Mist filled the abandoned quarry, stone dust coated the back of the throat, and water dripped from the terraces where the mountain had buried seventeen men four years back.

  Aron knelt in the grit and pressed his palm flat against the damp earth. The silver scar tissue on his left hand itched. Jagged as fracturing stone, it marked where the mountain had tried to take him too. Now it warned him when magic lurked nearby, like the old spells still lingering here from when masons used explosive enchantments to cut marble. His palm burned against their residual energy.

  Eighteen years old, pale from indoor drafting work, he wore his father's old canvas coat. Graphite stained his fingers black, ground so deep into the skin that no amount of lye could bleach it out. Grey eyes tracked invisible angles in the air while his right hand sketched formulas in the dust.

  Five meters away, Garett Lok tested a chunk of broken stone in his hands. Eighteen like Aron, but built different. Rubble hauling had layered large muscles across his shoulders. He breathed in deep and exhaled a cloud of mist in the cold air as his wrapped hands opened and closed. His father had died in the southern tier collapse, but Garett wore that grief like ballast, not an anchor.

  Heat flared in Aron's palm. "Resonance is thick. Something in the southern cavity bleeds old mana."

  "Good," Garett said. "Patrols won't come near it. They're scared of ghosts."

  "Ghosts don't singe palms."

  "Stupidity does." Garett laughed, low and brief. He peeled back rags from blistered hands, revealed shiny tight skin, then rewrapped them tighter. "Ready?"

  Standing, Aron brushed dust from his knees. Forty units of mana pooled in his chest. Enough for nine iterations of the spell he had been working on if he maintained discipline. He extended his right hand and formed his fingers into the conduit shape his mother's notes had described.

  "Stone density four," he calculated aloud. "Shape modifier 0.8. Size 0.1 cubic meters. Base cost 0.3. Duration 1 second. Force strength three. Distance 0.5."

  Stone dust vibrated above his palm. Particles coalesced. His reservoir drained in measured pulses.

  Shape formed first. A needle thin dagger of compressed mineral hovered, rotating. Duration holding it together. Launch force engaged.

  Eyes narrowing, he tried to layer a second force, a delayed ricochet at ninety degrees after half a second. Three more mana required.

  The spell ran dry mid cast. He hadn't reserved enough.

  First force fired, sharp crack of displaced air. Second force sputtered, then nothing. The projectile spun wild, tumbled like a thrown pencil, burring itself in a nearby pile of dirt.

  Shoulders dropped. Mouth curled. "Why is this difficult? One hour with a mage's handbook. That's all I need." He turned to Garett. "I'm getting closer."

  Garett shook his head, grinning. "You've said that every night this month."

  "Missed by calculation, not theory. Fixable." Aron rubbed his palm, now silent. "Your turn. Try not to lose any fingers."

  Garett stepped to the center. His magic lacked Aron's precision. Brutish. Instinctive. Desperate.

  Both hands rose, palms cupped. "Fire element," he muttered. "Sphere shape, modifier 1.4. Density 0.8, size 1.5. Duration 0.1 seconds, explosive trigger. Force strength three, distance 0.1 meter."

  Crimson flame coalesced from air, ionizing into plasma. It spun above his blistered palms until fully formed, then force launched it outward. Duration lasted an instant. Explosive property engaged, detonating at his fingertips.

  The blast knocked Garett onto his back. Heat flashed. The crack echoed off quarry walls, scattering birds. Garett lay in the dust, laughing through pain, cradling hands that wept clear fluid beneath his bandages.

  "It worked!" He sat up, holding his palms against his chest. "Just need to fix the distance timing."

  Crouching low, Aron crossed to him. He looked at the burns, at damage wrought by necessity on a body that couldn't afford safety margins. Guilt twisted his stomach. "You're destroying your hands. You’ll have no skin left by winter."

  "I’ve got plenty of skin." Garett's grin was tight at the edges. "It’s my currency, Aron. Like those flasks rich kids carry. I spend flesh because I can't spend gold."

  Silence settled between them. Aron looked toward the southern tier, at broken scaffolding where the collapse had happened. Memories surfaced. He had calculated those support beams, drafted specifications, and trimmed safety margins to save the Crown on timber. He built for the stone he wanted, not the stone he had. But one day, unforeseen conditions shifted a full two hundred forty tons onto supports that were rated for only two hundred.

  "Your father," Aron said, voice low. "I'm sorry. Again."

