Hours later, the simulation room of the Arcanum Ring was alive with echoes.

Thorne stood in the middle of the circle, breath sharp, wand raised. A faint tremor still lingered in the air, the afterimage of his last attempt quivering along the walls where a shallow groove had been bitten into the stone. Dust floated in the motes of aether-light above, swirling in lazy spirals.

The spell was called Sunderstrike.

It wasn't simple like Flame Needle, something sleek and elegant that could be pushed into form with little more than focus and anger. This was heavier, demanding precision and discipline. Four sigils. A longer incantation that had to be timed perfectly. And worst of all, the weaving of refined aether into multiple pathways, splitting it from his core, directing each line into place at the exact moment before releasing.

One slip, one hesitation, and it unraveled into nothing.

Thorne drew a steadying breath, letting the air fill him, emptying his mind of the chatter of the day. He pictured Argessa's lessons, her voice crisp in his memory, reminding him how to pace the flow of refined aether. Not all at once. Not in a rush. A stream, guided and bent, carried where it needed to go.

"Alright," he muttered. "Again."

He raised the wand, closed his eyes, and felt his core stir. Aether surged, hot and eager, straining to burst free. He forced it down, split it, channeled it.

The aether coursed through his body in split streams, each one tugging at his concentration as it pressed toward the focus in his hand. When it reached his wand, he began the most delicate part, tracing the four sigils into the air, each stroke leaving behind a fleeting shimmer. To the untrained eye, nothing more than ripples of heat-distorted air. But to Thorne's Elderborn sight, the lines burned like molten wire across the void, perfect geometry stitched into reality itself.

Rathen curved like a crescent, a single sharp edge humming with potential. Vorun cut straight, jagged strokes crossing each other like shattered glass. Selis spiraled inward, tight and unyielding, pulling at the flow around it. Korrin anchored them all, a harsh square frame that pulsed in rhythm with his own heartbeat.

Every line had to be exact, every angle balanced. A fraction too slow, a tilt too wide, and the pattern dissolved in a blink. Most students could only grope at the invisible shapes, feeling for where the flows aligned. But Thorne? He could see them. Every stroke, every flare, seared into the air like writing carved in starlight. It was his one unfair advantage, and he leaned into it, determined not to waste it.

His lips moved through the words of the incantation, each syllable binding the pattern together. The air around him warped faintly, as if the room itself was holding its breath.

And then he thrust the wand forward.

A ripple shuddered through the air in a straight line ahead, bending the light like heat distortion. It slammed into the stone target thirty feet away with a muffled crack, scattering dust as a thin fracture spidered across the wall.

The ripple faded, the silence of the chamber returning.

Thorne lowered his wand, panting. "Weak," he muttered. But it was something.

He rolled his shoulders, grounding himself again. The challenge wasn't summoning the force, he'd managed that quickly enough, faster than he had any right to. The challenge was the precision. Guiding refined aether along four pathways at once, feeding each at the exact moment, not a fraction too early or too late. That was what strained him. That was what needed practice.

Argessa's techniques had helped, giving him the tools to separate his focus, to hold the streams apart instead of letting them tangle. But it still felt like juggling knives in a storm.

He grit his teeth, raising the wand again.

"Once more."

When the ambient light inside the chamber flared, signaling another hour had passed, Thorne lowered his wand. His arm ached, his head throbbed, and the sigil lines still glimmered faintly in his aether vision before fading like afterimages burned into his eyes. He exhaled and let the spell unravel.

That was enough.

He had a decent grasp of Sunderstrike now. Not mastery, not even close, but he could probably pull it off in a duel with middling success. To truly command it, though, to make it strike like the breaking of the world instead of a ripple against stone, would take hours upon hours of practice. Hours he didn't have. There were assignments waiting for him, essays half-finished, and more classes lined up than he wanted to think about.

With a resigned grunt, he holstered Ashthorn at his side and left the chamber.

At the counter, the attendant barely looked up before sliding a slate across the desk. "Eighteen cycles, three hours each. That's fifty-four gold coins."

