Born Good

The gates of Tetherpoint AcademyLocation — AcademyThe premier adventurer academy in Valerguard, founded during the Age of Ashes.→ Read moreTetherpoint Academy were taller than the granary back home, and I had spent eleven years imagining them wrong.

In my head they'd been gold. They were black iron, older than the kingdom, and the sun off the spires behind them hit my eyes like a blessing I hadn't asked permission for. My heart was going hard enough that I checked, stupidly, whether the people around me could hear it.

I made it. The thought arrived plain, no trumpets. Every candle I'd burned to a stub over borrowed books. Every winter dawn mucking stalls before lessons. Every time my father looked at my marks and nodded once, which was his whole vocabulary for pride. All of it had been for this gate, and now the gate was in front of me, and I couldn't move.

Tetherpoint AcademyLocation — AcademyThe premier adventurer academy in Valerguard, founded during the Age of Ashes.→ Read moreTetherpoint sat along the Tether River in the academy town of MellonwoodLocation — TownAn academy town just outside the capital, built to serve Tetherpoint.→ Read moreMellonwood, a half-day's ride from the capital, and the town itself was louder than any place I'd ever stood. Smith-hammers rang on trainee steel. A merchant shoved a glowing manual at my chest and quoted a price that would've bought two of my father's bulls. An actual adventurer walked past — cloak, scars, a sword with a name, probably — and nobody stared but me.

Six years. Keep my head down, keep my marks up, don't get expelled, and this was home.

It was a long way from RavenscroftLocation — VillageElias's ancient home village. Rarely does anyone from here attend Tetherpoint.→ Read moreRavenscroft. A few thousand souls, cattle and soil, a village so old nobody remembered founding it. My father ran one of the bigger stocks and worked a forge on the side. My mother had studied once, at a small academy for agriculture and community service — that's where they met, before Tether spat him back out to the fields. Simple folk. People said it like a diagnosis.

I was the first in generations to stand at this gate.

Well. The first anyone would admit to.

There had been a great-uncle. Mother's side. Once the family's shining pride — I knew that much only because of how thoroughly he'd been erased. He attended Tetherpoint, and then he chose The VeilFaction — One of the FourA secretive faction wielding forbidden magic. Their methods are considered dangerous by most.→ Read moreThe Veil over The ShieldFaction — One of the FourThe most honorable of the Four Factions, focused on protection and defense.→ Read moreThe Shield, and after that his name worked like a curse in our house: say it, and every adult in the room found something urgent to do with their hands. I learned young that asking was the fastest way to eat supper in silence. So I stopped asking. Mostly.

The VeilFaction — One of the FourA secretive faction wielding forbidden magic. Blamed for calamities best forgotten.→ Read moreThe Veil — one of the The Four FactionsPolitical StructureThe four governing bodies that maintain balance in Valerguard.→ Read moreFour Factions that kept ValerguardKingdomThe kingdom in which the story takes place, governed by the Four Factions.→ Read moreValerguard balanced — that was the polite version. The version people said after two ales was different: forbidden magic, cloaked methods, half the calamities in the history books laid at their feet. And yet the kingdom still stood, and the Four still stood with it, which meant somebody, somewhere, had decided The Veil was necessary.

Necessary. Dangerous. Both words got used. Nobody ever explained how both could be true.

◇ ◇ ◇

"Alright, out you go."

The voice hit like a dropped anvil. Its owner was a mountain wearing a man's clothes — black beard dense enough to nest birds in, arms like something you'd hang a gate on. He waved at our shuffling line the way my father waved at slow cattle.

"Time to get your stats checked out."

And despite everything — the nerves, the noise, the strangeness — a spark went through me, because that was the promise. The The Wizards EmporiumOrganizationThe organization responsible for performing Soul Enchantments on admitted students.→ Read moreWizards Emporium would perform the Soul EnchantmentMagical ProcessA ritual that transforms students into adventurers, granting stats, levels, and abilities.→ Read moreSoul Enchantment on every admitted student. After that you could level. Unlock skills. Wake powers that ordinary people would live and die without ever touching. Adventurers sat at the peak of society, and only a fraction of a fraction ever climbed there.

Kids from muddy backwaters like Ravenscroft didn't climb there. Except, apparently, today.

"Oi. Shit-for-brains."

A finger the width of an axe handle jabbed my chest. Pain flared like a cattle prod.

"You gonna stand there daydreaming all afternoon, village boy?"

"Y-yes, sir!"

"Then move."

The shove nearly put me on the cobbles. I scrambled forward, gathering what dignity I had left, which fit comfortably in one hand.

◇ ◇ ◇

Ahead, a stone arch was built into the base of a tower, and where a door should have been there was a wound in the world — purple, black, and crimson, churning like water deciding whether to drown you.

A portal. The The Academy GateMagical StructureA portal arch that transforms those who pass through into adventurers.→ Read moreAcademy Gate.

Elias and Kip before the Academy Gate

I'd read about portals my whole life. Some crossed continents. Some sealed ruins that were better left sealed. This one made adventurers, and standing in front of it, my chest felt like a cage full of birds that had just understood what cages were.

A short red-haired boy stood frozen at the threshold ahead of me. His turn came and he simply... stopped.

"I— I don't know if I—"

"Oh, look." The voice came from behind me, pitched to carry. "Baby's scared."

The speaker shouldered forward — big, and built like he knew it, with the grin of someone who'd figured out early that size plus cruelty equaled getting whatever he wanted, and had never needed a second lesson.

"Maybe we should send him back to his mama."

The red-haired kid folded inward, shoulders curling like he was trying to be absorbed by his own robes.

Here is a thing that has always been true about me, and would eventually be the ruin of me: I have never once feared a consequence as much as I've hated a bully.

"Leave him alone."

The big one turned. The grin widened into something with more teeth in it. "And who the fuck are you?"

Nobody. Elias from Ravenscroft, first day, no stats, no friends, no plan.

"You heard me," I said.

The fist arrived before the sentence finished being brave.

The world spun once, generously showing me sky, tower, cobblestones. Then the cobblestones came up to meet my back and three of them had my arms pinned. The big one planted his full weight on my face like he was claiming territory.

"Thought you'd play hero?"

What followed was a sulfuric act of war that I will not dignify with description, except to say that his friends howled, and I gagged, and some small ledger in the back of my skull opened to a fresh page and wrote his face on it.

"Get off me, you oversized pig!" — muffled, from a position I'd rather history forgot.

"Hero's got spirit!"

"Let's see how brave he is inside!"

Hands hauled me up. The red-haired boy screamed. And before either of us could do a single thing about it, they threw us into the portal.

That mouth-breathing bastard and his pack. I wouldn't forget them.

It turned out I was right about that. Just not in any way I could have survived knowing.

◇ ◇ ◇

Falling. Not down — through. The world came apart into ribbons of purple and silver, and inside my skull, a voice spoke.

Not heard. Installed. Cold, metallic, and closer than my own thoughts.

Panels of translucent glass unfolded across my vision, hanging in the chaos like they'd been waiting there my whole life for the light to catch them.

Every child in ValerguardKingdomThe kingdom in which the story takes place, governed by the Four Factions.→ Read moreValerguard learned the six Core Stats before they learned to read. Strength, Agility, Vitality, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma — you could recite them like a prayer, and most people did.

I had never in my life heard the words Soul BalanceStat Category — HiddenA mysterious set of hidden stats measuring the moral and emotional fabric of a person.→ Read moreSoul Balance.

And there was that other word, sitting in parentheses like it thought I wouldn't notice. Hidden. Hidden from whom? Not from me — I was looking right at it. Which left only one reading, and I didn't like it: hidden from everyone else.

I focused on Mercy, and the panel obliged.

Mercy — The capacity to forgive, empathize, and value the lives of others above one's own interests.

High Mercy strengthened healing affinity and support magic. Made bonds form easier. Low Mercy — the text was almost gentle about it — made ruthlessness easier. Made sacrifices more acceptable. Might even strengthen offensive abilities.

Might even. Like the System was leaving the door unlocked and mentioning, in passing, where it kept the knives.

I went through the rest with my stomach tightening a notch per entry. Conviction — the strength of one's beliefs under hardship. Resentment — the accumulation of grief, anger, betrayal, and unresolved pain.

I stopped on that one. Read it twice.

The System was measuring my resentment. Keeping a running total, like coin in a ledger. And a ledger only exists so that someday, someone can spend what's in it.

Connection. Hope. And last —

Identity — The degree to which a person remains true to their original self.

Identity: 100.

I stared at the number until it stopped being a number. Was that normal? Was that good? I'd never heard a single soul mention a Soul Balance score, which meant either nobody else had them —

— or the System only showed them to the people it wanted to watch.

The thought was still crawling down my spine when the world remembered I was falling.

Stone. Knee-first.

"AGH!" The pain went off like a struck bell, and a green bar flickered into the corner of my vision, ticking down a sliver as if to say: noted.

Around me, dozens of students were picking themselves up, laughing, shouting, jabbing fingers at screens only they could see. I barely registered them. Because at the bottom of my own status window, in silver letters faint as a dying candle, something was flickering — something I was almost certain had not been there ten seconds ago.

I leaned in, heart hammering, and had just made out the first word—

The message vanished.

The portal spat us into a stone hall big enough to make everything in Ravenscroft retroactively embarrassing. Rows of chairs faced a raised podium. Banners bearing the Tetherpoint crest hung from a vaulted ceiling that had clearly never once worried about the price of candles.

All around me, my new classmates were comparing revelations.

"My Strength is twelve!"

"I got a Fire Affinity!"

"No way — show me, show me—"

The energy was infectious, if you were in the mood for a pep rally. I was in the mood to stare at the edge of my vision, where a line of silver text had appeared, said something meant for me, and unsaid it.

"I saw your screen."

The red-haired kid from the portal was suddenly at my elbow, delivering this the way another person might report the weather. "I do not have Legacy Features."

I blinked at him. "You what?"

"Legacy Features," he repeated, patiently, like I was the strange one. "Mine does not have them."

A knot pulled tight in my gut. I hadn't even been sure the words were real — half a second of flicker, then gone. Now they had a name, and the name had a witness. I changed the subject before my thoughts could spiral somewhere useful.

"Name's Elias. Elias Lumina." I stuck out my hand.

He stared at it long enough for me to reconsider the custom of handshakes as a species, then seized it in both of his and pumped like he was drawing well water. "Kip Krumplnick," he announced.

"Krumplnick."

"That is my surname."

"Right."

He kept looking at me — not rudely, just totally, the way you'd study a page you intended to memorize. It was deeply unsettling and, I'd learn, permanent.

"I noticed," he continued, "that you do not have an Affinity yet. I do not either."

I shrugged. "Guess we're both unlucky."

Kip lit up like I'd handed him a festival prize. "I am delighted."

There is no correct response to that sentence. I didn't find one.

A snort carried across the hall. The oversized bastard from the gate stood with his pack, pointing at me, rubbing his knee in exaggerated pantomime — look, the farm boy fell — and howling. His friends howled along, because that's what a pack is for.

I glared with everything I had. Spontaneous combustion remained, sadly, outside my skill tree.

"Why did you intervene in my social interaction with Cassian?" Kip asked.

I turned to him slowly. "Your social interaction."

"Yes."

"The part where he punched me, pinned me down, and farted on my face?"

Kip nodded, solemn as a judge. "Yes."

"You know he's a bully, right?"

Kip frowned — and here's the thing, it was genuine confusion, root to branch. "No. Cassian Drake is my friend."

I laughed before I understood he meant it. "Your friend."

"Oh yes. We have known each other since we were six. We wrestle often."

I was assembling an explanation of the difference between wrestling and getting beaten by someone twice your size when Kip's whole face went bright. "Cassian!" And he trotted straight over. Trotted. Like a dog hearing its dish.

Cassian groaned for his audience. "Oh gods, the goblin found me."

Kip sailed through the insult without touching it. "Can I see your stats screen?"

Cassian took him by the collar, folded him into a headlock, and ground knuckles into his scalp. "Why are you so damn weird?" he laughed, and the pack laughed, and Kip winced in real pain and did not fight back. Didn't even look angry. When Cassian shoved him loose, Kip straightened his clothes, fixed his hair, and resumed asking about Strength scores as though the previous fifteen seconds had happened to somebody else.

I watched the whole display in silence.

Kip thought Cassian was his friend. What I saw was a boy who'd been trained — carefully, over years — to receive cruelty and call it play. And for reasons I couldn't have put words to yet, I hated Cassian Drake a little more than I had five minutes ago.

Something in the back of my skull added a line. I didn't hear the quill. You never do.

◇ ◇ ◇

"Welcome! Welcome, Class 777 — The Golden CohortStudent BodyElias's incoming class, called "the luckiest of numbers" by Archmage Varric.→ Read moreClass 777!"

The voice owned the hall before I found its source: a wizard at the podium in crimson-and-gold robes, actual flames stitching themselves along the hems like living embroidery. Fifty-ish face, twenty-ish voice. Dark hair shot with silver. Eyes swirling blue-white, like storms kept as pets.

"What we have come to call — the Golden Cohort!"

"You are our hope," he declared, arms wide enough to embrace the architecture. "Our dreams. Triple sevens! The luckiest of numbers! Fortune smiles upon you this day, and history shall remember you as the brightest generation Tetherpoint Academy has ever produced."

The room detonated. Kids leapt up, hugged strangers, shouted their futures at each other. And I sat there, damp with humiliation, doing the arithmetic of my first day: punched, pinned, farted on, and shown a set of secret stats that existed, as far as I could tell, so something could keep score of my soul.

Luck wasn't the word I'd have picked.

I was just Elias Lumina. Farm kid. Ordinary parents. No prophecy, no title, no—

The wizard's eyes found me across three hundred heads. It felt like being stepped on.

"Interesting," he said, and the warmth left his voice like heat leaving a corpse. "It appears we have one student in the back scowling during my introduction."

Laughter rippled. My face went furnace-hot. I glanced around on the desperate chance he meant some other scowling farm boy. The hall's geometry disagreed.

He took up a long black staff — its head a crystal where blue ice and red flame circled each other like old enemies — and came down from the podium. The hall went quieter with each step. When he stopped in front of me, those storm-lit eyes moved over my face the way a locksmith's hands move over a lock.

Then something behind them turned.

"Oh," he said, very softly. "I see."

"...What?"

"What is your name, boy."

"Elias."

"Your surname."

"Lumina."

The color left his face all at once, the way it does when a man sees not a stranger but a ghost wearing one. His jaw set. And then — in front of three hundred students, in the middle of his own welcome speech — he spat. The glob struck stone an inch from my boot.

The hall went silent as a held breath.

"What the hell, sir?" It was out of me before wisdom could vote.

The whispers came up like floodwater. Did he say Lumina? — I thought that family was finished — no wonder—

No wonder what?

The wizard drew himself straight, composure sliding back over his face like a visor, though nothing warm came back with it. "Yes," he murmured, mostly to himself. "A Lumina. Of course."

I'd braced for nobles sneering at the farm kid. Every kid from a village braces for that. I had not braced for one of the most powerful men in the academy to look at my name like it was something he'd scraped off his boot — and to be afraid while he did it.

"Get to your seat, novice."

I wanted answers. I wanted them loudly. But there was a stillness in his eyes of the specific kind that precedes regrettable events, and even a farm boy knows not to slap the bull. I sat.

◇ ◇ ◇

He strutted back to the podium as though he hadn't just publicly declared war on a sixteen-year-old.

"This is indeed a happy moment," he proclaimed. "I am Archmage Varric Pyre — Elementalist Extraordinary, master of ice and fire, veteran of many wars, and now your prestigious instructor at Tetherpoint Academy."

Applause thundered. I barely heard it. I was busy being sixteen and rearranging my entire understanding of my family. My great-uncle hadn't just embarrassed the Luminas. Whatever he'd done, it was still radioactive two generations later — hot enough to make an archmage spit at a child.

What did you do, old man?

Varric lectured on: eight hundred glorious years since the The Age of AshesHistorical EraAn ancient period during which Tetherpoint Academy was founded.→ Read moreAge of Ashes, legendary graduates, slain dragons, sealed rifts. Every few minutes he punctuated himself with fireworks — flame twisted into duelists, ice bloomed into spires — the magical equivalent of a man flexing in every mirror he passes.

"Look around you," he boomed at last, and the hall hushed. "Look left. Look right. Look at the poor souls beside and behind you."

I looked. Cassian sat ahead, wearing the smirk of a boy who has never once been told no by anyone who could enforce it. Kip stared at the ceiling, lips moving through some private mathematics.

"Statistics tell us only half of you will graduate."

Silence, sudden and total.

"Half will fail. Some will quit. Some will discover they were simply never meant for this." He let that sit, his storm-lit eyes dragging slow across the crowd. "And the vast majority of those failures will not happen next year, or the year after. They will happen in the next fourteen days."

Whispers broke out, thin and frantic. Varric cracked the butt of his staff against the stone, and the hall snapped shut around it.

"The Culling," he said, rolling the word around like he was tasting a good vintage. "Two weeks. Fourteen days of unyielding, brutal assessment. You will be pushed past exhaustion, starved of comfort, and thrown into the wilds with nothing but the clothes on your back and the stats in your soul. We do not do this to be cruel. We do this because the monsters outside these walls do not care whether you slept eight hours, and they will not apologize before they open your throat."

He leaned into the podium, knuckles white around the wood.

"For the next two weeks, you are not students. You are raw ore. We are going to apply the heat, and we are going to swing the hammer. Shatter during the Culling, and you get to pack your bags and limp home to your mother." His grin went wide, teeth bright and predatory. "But survive it, and only then do you earn the right to call yourself a first-year. And I say — nay to those statistics!"

His hands went up. Fire roared to the ceiling and spread into a phoenix with a wingspan wider than my father's barn. Gasps. Cheers. A flick of his fingers and the flames cooled, crystallized, and came down as snow — soft, glittering, ceremonial.

The students lost their minds. Fists in the air. Golden Cohort! Golden Cohort! And for one stupid, shining second, I almost let myself believe it. Maybe we were special. Maybe I had made it. Maybe—

The avalanche hit me like a judgment. Not flakes. Slush — a full winter's worth, dumped square on my head, pouring ice down my collar and soaking me to the skin. I shot up out of my seat, gasping, scrubbing my eyes, and took inventory of the hall through the dripping: three hundred students dusted in pretty snow.

One student buried in it.

"Seriously — what the fuck?" My voice rang off the vaulted stone.

The laughter died. Every eye in the hall turned.

Varric rotated toward me with theatrical slowness. Whatever counterfeit warmth the speech had held was gone; what remained looked at me, looked at the slush, looked back at me. He knew I hadn't done a thing.

He simply didn't care. And he wanted me to see that he didn't. That was the lesson, I understood later. The snow was just the handwriting.

"I warned you, young Lumina," he said, cold as the ice in my collar. "Do not disrupt this gathering."

"But you—"

And here — I don't fully know how to explain what happened next, except that I raised my hand, and for one split second I could see it: the staff wrenched from his grip, the arc of it, the crack of crystal against his skull, the shock breaking open that smug storm-lit face. I could feel the weight of it in my palm like memory. Something in my chest pulled taut, and just underneath my ribs there was — pressure. Heat. Power, close enough to touch, if I only wanted it badly enough.

I wanted it.

Nothing happened.

Varric didn't so much as blink. "I did not ask for your explanation," he said, in a voice like a door being closed from the other side. "I asked for your silence."

The stubborn idiot who lives in my mouth opened it anyway—

Varric leveled the staff at my chest.

No flash. No thunder. One instant I was standing in the Great Hall, soaked and furious in front of the Golden Cohort. The next, I was falling through dark.

Stone met me. The air went out of my lungs in one flat cough.

I lay there a moment, then sat up, groaning, and took in my new accommodations: a small dreary room, bare walls, a cot with ambitions of being a bed, a slit window, a desk. Thick iron bars on the door. A brass plaque beside them, polished by generations of misfortune.

I stared at it.

"Well," I said, to no one. "Fuck."

I dropped into the chair and put my head in my hands. Snow melted out of my hair and ticked onto the desk, one drop at a time, like a clock that only counted losses.