  Garett's expression shuttered as he wrapped fresh rags around his ruined hands. "You didn't make the mountain fall. The company did. You calculated what they demanded, same as you calculate spells." He looked up, meeting Aron's eyes. "If you hadn't pulled me out, I'd be down there with Dad."

  The debt hung invisible between them. Aron had dragged Garett from the rubble before more came out, tearing his palm open on a jagged rock to get grip. That left the reminder scarred into his hand. Garett never called it debt, but it bound them. He needed Aron to succeed, for them both to succeed. Needed to believe the boy who saved his life could calculate a path out of District Seven, out of the dust.

  Three sharp cracks split the air. Signal whistles. Academy patrol.

  Urgency seized Aron. He pulled Garett up. "Guards. Southern ridge."

  Garett grabbed his satchel. "Eastern spillway. We can climb up the collapsed tier."

  They ran, boots slipping on loose rock. Behind them, shouts echoed against stone and they could hear the clinking of the flasks the guards carried at their belts. They were filled with a liquid crystal, beautiful but expensive, always glowing faintly blue from the purity. It was mana ready for instant use. Meanwhile Aron and Garett had only their native pools, depleted to nearly nothing from practice. Though they knew even fully rested they stood little chance.

  Escape arithmetic raced through Aron's mind. He felt exhausted, but not empty. Perhaps enough for one last Needle. He skidded to a halt beside a precarious stone outcropping blocking the path. He just had to dislodge it, a sudden shock, and the rubble would come down to slow their pursuiters.

  His hand rose. Fingers trembling. "Stone. Dagger modifier. Density 4, size 0.1. Duration 1. Force strength 2."

  Shape formed, sipping mana. Duration activated. Then force 1… demanding 3 mana.

  But his pool ran dry. This time not from miscalculation, just pure exhaustion. He had nothing left to give.

  With only one unit of force funded. The dagger formed, solid and black, but tumbled from his palm like a stick thrown by a tired child. It hit the ground and rolled across dirt, harmless.

  Black spots danced at the edges of his vision and he began to sway. The Hollow approached, what mages called mana deprivation, and it made limbs feel like they were made of lead. He fell to his knees, lacking the strength to take a single step further.

  Garett stopped and looked back at a defeated Aron's. "Well, great." He slowly walked back and placed a steadying hand on Aron's shoulder. "Looks like we aren't getting away this time." He laughed, faced the approaching guards.

  Three figures emerged from mist, enameled leather armor gleaming, truncheons drawn. The lead guard, a woman with a jet black braid, looked at spent spell residue glowing on Aron's palm, then at explosive scorch marks blackening Garett's rags. She did not draw her sword. She merely sighed a sigh of bureaucratic annoyance.

  "Unlicensed casting in a Crown quarry," she said. "Lower class channel use without sanction. You know the penalty?"

  Karl's breath labored on the ground. Garett's burned hands rose into the air in surrender. Despite fear, despite certainty of labor camps or worse, a laugh bubbled from Garett's chest, hysterical and relieved.

  "We're caught," he said. "Red handed."

  Aron looked down, watching as the useless stone dagger he had created broke apart into dust, it was the mathematical proof of exhaustion, and he found himself smiling too. The absurdity, the precision of failure, it was inspired awe.

  The guards closed in, iron manacles glinting, while the mist continued to rise from the southern tier where the dead remained, and the silver light of spent magic faded slowly from the boys’ skin.

  Cold seeped from the stone walls and carried the smell of rust. Water running down the masonry in slow trails. Pale morning light cut through a single high window in the cell, laying a bar of light across the floor. There Aron sat with his back against the rough stone, knees drawn to his chest, as he replayed the night's failure in his head. The scar on his palm stayed quiet here; no magic thrummed through the administrative wards to make the nerves sing. Only the dull ache of empty channels remained, and the hollow exhaustion of a drained pool.

  Across the narrow corridor, separated by crude iron bars, thick as a man’s wrist, Garett Lok paced in loops. His large frame filled the small space with anxiety and his blistered skin glistened with the pale yellow of healing salve the guards had tossed at them with casual indifference; the kind of bureaucratic mercy that suggested paperwork rather than compassion.

  "Still counting?" Garett paused mid step to lean against the bars.

  Aron's fingers stopped tapping his knee. "Recalculating the escape. Force allocation was wrong. I felt I had more mana than I did. Channel degradation from exhaustion, perhaps."

  "You had enough for Shape and Duration. Saw that needle form clear as anything." Garett scratched his head. "Just dropped like a stone."