Thorne gritted his teeth. Fifty-four. Enough to buy a small wagon back in Caledris. He counted out the gleaming coins all the same, pushing the stack forward with a flat expression. The price of progress, he told himself, though it still made his stomach twist.

Before he could turn away, the attendant produced two folded letters sealed with wax. "These came for you while you trained."

Thorne raised an eyebrow but took them without a word. His curiosity stirred, letters weren't common, not here, but before he could break either seal, movement in the corner of his vision caught his attention.

Rowenna stepped out of one of the adjacent simulation chambers, her mahogany braid tight, her uniform immaculate even after a session. She carried herself like a drawn bow, rigid and unyielding, every line of her body precise.

"Rowenna," Thorne called.

She looked at him. Just for a moment. Then her gaze slid past him like he wasn't there, and she kept walking.

Thorne sighed, shaking his head. The letters felt suddenly heavy in his hand. He tucked them away and left the hall.

As he walked past the floating bridge and into the central courtyard, Thorne cracked the wax seals.

The first letter was written in Argessa's sharp, looping hand:

Thorne, a new shipment has arrived. Wands, staves, orbs, all in need of hands to test them. Stop by after class. I expect notes, not just impressions.

The second, written in Marian's precise, angular script, felt colder:

You missed last night's practice. Do not make a habit of this. I am not in the business of wasting my time, nor should you be in the business of wasting yours. Tonight. Same time. Do not disappoint me.

Thorne sighed again, feeling his shoulders slump. Everyone wanted a piece of him these days.

By the time he reached his room, all he wanted was to collapse onto the bed. Instead, he sat on his tiny desk, dipped his quill into the inkpot, and stared down at a blank sheet of parchment. With a resigned groan, he cracked open the thick, dry-spined tome of Elemental Theory & Control and began to write.

"The fundamental error of novice mages lies in treating the elements as separate forces. Fire and water are not opposites, but two halves of the same cycle. To create flame, one requires air; to temper flame, one requires water. To mistake them for enemies is to misunderstand that all elements are bound by refined aether, the common root. The theory of elemental equilibrium rests not in dominance, but in rhythm, a rhythm any serious caster must learn to hear before they can shape."

His eyes bounced between the textbook and his own cramped handwriting until the words blurred together. Eventually, when the essay was at least somewhat passable, he pushed it aside and reached for the next assignment sheet.

This one was mercifully shorter, a practical list for Alchemical Applications I. He scrawled down the required ingredients for one of the simpler brews:

Potion of Whispering Wake (A minor stimulant favored by students cramming for exams.)

3 measures of powdered moonleaf

2 drops of silver dew

1 sprig of sunmint

A pebble of refined quartz, dissolved in heat

Common side effects if brewed incorrectly:

Temporary ringing in the ears (mild cases)

Sleeplessness for up to three days (moderate)

Whispers in the mind, escalating to paranoia (severe mishandling)

Thorne leaned back, rubbing ink-stained fingers against his temples. Elemental essays, potion lists, wands to test, lessons to attend, Marian breathing down his neck, all while half the academy whispered his name like it meant something.

Sometimes he wondered how long he could keep this up before it all cracked.

Before he went to Marian's crystal tower, Thorne grabbed a quick handful of the enchanted snacks that always seemed to appear in the small sitting area outside his room, candied nuts, crisp apple slices that never browned, a wedge of soft bread steaming with warmth as though freshly baked. Convenient, yes, but hardly satisfying. He would have preferred roasted meat and honeyed potatoes in the Astral Hall, but he had neither the time nor the patience to sit under the stares and whispers that seemed to follow him everywhere these days.

When the bell chimed midnight, a low, resonant tone that made the ambient aether in the walls vibrate faintly like a plucked string, Thorne stood. With a breath, he pulled his stealth skills about him like a cloak, letting the shadows swallow his form. The few students lingering in the common room of Umbra never even glanced his way as he slipped past, unseen.

The crystal tower was quiet when he arrived, its tall panes glinting with moonlight and starlight alike, refracting in pale ribbons of silver and violet. He rapped once, knuckles against cold crystal. The door parted soundlessly, and Marian stood waiting, her expression unreadable, her eyes sharp.

