Reality returned the moment they stepped outside.
"We only pass through the Academy once," Callius said. "If we fail, we'll spend our lives as functionaries."
"And if we're enslaved during the game?" Aerys asked.
Callius's gaze darkened.
"Can you imagine something worse?"
Aerys snorted softly.
"As if I needed encouragement."
"Your father won his year," Aerys added. "Primus?"
"Yes. He always said he finished effortlessly. I never understood what that meant until now."
They agreed on one thing.
For Celerion to unite, Titos had to disappear.
A frontal assault was dismissed immediately—his clan was too widespread.
"We could kill him in his sleep," Callius said calmly. "The two of us could manage it."
The words sent a chill down Aerys's spine.
He had never killed anyone.
Callius noticed.
But said nothing.
Of the two of them, Callius was the one people loved—easy laughter, quick humor, effortless charm. He blended among enemies without friction, joking even with members of Titos's pack.
Aerys did not.
Where Callius drew trust, Aerys drew suspicion.
They left the question unanswered.
Titos, meanwhile, treated Aerys with open wariness.
Sometimes Callius vanished for entire days with Jinn.
Aerys liked Jinn.
Once, she returned with a deer slung over her shoulders and described—grinning—how she had killed it with her teeth, showing the bite marks and fur tangled in her canines.
For a moment, Aerys and Callius thought they had found a second Sevrius.
Slightly prettier.
Then she laughed.
Callius helped her pull the fur free.
Aerys liked people who could be this natural.