What was so poisonous about my name that an archmage would spit at the sound of it? Why had he looked afraid? Why the whispers — that family, no wonder — like everyone in the kingdom had read a page of my story that had been torn out of my copy?

I had worked for this my whole life. The late nights. The volunteer rolls. The perfect marks that made my father nod his single nod. Years of dreaming about black iron gates. Had I really climbed all that way just to burn down on day one — for a name I couldn't even get anyone to explain?

The cell offered no answers. Cells never do. That's rather the point of them.

◇ ◇ ◇

My thoughts were circling somewhere dark when the screech split them open.

At the slit window perched the strangest owl I had ever seen — ancient, feathers ragged as an old battle-standard, and its eyes wrong: one pitch black, drinking the light; the other burning gold, like it had seen too much and started keeping some. It studied me with an attention no bird should own.

We regarded each other for a long moment, the owl and I.

Then it hopped inside, landed on the desk with a thud far too heavy for its body, and stared some more — searching my face for something. Whatever the test was, I failed it. The owl huffed, an unmistakably disappointed sound, spread its wings, and was gone through the slit.

It left something behind.

A weathered envelope lay on the desk where, seconds ago, there had been nothing but melted snow. Yellowed. Soft with age, as if it had been carried a long time before it was sent. On the front, in silver ink:

I picked it up. Set it down. Picked it up again.

Nobody talked about Uncle Daemeon. Not once, not ever. His name was conversational poison — the kind that killed a room and made every adult in it check the door. I'd stopped asking about him years ago, the way you stop pressing a bruise.

Now, stuck in detention on day one — snow in my hair, my name a curse, an archmage's spit still drying on the stone of the Great Hall — I finally held something from the family ghost.

This time, I didn't put the envelope down.

Elias, my dear nephew,

Take this gift. Know this: it will only awaken if you join The VeilFaction — One of the FourThe most feared faction. Studies souls, memory, identity, and forbidden magic.→ Read moreThe Veil. Should you do so, it will grant you power. More power than you can presently imagine. And with it, you will discover the truth of our ancient heritage.

The world will tell you many things about me. Most of them are lies. I pray that, one day, you will understand why I chose the path I did.

With love,
Uncle Daemeon

"Fuck no," I said, out loud, to an empty cell.

I came within a breath of hurling the pendant against the wall — actually cocked my arm, felt the weight of it leave my fingers in imagination the way the staff had, back in the hall. The family ghost sends his first letter in my lifetime, and it's a recruitment pitch.

No. No goddamn way. I wasn't following a disgraced traitor down whatever hole he'd crawled into. I wasn't joining The VeilFaction — One of the FourThe most feared faction. Studies souls, memory, identity, and forbidden magic.→ Read moreThe Veil. I wasn't touching their forbidden filth. I'd been raised to protect people — to stand between the herd and the wolves, my father would say — not to slink through shadows hoarding dirty little secrets like a gutter rat.

The trouble was that the fucking thing was beautiful.

The Luminus PendantLegacy Item — DormantA mysterious pendant from Uncle Daemeon. Swirls with blue-green light and ancient symbols.→ Read morependant sat in my palm, warmer than a stone had any right to be, blue-green light moving under its surface like a sea with something living in it. Symbols drifted up through the glow — old, angular, patient — surfacing just long enough to almost mean something before sliding back under. I found my thumb tracing the crystal's edge and made it stop. Then found it tracing again.

I hated how badly I wanted to put it on. Hated it the way you hate a hunger.

"Damn you, Daemeon Lumina," I said through my teeth. "Damn you straight to whatever pit you crawled out of."

My fist came down on the desk.

"OI! NUMB NUTS!"

I nearly left my skin behind. The mountain from the gate — the bearded gorilla who'd herded us like slow cattle — filled the doorway beyond the bars, scowling like I'd pissed in his ale.

"We ain't runnin' no desk brothel in here! Keep yer filthy hands off the furniture, boy."

I blinked. "...What?"

"Ye heard me."

For the sake of my continued existence, I elected not to pursue the point. So this walking avalanche ran the The Detention BlockLocation — Tetherpoint AcademyAn underground holding area beneath the Great Hall, overseen by Borin Grimhall.→ Read moredetention block. Wonderful. Nothing good had ever come from a room a man like that held the keys to.

I raised my hand. Actually raised it, like a schoolboy. Eleven years of village classroom will do that to a person.

"Sir?"

"Yes, food-for-maggots?"

"How do I get out of here?"

He considered me for three full seconds. Then: "Graduate."

My stomach dropped through the floor and kept going.

"Kiddin', lad." The laugh came up out of him like rocks in a barrel, shaking the bars. He wiped an eye and squinted at his clipboard. "Elias Lumina, eh?"

A pause. Long enough to have weather in it.

"Huh."

My guts twisted. Here it came. The spit. The whispers. The—

"Interestin'," he muttered, and there was no disgust in it at all. Just an old man reading an old name. "Another Lumina."

Another.

I opened my mouth — and he was already lumbering over, hauling a ring of keys heavy enough to beat a man to death with, which I suspected was not hypothetical.

"Tell ya what, kid." The lock clanked. "This whole mess reeks of a setup."

The iron door groaned open.

"Name's Borin GrimhallAlly — Detention WardenA mountain of a man who runs the detention block. Member of The Veil.→ Read moreBorin Grimhall." A hand the size of a dinner plate came at me. "Pleasure."

I hesitated half a second, then shook it. My hand disappeared to the wrist.

Elias meets Borin Grimhall in the detention block

That's when I saw it. Pinned beneath the beard, half-swallowed by wiry black hair: a silver insignia. A hooded eye, wreathed in black thorns.

The Veil.

I stared. I knew I was staring, and I stared anyway, the way you stare at a snake you've just realized shares the room with you.

Borin's face closed like a shutter.

"Ain't polite to stare, boy."

My eyes snapped up. "S-sorry."

The silence stretched long enough to be its own conversation.

Then he grunted. "Most folks see this and shit themselves."

"I'm nervous," I admitted, because lying seemed both pointless and fatal.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smirk. The fossil of one. "Good. Means ye ain't completely brainless."

He stepped aside. "Off with ya."

I snatched Daemeon's letter off the desk — and stalled, eyes dropping to the Luminus PendantLegacy Item — DormantA mysterious pendant from Uncle Daemeon. Swirls with blue-green light and ancient symbols.→ Read morependant. Still glowing. Still warm from my hand. Still, per its own paperwork, a trap dressed up in pretty light.

The letter had been clear. It only woke if I joined The Veil. Which I was not doing. Absolutely, positively, carve-it-on-my-headstone not.

But if it was inert...

It was one hell of a nice necklace.

Then the paranoia landed, cold and sensible. What if it was cursed? What if the second it touched my skin, dear Uncle Daemeon turned me into a toad, or a puppet, or worse — into whatever he was?

I glared at the thing.

"Ye ain't seriously scared of a shiny rock, are ya?" Borin called from the door.

"I'm exercising caution."

"Yer glarin' at it like it kicked yer dog."

The pendant sat there, glowing, radiating innocence.

Bastard.

"Hey!" Borin barked. "We ain't got all day, space cadet!"

I groaned, grabbed it, and shoved it into my inventory before my hindbrain could file an objection. Blue text flickered at the edge of my vision:

It was gone before I could dig deeper.

Inheritance confirmed. So the old traitor had been at least half honest. The thing really was tied to our blood — to whatever "ancient heritage" was worth wrapping in silver ink and sending by owl.

But why lock it behind The Veil? If they were the villains everyone said — the forbidden magic, the hidden knives, the atrocities — why would anyone choose that door?

And if they weren't the villains—

No.

I shook the thought off like a dog shaking off river water. The Veil dealt in poison and shadow. Everyone knew that.

Everyone knew that. I was sixteen, and I had not yet learned to be afraid of sentences shaped like that one.

"'EH!" Borin bellowed from below.

I leaned over the stair railing.

"If ye ever need somethin', I'll be down here — babysittin' you sorry lot of scoundrels!"

A reluctant half-smile got away from me. "Thanks!"

It came out more uncertain than grateful, which was honest, at least. Hell of a first ally: a Veil thug running the academy's detention block.

Shouldn't that job have belonged to The Shield?

Best not to dwell. Thinking too hard about anything in this place seemed to be a pre-existing condition for migraines.

◇ ◇ ◇

At the top of the stairs I cracked the massive oak door and peered through the gap.

The The Great HallLocation — Tetherpoint AcademyThe central gathering space where major announcements and ceremonies take place.→ Read moreGreat Hall. Perfect. And Varric, still at the podium, still in love with the sound of his own thunder. I eased the door back like a coward and stood in the dark, listening. No force in Valerguard was getting me zapped back into that cell twice in one day.

"And now," Varric boomed, "you shall commence Faction TryoutsAcademy EventAn exercise where students whose souls are deemed ideal are selected as faction leaders.→ Read moreFaction Tryouts!"

The hall went up like dry kindling — three hundred voices at once.

"Those whose souls have been deemed ideal representatives have already been selected as leaders..."

Through the crack I watched him sweep his staff. Four students lit up like prize livestock at auction, golden light pouring down over them, insignias burning themselves onto their uniforms one by one.

The Shield.

The Flame.

The Grove.

And—

I squinted through the gap.

No.

No.

Cassian Drake stood front and center, haloed in gold like a false prophet, and across his chest — proud, radiant, official — blazed the lion of The ShieldFaction — One of the FourThe protectors of Valerguard. Knights, guardians, and defenders of civilization.→ Read moreThe Shield.

I nearly choked on my own spit.

The boy who punched me at the gates. Who pinned me down and used my face for a throne. Who greeted his oldest friend with a headlock and an insult. That was the soul the System had weighed and found to be an ideal representative of the kingdom's protectors.

The ledger in the back of my skull didn't add a line. It added a page.

I scanned the hall through the crack, hunting for someone — anyone — whose face said what mine did. One student, one instructor, one person present who had seen what I'd seen at the gate.

Cheering. Applause. Kip, somewhere in the crowd, probably clapping hardest of all.

Nobody batted an eye.

And that — not the spit, not the snow, not the cell — was the first genuinely frightening thing Tetherpoint Academy showed me. Not that cruelty existed here. That the System had audited it, and stamped it a lion.

The Year 1 Male BarracksLocation — Tetherpoint AcademyCramped maze of bunks housing all first-year males before faction sorting.→ Read moreYear 1 male barracks smelled like feet, lamp oil, and the sour anxiety of two hundred boys pretending to be asleep. Because faction sorting hadn't happened yet, they'd penned all of us together in one maze of bunks — cattle logic; I recognized it professionally.

Thank the gods my cot was at the far end from his.

Cassian DrakeRival — First-Year NoviceA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others.→ Read moreCassian.

I lay staring at the stone ceiling, fists white-knuckled under a blanket thin enough to read through. The ShieldFaction — One of the FourThe protectors of Valerguard. Knights, guardians, and defenders of civilization.→ Read moreThe Shield. A protector. The word kept circling and refusing to land. I ran the math every way I knew — maybe the System weighed potential, maybe it weighed pedigree, maybe strength covered a multitude of sins — and every route came out at the same answer: the audit was wrong, or the audit was lying, and I couldn't decide which possibility I hated more.

They should have marched him straight to The VeilFaction — One of the FourThe most feared faction. Studies souls, memory, identity, and forbidden magic.→ Read moreThe Veil with the rest of the degenerates.

Then again.

Borin GrimhallAlly — Detention WardenA mountain of a man who runs the detention block. Member of The Veil.→ Read moreBorin was Veil. Gruff as a rusted axe — and the only person in this entire academy who'd opened a door for me instead of throwing me through one.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. One day. I'd been here one day, and the map they'd sent me from home already didn't match the terrain.

Sleep, when it finally came, showed no mercy.

It dragged me down into a field of gray ash that ran flat to every horizon under a dead sky. Burnt bodies lay scattered like dolls a giant child had grown bored of. And the faces — the faces came to me one at a time, out of the smoke, each twisted in the specific agony of the betrayed. Dozens. Hundreds. Every single one arrived like an accusation with my name on the envelope.

The nearest face began to sharpen. Familiar. Almost—

White light detonated the world.

"GOOD MORNING, CLASS OF 777!"

I came awake mid-flail, half off the cot, heart slamming. In the center of the barracks stood Sylin MerryweatherAnnoyance — Year 6 RAA relentlessly cheerful sixth-year and proud member of The Grove. Wakes cadets at dawn with a Shiver-Beak Rooster.→ Read moreSylin Merryweather — Year 6, Residential Assistant, insufferably proud member of The GroveFaction — One of the FourHealers, druids, and nature mages who serve as the backbone of any adventuring party.→ Read moreThe Grove — his staff blazing with counterfeit sunrise. And perched atop it, feathers puffed with malice, sat the true instrument of evil: a Shiver-Beak RoosterCreature — Magical BeastAn enchanted bird whose screech drains mana and the will to live.→ Read moreShiver-Beak Rooster.

The scrawny little horror opened its beak and screeched.

The sound went in through my ears and came out through my teeth. My skull rang like a struck pot. Somewhere behind my eyes, tiny claws scraped away my will to live, one shaving at a time.

Sylin, radiantly immune to the suffering of others, beamed at us. "Today will be a great day! You will all embark on your very first adventure! Archmage Varric will meet you in the dining hall with further instructions."

◇ ◇ ◇

"Yip, yip!"

The sound scraped across the barracks — flat, dead-eyed, and coming from Kip KrumplnickAlly — First-Year NoviceA small, red-haired boy with an intense stare and an oddly literal way of seeing the world.→ Read moreKip, who had just discovered via the morning board that the kitchen was serving potato hash and scrambled eggs. This, I gathered, was his species' mating cry of pure joy.

I was still watching him celebrate when Cassian "accidentally" broadsided him in passing and put him face-first into the menu frame.

And for one second — one beautiful, flickering second — Kip came up off the floor with actual fury on his face. Real anger. Teeth. A person, fighting his way to the surface.

Then he saw who had leveled him, and I watched the anger drain out through some hole years of friendship had drilled in him, and the vacant, grateful grin slid back into place like a mask picked up off the floor.

I looked away. The whole dynamic made my back teeth ache. Somewhere in my chest lived a vivid, fully staged fantasy of stringing Cassian up by his big toes until his ears bled — but fine. Whatever. Not my circus, not my brain-damaged monkeys. I had my own day to survive.

Kip's yipping cut off. He'd spotted me. He came scuttling over like an eager, oversized beetle.

"Hello, friend. We are having breakfast hash and scrambled eggs today at morning chow. That is great, do you not think?"

Kip topped out at a generous five-foot-two to my five-ten, which forced him to crane back and look up at me with the devastating expectancy of a golden retriever watching a hand near a ball. He wanted a partner in his joy. He wanted it badly.

I bent my mouth into something shaped like a smile. "Oh. Right, yes. Delicious."

The lie sufficed. He glowed, his attention drifted, and I was mercifully released.

"Let us walk together," he chirped, falling in beside me.

Kip and Elias walk to the mess hall

The walk was a masterclass, though I didn't yet have the vocabulary for what in. Kip spent every step of it laying out his grand aspirations for The Shield. He and Cassian had discussed it at length, he informed me proudly. Cassian believed Kip would make a "dutiful soldier." Cassian had explained how crucial it was that Kip remain "completely submissive to the chain of command."

Completely submissive. Kip repeated the phrase the way you'd repeat a compliment.

I kept my face still and my stomach didn't cooperate. Because I could see the shape of it, whole: take the loyal one young, teach him that pain is play and obedience is friendship, then hand him a banner and call the finished product a soldier. It wasn't just an abuse of power. It was a curriculum. And the graduate walking next to me couldn't wait to enroll.

The worst part was that Kip didn't even fit there. Anyone with eyes could see he belonged in The FlameFaction — One of the FourWarriors, duelists, and battle-mages who thrive in direct combat.→ Read moreThe Flame or The Grove — somewhere that wanted his strange, precise mind instead of his neck.

Breakfast, infuriatingly, was excellent. The hash ran heavy with wild boar and Emporium Silver potatoes; the eggs were no mass-produced chicken sludge but genuine Drake eggs, rich enough to make a farm boy suspicious. Fine. Kip's palate was vindicated. But the gourmet spread read to me like a receipt: we are turning you into the elite, and we do not skimp on our investments.

For one unguarded second, warmth flooded me — pure, animal entitlement. I earned this seat. I belong here.

Then the old familiar weight came down across it, guilt landing on pride like a lid on a pot. I didn't have the luxury of enjoying a meal. I had a name to scrub clean. I needed The Shield — needed to force my parents to be able to look at the son they'd raised without flinching at his surname.

I ate fast and tasted nothing. It seemed safest.

◇ ◇ ◇

The oak doors banged open hard enough to bounce.

Archmage Varric PyreInstructor — Elementalist ExtraordinaryMaster of ice and fire. Member of The Flame. Targets Elias with open hostility.→ Read moreVarric sauntered into the mess hall trailing effortless superiority like cologne — and, to guarantee every eye landed where it belonged, he flicked his wrist and conjured a private thunderstorm directly over his own head. Lightning cracked against the ceiling vaults. Thunder rattled three hundred plates.

The man traveled with his own weather.

"A wonderfully good morning to you all," he purred, cutting under the rumble without effort.

His gaze swept the hall like a landlord counting livestock — and snagged on me for a fraction of a second. The brow twitched. A micro-scowl of profound disappointment, there and smoothed away, and then he was past me and into the sermon.

"Every great adventurer starts with a singularly pathetic first step." He paced the head of the hall, smirking. "Today is yours. It seems the Rustlefoot GoblinsCreature — EnemyBottom-tier pests (level 3 max) outside Tether. Foots, Clerks, and Handlers.→ Read moreRustlefoot Goblins outside Tether have mistaken our patience for weakness. No longer content to eat our garbage at the landfill, they have graduated to robbing the defenseless. They even slaughtered a resisting elderly woman — after she dared defend herself with a cane."

The hall gasped on cue, young and outraged and sure of everything.

"Yes, yes, do pipe down." Varric waved off their anger like a mild odor. "She was a delight, really. Grannie EzmereldaPerson — DeceasedBeloved former Academy cook murdered by Rustlefoot Goblins.→ Read moreGrannie Ezmerelda. Cooked in this very hall for decades before her retirement. Tragic." He allowed a moment of silence with the approximate sincerity of a market juggler.

"So — we clean up the trash. The Rustlefoots are bottom-tier refuse. Level three at their absolute best. Their little bands come in three flavors: the 'Foot,' a grunt who dual-wields daggers; the 'Clerk,' who fumbles with potions to manage weak heals and laughably futile fire-bombs; and the 'Handler,' who commands mangy strays, throws pebbles, and expects you to be intimidated by a mutt."

Around me, the cohort split cleanly into two species: the cocky grins, and the rising masks of panic. Because under the archmage's contempt sat the actual fact of the morning — real monsters, real steel, and a real chance of dying the moment we accepted the quest. The System didn't hand out practice deaths.

"Some of you may be feeling squeamish," Varric boomed over the murmur. "If you are not up to par, do see me after chow. I can easily strip your adventurer stats and post you home to your mothers."

He swept his staff, and all four corners of the The Great HallLocation — Tetherpoint AcademyThe central gathering space where major announcements and ceremonies take place.→ Read moregreat hall warped — stone and light folding into four distinct liveries, four banners, four thrones-in-waiting.

"But for those of you who are not neutered kittens," he sneered, "find your chosen faction's corner. Gather."

I looked across the hall. My eyes went straight to the lion of The Shield — and to the boy already standing at the center of its corner like he'd been born there, receiving first-years the way a toll collector receives travelers.

Cassian standing at the center of The Shield corner

"This is merely a trial," Varric added, almost bored. "You have not taken the The Insignia OathAcademy TraditionThe formal ceremony by which a student pledges allegiance to a faction.→ Read moreInsignia Oath. You are simply trying to find a fit."

A fit. Fine. I could survive one campaign under Cassian Drake. I mustered what confidence hadn't been spat on, drowned, or jailed in the last day, took a breath, and walked to the lion.

