The air in the Hall snapped cold as every head turned to watch Soren wipe the sweat from his brow, reset his practice blade, and exit the circle.

He followed Dane through two antechambers, each lined with old oil portraits, none of which Soren recognized or cared to linger on. The Swordmaster's office waited at the end, smaller than anticipated, but clean to the point of asceticism.

Three blades hung behind the desk, each in a different state of undress: a ceremonial saber, a battered dueling sword, and a weapon so ancient it looked like it might have been excavated, not forged.

Dane stood by the high window, mid-distance gaze fixed on the rain-lashed rooftops of the city. He didn't sit, nor did he offer Soren the one guest chair present in the room.

"You've been walking the halls after curfew." Dane didn't phrase it as a question.

"Yes, sir," Soren replied. No sense bluffing; the Swordmaster's attention was surgical.

Dane's jaw ticked minutely, a measurement weighing annoyance against expectation.

"You're not the first to think the rules are optional. But you are the only one who bothers to shadow the instructors."

Soren let the silence grow, resisting the urge to clarify or correct.

"So," Dane said, turning to face him. "Are you learning anything from them?"

Soren considered. He wasn't sure what answer would serve best, so he defaulted to the partial truth. "I saw Instructor Veyra marking wards on the dorms."

Dane's eyes narrowed, nothing else moved. "And you followed her?"

"Yes, sir."

The Swordmaster let out a breath, more a valve-release than a sigh. "Most would be afraid to even notice."

Soren said nothing.

Dane moved to his desk, where he pressed his palms flat against the wood, the posture of a man holding back a flood. "You're not afraid of the right things," he said, as if to himself. This time, his voice dropped lower. "Do you know what the foundation of Aetherion is, Vale?"

Soren hesitated, in many places it would be philosophy, or doctrine, or the bones of the dead. Here, he guessed the question was literal. "Stone."

Dane shook his head, a flick so sharp his hair barely moved. "Binding. This entire place is constructed not to teach power, but to contain it. Every lesson, every duel, every sigil, containment, not expression."

He gestured, and Soren stepped quietly closer, unsure whether this was a rebuke or an education.

Dane looked as if he wanted to say more, but held it inside. "You're being watched from more than one direction," he said at last. "Keep your curiosity from exceeding your camouflage, and you'll survive another month."

Soren nodded and glanced at the ancient blade on the wall.

Dane caught his gaze. "That sword belonged to the first master of this Academy. He was assassinated by a student he chose not to notice. Do you understand the lesson?"

"Don't underestimate students?" Soren offered.

"Don't forget which edge is turned outward." Dane's voice softened by almost nothing. "Dismissed."

Soren saluted, awkward, unschooled, and left the Swordmaster's office, feeling the weight of three hundred years of discipline pressing on his shoulders.

In the corridor, Valenna's presence rose around the edges of his thoughts, this time edged with something sour and faintly amused. "He is not wrong," she said. "Containment is the true art of a blade. Yours, or theirs."

Soren returned to the Hall of Mirrors, and for a moment the flash of blue seemed to follow at his shoulder, a whisper of wrongness in a world obsessed with the fracture of its own image. He squared his reflection and tried to see, in the infinite multiplication of self, the single version which might actually survive this place.

He couldn't.

But he could pretend.

And in the Academy, sometimes pretense was the only difference between promotion and elimination.

Night bled into the common lounge on the fourth floor, where a group of initiates had taken up position along the semicircular benches nearest the roaring fireplace.

Rain lashed at the fogged windows, distorting the city's lights into a shifting patchwork of gold and black. Soren watched from the overlook above, his shadow invisible among the library's colonnades.

Cassian had drawn nearly all the attention, six or seven in his inner orbit, another dozen drifting in the bleed between conversation and eavesdrop.

The topic, Soren realized, was him.

Cassian's voice felt engineered to sound careless, every phrase feathered with humor and just enough volume to reach the unattached. "When was the last time an initiate got called by Master Dane three times in seven days and didn't land in the Infirmary?" He let the question dangle, the laughter that followed it natural enough to belong to any upper-tier salon. Soren marked the smiles: who bared teeth, who looked away.

"Heard it's for 'additional instruction,'" said a dark-haired girl from the southern provinces, Aria, or something like it. "Maybe he's just slow to learn."

Another round of laughter, thinner now.

Cassian twirled his spoon through the dregs of his mug. "And yet, no marks, no bruises, no stories. Only that golden silence." He angled his head just so, the pose inviting confidence. "That's what worries me."

Someone else, probably Elri of the slouch and the perpetual leg twitch, asked: "Why, exactly?" The tone was all mockery, but Soren caught the faint clench in his jaw.

"Because silence is for secrets," Cassian answered, eyes on the fire. "And what this place breeds best isn't swords, it's secrets with sharp edges." Several nodded, including one or two who'd previously seemed immune to Cassian's charisma.

Soren leaned back, feeling the pulse at his wrist quicken. He didn't move, didn't shift his hands or change his breathing, though part of him itched to see if the conversation would shift to the Arcanists, to Veyra.

He didn't have to wait long.

"Anyway," Cassian said, now putting the whole coterie onstage, "anyone else notice the wards being set harder in the north hall? Or is just the Blade dorms getting the special attention?"

Three hands shot up. Cassian, ever the magnanimous, nodded to each, conducting the air like an orchestra. The consensus: the worse the weather, the more the blue sigils crept in on every frame, codex, and stairwell.

Soren logged who claimed to see them, and who deflected.

From the edge of the firelight, Kale Trennor grinned crookedly. "Maybe it's to keep Vale here from sleepwalking his way into the forbidden archives. He does have the look of a fabled arsonist, doesn't he?"

Even that jab slid off Soren like oiled silk. He wondered if the direction of the scrutiny mattered, or if it was the act of being noticed which posed the real threat.

He marked the group: the ones ruled by pride, those ruled by fear, and the slippery third cohort that navigated by neither but only by how the wind blew.

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