  "Exactly. Formation was precise. Duration required only a single unit for integrity. To fail at force application... it had to be close." Aron's voice clipped into the precision he used for load tolerances. "Should have required two units for meaningful propulsion. Only two units!"

  Garett laughed, a short bark holding no humor. "Mana capacity's a bastard that way. We don't really have much to work with."

  "Capacity is known. My error was variable." Aron looked down at his scarred palm, watching his silver tissue catch the dim light. "Even perfect calculations can't account for poor materials."

  Garett stopped pacing. Through the bars, his eyes met Aron's; bloodshot from smoke and exhaustion, they lacked the accusation Aron had feared for two years.

  "Sorry to get you caught up in this," Aron said quietly.

  Garett laughed again. "Says the guy who dragged me thirty feet with a broken arm and a concussion. But yeah, let’s say you owe me one."

  Aron pressed his forehead against the cold iron. "We could stop. After this. If we get the chance. Back to hauling and drafting. Forget the casting."

  Garett's voice dropped. "Watch my sister's fingers fuse in the alkali until she can’t grip a spoon? Wait for stone dust to fill my lungs like it filled my father's?"

  He lowered his voice though the corridor stayed empty, their isolation marked only by distant footsteps and water dripping somewhere deep in the facility's bowels. "My sister Lara is only twelve. Works the factory laundry in District Four, the big textile plant by the river. She got a promotion last week. Small enough to reach the boiler mechanisms for scrubbing, they said, so they keep her there twelve hours daily."

  Aron looked up. In the dim light, Garett's face showed lines beyond his years, etched by responsibility rather than time.

  "What kind of life is that?" Garett continued. "I wanted to be there for her. Maybe earn guild wages someday, enough to pull her out. Get her into a proper school. She's smart, Aron. Smarter than me. Reads everything I bring home, even my father's old engineering manuals she can barely lift." His burned hands gripped the iron bars tighter.

  Turning his palms upward, he showed the damage. "Good chance of corruption if we keep casting unsanctioned. But what choice do we have? Our kind, eighty percent dead before fifty? Ninety?" His voice softened, almost defeated. "I don't need to master force programming or Anti Gravity theory. I don't need to be the best. Just need a license."

  "You know it's not that easy." Aron shifted against the stone wall, feeling the chill seep through his thin shirt. "Practical licenses require fortunes. They're for nobles wanting easy careers."

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  Aron continued, "The only path for people like us is the Mage Academy. My mother tried. She died when I was eight; channel corruption from impurities in black market dust. I have her tablets, covered in equations, marginal notes on force intersection theory and sequential mana distribution. It's why we've gotten this far."

  Looking away from Garett, he stared at the ground while his finger traced anxious patterns across the stones. "But the Mage Academy is too dangerous. The elite struggle there. Lower class don't survive."

  Garett gripped the bars, not noticing how his burns protested. "At least it's a chance."

  His shoulders straightened, resolve hardening his face.

  Aron met his eyes through the iron, nodding. "If we ever get another..."

  Aron's scar began to tingle, faint burning spreading up his forearm. He sat upright, alert. "Something's coming."

  Garett looked toward the corridor entrance where boot heels clicked against flagstone with methodical precision. "Guards?"

  "Perhaps. Or something else." Silver light glowed faintly on Aron's palm, reacting to crystallized mana somewhere in the facility. His depleted pool ached, empty channels thirsting for replenishment. "If they send us to the crystal mines for this..."

  "You don't always win the gambles you take," Garett replied, managing a half smile despite the fear evident in his eyes.

  Footsteps approached, heavy and official, accompanied by the jingle of iron keys and the distinctive clink of glass containers. Flasks. Accompanied by their faint blue glow visible even from the corridor's end. Aron's scar sang louder, burning with warning and desire. He stood, brushing stone dust from his trousers, and faced the bars while calculating angles of approach, probabilities of survival, the efficiency of standing versus sitting when authority arrived.

  Garett moved to the front of his cell into a rigid posture, shoulders squared, that familiar pride of trying to power through overwhelming weight.

  Between them, the corridor stretched into darkness for what seemed like an eternity.

  Guards marched them through corridors reeking of sealing wax and damp, iron manacles biting cold against Aron’s wrists, heavier than the exhaustion weighing his every step. Eventually they reached an interrogation room where a stone table stood, dominating the center, its surface scarred by fingernails and burn marks from uncontrolled casting. Iron rings set into the edges suggested old restraints. A narrow window pierced the eastern wall, admitting light that stretched across the floor where two wooden stools waited together.