"Well, well." The smirk assembled itself as I approached. "Look who we have here." He let me stand there a moment, just to establish who could make whom stand. "In The Shield, we expect discipline." His eyes came down on mine, flat as a closed visor. "Name and desired role for this campaign."

"Elias Lumina. I..."

And there my momentum died, because the honest answer was I don't know — a wave of unpreparedness broke over me out of nowhere, eleven years of book-learning suddenly worth nothing against one practical question. "I'm not sure yet."

"Well, for fuck's sake." He rolled his eyes for the benefit of his audience. "You're tanking, then. Go grab a shield and a one-hander." A slow inventory of my frame, top to bottom, the way my father sized a yearling. "You've got a little muscle on those chicken-wing arms. Grab the mace."

"A tank? Seriously?" My temper arrived before my judgment, as was becoming tradition. "Shouldn't you be the tank? You're the biggest one here!"

The smirk didn't fade. It dropped — like a curtain, like it had only ever been hung in front of this. "I do not tolerate insubordination, village boy," Cassian said, and his voice had gone somewhere older and colder than sixteen. "Insubordination gets people killed."

I never saw him start moving.

The stone floor hit my back with the full weight of him behind it, air leaving my lungs in one hard cough, and then I was pinned — genuinely, geologically pinned — under a boy the System had certified as a protector of the realm. His fist drew back and hung there, inches from my face, patient as a signed verdict.

"Don't you ever try to embarrass me in front of my crew again," he said. Low. For me alone.

I lay still. Around us, thirty trainees of The Shield — the faction of guardians, the wall between the herd and the wolves — watched in perfect silence.

Nobody stepped in.

I filed that. It went down without comment, the way these things do.

He shoved off me and walked away. I lay on the stone a moment longer, breathing, then got up, swallowed the fire in my throat one coal at a time, and went to the racks to collect my shield.

And thus I was officially a meat-shield in the service of Cassian DrakeRival — Shield Faction LeaderA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others. Selected as leader of The Shield's first-year cohort.→ Read moreCassian Drake.

Let the record reflect the absurdity. I was quick. I was agile. I'd swung hammers with leverage since I was old enough to be trusted near an anvil. Lean, yes — swattable, next to a lumbering mammoth like Cassian — which by any sane doctrine made me a skirmisher, a striker, a flanker. Anything fast.

Instead: tank. Institutional violence by way of a stat sheet, conformity codified and issued with a mace.

One quest, I told myself, testing the trainee shield's unfamiliar weight on my arm. Survive the trial, then argue my way into a real role. Or — the pettier plan, which I kept in my back pocket where it purred — perform with such aggressively malicious incompetence that the bastard reassigned me out of sheer self-interest.

The trial parameters resolved on our interfaces, sterile as an invoice:

Ten kills per squad. Thirty-odd The ShieldFaction — One of the FourProtectors of Valerguard. Knights, guardians, and defenders who believe duty is the highest calling.→ Read moreShield hopefuls, split into standard five-man cells. And Cassian — grand commander Cassian — didn't lower himself into any squad at all. He set up in the center of the operational zone and distributed Trans-Communication CrystalsEquipment — Standard IssueCrystals that feed visual data-streams to a commander and grant teleportation anchors to squad locations.→ Read moretrans-communication crystals to his hand-picked leaders like a lord dispensing favors.

Standard low-officer kit, those crystals: a visual feed piped straight to his interface, plus a high-priority teleport anchor to any squad's position. Which meant the academy wasn't just tolerating him.

They were grooming him for command. Day two, and the machine had already chosen its officer. My stomach turned over. That anchor should have belonged to someone with a working brain. Me. Kip KrumplnickAlly — Group 3 Squad LeaderA red-haired archer with terrifying enthusiasm and fierce loyalty to both Cassian and Elias.→ Read moreKip. The rooster, frankly.

The sigh got out of me before I could stop it. Audible. Bitter.

"You got something to say, soldier?" Cassian's voice came over sharp, clipped, wearing its authority like boots that hadn't been broken in.

"No, sir." I didn't bother scrubbing the venom off it. My skin was running hot with a cocktail I was starting to know by taste — one part humiliation, two parts something the System had a stat for.

I turned my back on him and took stock of Group 3, my new comrades-in-expendability. A stranger collection of first-years would have been hard to curate. Kip, locked in as our ranged damage. Beside him a girl named Telilah ArregardeGroup 3 — Melee DPSAn intense dual-wielding fighter and Tevin's twin sister.→ Read moreTelilah, intense as a drawn bowstring, white-knuckling two short-swords like they might be confiscated; her twin brother Tevin ArregardeGroup 3 — Support / HealerTelilah's twin brother. A reluctant healer who prioritizes his sister over the rest of the party.→ Read moreTevin idly counting low-grade healing potions, our designated support, already wearing the expression of a man who found other people's injuries tedious. And on the end, Markko SmittyGroup 3 — Demolitions EnthusiastAn eccentric who hoards explosive reagents. Prefers detonating enemies to fighting them.→ Read moreMarkko — an eccentric who had spent the entire prep period hoarding unstable explosive reagents with the serene focus of someone who intended to detonate the goblins rather than fight them fair.

And I was to stand in front of this circus and absorb its consequences.

"Good," Cassian barked at nothing in particular, then stepped past me like furniture, eyes landing on the red-haired boy. "Kip. You're leading Group 3."

He pressed the glowing crystal into Kip's hands.

"Yes, sir!" Kip barked back, with an enthusiasm so total and unironic it hurt to witness.

Cassian entrusts Kip with the trans-communication crystal

I was glad for him. I want that on the record too — some part of me was genuinely glad. But the knot in my stomach only pulled tighter as I watched the exchange, because I finally understood what I was looking at, and it wasn't Kip being used. That would have been simpler. Kip was fiercely, genuinely loyal to Cassian — blind to the malice, fluent in translating cruelty as discipline — while somehow also loyal to me, rawly, completely, in his strange literal way. Navigating his split devotion was going to be exhausting. Watching where it eventually led him was going to be worse. I didn't know that second part yet. Lucky me.

And the crystal itself — the strategic insult of it was unmistakable. Any adventuring doctrine ever inked puts command with the tank. Basic tactics: the one taking the hits sets the pace, controls positioning, reads the field from inside it. By nailing me into the meat-shield slot and handing the crystal to his favorite whipping boy, Cassian had thrown out his own faction's combat logic purely to keep his boot where he liked it. It wasn't strategy. It was a message, notarized by the System, addressed to me — and a treat tossed to Kip for compliance.

Though if I had to lose the crystal to someone: Kip was odd, unsettlingly literal, and more perceptive than any five other first-years stacked in a coat. I just had to hope the perceptiveness survived contact with his idol's gaze.

"Attention, squads!" Cassian, barking at the cohort now, unrolling a map with a flourish he'd clearly practiced. "We move out toward High BreenLocation — VillageA settlement outside Tetherpoint. Its surrounding woods are a nesting ground for Rustlefoot Goblins.→ Read moreHigh Breen village. Scout reports indicate a massive troupe of Rustlefoot Goblins holding the terrain between here and the settlement."

He began assigning coordinates across a grand semi-circle formation, naming each arm of it something pompous enough to gag on. I settled for rolling my eyes on a delay, when his back was turned. Discipline, of a kind.

Group 3 drew the spearhead. Dead center. Straight down the main road.

Naturally.

◇ ◇ ◇

We marched out under a bright sky, crystals glowing in the squad leaders' fists, and for the first quarter mile I let myself actually think. Why were the local monsters getting bold? Goblins robbing travelers was one thing; goblins killing a woman on her own doorstep was another animal. Were their numbers surging? Or was something out there — deeper in, further down — pushing them toward the settlements?

The question lasted exactly until Cassian tested the audio link.

His voice crackled out of Kip's crystal, smug and omnipresent, and proceeded to read aloud — page by page, step by step — from a standard-issue Shield tactics manual. Formation spacing. March cadence. The correct angle at which to hold a shield one has been holding correctly for two hours. The chain of command as lullaby, as liturgy, as leash.

It was wholly unnecessary. Archmage Varric PyreInstructor — The FlameAn Elementalist Extraordinary and one of The Flame's most respected instructors at Tetherpoint Academy.→ Read moreArchmage Varric had said the soft-handed scholars of The GroveFaction — One of the FourHealers, scholars, and caretakers who believe compassion is the highest virtue.→ Read moreThe Grove could clear these woods. For self-selected Shield volunteers this was breathing exercises. But necessity had nothing to do with it — the broadcast wasn't instruction, it was presence. He couldn't march with every squad, so he made sure no squad could forget him.

The doctrine itself was simple enough to fit on a tavern napkin: tank pulls the goblins' focus — insults, thrown rocks, frontal charge, anything that pisses them off — then the backline delivers arrows and alchemy into the distracted mass. Tevin keeps me standing. I body-block the cowards who break and run. Cassian's manual specified a skull-bash as the optimal opener for a mace, but I ran my eyes down my own lean arms and quietly amended doctrine: I'd take their tendons and let gravity handle the rest.

We found them in a dense thicket a mile short of the village. The Rustlefoots were somehow uglier than the woodcuts — squat, four feet of warty greenish-blue hide in rags, chins jutting like broken plows under stubby arms, bow-legged feet shifting in the dirt around a crude campfire. Three of them. Level 1s, all.

The System painted their names in the air above their heads, matter-of-fact, like produce labels.

I didn't give them time to become a formation. I ran.

The shield-charge caught the lead goblin dead center — a full-body impact that jarred my teeth and sent the creature cartwheeling into the dirt.

Elias charges into the Rustlefoot Goblin camp

"Ah — what the fuck, man!" one of the others shrieked, in perfectly serviceable common, which was somehow the most upsetting detail of the entire morning. It scrambled backward, flinging jagged stones.

I snapped my wrist up and took the rocks on the shield face — crack, crack —

—and I brought the mace down into the staggered goblin's skull. The sensation traveled up my arm and lodged somewhere I'd be finding it for years. The System, tactfully, only showed me numbers.

Before I recovered my stance the third goblin came out of my blind side, a rusted dagger punching in under my guard and biting deep into my flank. Heat, then wet, then the pain arriving late like it had been held up in traffic.

A splash of cold burst across my shoulder — Tevin, lobbing a low-grade healing potion from the rear with the enthusiasm of a man feeding someone else's cat.

A whistle split the air. Kip's arrow took the staggered goblin through the eye socket — through, fletching-deep — and its remaining fifty points of health zeroed in an instant. The body folded like dropped laundry.

I pivoted, walling the dagger-wielder off behind my shield. The move deliberately opened my flank to the stone-thrower — a calculated trade; a jagged rock bruised for a single point where a blade carved for eight.

"Tank, pin the daggers." Kip's command came out entirely monotone, a boy reading a grocery list through a hurricane. "Telilah — rush the stone-thrower and execute."

And gods help me, the squad moved like clockwork. Telilah blurred past my perimeter, both short-swords working, and put five rapid stabs into the stone-thrower's chest; its bar plunged red as Kip's follow-up volley pinned it to the dirt.

Which left me alone with the dagger.

The little bastard was fast — faster than anything I'd ever squared against, all elbows and murder. I cycled shield-blocks and ugly dodges, hunting a clean window that refused to open, while shallow cuts accumulated up my forearms like tally marks. Forty-odd points of cumulative damage in, breathing hard, I glanced back for my heal—

—and found Tevin hovering over his sister. Who had not been scratched.

"Oh, for fuck's sake — heal me!" I roared, parrying another frantic swipe on reflex alone.

"Chain of command, asshole," Tevin called back, casually reorganizing his satchel. "Listen to the squad leader."

"Heal him," Kip said flatly, without breaking aim.

Tevin scoffed and smashed a secondary potion at my boots like he was tipping poorly.

"He's a shit tank," he muttered to Kip, pitched precisely loud enough to reach me. "Takes way too much damn damage."

The heat went through my chest in a straight line — and I did something with it I'd never consciously done before. I funneled it. Down the shoulder, through the wrist, into the swing. The mace caught the dagger-wielder in a crushing side-sweep that erased a quarter of its remaining health in one hit, and some cold new part of me watched the number and thought: interesting.

The squad converged. Surrounded, outnumbered, the last goblin lasted about as long as its arithmetic suggested.

As the light left its yellow eyes, gold text cascaded across my vision:

With the adrenaline draining, I finally looked back at the full field — and found Markko face-down in the dirt. The stone-thrower had apparently bested him early in the scuffle, knocking him cold before he'd detonated a single reagent. His bar sat comfortably out of the red; he was just paralyzed under a standard [Unconscious] debuff, sleeping through his own first battle.

Tevin — his sister now certifiably safe — finally deigned to practice medicine, lobbing a potion at Markko's limp form to clear the status.

Markko scrambled up coughing dirt, and we crowded the camp to divide the spoils. Kneeling over the dissipating corpses, we looted with the solemnity of a first time.

The take: a few tarnished coppers. No rare drops. No enchanted trinkets. The absolute baseline scraps of a bottom-tier encounter, divided evenly, four copper pieces per head.

I turned mine over in my palm — my first adventurer's wage, still goblin-warm — and decided not to calculate what it worked out to per stab wound. Some math you leave alone.

Turns out this school doesn't teach you to swim. They chuck you in the deep end, chart how long you thrash, and bill your family for the water.

And that smug-nosed excuse for a healer. He left me out to dry — me, the tank, the one contractually standing in front of the knives. I understood he had some creepy psychic tether to his twin; fine. But she was unhurt. I take the hits, I get the heals. That is the entire mathematics of the position.

...And now I was calling myself the tank. Unprompted. In my own head.

I didn't even want to be a tank. Goddammit.

"Shit work, Lumina!" Cassian's voice arrived before he did, dripping disgust. "You let your melee DPS take damage. You failed to protect her. Because of your incompetence, the healer had to pivot and neglect you."

I sneered and drew breath to explain the actual sequence of events. "Well, if you would have—"

A lazy wave of his hand erased me mid-sentence. "As a tank, your party looks to you for leadership."

The audacity landed like a second slap. Leadership. "You know what?!" My voice spiked past every checkpoint my judgment had set up. "Why the fuck is Kip the leader instead of me, if I'm supposed to be running things? I can't command a squad like this!"

Cassian didn't argue.

He smiled — razor-thin, genuinely pleased, the smile of a boy handed exactly the pretext he'd been fishing for — and then the world hit me in the sternum.

I never tracked the charge. One instant upright, the next flat on my back with every molecule of air evicted from my lungs, gasping at the sky like a landed fish while his shadow moved off me at a stroll.

Cassian pins Elias to the dirt while the squad looks on

"Kip is a better strategist than you," he said to the air, entirely unbothered, already done with me. "Now — Kip! Constant communication with your tank. More assertiveness."

"Yes, sir!" Kip barked, eager and immediate and painful to hear.

"Do better next time," Cassian called over his shoulder — and the crystal's anchor took him, gone in a fold of light before his own dust settled. Command by apparition. Judgment by teleport.

"Fucking hell," I wheezed at the clouds, hauling myself up around my ribs. "That miserable prick."

"Go fuck yourself, Lumina!" Telilah shrieked from the sidelines, delighted, scenting blood. "You heard the man. Do better!"

And here is the part I would spend a long time not thinking about afterward.

The thought arrived fully formed. Not built — delivered. One of her precious daggers, out of her belt and down her throat, and me watching the light change. Complete. Vivid. Patient. It sat in the center of my mind for a full second like it had reserved the space, and the worst part — the part that actually frightened me — was how calm it was. My anger had always been hot. This had come in cold, and it had come in wearing my voice.

I looked at my boots and breathed until it left.

It did leave. That time.

"Okay. Let's move," Kip ordered, already marching, mercifully oblivious. "Seven more Rustlefoot GoblinsCreature — EnemyBottom-tier pests found outside Tether. Their bands consist of the Foot, the Clerk, and the Handler.→ Read moregoblins to slaughter."

◇ ◇ ◇

The next three went down owing considerably less blood — mine, specifically.

Level 2 had bought me a Fast FeetJob Passive — TankIncreases Dodge Chance by 5% per Job Level, reflecting the bearer's natural agility.→ Read moreFast Feet passive, and stacked on the boosted agility it let me move like a functioning human being at last, slipping rusty blades instead of cataloguing them with my forearms. Better: I discovered that a shield planted directly into a goblin's teeth switched the creature off for a solid minute — senseless, wide open, a problem converted into a chore for the backline to finish execution-style.

Even Markko stayed conscious this round, which promoted him from cautionary tale to asset. His bombs kicked off blinding mini-sun flashbangs that kept the little bastards staggering in circles, and every flash bought Telilah her opening — a slide into shadow, a step behind them, both blades home. Her backstabs hit like a runaway cart and left bleed wounds that drained a goblin's bar in seconds.

The glaring weak link remained her prick of a twin. Tevin ran his triage on one rule — is Telilah scratched — and healed me only at the last agonizing second before my bar mattered, never a moment sooner. "Topped off" was not in his professional vocabulary. I absorbed every ounce of punishment on that field while his sister finished without a mark on her, and my health bar stayed an afterthought at the bottom of his list.

Each instance went down in small, neat entries somewhere behind my eyes. I could feel it writing now. That was new.

On the genuinely bright side: Kip was growing a spine in real time. I fed him line-of-sight reports from the front — positions, postures, which goblin favored which hand — and his brain converted them into correct commands instantly, no lag, no doubt. Scarily adept. I could have issued the same orders myself and cut out the middleman, and some sore part of me kept saying so on a loop — but the boy wasn't a liability. He was competent. Genuinely.

Both things were true. I was learning that this place specialized in arrangements where both things were true.

◇ ◇ ◇

"Group three, turn to two o'clock." Cassian's voice crackled through the crystal, smug even at a distance. "I need you to take out a band of four level-twos."

Now this was an actual test. Everything so far had been level-one trash in threes. What waited at two o'clock was a balanced squad: two Foots with their paired rusted blades; a Handler with its arm cocked to throw — and this one had brought the mutt, a ribby, mange-riddled thing straining at a rope of braided hair; and behind them all, a Rustlefoot GoblinsCreature — EnemyThe Clerk fumbles with rudimentary potions — weak heals and laughably futile fire bombs.→ Read moreClerk, the squad's pocket healer, potion bandolier clinking.

"So that's basically five of them," Markko muttered, voice tightening around the count.

"Tank, charge the clerk," Kip ordered, new authority snapping in his voice. "Markko, flashbang the handler and the near foot. I'll multishot them while Telilah and Tevin eliminate the clerk. Tank — pivot immediately after your charge and bash the second foot."

I hated it. Every joint of it. Prioritizing the clerk smelled like a trap — healers expect to be rushed — and leaving a dual-wielding Foot unmonitored anywhere near Telilah was a fast route to shipping her home in pieces. Kip was reading the manual's answer. I was looking at the actual field.

So I fixed his strategy on the fly.

I ignored the order, charged the un-stunned Foot, and yelled for Telilah to back me.

She didn't. She followed her squad leader — bypassed my target entirely and lunged for the Clerk, exactly as commanded, because that is what a functioning unit does, and I had just unilaterally decided we weren't one.

It came apart with astonishing speed.

Telilah's blade went into the Clerk — and the little monster didn't drop. It chugged a potion straight off its own bandolier, wounds sealing between heartbeats, and cast fear directly into her face. Telilah screamed — a raw, wrong sound I'd never heard a person make — and bolted, blind, weapons forgotten, sprinting terror in a straight line away from us. The Clerk, unbothered, began lobbing healing potions to the Foot I was failing to kill.

Suddenly I was locked in a private duel with a goblin on an intravenous drip — tanking exactly one-fifth of the battlefield. The flashbang wore off. The Handler's dog tore loose and went for Tevin, bloody teeth ripping into his robes. And worse — so much worse — the second Foot and the Handler simply walked around me, the way you walk around furniture, and went for Kip.

For the crystal. For the small monotone boy holding it, who had given the correct order and been countermanded by his own tank.

Cold sweat sheeted down my neck. I had fucked up. Royally. Singularly. Me.