Wordlessly, she turned and led him inside.

Moments later, the world fell away.

He stood once more upon the small, round island, no larger than a stadium, set adrift in the middle of endless waters. The air here was thick with aether, so dense it reminded him of Aetherhold itself, every breath filling his lungs with a quiet hum of power. This was no illusion, Marian had told him once this place was one of the primal spots in the world, untouched by mortal feet until now. Around the island stretched a vast tropical sea, its waters dark and fathomless, stirred by unseen currents. Somewhere in those depths, he could feel the presence of massive things moving, aether beasts that made his skin prickle, their silhouettes breaking the surface now and again before sliding back beneath.

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This was where Marian taught him. This was where the real lessons began.

Marian lifted her hand, the pearl ring on her finger pulsing with a soft glow, and reality itself seemed to ripple in response. The air shivered, then peeled back like a curtain and out of the shimmer, a massive figure emerged. A golem, wrought of jagged earth and lattices of crystal, its surface catching the faint starlight in cold gleams. It stood motionless, like a monument carved by ancient hands, until Marian stepped forward. With a casual grace, she pressed a small mana crystal into a hollowed cavity in its chest.

The gem sank into place, flared once, and the golem shuddered.

Its eyes, two burning slits of pale light, flickered open.

Thorne sighed, already knowing what was coming. "That thing again…" he muttered under his breath.

"Begin," Marian said, her voice cutting across the island like a commandment sung into being.

The golem's body ground and shifted, plates of stone sliding with terrible weight, while Thorne moved to meet it, hands already raised. He reached for the ambient aether, calling it to him, his focus fixed not just on shaping force, but on Marian's newest cruel lesson:

Aether Flow Phasing.

Until now, his aether constructs, the blades, the shields, the barrages, existed in the world as solid things, clashing against matter, resisted by it. But Marian demanded something more subtle, more refined: to thin them, to let them slip between what was tangible and intangible. A blade that passed harmlessly through armor, only to solidify inside. Constructs that cut through the world without leaving ripples. Power that whispered instead of thundered.

And against this opponent, he had no choice. The golem's defenses were absurd, its body built from rare aether-infused stone that turned aside nearly everything he threw at it. He had tried before, Aether Barrage, Aetheric Explosion, even clever combinations, and none had done more than scratch the surface. The thing was a wall of crystal and earth, and worse, it fought back.

A tremor split the ground as the golem raised one massive arm, shards of crystal jutting from its forearm like a siege weapon ready to fire. Marian, ever the picture of composure, merely folded her hands and observed.

Thorne exhaled through his nose, muttering again, "Of course she has this thing."

Marian's lips curved in the faintest hint of amusement. "A loan from a dear friend of mine," she said.

That was nearly as shocking to Thorne as the golem itself. Marian, having friends? That was a thought worth staggering over, if only the golem wasn't already hurling a volley of jagged crystal in his direction.

The pearl on Marian's ring flashed like a captured moon and the island answered. Stone shouldered itself out of calm sand; crystal ribs grew through it in spirals; joints locked with the sound of a cliff deciding to stand. The golem's chest opened like a vault. Marian slid a thumb-sized mana crystal into the socket and stepped back.

A hum rolled through the clearing.

The thing woke.

"Begin," she sang, as if asking him to recite a poem.

Thorne didn't reach for Ashthorn. He didn't need it. He pulled air through his teeth and with it the ambient aether, thick as surf here. It came happily, he's always had that effect on motes, a knack for pulling them into shape on intent alone, and they answer him like trained hounds.

He didn't make a blade. Not yet. He made absence.

A ribbon of almost-nothing unspooled between his fingers, an edge sketched in faint frost and bent light. He stepped in, heel kissing sand, and let the ribbon drift through the golem's shin. At the last instant he forced the edge to reality inside the leg.

Too early.

The edge bit crystal plate, sparked, screamed, and skated off. The golem hardly noticed. It swung. Earth jumped. Shards howled off its forearm in a fan.

"Your phase is late," Marian said, utterly serene. "You're treating solidity like a switch. Think breath. Out, gone. In, here."

