Scars and Leaks

The same emptiness.
The same quiet. 
The same hand buried underneath rubble. 

Rose opened her eyes calmly. Their oceans glittering from the morning light that spilled across her room, chasing away the fragments of that dream she no longer feared. The same dream, night after night — cold, vast, endless — and yet she faced it now with the steadiness of habit.

Her arms extended, stretching themselves underneath her covers. Taking a moment to take her surroundings in, she slowly lifted herself up. 

Sunlight pooled across marble floors, the air filled with the faint songs of cuckoos outside her window. The room, too large for a student, glimmered with quiet luxury — the privilege of being the only white cloak in the academy.

A soft knock.
“Madam Solenne, are you awake?”

Her maid’s voice carried through the oak door.

Rose smiled faintly. “I’m awake, Alice. You may come in.”

One of the massive arched doors creaked open. Alice entered, pushing a silver trolley set with warm pastries and tea. The scent of peppermint and baked sweetness swelled to fill the room.

“My apologies,” Alice said, walking past the trolley to open the window. The breeze swept through, scattering the curtains like soft waves.

“Thank you, Alice,” Rose replied, her tone polished, composed. Her image mattered; it kept doors open, archives unlocked.

She drew the thin sheet aside, swung her legs over the bed, and felt the cool tile meet her feet. Removing the night cap from her hair, she let the long black strands fall free down her back.

“The usual.”

Crossing the room, she settled into a brass-lined chair. Alice placed a cup before her, steam rising in soft curls. Rose lifted a finger. The saucer trembled, then floated up; the cup separated and glided toward her lips. She took a sip, motioned lightly, and the tea returned to its place without spilling a drop.

“It’s good.”

Alice bowed.

Rose studied the maid's reflection in the window’s glass. Even Alice, devoted and aging, must have had a tether. Without it, she wouldn't even be alive. She was a stabilizer after all.

The thought pressed against her chest like a weight.

Another motion of a finger — another sip. Magic obeyed her effortlessly, but she could feel the faint resistance lately, like a string stretched too thin. I’ll lose this, too, she thought, if I don’t fix it in time.

Rose's hand motioned in a small swoop. “I’ll be leaving earlier than usual.”

Her robe had lifted itself from the hook and drifted toward Alice’s open arms. As the maid prepared it, Rose’s thoughts darkened. The signs would appear soon: a faint gold shimmer in her eyes, harmless at first. But by sixteen, that glow would wrap her body in light.

Illegal light.

Casters who leaked were hunted or contained. That was why this academy existed — not to teach, but to control. It encouraged families to enroll their children on the premise of saving them.

When Alice finished tying her sash, Rose sat before the mirror. The brush moved in smooth strokes through her hair. A muffin hovered near her lips as she bit delicately into it, eyes fixed on her reflection.

Gold. Barely visible, but there.

The beginning of her leak.

She rose, thanked Alice, and stepped into the hall. Her footsteps carried a quiet command as they echoed through the quiet corridor.  She had time before class — enough for the library.

The doors greeted her with their familiar creak. The air inside was heavy with dust and parchment. Only the librarian was present, half-asleep behind the counter. Rose nodded politely and turned toward the Laws and History aisle.

Her gaze trailed along spines until one caught her eye above — Leakage Laws and Why They Exist.
She reached her hand out, finger pointing and with a light motion, the air shimmered; the book shuddered, then slipped free from the shelf, floating gracefully down into her waiting hand.

She opened it. With a weightless flick beneath the cover, the pages began to turn themselves, stopping exactly where her attention lingered.

Wild Zones — regions of excessive mana concentration, born from uncontrolled leakage expelled by casters approaching their sixteenth year. Such areas exhibit heightened aggression among all living forms, along with plant and animal mutations. To prevent collapse, cities founded academies within stable regions, enforcing tethers under direct supervision to regulate global mana density.

Her finger twitched. The pages rippled, flipping forward again.

As mana density intensifies, the aura becomes visible — a golden haze encasing the caster. Their eyes turn fully gold before dulling to grey as their body silences. These “Grey-Eyes” are outlawed from civilized zones. Stabilizers who fail to tether suffer internal mana erosion and die before sixteen.

The book snapped shut between her hands.

I wonder if theirs hurt, she thought, picturing Kai’s quiet stare, the way he always avoided the light.

Her brows lowered. Time is slipping away.

The same sun that brightened Rose’s path now spilled into another corner of the academy.