The dog gnawing on Tevin failed to break my heart, I'll confess it. But Kip — watching the two of them hack into Kip's bar while he stood his ground and kept commanding, coughing, refusing to run — something in the center of my chest cracked open along a seam I hadn't known was there, and what came through the crack was white-hot and had been waiting.

The ash field flickered behind my eyes. The gray horizon. The accusing faces. For a quarter of a second I was standing in it — and then the System's text carved itself across the burning:

I didn't read it. I was it.

I went forward and up — ten feet of air, gravity waiving its objection — and came down on the Foot attacking Kip with the mace leading and my whole falling weight behind it. The head hit the ground through the goblin. Stone fractured under the impact point; a shockwave rolled out through the dirt in a visible ring.

Rage Jump — Elias crashes down on the Foot, mace-first

Every monster within three meters locked up — stunned rigid a full second, movement crippled for five more. The Foot beneath my mace had ceased to be a combatant, or a shape.

The new bar at the edge of my vision burned bright and full, and it fed back into me like a bellows into a forge. I crossed the clearing at a speed I had no stat to explain and put my shield through the dog on Tevin's arm.

"Heal Telilah!" Kip barked — coughing blood, still reading the field, the little maniac.

The dog and the last Foot snapped their aggro to me as one, which for the first time all day was the plan. I dragged them backward toward the Handler — already sitting at quarter health from Markko's earlier fire — and pinned it as Telilah came out of her fear state, slid through the shadows like she'd never left them, and buried a backstab in the final Foot.

My own bar was tanking hard now, sliding toward half under the combined weight, but the squad had rallied around the crater I'd made. Markko's fire potion took the Handler center-mass; the goblin went up like seasoned firewood, screaming inside its leather. Kip put a tight cluster of arrows through the stunned dog's skull. And Telilah closed the circuit — a lunge, a vicious dragging tear across the last goblin's abdomen, its innards meeting the dirt before its knees did.

Silence, except for five sets of ragged breathing and one small fire.

A crisp golden notification flooded my vision, washing the exhaustion back like a tide:

I stood in the middle of what I'd almost caused and what I'd just become, chest heaving, rage bar draining down by degrees like bathwater with something at the bottom of it.

The System, I noticed, had known my thresholds before I did.

It had been waiting too.

"Lumina, what in the actual fuck was that?" The veins in Cassian DrakeRival — Shield Faction LeaderA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others. Selected as leader of The Shield's first-year cohort.→ Read moreCassian's neck had gone properly purple. "Your sheer, unadulterated stupidity almost got the entire squad slaughtered!"

Humiliation scorched up my face and I looked at my boots — one honest second of it, because he was right, and the rightness crawled up my spine on small cold legs. Telilah's scream. Kip coughing red. My call. My field. My—

And then, mid-crawl, the shame hardened into something with edges.

Was he right?

Kip's original plan had its own body count baked in — the Clerk rush was a trap and it had sprung, exactly as I'd read it. Following orders would have gotten us mauled by a different door. And my gamble, botched as it was, had unlocked... whatever these new abilities were. Whatever I was now. The math wasn't as clean as Cassian's volume implied. The math was never as clean as the volume.

I brought my chin up and sneered directly into his face. "Whatever, sir."

My cheeks were still burning. I didn't look away. Because even if I'd miscalculated in the field, he was miscalculating right now — breaking me down like a dog in front of the unit, with the twins circling at the smell of blood. There's a cost to teaching everyone watching that this is how power talks. He'd be a while learning it. I'd already started.

"You got something to say?" He stepped into my space, chest to my chest, close enough to share breath. He wanted the tantrum. He wanted me loud and flailing and easy to break in public.

Too bad.

I swallowed the heat whole — banked it, the way you bank a forge for morning — and when my voice came out it had gone somewhere flat and iced-over that I didn't fully recognize.

"I didn't almost get the squad killed, sir. I made the executive decision to unlock my rage capabilities." I held his eyes and let every degree of feeling drain out of my face, and the strange thing, the instructive thing, was how easy that had become. "I already told you I'm not your fucking meat-shield. I tank on my terms now."

The silence lasted half a heartbeat.

His hand cracked across my jaw.

The slap whipped my head sideways — copper flooding my mouth, the corner of my lip splitting against my teeth. I didn't fall. I didn't cry out. I turned my head back with deliberate slowness, gathered the blood on my tongue, spat it toward his boots.

And smiled.

It wasn't bravado. I want to be precise about this, because precision is all I have left of that boy. It was data. His fragile ego could not withstand the discovery that I'd stopped playing his game — the slap proved it, notarized it, published it to everyone watching. If I was stuck in this hellhole, then fine. I'd rewrite the rules from inside the cell they kept putting me in.

"Detention," Cassian hissed. "Now."

He didn't trust me unsupervised — a small, real victory — so he and a cohort of lackeys flanked me the whole march down to the The Detention BlockLocation — Tetherpoint AcademyAn underground holding area beneath the Great Hall. Overseen by Borin Grimhall.→ Read moreholding cells, guards escorting a war criminal of sixteen. The heavy iron door slammed. The deadbolt went home with a definitive thunk.

Through the grate, his eyes burned. "Think about your choices."

Detention. Twice in three days. Had to be a school record — somebody strike a medal.

I held the smile until his footsteps faded up the stairs. Then I sank into the splintered wooden chair and let it slide off my face, now that there was no one left to watch it crack.

My jaw throbbed in time with my pulse. That wasn't the part that bothered me.

The part that bothered me was under my ribs: a warmth, low and patient, still simmering long after the fight was gone. The rage hadn't receded. It had banked — sitting there like a fire someone forgot to snuff, coals organized, ready, waiting for an excuse with the calm of something that knew excuses were plentiful around here.

Adrenaline, I told myself.

I was getting better at lying to everyone but me.

◇ ◇ ◇

The cell dragged the ghost of my Daemeon LuminaMystery — UncleElias's great uncle. Chose The Veil over The Shield, becoming a pariah in the Lumina family. Sent the Luminus Pendant.→ Read moreuncle's letter back up, the way cells do — nothing to furnish them but your own worst inventory. I reached into my satchel and drew out the Luminus PendantLegacy Item — DormantA Maw Shard pendant from Uncle Daemeon. Will only awaken if its bearer joins The Veil.→ Read morependant.

It had changed. Or I had. The light beneath the surface ran deep purple now, swirling like oil on water, and the craftsmanship struck me fresh — intricate, cold, deliberate, every facet cut by someone who had meant something by it. What kind of power slept in a thing like this? What had Daemeon thought was worth binding to our blood?

I pressed my thumb flat against the crystal.

The purple bled crimson.

Mist hissed off the stone — localized, unnatural, coiling upward — and condensed into the translucent apparition of a Ground HulkCreature — Wild BeastA compact predator of pure spite, known to rip the throats out of Mountain Bears through sheer resilience.→ Read moreGround Hulk. I knew it from the bestiaries before my brain finished flinching: low-slung, compact, dense cords of muscle over a frame built entirely out of grudge. Sub-two-hundred pounds of pure unfiltered spite, famous in the wilds for ripping the throats out of Mountain Bears through nothing but resilience and unhinged ferocity. A creature that won fights by refusing, categorically, to lose them.

The pendant conjures a spectral Ground Hulk in the detention cell

The spectral beast turned its head. Looked at me — recognized something, I'd have sworn it — bared its fangs, and lunged straight at my face.

It vanished back into the crystal with a snap an inch from my nose.

I sat very still, heart hammering, thumb still on the stone.

Hello to you too, Uncle.

◇ ◇ ◇

"Elias, my dear knuckle-headed boy. Back so soon?"

Borin GrimhallDetention Warden — Tetherpoint AcademyA mountain of a man who runs the detention block. The only person who doesn't lie to Elias's face.→ Read moreBorin filled the stone doorway, clipboard in hand, voice a smooth cocktail of sarcasm and something that in a smaller man might have been fondness. My jailer. Also, running tally after three days: still the only person in this entire academy who hadn't lied to my face.

"Sir," I managed through my teeth, shoving the pendant into my bag.

"Let's see here." He tapped his quill down the parchment, strolling the length of the bars like a man reading a menu. "Insubordination. Defying a direct command in the field. Near-total party wipe." He let each item hang in the damp air before adding the next. "Not a good look, Lumina. Out in the real world, The ShieldFaction — One of the FourProtectors of Valerguard. Knights, guardians, and defenders who believe duty is the highest calling.→ Read moreThe Shield executes soldiers for a good deal less."

"The Shield is run by fucking idiots." It was out before I could tax it. "I did what had to be done. I survived, and I unlocked a tank build I can actually use."

"Aye, yes, brilliant tactical mind." He arrived at the bars and rapped the clipboard against the iron — clang, clang — schoolmaster's punctuation. "But ye do realize ye signed up for The Shield. Right?" The sarcasm came off his tongue slow and acid, given time to etch.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

I was out of the chair and up at the grate before I'd decided to move — which was itself becoming a pattern worth someone's attention.

"Easy there, rabid dog." He didn't step back. Didn't blink. "Snap those jaws shut and open yer ears."

I forced a breath in through my nose, ragged, and held it. The heat in my chest sat like a swallowed coal — and I could feel now, clearly, that this wasn't my old temper wearing a new coat. The old temper had been weather. This was climate: a constant low boil under the skin, a frequency, alive in a way I did not have a word for and did not want one. The power it bought was undeniable. Whether the price was fair — I didn't know yet.

I wasn't sure I wanted to be the version of me who found out.

"Fine," I spat, backing off the bars, dropping into the chair. "What, then?"

"Yer too headstrong for The Shield, Elias." No mockery now. Flat, and worse for it. "Keep buckin' the reins like this and they won't just fail ye. They'll court-martial ye. Or put a sword through yer neck and file it under trainin' costs."

"And what's your brilliant alternative?" The snort came out exactly as mocking as I built it. "I join you? In The VeilFaction — One of the FourSeekers of forbidden truth. They study souls, memory, and the taboo aspects of Chaos magic.→ Read moreThe Veil?"

But something happened between my throat and the air.

Saying it out loud — it didn't land like a joke lands. It landed like a knock. Like I'd rapped my knuckles on a door I hadn't meant to find, in a hallway I'd been told my whole life was empty, and heard the sound change. Occupied. Expected.

I shoved the feeling down before it finished forming. I wasn't a villain. I wasn't evil. I just had the instinct to survive a shit plan, and the instinct had made me stronger, and any organization that executed its most viable assets over etiquette didn't deserve them. They clearly valued strength here — they'd handed the first-years to a sadist and called it leadership development.

Borin didn't laugh.

He looked at me through the bars for a long moment, and his expression went dangerously, perfectly flat — the flatness of a man setting sarcasm down because the next thing was too heavy to carry both.

"It's a distinct possibility," he said quietly. "And frankly, boy — I think it would suit ye perfectly."

The words went in under my sternum and stayed. Cold. Lodged somewhere the Rage SubclassJob Specialization — TankReplaces the Mana bar with a Rage bar. Grants abilities like Rage Jump and Charge, powered by raw fury.→ Read morerage couldn't reach to burn them off — and it tried; I felt it try.

I wanted to laugh in his face. I wanted to tell him he was wrong.

I didn't say anything at all.

Neither did the part of me that had knocked.

I sat in the silence Borin GrimhallDetention Warden — Tetherpoint AcademyA mountain of a man who runs the detention block. The only person who doesn't lie to Elias's face.→ Read moreBorin left behind, waiting for the heat under my ribs to come down off its redline.

That cocky bastard genuinely believed I belonged in The VeilFaction — One of the FourSeekers of forbidden truth. They study souls, memory, and the taboo aspects of Chaos magic.→ Read moreThe Veil. Me. Preposterous. Insulting. Fuck him, fuck his clipboard, and fuck this entire godforsaken room—

My fist hit the desk.

The desk declined to participate. A sharp crack echoed off the stone — not the oak; the oak hadn't given a millimeter — and white agony shot up my arm from knuckles that were ballooning before my eyes.

Great. Brilliant. Tremendous work all around. I'd just broken my own hand on furniture.

"Ah, goddammit!" I grabbed my wrist and folded around it.

The door groaned. Borin, leaning in the frame, wearing the expression of a man watching weather he'd already predicted. "Boy. Stop that temper tantrum."

I sneered up at him through the pain. "Fuck you."

"Is that how ye treats superiors?" He didn't even sound angry. That was the maddening thing about him — the flatness. Like I was a known quantity. Like I'd been charted.

"You're trying to trick me into joining a demonic faction. What do you expect? Gratitude?"

"Ai, I see. Ye's delusional." He crossed to a chair, dropped into it, and kicked his boots up onto a stool, settling in like a man at his own hearth. "Yer just a dumb boy. Wouldn't know facts if they was tits in his face."

I turned away from his smug beard, dropped my arms onto the desk — the good arm and the ruined one — and buried my head. No telling how long this stretch would run. Longer than the first. I'd actually broken their precious rules this time.

◇ ◇ ◇

Never mind that Cassian DrakeRival — Shield Faction LeaderA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others. Selected as leader of The Shield's first-year cohort.→ Read moreCassian had earned exactly what he got. Never mind that my call won the damn battle — quota met, ten of ten, everyone breathing. The place was simply engineered to grind me down, gear by gear, and knowing it changed nothing about being caught in the teeth.

My good hand found the Luminus PendantLegacy Item — DormantA Maw Shard pendant from Uncle Daemeon. Will only awaken if its bearer joins The Veil.→ Read morependant in my pocket. Thumb circling the crystal. Slow. And the strangest thing — it soothed. A cool, even calm spreading up from the stone, the first quiet my chest had held in three days.

Until it didn't. Until I squeezed, just slightly, forgetting — and radiant pain tore up the side of my hand into my elbow, nearly ripping a yelp out of me.

By the gods. My mace hand. Swollen up like a winter squash, and climbing.

I needed this rage choked down to a simmer if I wanted to survive the next five minutes, let alone talk my way into a healer. So I reached for the other tool. The old one. The farm boy.

"Mr. Grimhall? Sir?" I squeezed my voice into the most pathetic whine my village could export.

"Yes, boy." He spat the word like it had gone off.

"My hand, sir. It's— well. Look at it."

Borin looked. Grunted. Rendered his medical opinion: "Aye. That's what an idiot gets for punchin' Iron Oak. Wood wins against stupid every time."

"Aren't you gonna find me a healer?"

He barked one short, dry laugh.

"Neh."

That single syllable was gasoline on coals. The simmer broke. I came out of the chair screaming every filthy word Ravenscroft had ever taught me and several I invented on the spot, whole body given over to it, the rage bar in my periphery climbing like it had somewhere to be — magnificent on a battlefield, and in a detention cell, a death sentence with enthusiasm.

Borin didn't blink. He flicked his wrist.

"Shadowbind."

Black smoke hissed up out of the floorboards and took me — limbs wrapped in cable I couldn't see the ends of, jaw snapped shut mid-curse, every muscle seized between one heartbeat and the next. I stood frozen. A screaming statue with the screaming sealed inside.

Borin's Shadowbind seizes Elias mid-curse

"I'm warnin' ya, boy." He leaned in close, stale ale riding his breath. "Level 80 Shadowmancer. Level 90 Rogue. Don't mistake my patience for a lack of options."

Seventy-seven levels between us. I ran the numbers because the numbers were all I could still move: not a spell, not a stat, not a prayer. I wasn't outleveled.

I was kept. At his mercy, entirely, the way a jarred insect is at the mercy of the child holding the jar — and the child was pulling up a chair.

◇ ◇ ◇

"Boy," Borin said. "Story time."

He cleared his throat like a man preparing to teach a child not to piss in the cooking pot.

"Indoctrination. Ye ever heard the word?"

I hated that I had. Sort of. It lived in the back of my skull with the other words adults deployed right before making something simple unbearable.

He read it off my face and smiled. Not kindly.

"It means somebody got inside yer skull before ye knew there was a door. Put their furniture in. Hung their flags. Taught ye which words should make yer chest swell — and which should make yer stomach turn." He tapped two fingers against his temple. "And then they convinced ye those reactions were thoughts."

I stood bound in the smoke, jaw locked, nowhere to look but at him.

"Stimulus. Response." He snapped his fingers once, sharp as a trap. "The Shield."

And gods help me — warmth moved in my chest. Loyal, stupid, automatic warmth, rising before I could vote on it. For the faction that had spat on me, snowed on me, jailed me twice, and slapped my mouth bloody.

Borin watched it happen. Said nothing. Snapped again.

"The Flame."

My shoulders tightened. On their own. A wariness installed by — who? A story? A woodcut? I couldn't name a single Flame adventurer. The reaction fired anyway.

"The Grove."

Relief. Soft, green, automatic. Trees and healers and safety. I had never in my life met a member of The Grove. This morning one of them had assaulted me with a rooster.

"The Veil."

My lip curled. I felt it curl — felt the disgust deploy, crisp and complete and instantaneous, the entire verdict rendered in muscle before a single thought had reported for duty.

Borin leaned forward, satisfied as a man watching a well-built clock strike the hour.

"There he is."

I wished, with everything in me, that he would shut up.

"See? Didn't even have to make an argument. I just rang the bell — and the trained thing showed its teeth."

My broken hand pulsed against my chest, keeping its own time. I wanted to hit him. I wanted it so badly, so specifically, that it scared me — and underneath the wanting, quieter, the ledger scratched away, and I could no longer tell which entries were mine.

The Veil is evil, I thought at him, since thinking was all I had. That's not conditioning. That's reality.

"Aye." He answered as if I'd said it aloud, which was somehow the most frightening thing yet. "And who handed ye that reality? Who named the monsters for ye? Who pointed at the shadows and said — hate that, fear that, kill that if ye ever get the chance?"

Everyone. The answer assembled itself without my permission. Teachers. Priests. Commanders. My father, by the fire, going quiet at a name. Every book with clean ink and official stamps. It was known. It was fact — the way the four corners of the hall were fact, the way the lion on Cassian's chest was fact.

Borin was telling me the facts had authors.

His smile thinned to a blade's width. "They get ye young, because young minds don't ask who benefits. They just swallow. Pride for this banner. Disgust for that one. Loyalty dressed up as virtue. Obedience dressed up as courage."

He sat back and let it all rot quietly in the room between us — the smoke, the bind, the bell he'd rung and the teeth I'd shown.

"Some grow up and spit it out."

His eyes dragged over me, slow, taking a measurement I couldn't see the units of.

"Most just learn to call the taste truth."

"Tits and barley, barley and hops — hops and whiskey till the singin' stops."

Borin GrimhallDetention Warden — Tetherpoint AcademyA mountain of a man who runs the detention block. The only person who doesn't lie to Elias's face.→ Read moreBorin came down the stairs singing it low and off-key, a wooden tray balanced on one enormous palm, and the tune was cheerful. Stupidly cheerful. The kind of cheerful that had no business anywhere near damp stone and iron at whatever gray hour this was — which, I'd decided somewhere in the night, was exactly the point. Everything in this place was calibrated to remind you that your misery was routine. Even the music was institutional.

I hadn't spoken since the shadowbind released. Somewhere past midnight I'd made a formal decision about that, sitting in the dark with my jaw still humming and my ruined hand keeping time with my pulse: if silence was the last thing left that was mine to give or withhold, I would withhold it. Let the old bastard sing to himself. Let him wonder.

He set the tray of lukewarm porridge through the slot without dropping a beat.

"Mr. Lumina. Cat got yer tongue lately?"

I stared at the wall like it owed me money.

And something got out of him — a short, involuntary sound from deep in the chest, half a chuckle, caught and swallowed before it could finish being one. By the time my head whipped around, his face had smoothed back into that unreadable professional mask, and the only surviving evidence was a small smirk at the corner of his mouth. Maybe. If it had ever been there at all.

He knows exactly why I'm not talking, I thought. He gets his rocks off silencing students. Probably loves an empty block where no one can watch him power-trip.

I want to be honest about this part, looking back, because it matters later: I had no proof of any of that. What I had was a man humming a drinking song at breakfast, half a laugh, and the twitch of a beard. But my certainty had stopped waiting for proof somewhere around the second detention. Now it simply arrived, fully dressed, and told me what I was looking at.