  Then guards shoved Aron onto one stool and Garett onto the other, the wood creaking under their weight while rough grain caught at trouser fabric. Across the table, a leather folder rested precisely aligned with the edge, its corners sharp as blades.

  Silence settled over the room, only a faint sound of movement came from the hallway.

  Soon the door opened without announcement and Proctor Voss entered, not even glancing at the two as they sat watching. Middle age had carved severe lines around hazel eyes that missed nothing and silver streaked her dark hair, pulled back in a utilitarian knot emphasizing sharp cheekbones. She wore charcoal grey Academy robes, fine wool woven tight and belted with a sash the color of dark slate. In her right hand she carried a bone stylus and in her left, two crystal flasks glowing with faint blue luminescence. She placed the flasks on the table between them and the sound of glass touching stone rang through the room.

  "Drink," she commanded, her voice carrying the timbre of someone accustomed to obedience without question. "Your channels are depleted. I require you conscious and capable of comprehension, not swaying from mana exhaustion."

  Garett reached first, burned fingers trembling as they closed around the cool glass, and Aron followed, noting the precise weight of the container and the mathematical perfection of its cylindrical shape. The liquid crystal slid down Aron’s throat to pool in his gut, cold lightning that suddenly warmed as it hit his channels. His body sang as pure mana flooded depleted pathways and the raised scar on his palm seemed to unclench as clean energy replaced the hollow ache. Across the table, Garett winced and his hands spasmed around the glass while he sucked air through his teeth, the sharp intake suggesting the clean replenishment burned worse than the spells which blistered his hands nightly.

  Voss waited until they had set the empty flasks down, watching their reactions with the patience of someone observing stress fractures in bedrock. She opened the leather folder, revealing documents written in dense bureaucratic script, illuminated with marginal seals that caught the light. Then she rose, her robes falling into precise folds, and began to circle the table with slow, deliberate steps.

  "Aron Knapper and Garett Lok," she read, their names hanging in the air before continuing. "Charges: illegal manipulation of elemental forces by unlicensed practitioners. Class four violation: lower-class channel use without Crown sanction. Circumstance: unsanctioned practice in a collapsed industrial zone, constituting reckless endangerment of municipal infrastructure and unregistered exposure to ambient mana concentrations."

  She paused behind Garett, her shadow falling across his shoulder, and without asking permission she reached down and seized his right wrist to lift his burned hand into the light. Her grip was clinical and detached, examining the blistered skin and silver staining with impersonal interest of a butcher assessing marbling.

  "Unfortunate channel trauma," she observed, turning his palm to reveal the damage. "Contact burns from explosive property miscalculation."

  Garett’s jaw tightened, but he did not pull away.

  Voss released him and continued her circuit, her footsteps measuring the stone floor in precise intervals. She stopped before Aron, her eyes dropping to the scar on his left palm.

  "Your work in the quarries flagged in our surveillance reports," she said, her voice dropping to a conversational register that felt more dangerous than shouting. "Insufficient safety margins on temporary support calculations. You killed four men with math, Knapper. Collapsed a southern tier through elegant equations optimized for cost rather than load-bearing capacity."

  Aron’s scar burned under her gaze. "The company demanded efficiency."

  "The Crown prefers such calculations aimed at enemies." Voss moved to the head of the table, placing her bone stylus beside the folder with exact precision. "Standard sentencing mandates five years extraction labor in the crystal mines of the Northern Reach. Underground confinement. Daily inhalation of raw mana particulates. Cumulative channel degradation rather than dramatic failure, inefficient systems collapsing one mana pathway at a time until the organism expires. Fatal in ninety four percent of cases before sentence completion."

  Garett’s knee bounced beneath the table, a rapid staccato against the stone. "Ninety four percent," he whispered.

  "Ninety eight percent with your specific channel scarring, Knapper," Voss corrected, her eyes never leaving Aron’s face as she turned a page in the folder. "I have your mother’s file. She died from cumulative corruption similar to what the mines would inflict. Your channels bear hereditary weakness. The dust would accelerate your degradation significantly faster than standard projections."

  Aron’s fingers pressed against the table, his voice steady despite the situation. "And what’s the mortality for the rest of the industrial class? Why-" he said.

  "Silence."

  The word cut through the air and Voss leaned forward, her palms flat on the table, her face entering the rectangle of light so that Aron could see the fine lines around her mouth and the small scar bisecting her left eyebrow. "And as for your sister," she said, shifting her gaze to Garett. "Lara Lok. Twelve years old. Employed at the District Four textile plant. Current life expectancy: forty one years, assuming no industrial accidents or alkali poisoning. If you serve the mines, she enters the orphan rolls. If you survive, which you will not, she will already be dead."