The volley came. Thorne cut left, riding a two-stride silent stair that appeared and vanished underfoot, platforms that didn't displace air, didn't stir grit, didn't even whistle when they blinked out. He palmed a thin veil-wall into the shard stream, phasing it inside the flight path; the crystals met solidity from within and burst into glittering dust that never touched him.

"Better," Marian murmured. "You're still dragging turbulence. I can hear it."

He bared a fang and smiled despite himself. Of course she could hear the turbulence.

He flowed right. The golem tore a furrow with its palm and the island's crust answered; a ridge bucked up beneath him like a surfacing whale. Thorne lifted one hand and drew four lines in the air, not sigils, but vectors, feeding the ring's heavy ambient into a woven lattice thinner than hair. It looked like a spider tried to remember geometry and got excited.

He cast it like a net.

It passed through crystal plate without a sound.

Inside the leg, at the knee, Thorne saw it all with Elderborn sight: stress lines, growth bands in the quartz, a slow oscillation as the mana-core's beat propagated through the frame. The trick Marian wanted was timing the phase-in to the down-beat of that oscillation so the lattice would harden where the frame wanted to move.

He counted the pulse, one-two-three, and closed his fist on four.

The lattice solidified.

The knee didn't explode. It stopped. All its momentum went nowhere; cracks spidered inward; the golem staggered and dropped to one side hard enough to shiver sand into rings.

"Closer," Marian said. "Again."

The golem answered her by raking up a wall of sand and stone, sheathing it in crystal and driving it forward like a slow, inexorable bulldozer.

"While we're here," Marian added lightly, as if they were discussing the weather, "you should answer the Empire. Doors become walls when neglected."

A crystal spire scythed at his head. Thorne clenched his fist and snapped a thin phase-plane into being, a ghost-slice of aether that opened like a hinge. The spire cut through the empty fold, shearing itself in two as the plane snapped shut again with a hiss of displaced dust.

"Varo says there's a way to avoid the sponsorship," he said, dropping a hand. A set of micro-wedges, dozens of phasing splinters, whispered through the moving wall, set themselves inside its keystones, and then became iron. The wall folded like bad origami. "So I find it."

"Varo knows many ways to gamble with other people's futures," she said. "Phase on the off-beat, Thorne."

The golem planted both hands and the island convulsed. A crown of needle-crystals shot up in a ring. Thorne slid through, leaving no footprint, riding zero-ripple steps that existed only on the idea of contact. He threw a hollow blade, a sheath of almost-space, through the golem's torso and waited. When the blade's trailing edge cleared the back-plate he snapped the world shut.

The sound was a jar sealing.

A long crack opened down the golem's spine.

"Good," Marian allowed. "You're thinking in volumes, not edges."

The golem learned. It began salting the air with dust to catch disturbances, throwing wide fans of grit that would bloom around anything that displaced it. Thorne smiled: fine. He flicked his fingers and seeded the space before him with a veil-field of phased screens, each one eating the dust that touched it and releasing only still air. He sprinted through the corridor of false calm he created, unseen until he was already inside the golem's guard.

"Answer them," Marian continued, voice unbothered as she tracked him with that pearl-pale gaze. "The Third Light won't keep kneeling. You think Aetherhold is the only board on which you're a piece."

The golem hammered both fists down. Thorne slid sideways, dragging a ribbon of phasing aether through the air like a whip. It snapped into a six-sided cage construct that clamped around the golem's chest, each translucent plane shimmering with glasslike veins. When the core pulsed, its mana had to squeeze through his false lattice. Thorne twisted his fingers, locking the cage's joints, and the construct half-solidified on the pulse.

Everything seized.

The golem hiccupped, a cathedral forgetting a prayer.

"I told you," he said, boots braced on ribs of fused quartz, "I'm not bending the knee just because they sent a pretty emissary. If there's a way out, I'll find it."

"You mistake time for choice," she said. "Again."

The golem blew him out of its chest with a cone of pressurized grit and razors. He turned midair, drew a mute disc that only existed where the pressure would be worst, and let the blast spend itself on a surface that did not quite happen. He dropped, bent, and sliced a phase-shear through the left hip: an infinitesimal-thin plane that existed for less than a blink, exactly where the load path had to travel.