Why is everyone going after me? What did I ever do? I busted my ass for eleven years just to get here, and for—

"Fuck you!" It tore out of me before I'd voted on it, cracking the whole night's silence in half. "When the fuck am I getting out of here?"

I was at the bars before I'd decided to stand, both hands on the iron, shaking them with everything my splinted hand could still contribute.

They didn't budge. They didn't even rattle. Iron doesn't care how much you mean it.

Borin watched me do it the way you watch weather — mildly interesting, entirely survivable — and that, more than any laugh could have, was what set my teeth grinding. React, I wanted to scream at him. Give me something real to be angry at.

"Seriously?" My voice cracked on it, humiliatingly, landing somewhere between a shout and something much younger. "You're just going to stand there?"

"Oh, Mr. Lumina." He said it almost gently. Almost. "We got no out-date for ya."

The words didn't land right away. I stood there with my mouth open, waiting for the part where he was joking.

He tapped one stubby finger against the clipboard hanging off the bars — didn't hand it over, just angled it so I could read the line he meant. Crisp, fresh script across the top of the parchment:

Insubordination resulting in near-mortal harm of fellow trainees.

Near-mortal harm. That wasn't what happened. Three days ago the charge had been a party wipe that nearly happened; now it was harm I'd nearly caused. Nobody had rewritten it in front of me. The record was inflating on its own, in the dark, the way records do — the institution quietly drafting a monster in my name.

Except—

Kip on his knees, coughing dark crimson into the grass. Telilah screaming a sound I'd never heard a person make.

The memory surfaced on its own, uninvited, sliding in under my ribs like a blade finding the gap in a guard — and just as fast, I found the door and shut it behind. I won that fight. I saved them. If I hadn't stepped up, we'd all be dead. The argument was airtight. I'd built it carefully.

The cold weight in my gut didn't care about the argument. It kept sinking anyway.

And then the other thing arrived, worse, in pictures instead of words: Group 3 forming up in the courtyard right now, this morning, without me. Some other body slotted into the tank line. Someone else taking the hits, the XP, the loot, the loyalty — everyone's boots pointed out toward the gate while mine pointed at a stone wall, possibly forever.

The bars had gone freezing under my hands. I let go and stepped back into the shadow of the cell, and the floor seemed to tilt a degree under me, the way floors do when the arithmetic of your life changes while you're standing on them.

"Why me?" It came out at the floor, raw and hollow. Smaller than I wanted him to hear. "Why am I getting targeted?"

"Eh. Quit yer whinin'." Flat. Worn smooth. Said the way you say a thing for the hundredth time, not the first. "Yer lucky they didn't take yer head, or expel ye outright." He pulled open a ledger on his desk, already elsewhere. "Count yer blessin's, little Lumina."

Then heels sounded on the stone stairway — a sharp, arrogant click, descending.

◇ ◇ ◇

Around the bend came a man draped in the crimson of The FlameFaction — One of the FourWarriors, duelists, and battle-mages who thrive in direct combat.→ Read moreThe Flame. No announcement. No theater. He rounded the corner and stopped in front of the bars like a man arriving somewhere he'd been before.

Archmage Archmage Varric PyreInstructor — Elementalist ExtraordinaryMaster of ice and fire. Member of The Flame. Targets Elias with open hostility.→ Read moreVarric Pyre.

He looked at me the way you look at a problem you've been thinking about for a long time. Not contempt. Something closer to assessment — like he was checking whether what he'd expected was actually there.

"Leave us."

He hadn't looked at Borin once. Borin rose anyway, bowed — low, lower than I'd have thought that mountain could fold — and cleared out with heavy, hurried thuds, boots taking the stairs two at a time. At the landing he paused. Half a beat. His head angled back a degree, not far enough to be looking at anything.

Then he was gone.

Varric stood in the quiet for a moment after. Something shifted in his face — not much. The classroom version of him, the one that performed for audiences, wasn't here. What was here was older. More careful.

"You want to know something true?" He stepped to the bars, unhurried, and lowered his voice like he was closing a door. "Everything you've been told about power in this place — what earns it, what it's for, who deserves it — is a story. Told by the people who already have it, to the people who don't."

I gave him nothing. Just the glare — steady, level, while somewhere behind it a thing with my voice calmly mapped the geometry of tearing his throat open through the bars. The image arrived complete and unhurried. I filed it.

"You can keep looking at me like that." He didn't flinch. "It won't change what I'm about to tell you. Might makes right. That is the only honest thing anyone in this institution has ever said. The rest is decoration."

I scoffed, turned my back on him, and walked to the cot. Sat. Put my boots up against the wall, one over the other, and studied the ceiling. Whatever he'd come down here to collect, he could go home without it.

Then I heard it. A faint, low-pitched winding, rising — the sound of air being pulled somewhere air isn't supposed to go, a vacuum inhaling — and the heat hit my back like an opened forge.

I spun off the cot in time to watch him unleash it.

The elemental came through the bars like they were a suggestion — pure predatory flame, iron meaning nothing to it, its face a jagged grin of white-hot embers assembling and reassembling as it moved. It looked delighted. Then it lunged, and the world went orange.

The heat hit like falling masonry. It blistered the air out of my lungs before I could spend it screaming — skin scorching, a blinding sting ripping across my face, the reek of my own hair singeing. My health bar plunged into freefall at the edge of vision, a [Burning] debuff stacking itself in tidy, clinical rows while my brain cooked toward boiling inside my skull.

He's actually executing me — the thought arrived with absurd calm, the calm of the already-dead — the archmage of Tetherpoint Academy is executing a first-year in a detention cell and no one is going to—

"Lumina." Varric's voice cut through the roar — not a bark, not a command, something closer to an order given to someone who matters. "The pendant. Now."

The what—

And through the panic, half a thought lit and died like the silver text on day one: he knows. Nobody knows about the pendant. Nobody but—

Survival strangled pride and finished the motion for me. I clawed the satchel open, ripped the Luminus PendantLegacy Item — ActiveA Maw Shard pendant from Uncle Daemeon. Absorbs elemental threats. Legacy access: granted.→ Read morependant loose, and forced the cord over my head with fingers I couldn't feel.

The moment the crystal touched my chest, the world buckled.

The heat didn't stop. It was dragged — savagely, backward, out of the air and out of my skin and out of the room, the elemental's grin warping into a shriek as its whole burning body stretched, funneled, spiraled down into the crystal like floodwater forced through a drain. The pull of it hummed in my sternum. Then a snap.

Silence. Smoke. The smell of my own singed hair, and a heavy glass vial shattering against the stone at my feet, splashing thick blue light across my boots.

A healing potion. He hadn't even bothered to hand it to me.

Before the cooling relief finished crawling over my burns, a chime sounded — clinical, sharp, directly inside my skull, in that cold installed voice I hadn't heard since the portal:

And beneath all of it — for half a heartbeat — a line of faint silver letters, flickering like a dying candle, gone before my eyes could close around it.

Exactly like day one. Exactly like the message the System had shown me once, and taken back, and filed somewhere I wasn't cleared to look.

I stood in the wreckage of my own execution with power flooding my veins like spring melt through a cracked dam — the burns forgotten, the terror forgotten, everything forgotten except the raw voltage of it, and the crystal pulsing against my sternum like a second heart that hadn't yet decided whose.

Outside the bars, Varric hadn't moved. He stood watching the last of the smoke clear with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — not satisfaction, not relief. Something quieter. Like a man setting down a weight he'd carried a long way.

"That," he said, "was the truth. Everything else was just getting you to listen."

He turned and started up the stairs without ceremony. Three steps. Four. Then he stopped — and when he looked back, the face he turned on me wasn't the classroom face, wasn't the archmage-in-performance. It was just a man, tired, and very certain about one thing.

His eyes didn't go to my face. They went to the crystal against my chest.

"Don't ever take off that pendant."

Then he was gone, heels quiet against the stone, and I was alone with the thing he'd just put around my neck without once asking.

◇ ◇ ◇

My hand went to the clasp before I'd finished deciding to — pure spite, pure animal contrarianism, you don't get to own what I wear — and my fingers found the cord.

And stopped.

The crystal was warm. Not the fire's warmth; the other kind — the exact temperature of the calm it had fed me two nights ago through the fabric of my pocket. And underneath the warmth, faint as a pulse felt through a wall, something turned over. Shifted its weight. Settled — the way a beast settles into a den it has decided, after long consideration, to keep.

I let go of the clasp.

Fine, I told myself. Fine. I wasn't going to take it off anyway. It was mine — my inheritance, my blood, the first real power anyone in this cesspit had shown me instead of beaten into me. Keeping it on was my choice. Mine.

Sixty-seven hours in detention makes a person appreciate the little things. Specifically, anything that isn't gray, lukewarm gruel.

I hit the mess hall right at morning chow, piling my plate high with steaming thunderbird omelets, crispy wildhog bacon, and roasted maroon potatoes smothered in melted cheese. Once I sat down, I put my head down and demolished it.

"Lumina, you gonna take a breath or just inhale the plate, too?"

Markko SmittyGroup 3 — ArtificerAn eccentric who hoards explosive reagents. Prefers detonating enemies to fighting them. Recently unlocked the Artificer class.→ Read moreMarkko dropped his tray onto the table across from mine. I offered him a close-mouthed, cheesy grin and kept right on chewing. I liked Markko. He was clumsy, but his heart was in the right place — and he made one hell of an explosion. He had recently unlocked his first class: ArtificerClass — Crafting & AlchemyA class specializing in potion-brewing, trap-setting, and the creative application of unstable compounds. Rare within The Shield.→ Read moreArtificer. As a member of The ShieldFaction — One of the FourProtectors and warriors who form the defensive backbone of Valerguard.→ Read moreThe Shield, he was an anomaly. While most of the faction focused on melee weapons or absorbing punishment as heavy tanks, Markko brewed potions. It made him one of the few Shield members who could actually heal, which meant we wouldn't always have to beg a healer from The GroveFaction — One of the FourHealers, druids, and nature mages who serve as the backbone of any adventuring party.→ Read moreThe Grove to join our parties. Shield and Grove naturally gravitated toward each other anyway, leaving the magic-heavy factions — The VeilFaction — One of the FourSeekers of forbidden truth who operate through secrecy and shadow.→ Read moreThe Veil and The FlameFaction — One of the FourWarriors, duelists, and battle-mages who thrive in direct combat.→ Read moreThe Flame — to form their own alliances.

"I learned a new recipe," Markko said, swirling a small, slightly glowing vial in his fingers. "Haste potion. Makes you move twice as fast. Glad to have you back out of the hole, by the way. Can't wait to test this out on you."

"Thanks," I mumbled around a mouthful of eggs.

◇ ◇ ◇

The mess hall doors banged open. Archmage Varric PyreInstructor — Elementalist ExtraordinaryMaster of ice and fire. Member of The Flame. Targets Elias with open hostility.→ Read moreVarric swept into the room, cape billowing.

"First-years, good morning!"

He threw his arms wide, demanding the room's attention. "Most of you, by now, should have unlocked your first class." He paced the front of the hall, pausing to glare at a small, sleepy-looking Grove boy in the front row. "With the exception of the more... sluggish members of your cohort."

Varric drew himself up. "Myself, I boast three classes. An incredibly rare feat. I am a Level 100 Pyromancer, a Level 75 Frostmancer, and a Level 25 Kensui Monk." To demonstrate, he spun his staff through a dizzying sequence against an invisible opponent, the air whistling around the wood.

"Most of you will eventually unlock a second class,"

Varric lectured, leaning on his staff. "Typically, that happens around level fifty. A prodigy" — he paused to let a smug smile spread — "might manifest one as early as level thirty, as I did with my Frostmancer abilities. A third class is exceptionally rare, usually reserved for those brushing against the level one hundred cap. A fourth? Unheard of. Fable and myth. Perhaps two or three adventurers in history have managed it, though I've yet to meet one."

All that breakfast turned to a brick in my gut.

Level fifty? Level thirty for a prodigy?

I had unlocked my second class yesterday. At level three. Sitting alone in a detention cell.

I stared at Varric, panic rising. From across the hall, his eyes found mine. He paused mid-stride, held my gaze for a beat, and gave me a slow, deliberate wink.

Keep your mouth shut, the wink said.

"A select few of you,"

Varric continued smoothly, looking away from me, "may even unlock sub-classes from entirely different factions, though that requires a very specific... disposition. I achieved this myself, bridging my two The FlameFaction — One of the FourWarriors, duelists, and battle-mages who thrive in direct combat.→ Read moreFlame classes with the martial prowess of a The ShieldFaction — One of the FourProtectors and warriors who form the defensive backbone of Valerguard.→ Read moreShield class."

My scalp prickled. I already held two classes: one rooted in The Shield, the other tethered to The VeilFaction — One of the FourSeekers of forbidden truth who operate through secrecy and shadow.→ Read moreThe Veil.

The two slotted together almost too cleanly. As a Rage SubclassJob Specialization — TankA Tank variant that converts sustained damage and combat intensity into escalating offensive power.→ Read moreRage Tank, every blow I landed — and every hit I took — stoked my rage bar, exponentially boosting my raw strength and speed. The glaring flaw of the class, of course, was magic; spell-casters usually shredded Rage Tanks from a distance. But my second class, Siphon MageSecondary Class — Veil-AdjacentAbsorbs incoming elemental attacks and converts their energy into raw power. Unlocked through the Luminus Pendant.→ Read moreSiphon Mage, devoured incoming magic, plugging the exact hole in my defenses. My pulse hammered just thinking about it.

Then I remembered the wink. Keep quiet.

I had to play the part of a dumb, straightforward Rage Tank. I had to bury my The VeilFaction — One of the FourSeekers of forbidden truth who operate through secrecy and shadow.→ Read moreVeil class deep. It made a sickening amount of sense — the historic rivalry between The Shield and The Veil was written in blood. If the higher-ups in The Shield discovered I was harboring enemy magic, they wouldn't debate it. They'd exile me. At least for now, until I proved myself.

"Fuck,"

I muttered, the word slipping out before I could catch it.

Markko SmittyGroup 3 — ArtificerAn eccentric who hoards explosive reagents. Recently unlocked the Artificer class.→ Read moreMarkko blinked, and Kip KrumplnickAlly — Group 3 ArcherA red-haired archer with terrifying enthusiasm and fierce loyalty to both Cassian and Elias.→ Read moreKip — who had silently materialized into the seat next to him — tilted his head.

"Oh, sorry," I backpedaled, stabbing a potato with my fork like nothing was wrong. "Just... lost in thought."

"Specify the thought, Lumina," Kip requested, his voice flat as ever.

I hesitated. Lying to Kip felt wrong, but defying Varric? The man could snuff me out with the casual ease of a boot crushing a roach. "I didn't get a chance to properly debrief with Cassian before they locked me up. I'm completely in the dark on our follow-up strategy."

Kip launched into a clinical rundown of the past two days. They had picked up a secondary quest to harvest Mudskipper glands in the bogs. Cassian DrakeRival — Shield Faction LeaderA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others. Selected as leader of The Shield's first-year cohort.→ Read moreCassian had stepped in as their frontline tank for the mission. And, apparently, Cassian had also slapped the absolute hell out of Tevin for missing a crucial healing window during an ambush.

"Yeah, Tevin was pissed," Markko chimed in, leaning across the table, his eyes wide with the gossip. "He rage-quit the party and defected to The Grove right after. Telilah ArregardeGroup 3 — Melee DPSAn intense dual-wielding fighter and Tevin's twin sister.→ Read moreTelilah didn't follow him, though. Whole lot of drama."

I rubbed my temples. "So, who is in our group now?"

Markko started to answer, but the words died in his throat as a shadow fell over the table.

◇ ◇ ◇

Cassian DrakeRival — Shield Faction LeaderA large, confident bully who uses his size to dominate others. Selected as leader of The Shield's first-year cohort.→ Read moreCassian Drake dropped his tray with a clatter and shoved his bulk onto the bench beside me, his thick arm deliberately brushing mine.

"Good morning, team."

All warmth and camaraderie, as if he hadn't just gotten me thrown in a cell for the last few days. I suppressed a scowl and slid an inch to my left, desperate for breathing room.

"So," I asked, staring at my half-eaten eggs, "who's filling the fifth slot?"

"You're looking at him," Cassian blurted, puffing out his chest. "Best team ever. I'll be taking over leadership duties from Kip, at least until we poach a decent defector to The Shield."

Best team ever. The guy was a certified sociopath and a relentless bully. More importantly, his presence meant we were running a dual-tank composition. What exactly was my role supposed to be in that bloated frontline?

Cassian launched into a recitation that sounded suspiciously like verbatim passages from The Ultimate Guide to Battle Strategy by Merve Chaoric. I recognized the phrasing immediately — I'd practically memorized that textbook back in year nine just to get accepted into Tetherpoint Academy.

But Cassian was conveniently leaving out the fatal flaws. Two tanks in a five-man squad left the party starving for support and notoriously weak against ranged magic. Without a dedicated cleanser, a simple Bind or Slow spell could root both tanks in place. Enemy casters could kite us all day, pick off the squishy backline, and leave the immobilized tanks to be slowly slaughtered last.

That was Cassian in a nutshell. Oversized, overconfident, and clueless about real combat dynamics.

The words to tear down his strategy burned on my tongue, but the memory of cold gruel and gray walls kept my jaw clamped shut. If I bruised his ego, he'd just trump up some new charge to get me thrown right back in the hole. I gripped my fork, resigned to fighting twice as hard just to keep us alive in the upcoming skirmishes.

We finished chow in a silence broken only by Cassian's boasting. Just as I was pushing my plate away, Sylin MerryweatherAnnoyance — Year 6 RAA relentlessly cheerful sixth-year and proud member of The Grove. Wakes cadets at dawn with a Shiver-Beak Rooster.→ Read moreSylin Merryweather — the Residential Advisor for The GroveFaction — One of the FourHealers, druids, and nature mages who serve as the backbone of any adventuring party.→ Read moreThe Grove's first-years — sauntered up to the table.

"Archmage is having me distribute your next assignments," Sylin announced, his voice carrying an air of bureaucratic boredom. He slapped a sealed envelope down on the table, right in front of Cassian. "Individualized team orders this time."

Cassian tore the seal off the parchment, his eyes scanning the lines before a predatory smirk stretched across his thick jaw.

"Guess we're going to be smashing some goblins!"

"More Rustlefoots?" Markko whined.

He shot me a sideways glance, practically begging me to share his annoyance. Low-level trash mobs. If command was handing us individualized orders just to clear out Rustlefoots, it meant they still viewed us as bottom-tier grunts despite surviving the detention block and the bogs.

"No," Cassian replied, his smirk turning cruel. "Snatcher Goblins."

Markko's annoyance evaporated. He went pale.

Snatcher Goblins weren't fodder. They were elusive, high-mobility ambush predators. They didn't line up to trade blows on the ground. They scaled vertical drops, rained down rocks and razor-nets, grabbed anything shiny, and vanished back up the cliff face before you could draw a blade. Throwing a heavy melee squad at them was a recipe for getting kited to death.

"Worried you can't handle it, Markko?" Cassian sneered.

"I... I just need to prep some more explosives," Markko stammered.

Cassian looked him up and down, his lip curling in disgust.

"Then get to work!"

Markko grabbed his tray and practically bolted from the mess hall, sprinting toward the alchemy lab to brew as many fire bombs as his mana pool would allow.

I watched him go, then turned my attention back to the looming disaster sitting next to me, running a count of our melee-heavy roster. We had an artificer and an archer, but the artificer would be locked into healing, which left us exactly one true ranged attacker.

"So... we have a tank, a second tank, an archer, an artificer, and a close-quarters melee rogue."

"I fucking know, Lumina," Cassian snapped. "I know what to do."

I bit my tongue. I wanted to ask exactly what brilliant strategy he was cooking up to hit enemies clinging to a ceiling, but experience had taught me better. Pushing Cassian when he was floundering just triggered a tantrum, and I'd end up paying the price. I'd just have to keep my Rage Bar primed and be ready to hard-carry the encounter when his non-existent plan inevitably blew up in our faces.

"Can I make a suggestion?" Kip chimed in, his voice its usual flat drone.

"What?"