  Garett shot to his feet and the stool scraped backward across stone with a shriek that echoed off the walls. "You leave her out of this."

  Guards by the door shifted, hands moving to batons, but Voss did not flinch. She held Garett’s gaze until he slowly sank back onto the stool, his burned hands curling into fists.

  "The Academy examination trials begin tomorrow," Voss continued, as though the interruption had not occurred. "The Dean of Admissions has authorized limited amnesty recruitment for unconventional talent detected in the lower districts. Unlicensed practitioners who demonstrate sufficient native capacity and theoretical aptitude may petition for examination candidacy. Success confers full Crown pardon. You would emerge as licensed mages, sanctioned to practice and entitled to guild wages and Crown protections."

  Garett’s hands unclenched slowly and the burned skin tightened across his palms. "Three meals a day," he whispered, then louder, finding his voice in the hollow of his chest. "Legal spellbooks. A license that pays guild wages."

  "The Crown requires theoretical mages for the Eastern Reaches," Voss said flatly. "The nobility prefers administrative posts. We need channelers who can construct a dome under fire, who have nothing to lose and therefore do not flinch. You are raw material. We are offering to refine you."

  "But yes, enough to remove a sister from factory labor," Voss noted. "Enough to sponsor dependents for scholastic testing. Should they demonstrate aptitude, scholarships remain available regardless of birth status."

  Garett’s grin emerged despite the pain and despite the fear still lingering in his eyes, the expression of a man who had been drowning and suddenly felt stone beneath his feet. "I’ll take the examination. Whatever the cost."

  "The cost is failure," Voss said flatly. "Should you fail, the amnesty voids. You serve the crystal mines sentence regardless. The examination begins at dusk. You will be assessed on native pools, channel stability, capacity for theoretical construction, and practical control. Many candidates enter. Few emerge with robes."

  Aron’s breath came measured. "Our options seem limited," he said, his voice emerging confidently. "but the academy is preferable to the mines."

  Voss’s mouth shifted, not quite a smile, but the faint tightening of muscles that suggested recognition. A kindred logical mind had acknowledged another across the table. "Then you understand."

  "We understand, and accept."

  Voss reached into her robes and withdrew two sheets of vellum, heavy and cream colored, textured with the irregular surface of hand pressed fiber. She slid them across the stone table and each bore a wax seal the color of dried blood, impressed with the Academy crest of a perfect sphere intersected by a dagger.

  "Report to the Ascent Gate by tomorrow morning," she instructed, rising from the shadowed side of the table. "Present these invitations to the Proctors. Bring what supplies you please, but the academy will provide housing and support should you pass. What you were in the quarries ends today. What you might become in the towers begins tomorrow."

  She left the flasks on the table, empty but glowing faintly with residual light. The door closed behind her with a click that echoed like a final judgment.

  Aron lifted the vellum, feeling its weight and texture and reality. Through the narrow window, the sun had begun its descent toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose. Garett held his own invitation in shock, turning it over and over as though reading the future in its fibers.

  "Ascent Gate," Garett said quietly. "Never thought I’d walk toward any gate but the one leading underground."

  "This is our chance," Aron replied, tracing the seal with his thumb and feeling their raised edges. "Our one chance."

  "Upward then." Garett stood, tucking the invitation against his chest where his heart hammered against his ribs. "Upward or nothing."

  Outside, the bells of the Academy began to ring, calling the hour and measuring the remaining time until dusk when the trials would begin.

  Aron climbed the external staircase to his home. Then opened the large oak door, the one that groaned against its hinges. Warmth spilled from the workshop, amber lantern light cutting through the thick night air. The upper story served as both kitchen and study, graphite smudges marking the walls near his drafting table, stone chips littering the floorboards near the brazier.

  Brom stood by the iron stove with a kettle in his hands. Forty eight years had settled into his frame, but the stone had carved deeper than time. Silica scarring bleached his fingers white, the skin tough as leather where dust had embedded and never washed free. A slight wheeze marked each breath, the legacy of mornings spent spitting grey phlegm. Before lifting the kettle, he massaged his right wrist, kneading calcified joints that decades of vibration had turned to gravel. Dust grey hair clung to his skull, and his apron bore the faint stains of finished blocks.

  As he turned to the creaking door, he saw his son, and immediately came the sound of the kettle clattering down against the stove top.