The hip failed. The giant listed.

"Your phasing cadence is improving," Marian said, which, coming from Marian, rated as lavish praise. "Now marry it to layering."

He did.

Three constructs at once, all on different beats. A tremor-veil across its feet, phased so its contact with the island pretended to be water. A spine-hook threaded through vertebrae, timed to harden right after the tremor made the posture sway, and a kernel-pin, a single, hair-thin spike, sunk through the gap in the crystal collar around the core's socket, not touching, just waiting.

"Exhale," Marian said.

He did. The veil melted; the giant dipped; the hook bit; the pin kissed the socket as the whole frame tried to compensate, and for a heartbeat Thorne held the creature's entire posture on five ounces of thought.

"Inhale."

He did. Everything that wasn't real became real.

The golem locked.

Not broken, not dead, just held in a geometry it could not resolve, posture and pulse out of argument with one another. The mana crystal in its chest squealed as the socket warped a fraction; the light in its eyes fluttered.

Marian's pearl ring chimed softly. "Now exit without collapsing it."

Hard mode. Fine.

Thorne reversed the order: he let the hook dissolve into not-quite, slid the pin out as if it had never been there, and last he turned the tremor-veil to vapor so the feet accepted load again without step. The golem groaned, sagged to one knee, and… lived.

It turned its head toward him.

He could have ended it there with a thought and a line.

He didn't.

He hopped down from the ribs, landing without a footfall. The dust didn't stir.

Marian watched him for a beat. "You are very good at crude miracles," she said, almost affectionate, which on her sounded like a threat. "But if you cannot make them silent, you will always be late. And the Empire will not forgive lateness."

Thorne rolled his shoulders, heat slick on his skin. "I hear you," he said, which was not the same as agreeing. "One more."

"Two," she said, composing her face into that patient severity he had come to hate. "And then you will draft your reply."

He didn't answer. He moved.

The next passage looked like nothing at all. He became the calm in his own storm. The constructs manifested without edge or spark: a whisper-sword that wasn't seen even in aether sight until it kissed a seam; a pocket carved into the golem's forearm where a volley of crystals teleported to be before they could launch; a shimmer-stitch sewn through a knee and tied in a knot that only existed when the leg fully extended. Each was phased in and out on different sub-beats of the core's hum, each layered so that touching one woke or silenced the next.

The golem tried to rise.

It couldn't find a way the world allowed.

Its chest heaved; its arm drew back; its leg refused the thought of straightness; the volley it meant to fire was already spent into a pocket of unmoving air that hadn't been there a breath ago. It froze, confused, if rock could be, and leveled its blank gaze at him.

Marian's voice came softer. "Answer them, Thorne."

He looked back at her over his shoulder, breath steadying, phasing cadence finally settling into that breath she kept demanding. Out, gone; in, here.

"I'll write something," he said, and for once didn't lace it with defiance.

"Good." She lifted a hand and the mana crystal in the golem's chest gave a courteous chime. Its light dimmed to embers; the frame sagged. "Return my friend in one piece and I will consider loaning it again."

He snorted. "You have friends."

"Two," she said primly. "Both patient."

The last of his constructs unwove, leaving the golem to settle into maintenance stillness. The island sighed. The sea beyond muttered with distant, predatory life.

Marian studied him a long moment, the sheen of aether across his skin, the way the motes hung near him like moths to a lantern, even here, even when he forced them to do precise things instead of loud ones.

"Again tomorrow," she said.

He nodded once, already replaying the beats in his head, where he'd been late, where the knot had hiccupped, where the pocket had cost a whisper of dust he shouldn't have displaced. Advanced, yes. Fussy. Maddening. But the moment the phasing sang, the constructs felt like they belonged there, like he'd always known how to set knives inside the world and make the world forget.

He let the ambient aether slip from his grip. The motes lingered a heartbeat longer than they should have, then drifted away.

"Tomorrow," he echoed, and the island's heavy air carried the promise.

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