"You grab initial aggro, Cassian. Lumina will use his Rage Jump when they initiate the ambush, allowing us to focus on one staggered enemy. And—"

"Kip, shut up," Cassian barked, cutting him off. "I have a better plan. Stop your drivel."

I tried to catch Kip's eye, hoping for a shared eyeroll or some sign of solidarity against the stupidity of our commanding officer. But Kip just stared blankly ahead.

"Yes, sir," Kip replied.

We were marching into the muck for what amounted to a suicide mission. The objective was simple, brutal work: cull the local Snatcher Goblins and drag back whatever junk they'd pinched. The academy loved to play at being the noble protectors of Valergard, but out here, we were just high-priced exterminators reminding the local pests who held the leash.

Usually, a culling fell to the second-year parties. Sending out raw first-years was like throwing defenseless yearlings to a pack of starved wolves. I would have taken the assignment as a compliment, but I was fairly certain sending us out to get gutted in the mud wasn't a strategic masterclass from the Archmage. It was a disposal method.

He had already tried to fry me alive earlier. Or maybe he was trying to help. I couldn't read the scheming bastard. He had pushed me to wear this pendant so aggressively that he nearly scorched the life out of me, right before the crystal swallowed his summoned elemental whole.

The thing hung against my collarbone now, glowing a faint, angry yellow-orange beneath my shirt. It radiated a dull heat against my skin, like a fresh ember pulled from the forge. It was storing the elemental's energy, sure. But for what? I didn't have a clue.

Nobody ever bothered explaining how any of this worked. It was all blind happenstance.

Or really. Forced compliance.

The march to the cliffs near River's Bend was a two-day slog that felt specifically engineered to grind us into the dirt. Just hours of putting one foot in front of the other. We were scheduled to hit the village of High Breen by nightfall, where command had generously allotted us a whole two hours of leave before lights out. Then, up at the crack of dawn for another eight hours of blistering, miserable marching to River's Bend. We would camp there for the night before finally staring down those Goblins.

And through every agonizing mile, we had Cassian.

Naturally, he carried the trans-communication crystal, keeping a direct, glowing link to Tetherpoint Academy. We didn't get to speak to command; we had to funnel everything through him. He also kept the rations hoarded on his person. Some high-level artificer had woven a void space into his satchel — a neat little pocket of nowhere that held weeks of provisions, perfectly preserved.

The food itself was not half bad. Breakfast was dense bake-bars — eggs, salted meat, and Emporium Silver potatoes pressed into something that sat in your gut like a warm brick. Lunch was whole fruit and thick hoagies we could choke down without breaking cadence. Dinner was the real event — something different every night, cooked slow over the campfire. It was supposed to be the time to rest. To bond with the squad.

But, for fuck's sake. We had Cassian as party lead.

His idea of squad camaraderie was institutional bullying dressed up as a debriefing. He didn't talk with us; he broadcasted at us. He interrupted, talked over, and demeaned every one of us the moment we opened our mouths, all in the name of his precious chain of command.

The march to High Breen was uneventful. I had never been there before. Back in Ravenscroft, High Breen was a fable. It was the kind of place where soft-handed dreamers from all over Valergard went to make it big in the music or dancing scene.

Tonight, the main stage was supposed to host Edward Loreweaver. The man was a legend. They said his voice sat somewhere between a majestic tenor and a baritone, capable of sliding into a falsetto so pure it sounded like Jathor, the god of music, was personally blessing his throat. He was backed by a local troupe who unironically called themselves the River Dancers of High Breen. That was my destination. An evening having my ears and mind soothed, far away from the dirt, the bogs, and the goblins.

Armed guards patted us down at the entry checkpoint. We cleared without issue, stepping onto cobblestone streets, the air thick with roasted nuts and expensive incense. Near the center of town, a massive banner fluttered in the evening breeze: Edward Loreweaver and the River Dancers of High Breen.

I couldn't help it. My face broke into an actual smile.

"Don't even think about it, Lumina!" Cassian snapped, his voice arriving like a boot to the back of my skull. "We're using these two hours to bond. Squad cohesion."

My smile curdled into a familiar scowl.

"Command gave us two hours of personal leave," I shot back.

"I'm in charge here. You report to me." He puffed his chest out, like a lion wearing an idiot's face.

"I'm not missing that show."

I locked eyes with him. The stubborn idiot who lives in my mouth had taken the reins again.

"We'll see about that. You must love the feeling of detention, Lumina."

Cassian closed the distance, planted his feet, and swung. He didn't aim for the jaw. He aimed dead center of my chest, looking to put me on my back to establish the pecking order.

His fist landed square on my sternum. Specifically, where Uncle Daemeon's hidden pendant rested hot under my shirt.

The snap of bone rang out like a dry iron oak branch breaking under an axe.

Cassian let out an undignified yelp and recoiled, cradling his rapidly swelling hand.

"The fuck, Lumina?!" he spat, his face mottling purple. "What did you do to me?"

I didn't flinch, though my heart hammered against the crystal. If he found out I was harboring this pendant, the detention block would be a fond memory. I needed a lie, and I needed it fast.

"Nothing," I said, my voice flat. "I'm a tank, remember? Your attack just activated a passive skill of mine."

"The fuck. Why didn't you tell me this before?" he growled, trembling with rage and pain. He looked like he wanted to swing again, but the twisted angle of his knuckles was casting a strong veto.

I caught a breath. He was hurt. He was off-balance. I tried to wrangle my rising temper, taking the diplomatic route my father always preached when dealing with a spooked bull.

"Sir," I said, keeping my tone as even as possible. "Could I please use my personal leave to see Edward Loreweaver?"

Wrong move. Wrong tone. Wrong bull.

Cassian didn't swing. He charged. All two-hundred-plus pounds of certified Shield meat hit me at once, tackling me hard onto the cobblestones. The impact drove the air from my lungs, and before I could scramble, he had his full weight planted directly on my chest. And left me with two words:

"Fuck. No."

The cobblestones were digging into my spine when the local constabulary finally decided a public throttling was bad for tourism.

"Oi, beef block," a gruff voice called out. "Get your arse off the lad."

Cassian sneered, taking his sweet, agonizing time to stand. He made sure to grind his knee into my ribs on the way up, a parting gift meant to ensure I felt every ounce of his supposed authority. "I am his commanding officer," Cassian retorted, puffing his chest out like a prized rooster. "I am teaching him discipline."

The lead guard let out a dry, rattling chuckle. "Is that right? You look like you're still weaning off your mother's teat, you baby-faced little prick."

"Fuck off," Cassian spat. "I am in charge of these soldiers. Not you."

The guard sighed, the sound of a man who dealt with arrogant academy brats every harvest season. He glanced at the two heavily armored men flanking him. "Cuff him."

Cassian's eyes bulged. He planted his feet like he was preparing to hold a mountain. He actually thought he was going to fight them. Because of course he did. He was Cassian Drake, spawn of Sylvester Drake, Valerguard's premier shield tank. Never mind that his father was barely a rumor in his actual upbringing; Cassian wore the bloodline like a set of mythic armor, assuming it made him untouchable.

"The fuck you will," Cassian growled. He hefted his shield and braced.

As the lead guard casually closed the distance, Cassian lunged, triggering his [Shield Slam] ability. A heavy, glowing arc of kinetic force rushed forward, designed to stagger a monster.

The guard didn't even draw his weapon. He simply sidestepped the glowing mass of teenage entitlement and, with a lazy flick of his wrist, boxed the back of Cassian's head.

Cassian hit the dirt hard enough to bounce.

"Kid, stop now or you'll be charged," the guard warned, utterly bored.

Cassian rolled onto his back, spitting blood and dignity. "Kip! Shoot him! Lumina, stun him!" he shrieked, treating the town guard like a random goblin spawn.

Kip's hand instinctively went to his quiver. But even Kip's rigid obedience to the chain of command had an analytical ceiling. He looked at the three guards, noted the casual way their hands rested on hilts that had definitely tasted blood, and ran the math. Hitting a town guard with an arrow equaled a treason charge. Treason equaled a severed head on a pike.

Kip slowly lowered his bow, dropped perfectly to his knees, and bowed his forehead to the dirt in a gesture of absolute, unironic subservience.

I didn't even draw a weapon. I just dusted off my knees, turned my back, and started walking in the opposite direction.

"Help me, or I'll make sure you never leave detention!" Cassian screamed, his voice cracking as the guards hauled him up by his heavy pauldrons.

I let him scream. I was already calculating how peaceful the trek back to the academy would be without him. Then, my stomach rumbled, and a cold realization hit me. He was carrying our ration packs. Worse, he had the squad's trans-communication crystal.

I stopped and pivoted on my heel. "Hey!" I yelled back.

The lead guard paused, his grip firm on a thrashing Cassian. "Another one of you lot want to see the inside of a cell?"

"No, sir," I said, pitching my voice into the most pathetic, polite farm-boy drawl my village could export. "It's just... he has our squad's ration packs. And the communication crystal. Could I possibly get those from you?"

The guards exchanged a look. The leader gave a short, amused nod. They unceremoniously patted Cassian down, stripped him of the crystal and our food, and tossed them into my waiting hands.

I watched the local constabulary drag Valerguard's finest export away by his heavy pauldrons. It was, without a doubt, the most useful thing Cassian Drake had done for squad cohesion all week.

◇ ◇ ◇

But the arithmetic of the field remained. We were down one oversized, abusive tank, and we were still expected to clear our quota of Snatcher Goblins.

I looked down at the trans-communication crystal resting heavy in my palm. The logical, dutiful Shield response was to channel mana into it immediately, report the catastrophic failure of leadership, and wait for some smug officer to teleport in and ruin my evening.

I rolled the crystal over in my fingers. Then, I shoved it deep into my satchel.

I had spent sixty-seven hours in a damp stone cell eating lukewarm, gray slop. Command could wait two hours to bail out their golden boy.

"I am experiencing a severe caloric deficit," Kip stated, breaking the silence with his usual flat delivery. Next to him, Markko was eyeing the confiscated ration pack in my hands with the desperate focus of a starved hound.

"I'm so hungry," Markko whined, rubbing his stomach.

I popped the arcane clasp on Cassian's void storage pouch. I had expected standard-issue field rations — dried boar, iron-tack, maybe some medicinal bitter-root. Instead, a translucent inventory window expanded in my vision, cascading with an absurd list of high-society confectionaries. It certainly explained the generous layer of soft padding draped over the boy's muscles.

I reached into the void space and pulled out a genuine Sunpie pastry, heavy with imported cream and dusted in fine sugar. I tossed it to Markko. He caught it like a lifeline, his face splitting into a smile of pure delight. I tossed a candied honey-crisp to Kip, who caught it and began examining its sticky surface as if it were a complex tactical puzzle.

"Listen up," I said, looking at my surviving circus. "We are going to the central stage. We are going to see Edward Loreweaver, and we are going to let the man soothe our ears."

"What about the communication crystal?" Kip asked, his brow furrowing slightly. "Should we not inform command of Cassian's... forced physical relocation?"

"I'll make sure to let the academy know exactly what happened," I said, though I supposed I would tell them something eventually. "After the show. And after we eat an actual dinner."

I turned on my heel and walked toward the music drifting through the streets. The rest of the party followed.

◇ ◇ ◇

Telilah was silent. I watched her from the corner of my eye. She walked like her joints were rusted shut, apprehension pulling every muscle taut. She was a true believer in The Shield, through and through. The exhaustion of watching her certified, academy-stamped commanding officer get dragged away in irons was weighing on her like iron chains. And underneath that, the guilt of not drawing her blades to help him. Cassian had never been bad to her, after all. He saved his creative sadism for me and his so-called best friend Kip. To Telilah, he had just been a loud, confident tank.

"Telilah," I said, against my better judgment. "How are you holding up?"

She stopped. The tension snapped. And right there in the street, with the faint strum of lutes carrying on the wind, she just started crying.

Shit.

"We're gonna die," she choked out, her voice raw. "We're fucking gonna die." She dropped to her knees, right there on the stones, burying her face in her hands.

I stood there, possessed by the profound, paralyzing awkwardness of a sixteen-year-old farm boy confronted with tears. I did not do well with crying. I knelt beside her and delivered two tentative, stiff pats to her shoulder, treating it with the delicate uncertainty of a man checking a melon for ripeness.

Technically, she was correct. This world didn't hand out practice deaths, and Snatcher Goblins were notorious for ruining melee-heavy squads. But pointing that out seemed like a spectacular way to make the crying worse. Besides, I actually doubted her math. Even without Cassian soaking up hits, we weren't helpless. If the goblins had magic, my freshly minted, hidden Siphon Mage abilities could eat it. If they didn't, well, Snatchers were thieves, not gladiators. They hit, grabbed the shiny things, and bolted. You just had to be fast enough to make the toll too high.

"Our chances of death without Cassian are precisely fifteen-point-seven-eight percent," Kip interjected. He delivered the statistic to the back of her head with all the emotional resonance of a falling brick.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second. "Thanks, Kip. Invaluable."

I looked back down at the rogue. "Let's get going, okay?" I held out my hand.

She stayed hunched for a long moment before reaching up. Her grip was surprisingly strong. I hauled her to her feet. She scrubbed her face with the back of her sleeve, inhaled a shaky breath that rattled in her chest, and plastered a brittle, entirely counterfeit smile across her face.

We went on.

The concert was magnificent. For once, Cassian was locked behind iron bars instead of breathing down our necks. The man had no concept of how to forge loyalty. You build camaraderie the way you build a barn roof — shared sweat, and holding the line when the weather turns. You don't build it by using your squad as punching bags. Why anyone in command looked at a sadist like him and saw a leader was a mystery that made my back teeth ache.

Dinner didn't hurt either. Elk fillets with all the fixings, rich and heavy, about as far from lukewarm detention porridge as food gets. But the meal sat like a stone in my gut now. I had to contact Tetherpoint and report that Cassian had detoured into a jail cell, and if I ever wanted a leadership role in The Shield, that meant stepping into the mud and making the call myself.

I slipped away from the noise of the group and found a quiet corner. I fished the communications crystal out of my satchel and gave it a sharp tap. A translucent menu unfolded in the air. I focused my intent on the academy's frequency, and the crystal began to swirl, humming like a river running high.

"Hello, Cassian." Archmage Varric's voice drifted out of the channel, warm as a hearth fire.

"No, sir. It's Elias."

"Oh. Interesting." The warmth went out of it like a door opening on winter. "Why is Cassian having you use his crystal?"

"He isn't. He's in jail."

The channel hummed. "He is in what? Jail. Do tell."

"He jumped me in front of the local guards," I said, "then decided he was above their orders."

"I see," Varric murmured. "Hold a moment."

And there it was. The hold. The magical equivalent of a slammed door. I leaned my head back against the wall. He'd contact the local garrison, pull rank, and shake his golden boy loose by morning.

It had been fun while it lasted. A few hours of peace — the first genuine joy I'd felt since walking through Tetherpoint's black iron gates. And like everything else in this place, it was already over.

The crystal's light pulsed, hovering in the air like a ghost.

"Lumina." Crisp. Unbothered.

"Yes, sir."

"Congratulations. You are now officially in command of your little adventuring party."

I stared at the floating menu. "Excuse me?"

"Cassian Drake," Varric sighed, the fatigue entirely manufactured, "your former leader, decided to test his physical authority against a city guardsman. The local magistrate is unwilling to release him until he sees a judge. That will be in three days."

Three days. Three whole days out from under the living embodiment of cruelty. I swallowed a laugh. "Understood, sir. I won't let you down."

"I am thrilled by your eagerness," Varric said, winter creeping back into the channel. "Just know this, Lumina. You are in charge of your people now. You lose them, you face the consequences. And your quest parameters remain exactly the same."

The relief died right there on the floor.

Snatcher Goblins. High mobility. Vertical ambush predators. We were already sending a heavily bruised squad with no dedicated healer into the mud, and now we were down our primary meat shield. This wasn't a promotion. It was a cart already tumbling off a cliff, and Varric had just handed me the reins.

"Lumina," he added, softer. The theater gone from his voice entirely. "I expect you will live up to your bloodline. Goodbye."

The channel snapped shut with the sound of breaking glass. The crystal went cold in my palm.

What the actual fuck was that about?

It would be a long time before I learned the answer. Longer still before I stopped wishing I hadn't.

◇ ◇ ◇

The walk back to our room at the inn was a slog. I found what remained of Group 3 huddled near the bunks and laid it out flat: Cassian was in a cell. I was in charge. We still culled the Snatcher Goblins in the morning.

"What?" Telilah's voice cracked. Her hand dropped to the hilt of her short-sword and stayed there, gripping. "No. No way. I can't do it."

"Telilah," Kip stated. "If you abandon an assigned quest and your designated party members, you will be classified as a defector. The standard penalty is execution."

He delivered the kingdom's lethal doctrine with the same inflection one might use to report a change in the chow hall menu.

"Fuck. I know, Kip!" Telilah hissed. Then, quieter, like it cost her something to say: "I'm just... I'm so damn scared."

I remembered her screaming under the goblin Clerk's fear spell. I knew that terror. I hated it.

I rubbed my temples. I needed a plan, and I didn't have Cassian's borrowed, deeply flawed textbook to lean on. So I turned to the one person whose brain actually processed the battlefield instead of his own ego.

"Kip. Give me the math. How would you run this quest with just the four of us?"

Kip didn't hesitate. He stared at a blank spot on the stone wall behind me and started listing. "We isolate a single target. Snare one and pick it off. Markko deploys his stun grenades to neutralize their vertical mobility. You initiate with Rage Jump or a frontal charge to secure aggro. I loose arrows from the backline to pin them, and Telilah executes with close-quarters lacerations."

Brutal. Ugly. It relied entirely on Markko not dropping an explosive on his own boots, and on me acting as a fleshy anvil for falling monsters. But it was honest work.

"I like it," I said, and meant it, even with my gut winding itself tight. We had a full day's march to River's Bend tomorrow. Plenty of time to sharpen the plan — or to count all the ways it could go wrong.

The march to River's Bend was an endless slog of pale dirt and pine needles, the kind of terrain that stuck to your boots and quietly drained your Stamina bar one point at a time. Telilah dragged at the rear. She kept herself just close enough to remain in formation, but far enough back that her presence felt like an apology.

At our second stop, she refused water. By the third, she still hadn't offered a single word. Markko tried to plug the dead air with nervous jokes that landed like wet kindling. Kip did not. Kip simply walked, eyes tracking the canopy, no doubt running the odds on our impending deaths.

I left Telilah alone. I didn't bark at her about squad cohesion. I didn't shove her shoulder to establish dominance. That was Cassian's doctrine. My ledger felt lighter without it.

We reached River's Bend by late afternoon. The town wasn't much — a waterwheel, a smokehouse, a scatter of shale roofs — on the menu that night a stew thick enough to stand a spoon in, and I watched Telilah finish her whole bowl. Small victories. We took beds, slept hard, and rose before the sun to make the hour's walk out to the cliffs.

By mid-morning, the earth finally gave way. The canyon opened up below us, a ragged wound in the rock. The river at the bottom was nothing but a black thread. It growled like a distant forge bellows, buried too deep in the gloom to see clearly. Kip halted exactly where the parchment map told him to and pointed a single, stiff finger down into the gorge.

"There," he said. "Their territory."

Telilah shuffled up to the rim and stood beside me. She looked down into the shadows where the Snatcher Goblins waited. I watched her hand drop to her short sword. The leather creaked. Her knuckles were pale, but the trembling was gone. She had a grip.

It was not courage. It was just the cold math of survival. And right now, that was enough.

◇ ◇ ◇

We picked our way down the gorge like blind men in a root cellar. The ambush didn't announce itself with a battle horn. It came from the ceiling.

Four Snatcher Goblins, their skin the color of old, rancid meat, dropped from the overhangs clutching weighted Snatcher Nets loaded with river stones. My [Fast Feet] passive fired before my brain caught up, and I slipped the heavy mesh by a hair. Markko didn't. The net took him dead center with a wet crunch of stone on bone. His health bar sheared in half, plummeting a flat 50% in one hit. Kip took a glancing blow to the shoulder — a 10% loss, which he logged in his usual stoic silence. Telilah, moving entirely on rogue instincts, vanished into a shadow and slipped the drop untouched.