  "Patrol bells rang through the district," Brom said, his voice rough as unfinished sandstone as he took two rushed strides across the room, floorboards protesting. He wrapped his arms around Aron, crushing breath from his lungs with ferocity that spoke of hours spent imagining the worst. "I thought they'd taken you. The labor wagons."

  Aron returned the embrace, feeling the tremor in his father's back. "I'm here," he managed against Brom's shoulder. "I'm not going to the mines."

  Muscles tightened, preparing for fresh weight. "How?"

  Reaching into his pocket, Aron withdrew the vellum invitation. He held it out, cream colored paper stark against graphite stained fingers.

  Brom took it with hands that had shaped cathedrals but now shook. His eyes tracked the text, the Academy crest. Color drained from his weathered face. A complex shift moved through his expression, heavy with history and memory.

  "You have her look," Brom whispered, his thumb tracing the seal. "Elaine. When she would hold her stylus... like her spells were her world." He looked up, eyes wet and hard. "The pressure in those examinations... it isn't just mathematical. It's psychological. They want to see where you break."

  Aron's scar pulsed. "It offers a way out. Guild wages. A license. A chance for you to set down the chisel."

  Brom laughed, a sound like gravel scraping, interrupted by a wet cough. "And what happens when you collapse against a noble? Who sees your very life as an insult? When your mana runs dry and nothing remains to protect yourself?"

  Silence stretched between them, taut as a plumb line.

  Brom moved toward the loose floorboard near the stove, the one Aron had pretended not to notice for fifteen years. A broad finger hooked into the gap, lifting the plank to reveal darkness. From within, he withdrew a leather wrap worn soft by years, tied with cord that snapped when pulled.

  Inside, nested in velvet the color of deep earth, three glass cylinders lay cushioned. Pure crystallized liquid mana, with their now familiar blue glow.

  "Twelve thousand cubic meters of limestone," he said, his voice barely audible above the stove. He pressed the bundle into Aron's hands, and the weight felt immense, the accumulated mass of five years of savings. "Every fractured finger, every morning I spat grey. I wasn't going to let you end up like your mother, if this moment ever came."

  Aron's fingers closed around the worn leather. Through the hide, he felt the cylindrical shapes, the liquid inside sloshing with viscous density that pressed against his palms with the gravity of earned pain.

  "Rich students carry these like water skins," Brom continued, eyes tracking the faint blue glow seeping through the leather. "They practice ten hours daily, building pools to a hundred mana or more. You enter with what? Forty? These three... they're not for practice. They're for emergencies. For when you're in the ring and your pool hits zero, when you need that second chance to survive. You let them think you're empty, then you rise."

  Aron tucked the wrap against the small of his back, feeling the cold glass press against him like a physical debt. "I promise to be careful."

  "More than careful." Brom's hand rose to cup his son's cheek, the palm rough as pumice. "Just survive. That's all I ask."

  Stepping out from the workshop's warmth, he felt the temperature drop immediately. Dusk had painted the sky in purple and gold, the air turning sharp with evening cold that bit through Aron's thin coat. He knew it would take all night to climb the ascent in order to reach it by morning.

  Against his skin, the flasks grew cold, the liquid crystal inside becoming viscous in the chill, resisting movement like slow honey. Each step carried new awareness of that weight, the sloshing delayed, pressing against his lower back with a reminder that he carried five years of his father's broken stone.

  Garett waited by the water trough, his large frame wrapped in a linen shirt too clean and small to be his own. He held no satchel, no bundle of wealth hidden beneath his clothes. Only himself and a mission.

  Garett’s gaze wandered to the faint blue bleeding through the leather wrap beneath Aron's shirt, and he observed quietly. He said nothing about it, no question of how many or how much, but the knowledge settled in his expression, a recognition of the disparity between them.

  "Ready?" Garett said, averting his gaze and focusing on the climb ahead.

  "Yeah, I'm ready." Aron replied, feeling guilt over his father's gift.

  Together, they turned to face the ascent. Above them, the Academy walls towered, their marble facades glowing with faint silver luminescence where ambient mana pooled in the grain.

  Excitement thrummed in Aron's heart, terror and hope entwining. Garett's shoulder bumped against his own, the warmth of another body confirming their shared resolve.

  Ahead they could see the marble gates, open at the road's summit, forming a perfect parabola against the dark. Through them, the Academy spires pierced the sky, crowned with lights that burned not with fire but with crystallized energy, blue and steady as stars anchored to earth, inviting two boys from the dust to claim an impossible future.