"Kip, [Sticky Shot] the back two!" I barked, feeling my Rage bar start to simmer.

I triggered [Rage Jump], launching myself like a thrown anvil. I meant to crater two of them and establish a perimeter, but I only clipped one. The other scrambled out of the dust cloud like a startled roach. "Dammit." I burned raw, then enabled [Charge] to body-check the squirrely one, desperate to rip its aggro away from our fragile backline.

I hit it like a runaway cart. "Focus on this one!" I commanded.

Telilah blurred in, her blades flashing in a messy, desperate rhythm. Markko was patting his robes with the frantic energy of a man on fire, fumbling for an explosive while trying to bring out a basic heal potion. Kip's snare hit. His arrows found their marks, but the Snatchers didn't care about the [Slow] debuff. They just started hurling jagged rocks through the air. The stones pelted Markko, shattering his focus, and clattered against Kip's collarbone. Kip clinically adjusted his aim and returned fire.

Then the formation broke.

The goblin I'd clipped with my jump shook off its daze. It vaulted my guard and came down hard on Markko. The artificer crumpled, coughing dirt, his bar flashing red as it plunged to 30%. The goblin went to work with a rusted shank. I wrenched my stance wide and triggered [Shield Slam], putting a wall of iron into the creature's ribs to peel it off our only healer.

But my charged target took the opening. It launched off my pauldron and body-dropped Kip. The archer went down hard, his HP bleeding out past 40%.

Telilah's momentum shattered. With her target leaping away, she hesitated for a fraction of a second — and the rock-wielding goblins punished her for it. A barrage of heavy stones caught her mid-step, hammering bruises across her arms and knocking her HP down to 60%.

"Heal me!" she shrieked.

Markko couldn't heal her. He was busy getting crushed. My own health bar was sagging near 50%. Cassian's stupid textbook hadn't covered what to do when a pack of over-leveled ceiling-dwellers turned your squad into a meat grinder.

And that's when I heard it.

Unleash me, master.

It didn't come through my ears. It bloomed in the base of my skull, hot and impatient. The pendant under my shirt flared against my sternum like a live forge coal.

Unleash me.

No. I couldn't. It was Veil magic. I was the tank of a Shield squad. If I used it here, they'd know.

Markko finally fumbled two glass vials loose from his belt. He lobbed one to Telilah — a perfect toss. She downed it in a single gulp, her bar surging back to a full 100%. Markko popped the cork on his own potion, but a goblin's boot pinned his wrist to the dirt. I burned the last reserves of my rage on another ugly, uncoordinated [Charge], throwing my full weight into the goblin to buy Markko a breath. He scrambled back and drank. His HP climbed to 70%.

But Kip was drowning. 20% HP remaining.

"Markko, hit Kip!" I roared over the clash of steel as Telilah finally gutted the first goblin, dragging her blades through its belly. Markko tossed a vial through the chaos. Kip caught it, drank it with pure mechanical efficiency, and watched his HP rise to 60%.

My own bar was cratering. 30%. Every breath tasted like old copper. I triggered another [Rage Jump], bringing my mace down squarely on a rock-thrower. It collapsed into the dirt, [Stunned].

Bring me out, master. The whisper was a demand now.

Markko, bless his clumsy heart, finally produced a stun grenade. He hurled it at the remaining mobile goblin. The little bastard shimmied left with insulting ease.

The grenade then bounced squarely off my breastplate.

Bang.

White light washed out the canyon. My ears shrieked. The [Stunned] debuff clamped down on my nervous system for ten agonizing seconds. I was a statue. I couldn't even blink. The goblin grinned a mouth full of jagged yellow teeth and went to work on the gaps in my armor.

Knives in my side. Pain lighting up my spine. My HP plummeted.

10%.
9%.
8%.
7%.

Markko chucked a potion directly at my chest. It bounced off into the dirt. I couldn't move my arms to catch it.

5%.
4%.

The stun broke.

I didn't think about faction politics. I didn't think about the chain of command. I thought about surviving. I tore the mental lock off the pendant and kicked the door open.

The elemental erupted.

The Level 10 monstrosity of pure flame I'd swallowed in the detention block ripped its way out of the pendant with a roar that superheated the damp canyon air. The blast wave caught the two rock-throwing goblins, tossing them backward easily into the dirt. The [Burning] debuff stacked on them instantly, immediately followed by a three-second knock-back [Stun].

Elias unleashes the Protector Fire Elemental against the Snatcher Goblins

I snatched the fallen potion out of the mud and downed it. The cool liquid pulled my HP back from the brink to 44%.

In the center of my vision, the text etched itself into the air like scarred glass.

For a second, nobody breathed. The squad just stared at the towering pillar of fire wearing a jagged, ember-toothed grin. But the shock broke fast. Kip loosed a volley. Telilah darted forward. With a literal elemental soaking up the aggro and radiating heat, we butchered the last two Snatchers in seconds.

Silence settled over the gorge, save for the crackle of dying flames and the ragged heave of our lungs. Four dead goblins. One fading elemental. Three squadmates staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.

I wiped goblin blood and soot from my chin. Well. I had some explaining to do.

Looking back, I can point to the exact moment things started going wrong, and it wasn't the fire. It was the story I was about to tell them.

The rest of the culling went a damned sight faster. Mostly because the Snatcher Goblins did not know how to handle a walking pillar of predatory fire.

I decided to name him Burnie. My father would have given me his single, disappointed nod for being lazy with a title. But my brain was too tired for poetry and my arms were too bruised to argue with it.

Burnie soaked up the aggro. He radiated heat that kept the ceiling drops at bay, leaving me free to crush the stragglers. The combat was still clumsy, but nobody came near death. My shoulders throbbed from swinging the mace. I watched my HP dip, drank Markko's bitter potions, and managed my Rage bar while my boots sank into the canyon mud. But we survived. And we cleared the quota.

By the time the last goblin folded into the dirt, the notifications dropped into my vision in crisp blocks.

We dragged their stolen cache out of a damp fissure near the river. It was a heavy pile of tarnished coins and a few enchanted trinkets pinched from the local caravans.

I stood over the pile, my knuckles split and bleeding. We had not divided the loot yet. Most of it was stolen property. The trinkets were too risky to keep. A merchant would recognize a noble's stamped silver comb. But the gold. Gold rarely carried a name. I thought about pocketing a handful and claiming it was never recovered. I could use the coin. But I left it alone for the moment. We still had to see what the official reward would be.

The real problem was not the loot. It was the silence.

The party was alive. They were no longer getting pulverized by falling rocks. That should have bought me some grace. It did not.

Telilah kept a solid ten paces between us on the hike out. Markko flinched when I asked him how he was doing. Even Kip stared at the glowing pendant on my chest with unblinking, rigid attention.

It was exactly what I had tried to prevent. They feared me because I possessed a Veil skillset. Because the kingdom had drilled it into them since the cradle: shadows were evil.

And there was the joke of it. Cassian Drake had bullied them. He slapped them, belittled them, and used them as human shields. But they did not fear him like they did me. They respected his shiny badge and his so-called discipline.

I had never raised my voice at them. I had never laid a hand on them in anger. I stepped between them and the knives. I wanted to be the wall protecting the herd.

Instead, I was just the new monster in the room.

◇ ◇ ◇

We dragged ourselves back into River's Bend right as the sun bled out over the tree line. My boots felt like they had been forged from solid iron, every step dragging against my remaining stamina. I wanted to run a proper debrief, as that was the way of The Shield, so I mandated a fireside dinner once everyone had scraped the goblin mud and soot off their armor.

In the meantime, I had the paperwork to handle. I dug the communications crystal out of my satchel, channeled a sliver of mana into the stone, and waited for Tetherpoint's frequency to catch, fully expecting the archmage's winter chill to greet me.

"Oi. That you, Lumina?" The voice was gravel rolling down a chute.

"Borin?" I blinked at the glowing stone.

"Aye. Good to see yer in one piece," Borin grunted. I could hear the unmistakable slosh of a heavy wooden tankard, followed by a wet swallow. "Half expected a goblin to be clickin' its teeth at me through the crystal. They really set ye up for the slaughterhouse out there. How did you manage?"

"Everyone is breathing," I said, leaning my head back against the rough wood of the inn wall. "A few cuts and a lot of bruised pride, but nobody's HP bar hit zero."

"Well, holy hell. Best case scenario, then." Another deep gulp of ale echoed through the channel.

The words took over before I could stop them. "They will not even look at me, Borin." My voice sounded hollow, like a dropped bucket in an empty well.

A sharp bark of laughter cracked through the crystal. "Aye, I see! Ye used yer Veil magic. Bet they were stunned like an arse-fucked donkey findin' out ye got a second class already, too." The sound of a heavy hand slapping a massive knee carried over the link, followed by a wheezing chuckle.

I gripped the crystal tighter. The heat of my Rage bar gave a faint, phantom pulse under my ribs. "It is not a joke, Borin. This is serious. They are terrified of me. My own party."

The laughter cut off. The line went completely, uncomfortably flat. When Borin spoke again, the amusement was gone, replaced by cold, bedrock certainty.

"Ah, lad," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "They should be. I knew yer Uncle Daemeon. Yer of the exact same blood. And ye hold the same kind of power."

"So what now?" I asked. I needed an answer — some kind of tactical manual for when your squad realizes you're harboring forbidden magic. But the sinking feeling in my gut told me Borin wasn't going to forge me a clean way out of this.

"Aye, I report it as a success," Borin said, his tone as flat and unbothered as a leveled anvil. "Ye turn in yer spoils when ye get back to the Academy, and ye moves on."

"But what about the party?" The anxiety hijacked my throat, pitching my voice higher than I wanted. It felt like trying to draw breath through wet wool. "My leadership position?"

"Not sure. We'll see." The hollow thud of a wooden tankard hitting a table echoed through the link. "Best I go now. May the shadows keep ye safe."

The crystal snapped cold in my palm.

May the shadows keep ye safe. The traditional parting phrase of The Veil hung in the air, entirely unwelcome. With that, I washed up and got the fire going.

◇ ◇ ◇

I sat by the inn's hearth, arranging the hardwood coals into an even, glowing bed. It's a trick I learned back home at the forge — you don't cook over the wild flames; you cook over the embers if you want a proper sear without charring the meat to ash. I laid out the skewers: thick cuts of mutton, tomatoes, peppers, and onions, dusted heavily with salt, pepper, and crushed garlic.

I was just turning the spits when the members of Group 3 filed in. They arrived as a single unit, their boots scuffling against the floorboards. It didn't take a tactical genius to read the room; they had held a meeting out in the hall without me.

"Eat," I said, pointing a pair of iron tongs at the stack of finished skewers.

Kip stepped forward first, as if the decision were simple arithmetic. He took a skewer and sat. Markko and Telilah exchanged a loaded glance before reluctantly following suit. They didn't form a circle around the hearth. They arranged themselves on the far side of the fire, leaving me alone on the other. It wasn't a squad dinner. It was a tribunal.

I took a bite of mutton, the hot juice burning my split lip. "I contacted Tetherpoint," I said, keeping my voice flat. "Reported the clear. We rest tonight, and—"

"You used Veil magic." Markko blurted it out like he was vomiting poison, his eyes darting to my chest where the pendant rested under my tunic.

Telilah's grip tightened on her skewer. "I am so damned confused, Elias. I'm thankful we're breathing. I am. But..." She swallowed hard, staring at the coals. "I'm furious that we only survived because of... of that. That dark magic."

Kip tilted his head. "Are you a covert operative for The Veil, or do you retain your primary classification as a Shield member?" The question came out the way he might ask whether it looked like rain.

"I'm in The Shield," I snapped, defensive heat rising in my chest. I pulled the leather cord, lifting the pendant out into the firelight. "I inherited this. It unlocked a secondary Siphon Mage class."

I laid out the ugly truth — the detention cell, Archmage Varric marching downstairs, and the towering elemental he unleashed to cook me alive just to force the pendant to awaken. I left out Uncle Daemeon's name, but I gave them the rest, blistered and unvarnished, of how Tetherpoint's beloved headmaster operated.

Markko scoffed, a wet, dismissive sound. "Archmage Varric tried to execute you in a holding cell? Bullshit. They don't just murder students." He looked to Telilah for backup. She shook her head, her lip curling.

"Archmage Varric Pyre is a decorated officer of The Flame," Kip stated. "It is a strict violation of Valerguard doctrine to incinerate first-year trainees. Therefore, your narrative contains statistical anomalies."

They didn't believe a single word of it. I had dragged them out of the mud. I had nearly died for them and taken enough physical trauma to fell a draft horse just to keep their fragile HP pools from bottoming out. And for what? There was zero loyalty. The indoctrination ran too deep.

Markko shifted his weight, his hand inching toward a potion vial on his belt. "We took a vote," he spat. He flinched as he said it, his shoulders creeping up toward his ears. "We want Cassian back in command. Just... please don't hurt us."

Something hollow opened up beneath my ribs. Before it could settle, the forge caught it, and the sadness went straight to white-hot.

Are they fucking serious? They wanted the meat-headed sadist back. The boy who beat them, humiliated them, and marched them straight into a vertical ambush with near zero battle strategy. They preferred the boot on their necks because it wore the correct shiny badge.

"Okay," I muttered. My jaw was locked so tight my teeth ground together.

"We appreciate that you kept us alive today," Telilah said, her voice thick with blind, stupid righteousness. "But we are The Shield. You're tainted with The Veil. It would be fundamentally wrong to follow you."

Tainted. Wrong. Because the universe had strapped a pendant to my chest that swallowed magic, I was a monster. But the boy who snapped bones for sport was a hero.

The tether snapped.

I stood up, kicking my stool back so hard it splintered against the inn's stone wall.

"You are all fucking idiots!" I roared, the sound ripping out of my throat with enough force to send Markko scrambling backward on his hands and knees.

I didn't wait for a response. I turned my back on the fire, the mutton, and the three of them, and marched straight to my room, letting the heavy oak door slam shut behind me.

The trek back to High Breen was heavier than the hike up. Nobody spoke. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was the kind of quiet you get in a barn right before a sickly calf drops. My squad kept their eyes anywhere but on me the whole way down. That would be over soon enough. Once we hit High Breen, Cassian would take back the leadership, and I could go back to being furniture.

We hit the cobblestones just as the sun started to bleed out over the rooftops. We had one more evening of leave before the march back to Tetherpoint, but the dread had already set up shop in my chest. Cassian had been sprung from the local lockup that morning. The rest of the squad had already briefed him on my little fiery display in the canyon. I braced for the yelling. I braced for another fist to the sternum.

Instead, the lumbering idiot looked thrilled. Not grateful. Thrilled. He had the specific, hungry look of a butcher who had just been handed a heavier cleaver.

"Lumina." Cassian closed the distance and thrust his hand out. He gripped my fingers with the crushing, performative force of a boy who needed everyone to know his [Strength] stat was higher. "I appreciate you keeping my men alive."

I stared at him. Cassian Drake, thanking a village boy?

Then the arrogant smirk slid right back into place, greased and familiar.

"However. Do not think your insubordination will go unpunished. The chain of command exists for a reason, and discipline is absolute."

Ah. There it was. The world righting itself. I didn't have the energy to fight him. I didn't even have the energy to feed him a sarcastic remark. My HP was stable enough to keep me upright, but the mental exhaustion was a weight no potion was going to clear. I just nodded and pried my aching fingers out of his grip.

"I am leaning toward a couple of days in detention," he stated, puffing his chest out like a proud lion of The Shield. "I will decide the exact consequences after I review the field reports. My quarters. After chow. Do not be late."

"Yes, sir," I muttered.

Detention. Again. And honestly, a few days in the holding cells sounded like a vacation compared to marching behind Cassian's ego. Borin Grimhall would be there. The man was a gruff, drunken bastard, but he did not lie to me. He did not dress up his malice as virtue.

Borin was Veil. The hooded eye wreathed in black thorns. Every bedtime story and village priest back in Ravenscroft had promised me they were the monsters hiding in the dark, waiting to bleed the flock. But after watching the golden, noble lions of The Shield operate up close, the shadows were starting to look like a remarkably sane place to stand.

Then again, I had a bit of both locked inside me now.

A Level 5 Rage Tank. A Level 6 Siphon Mage. Two opposed doctrines welded together in one build, defying every piece of tactical literature I'd ever memorized.

The Shield was determined to beat me down with their version of discipline, and my uncle's pendant offered me raw, volatile power. Maybe it was time to stop pretending The Veil was such an evil force. Maybe I needed to stop thinking I was just a lion, and start learning how to appreciate the shadows.

◇ ◇ ◇

I took a moment to collect myself after dinner. I was not looking forward to visiting Cassian's quarters. He must have figured out that public assaults were bad for his brand. A short stint in the local lockup was exactly the kind of thing that tarnished The Shield's golden reputation. But a bruised ego like his always demanded a toll. I was the designated coin.

I had the Siphon Mage class now. I had Burnie. I was, by the math, more dangerous than him. But retaliation was a trap. The strategy was simple. Take the hits. Keep my mouth shut. Survive long enough to get out from under his heavy, armored thumb.

The thought alone made the Rage bar in my periphery build. A low, steady simmer. I wanted to let it off the leash. I didn't. Expulsion was a worse fate than a beating.

I knocked on the heavy oak door.

"Come in," Cassian called.

I pushed inside. Cassian stood waiting with a grin that belonged on a predatory horse. He swept a hand toward a chair. "Welcome. Please, sit."

I sat. I skipped the pleasantries. My pillow was calling my name. "Where should we start?"

"Elias, I am proud of you," he said. The friendly tone was thick. Counterfeit. "And amazed by your abilities. I think you would make an excellent addition to The Shield leadership."

I stared at him. "Right."

"I want to take you under my wing." He actually stepped forward and spread his arms, mimicking a massive, suffocating bird.

My stomach turned over. Had the jail cell cracked his skull?

"I realized something," he continued, dropping the bird routine. "It has been a long time since The Shield housed a member with a secondary Veil class."

I kept my face flat.

"Here you are. In the exact same vein as Tarvis Panthera and Shimone the Dark Knight. Legends." He paced the floor. "But legends need a master."

The math clicked into place. The idiot didn't just want a punching bag. He wanted a pet project, to hone me into a weapon.

"You did some reading," I said.

"I am not an uneducated fool," he preened. "Some day I might let you read my journal. Let you get the full picture."

"So you want me working directly under you." The idea tasted like week-old forge water. Being chained to a mentally unstable sadist whose nose I desperately wanted to break.

"Yes." His smile stretched. Maniacal. Genuine. "Yes, yes, yes."

I stood up. "I think I will pass. We can be peers. I am not working under your control. Are we done here?"

"No. And who said you had a choice?"

His voice shed its friendly coat. A low, ugly rumble. He pulled a glass vial from his satchel. Black liquid swirled inside, heavy as pitch. He threw it straight at my face.

The interface flickered, reading the projectile mid-air.

The glass shattered against my chest. Black smoke erupted. It crawled up my collar, forcing its way into my nose, my ears, my eyes. The pain was absolute. Blinding. Like hot iron pressed into the brain.

I had an overwhelming feeling that I did not want to be controlled. I wanted to maintain my own mind and sense of self.

Then the pendant woke up.

It flared hot against my sternum. The Siphon Mage passive triggered. It inhaled. The dark smoke was ripped backward, sucked into the stone until the air was clear.

Cassian did not notice. He was already gloating. "You are mine, Lumina!" he barked. "Stand on one foot and pat your belly."

I just looked at him. Standing on two feet. Patting nothing.

The confusion on his face was a masterpiece. The look of a rich boy who realized the expensive toy he bought was defective.

Then the confusion curdled into rage.

He lunged. His fist caught me dead on the orbital bone. A hollow crack echoed in my skull.

I hit the floor hard. He started kicking. Heavy boots driving into my ribs. I curled up, protecting my head.

I did not retaliate. My Rage bar was spiking, red and frantic, begging for a release. If I swung back, they would expel me. But if my HP dropped below ten percent, I decided I would cave his chest in.

"Fuck you, Lumina!" he spat, punctuating every word with a kick. "Fuck you and your Veil powers."

He was breathing hard. Gassing out. I waited for a pause, then scrambled to my feet. I backed toward the door, keeping my eyes locked on him.

He charged again. A desperate, sloppy haymaker. It clipped my nose. Blood exploded down my chin.

My HP was down to 67 out of 195. I tangled my legs with his. We went down in a messy heap of limbs. I landed on top, my face hovering over his. A fat drop of my blood fell from my nose and hit his cheek.

It did not smear. It soaked directly into his skin like water into dry earth.

The interface chimed. Clean gold text sliced through the red haze.

I did not hesitate. Before his heavy hands could find my throat, I selected "Yes".

Cassian went rigid. Paralyzed.

Sixty seconds. One minute to rewire the bastard's brain.

I leaned in close. I could smell the stale sweat and expensive pastry cream on his breath.

"You believe there is deep value in a Shield member wielding Veil abilities," I whispered. My voice was a cold rasp.

I wanted to order him to stop being an abusive prick. I wanted him to confess. But if his personality shifted entirely, the academy would know his mind had been tampered with. It had to be subtle. It had to sound like his own arrogant logic.

"You believe that Elias Lumina is an exceptional protege," I murmured directly into his ear. "You believe you must train him for leadership, directly at your side, as an equal."

It was nearly the exact arrangement he had just demanded. Only now, I held the reins. I would dictate how the training went. And he would think it was his brilliant idea.

"Well, well, well."

Varric smiled. It was that same theatrical, storm-lit grin that always made my back teeth ache. "I expected this last task to take you through the rest of the Culling." His swirling blue-white eyes locked onto mine. "I guess someone discovered some hidden powers."

Of course he knew. He was the one who had practically burned the pendant awake in the detention block. I kept my face flat. My orbital bone throbbed, a steady pulse of pain radiating from the [Minor Fracture] Cassian had gifted me the night before.

Varric paced forward. "Now, now. What shall we do with you, Mr. Lumina." He stopped directly in front of me. The wry twist of his mouth was bright with intentions I did not care to guess at. "Cassian. What say you?"

"Yes, Archmage." Cassian stood at attention. His voice was steady, devoid of its usual malice. "Mr. Lumina has shown appropriate deference to authority. I believe he should be given a light sentence for his insubordination."

Varric paused. He looked at Cassian. He looked at me. "Interesting. No pummeling? No expulsion? We do not want to take his head? You want him given... light punishment."

The archmage knew the calculus was wrong. The dynamic of Group 3 had shifted overnight, and Varric Pyre missed absolutely nothing. I was starting to suspect the man had an agenda that went far beyond churning out obedient leaders for Valerguard.

"No, sir. We debriefed last night and came to an understanding."

Cassian actually looked at me. He noted the blackened eyes and the swollen, blood-caked ruin of my nose, and his expression was nothing but patient mentorship. It was deeply, profoundly unsettling. My skin crawled.

"An understanding," Varric repeated, tasting the word and also noticing how beat up Elias was. "I see that you two have, indeed, hashed things out. Would you agree, Mr. Lumina?"

I held the archmage's gaze.

"Yes," I said. "We agreed that I would shadow Cassian. I am going to train to be a leader directly underneath his rank."

I put a heavy, deliberate emphasis on the word shadow. A small smirk got away from me. I could not help it.

"Hmmm."

Varric turned around, his crimson robes sweeping the stone floor. He did not push it. He just accepted the counterfeit reality I had built. "Then it is already settled. So. It is now time for your spoils."

◇ ◇ ◇

Time for your spoils.

The words hung in the hall, and every exhausted muscle in Group 3 suddenly found the energy to snap to attention. We had drawn the absolute worst assignment of the Culling. A task meant to bleed us for days. Instead, we cleared it in a single afternoon.

Varric paced in front of us, enjoying the suspense. "Let us see. There are a few rewards for your achievements. First, you have earned yourselves leave time until the Trials start next week."

Six full days. After the last week, that felt impossibly generous. I could make the trek back to Ravenscroft, sleep in my own bed, and talk to my father and mother and just relax. Or I could stay and figure out the exact geography of this Academy.

"Second," Varric continued, "it appears you recovered nearly seventy percent of the lost baubles and coins. Quite impressive. Usually, that figure hovers around fifty percent."

I wanted to be proud of that fact. Instead the guilt hit me like a kick to the ribs. Seventy percent. We wouldn't have recovered copper shavings if I hadn't summoned Burnie. Hell, we'd be extinguished. And if Varric hadn't tried to roast my flesh off in that cell, forcing the pendant awake, the outcome would have been dire. The Veil. The shadow. The forbidden magic. That was the only reason we were standing here looking like heroes.

"Third, you did this short-handed." Varric showed a genuine, deeply unsettling smile. "We certainly have the makings of a grand adventuring party with you five."

He produced a velvet sack from his crimson robes. He doled out gold first. Ten solid coins a head. The weight of it in my palm was absurd. You could buy a working Dwarf Pony or a Rock Lizard for that kind of coin back home. I wasn't in the market for livestock, but the armorers in Mellonwood were about to have my undivided attention. So many choices.

Then came the actual spoils. He handed Kip an intricate leather tube woven with silver thread.

Kip examined the stitching with the flat, unblinking intensity of a watchmaker. "This is statistically satisfying," he noted.

Telilah received a dagger. The steel was scored with black, swirling Damascus patterns. It was the universal signature of a forge fed by dragon fire. My interface caught the details before she even fully sheathed it.

Markko was handed a Dragon Wind Infused Crystal. The raw magic in the stone forced a notification window to cascade, unlocking [Cure Level 1] and a baseline Wind affinity for his artificer build. The kid looked like he was going to cry or blow something up. Knowing him, probably both.

Cassian's reward was a massive Dragon Wind Shield. Because of course it was.

He held it up, puffing his chest out and admiring his own reflection in the polished steel.

And then Varric turned to me.

He held out a mace. The head was wrought from solid mithril, shaped into roaring dragon skulls with cold, glowing green stones set in the eyes. I grabbed the leather-wrapped haft. It was heavy. Beautiful and balanced perfectly, like my father's favorite forging hammer.

A weapon that fed directly off my anger and choked the life out of whatever it caught. I stared at the green eyes of the mithril skulls. That was not just a weapon. That was an executioner's tool.

Varric handed me the heavy mace. I grabbed the haft, and my hand immediately began to tingle. It felt exactly like being struck by a tiny, freezing hailstorm out in the open fields. It was not an unpleasant sensation. It just felt like pure, volatile power. After holding the item for a few seconds, the slight pain abated.

I lifted the heavy mithril dragon head up near my face to inspect the forge work. The craftsmanship was incredibly intricate, and the glowing green stones set in the eyes made the weapon look absolutely terrifying. The shaft was forged from a deep obsidian-black metal, wrapped tightly in a black leather handle that reminded me of my father's heavy smithing apron.

At first glance, it did not look like a typical mace. It looked more like the head of a spellcaster's staff. But mithril is one of the hardest elements known to exist. Despite the pretty design, it was obvious that this tool was created to cause massive physical damage. The spikes crowning the skull were not merely decorative. They were lethal and carried a razor-sharp edge. The dragon's snout was forged hard, and the jaw housed teeth explicitly spiked for ripping through armor and inflicting [Bleed] damage along with its other procs.

It certainly does pay to come in first.

Leave was uneventful. For once, that was exactly what I needed.

I burned four of those days making the trek back to Ravenscroft. My parents took one look at my face — specifically the lingering purple and yellow of the [Minor Fracture] Cassian had gifted me — and nearly locked me in the root cellar for my own good. Then I dumped the goblin gold on the table, and the lecture died in their throats.

Ten solid coins. I could have wasted it at the Emporium in Mellonwood on some shiny, mass-produced plate mail. But I know forge-work. I grew up breathing the smoke. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can out-smith my father. I slid the gold across the rough wood of our kitchen table and asked for proper armor. He gave me his single, customary nod. It would take a few weeks to hammer out, but he promised me a second skin forged specifically for a Rage Tank — high durability, but light enough that it wouldn't throttle my Agility stat or choke my movement when I needed to build aggro.

They were proud. Relieved, mostly. They admitted they had spent the last week expecting a letter of expulsion, assuming my stubborn streak was too wide to fit inside The Shield's rigid, suffocating doctrine. They noted how much I had grown. How respectful of authority I had become in just a few short days.

I kept my mouth shut and let them believe it. It is surprisingly easy to fake a deep respect for the chain of command when you have covertly rewired your commanding officer's brain. A little Veil magic and a shadow whisper in the dark makes compliance remarkably trivial. Let Cassian think he was molding me into the perfect soldier. I was the one holding the leash.

I spent the last two days back in Mellonwood, actively avoiding anyone wearing a Tetherpoint uniform. I found a tavern bluntly named Meat Haus. No pretentious poetry, just thick, dripping cuts of roasted mutton and beef that replenished my Stamina bar faster — and tasted a hell of a lot better — than Markko's bitter alchemy. I followed that up with a trip to a bathhouse called Steam, Sweat, Swim. I spent hours soaking in the crystal-clear pools, letting the heat pull the lingering physical exhaustion debuffs out of my bruised joints.

But leave always ends. The water cools. The boots go back on. The quiet was over, and I had to hike back to the academy and face the reality of The Trials.

◇ ◇ ◇

The Culling left a butcher's bill that nobody wanted to look at too closely. Twenty-seven dead. Eighty-two quit. That wiped out roughly a third of the first-year meat, leaving exactly one hundred and ninety-one of us standing in the mud.

The academy called the next phase The Trials. Five-man teams. Cross-faction allowed, because out in the real dirt, nobody cares what color your banner is when the bleeding starts. Telilah cracked and ran back to her brother, which was fine by me. That left a hole in our roster. Cassian remained our primary wall of meat and iron. Thanks to the little shadow-whisper routine I had planted in his bruised skull, he was actually acting like a proper shield instead of a rabid dog. I slotted in as a secondary tank and DPS, depending on how much kinetic trauma I needed to absorb to fuel my Rage bar.

Markko had stumbled backward into actual utility. He pulled Wind magic out of his new crystal, which broke every mold The Shield had. Usually, you relied on heavily armored Paladins or obnoxious, tree-hugging Grove zealots for triage. Markko bypassed all that. Plus, he was an artificer. He had pockets full of volatile trinkets and bombs that could turn a frontline into a crater.

Kip stayed. That was a given, but it also kept my migraine from splitting my skull entirely. He was competent. Loyal. A walking abacus who processed combat like my father processed a horseshoe — strike exactly here, exactly now, or the whole thing shatters. I had firmly suggested to Cassian, through the same quiet mind-tampering, that Kip's tactical math was absolute and required his strict obedience. Miraculously, the brute listened.

We needed a fifth. Word leaked that we cleared the Culling first, took the hardest quest, and did it short-handed. Suddenly, twenty-five stragglers wanted to ride our coattails. Cassian and I agreed on a simple filter: Kip and his brilliant analytical noggin.

First cut was sheer practicality. We had tanks. We had a makeshift healer. We had Kip locking down the ranged DPS. We needed a rogue replacement. Melee or magical DPS. We culled the heavy armor and the pacifists. Out went the Paladins. Out went the priests. Out went the Grove healers who smelled like compost. That left seventeen bodies.

I let Kip run the second cut. He built a formula that weighed their damage output, party contribution, healing dependency, and overall squishiness, grinding seventeen hopefuls down to a final five. He handed me the parchment.

And there it was. Two viable pieces left on the board. Silas from The Veil, or Ruka from The Grove. The shadow-lurking assassin and the swamp-dwelling toxicologist.

Cassian would be pissed if we chose Silas; he would be more pleased with Ruka. However, the choice was difficult looking at it factually. Neither Kip's clinical spreadsheets nor Cassian's borrowed tactical manuals had an answer for a deadlocked tie. So I bypassed the chain of command entirely, and I decided, then and there, to let the Goddess of Chaos choose for us.

"By gods, let the winds of chance choose for us. Let the RNG decide."

The party members all looked at each other and shook their heads in agreement. Cassian gave a blank stare — he wanted neither. He wanted the other member of The Shield. Oh well. The rest agreed.

So I dug into my pocket and fished out one of the tarnished silver coins I'd brought from home.

Heads, we bet on the shadows. Tails, we take the swamp.

I flicked my thumb. The coin went up, spinning like a dropped farrier's nail catching the forge light. It hit the floor of our meeting room with a dull thud. No dramatic ringing. Just gravity doing its job.

I leaned over.

Heads.

The shadow-lurking assassin it was.

"Statistically acceptable," Kip stated. He did not blink. He just dragged a line through Ruka's name on his parchment. "Silas provides the highest burst damage potential. I will update the party ledger."

"A bold choice, Elias," Cassian rumbled with disappointment and venom. "The Shield must learn to utilize all available weapons. I suppose. I'm trusting you on this one, underling. But if he steps out of line, I will not hesitate to engineer a permanent solution to rid us of his kind."

He glared at me, and for good measure, he grabbed my shoulders in a vice grip to assert his physical dominance, letting me know he was serious. With that, I went to deliver Silas the good news.

◇ ◇ ◇

I found Silas lingering near the sparring rings.

I approached him.

"You made the cut," I said. My voice was flat. "We need a melee executioner for The Trials. You are in."

Silas tilted his head. The shadows shifted around his hood. "Group Three. The Shield golden boys. And you want a Veil dagger in your ranks." His voice was a dry whisper.

"You are lethal to monsters," I replied. "And we need someone who can crush a head like a melon."

"Cassian Drake hates The Veil," Silas noted.

"Yes, and he promised as much — to take care of you if you tried anything," I said.

I sent a party invite to Silas. A notification window cascaded into my peripheral vision.

"Fine. But I do not take hits for you," Silas said. "And you can let Cassian know, I made the same promise against him."

Drills. Drills. And more drills.

We were less than two days until the start of The Trials. I mandated a brutal schedule — at least I did through Cassian. Repetition. The kind of physical grinding that left your arms shaking and your [Fatigue] debuffs stacked past the point of clearing overnight. We needed tactics. We needed something resembling party cohesion before the real blood started flowing.

Silas was a problem. A necessary one. The boy was Veil, which meant he operated like a stray barn cat with a god complex. He looked at the rest of us like we were meat waiting to spoil. Merging The Shield and The Veil in one squad was an architectural nightmare. The Shield demanded you bow to the loudest lion in the room, absorbing abuse and calling it loyalty. The Veil preferred a silent model of shared competence. They voted on leadership in the dark, or they just knew where to put the knife without being told.

Silas himself made no sense. A Veil assassin trying out for a Shield roster defied the basic math of the factions. When I asked him why, Silas just sneered at me from under his blackened hood. He had heard the whispers in the courtyard. He caught the scent of Veil magic on me. He wanted a front seat to watch the farm boy play with forbidden fire.

Then came the real chore. Managing Cassian.

My new role as his trusted advisor was less advising than steering a blind bull away from a cliff edge. Even with the Shadow Whispers buried in his head, the work never stopped. I had to pull the puppet strings I had installed. I told him bluntly that brute force would fail against the assassin. Trying to dominate Silas would only result in a severed throat or a sabotaged mission. Silas required consultation in our battle stratagem. He needed to be treated as a competent fighter, not a dog to be kicked.

I watched Cassian process it. You could practically hear the iron gears grinding against the rust. His jaw clenched. A vein stood up along his temple. The urge to enforce his precious chain of command ground against the whispers I had buried in his skull.

The whispers won.

"Discipline requires tactical flexibility, Elias," Cassian gritted out, his face straining around the words. "If the shadow rat needs the illusion of a voice to remain subservient, I will permit it."

"A wise strategy," I replied.

I kept my expression flat. But underneath my ribs, a quiet heat turned over. I was controlling the brute that had tortured me. And if I were to be honest, I liked the feel of it. Looking back, that should have worried me more than it did.

◇ ◇ ◇

Silas was an abrasive bastard. He carried an arrogance thick enough to choke a draft horse, but the plain math of his build was undeniable. He didn't just hide in the shadows. He wore them like my father wore his leather apron at the forge.

The ability was called [Shadow Meld]. It went well beyond the standard stealth that rogues used to avoid detection before a fight. Instead, it allowed him to sink directly into the dark during active combat, rendering him untargetable for ten seconds while keeping his own offensive capabilities wide open.

The cooldown was a heavy ten minutes, meaning he got one free execution window per skirmish, but the skill was obnoxiously overpowered for its short duration. That was because it stacked flawlessly with his [Shadow Blade Dance]. That ability carried a twenty-minute cooldown, but for fifteen seconds, it spiked his attack speed and critical hit chance in direct proportion to his Agility stat.

When he popped both at the same time, Silas became an unstoppable, localized meat-grinder. And that was all on top of his [Shadow Strike] passive, which coated his blades in shadow force that chunked away the target's HP and MP at the same time.

Kip mapped Silas's violence into our party rotation with the efficiency of a man sorting iron nails by gauge. He built defensive and offensive contingencies, threading the assassin's cooldowns into my own need to absorb physical trauma to generate Rage. Kip's grasp of stats, skills, and tactics was encyclopedic. He identified tactical blind spots that Cassian and I lacked the vocabulary to even see.

Watching him work, the logic of it settled into my gut like a swallowed anvil. No wonder Cassian had spent years beating Kip into wagging obedience. A mind like Kip's did not come around often, let alone paired with the analytical chops to execute those strategies in the mud. To own that weapon, Cassian had broken the boy like a stubborn colt, translating abuse into friendship until Kip did not know the difference.

An uglier thought surfaced and scratched at the inside of my skull. If Cassian saw the raw utility in Kip and hammered him into a submissive tool, what exactly was he trying to do with me? Was the hazing, the beatings, the rigid insistence on the chain of command just his way of breaking my posture? Putting the saddle on the farm boy before I realized how heavy my own swing was becoming?

I hated the compliment buried in that logic almost as much as I hated him. The idea that this inbred, tiny-wanged bully was trying to control me for his own ends made the Rage bar in my periphery simmer red. My hand flexed on its own, some patient part of my brain visualizing the crunch of his orbital bone giving way. Nobody was going to control me. Not ever again.

◇ ◇ ◇

Cassian broke the thought, finding me near the weapon racks.

"He will do," Cassian grunted. He wiped sweat from his brow after a brutal sequence. "I do not trust him, but his fighting is undeniable."

"I knew you would see why this was a wise choice," I said, keeping my tone subordinate.

"If he fucks us over, it is your head on a pike too, Elias."

"Understood."

I offered a slight, placating bow. It cost me nothing, and it kept his fragile reality intact.

We walked over to where the rest of the party rested on the stone benches.

"Silas," Cassian barked.

The assassin turned, the shadows shifting around his hood. "What is it?"

"Do not let it get to your head, but you are pretty good with a blade. Welcome aboard."

Cassian said it with a forced civility that looked physically painful. Then the mask slipped. "But do not forget. You fuck us over, or you fuck with my men, and I will not hesitate to put a sword through your rib cage."

For a second, I thought the fragile alliance was going to shatter.

Then Silas's pale face lit up.

"And if you turn your back on me, I will hunt you and kill you in your sleep," Silas replied.

The venom was real. So was the grin spreading under his hood.

I watched the two of them stare each other down. They were actually enjoying this. Trading death threats like farmers haggling over a bruised apple. It was banter, of a kind, but it meant they were not currently trying to sever each other's limbs. Could be worse, I supposed.

Kip stepped forward, puncturing the murderous tension.

"Are we ready to tell the Archmage that our party is complete?" Kip asked. His voice was pure monotone, deaf to the hostility hanging in the air.

"Yes. Let us go," Cassian directed. He adjusted his heavy pauldron like a lord preparing to address his peasants. "Walk in formation. Try to look like a proper Shield unit."

We made our way across the stone floor over to the Archmage. Varric Pyre stood near the podium, wearing that same smug, storm-lit smile. Cassian reported our finalized party roster to him with the pompous gravity of a general negotiating a kingdom's borders. Varric simply logged the names. His eyes caught mine for a fraction of a second, cold and knowing, before moving on.

We found a spot in the great hall and waited for our next set of instructions.