Kai stirred beneath thin sheets, the faint rustle echoing in the small dorm. His eyes blinked open to a slant of light cutting across the floor. For a moment, he just lay there, the silence heavy except for distant footsteps in the corridor.

He sat up slowly, pulling the blanket aside. Pale cracks traced along his ribs, faintly glowing in the morning light — silent scars that never healed, never hurt, yet reminded him every day of what he lacked.

A tether. Or the unlikelier scenario, a cure. 

He exhaled, dragging his fingers over the marks until the glow dimmed again. Then he stood, dressed, and strapped his worn bag over his shoulder.

By the time he stepped into the rising traffic of the halls, the sun was high enough to set the academy’s white stone to a shine. As he turned toward the main hall, the library doors opened ahead.

Rose Solenne stepped out, her white cloak catching the light. She walked with the calm rhythm of someone always being watched. For a moment, her gaze found his.

She smiled — faint, careful, practiced.

Kai felt the strain behind it like a thread about to snap.

He lowered his eyes and continued walking, pretending not to notice the way his chest tightened.

Behind her, Jade and her maid were already waiting. Rose turned toward them, her expression perfectly composed once more.

The morning class carried a hum of heat through the open curtains. The sun painted streaks of gold across the brown-robed students who filled the benches. Most of them slouched, while others hid parts of their bodies under extra fabric or bandages. Some wore gloves too thick for the mild weather; others tugged their collars higher than necessary. It was a quiet, shared denial. Everyone knew why.

“Remember, a stabilizer’s strength lies not in the magnitude of their mana,” he said, pacing before the chalked board, “but in how they refine it. Raw force is meaningless without control. Enhancement begins here—” he tapped a finger to his chest, “—and extends only as far as the body can bear it.”

Kai sat upright, eyes half-opened, tracing the faint pulse at his wrist. The man’s words seemed distant, yet they echoed somewhere familiar in him.

“Stabilizers once were once a fraction of the populace,” he continued, turning his back to the class as he drew a circular diagram of overlapping forms. “But in the last few decades, more stabilizers are being born. Some say the balance is a response to the theory of they not existing before, or God noticing how many stabilizers die yearly.”

Kai tried to listen, but his mind was elsewhere. His ribs pulsed with that dull, living reminder beneath his robe. There was no pain yet, not truly. The ache only came when the lines spread—and each breath lately felt just a little heavier than the last.

He looked down the row and saw a boy fixing his gloved hand. When the fabric slipped for a moment, faint gray cracks glimmered beneath his skin before the boy quickly covered them again. Another girl tightened the belt of her robe to hide something around her waist. The sight should have comforted him—proof he wasn’t alone—but instead it only deepened the weight in his chest. This was the fate of stabilizers.

He thought of Rose’s eyes when she spoke that day under the willow. The calm certainty, the fire that refused to fade. She wasn’t just talking about change—she believed it could happen. Maybe, he thought, if someone like her believed it, he could too.

He stared at the board, the professor’s words fading into background haze.

Maybe I should stop pretending she’s chasing a dream. Maybe I should help her find it.

The day passed, and so did many after.

Weeks became months. The once-faint cracks along Kai’s ribs had spread like branching rivers beneath his skin. He wrapped his midsection tighter each morning before class, careful that no light escaped. Around him, most of his peers had already tethered; the ones luckily enough to have found valuable to a caster within the school. The faint groans between lectures disappeared.

Once again, he was alone. No caster saw value in him. But he didn’t mind.

And still, every few days, until it became a daily routine, Rose would visit the willow. A rhythm between the two. Sometimes they spoke of mana theory, sometimes about the strange, older texts she found in the library. Other times, they simply read side by side in silence, each following their own path through the same uncertain forest.

It wasn’t closeness, not the way others defined it. Their goals, their defiance—threads from the same fabric, weaving tighter with every passing week.

Kai had tried, more than once, to tell her to tether. “Find someone, anyone,” he had said. But she always turned the plea aside, quiet and steady, like brushing dust off her shoulder. She never argued. She simply refused.

The school adjusted around her defiance. Whispers grew in corridors and study halls. No one dared speak to her directly, of course—not to the white cloak, not to the girl backed by family names and faculty favor. But sometimes Rose would turn a corner and catch them mid-sentence, their words freezing in their throats, laughter shifting to forced smiles. The silence that followed said more than any insult could.

Kai noticed the change too—the way the crowd’s admiration dimmed, replaced by something more cautious, uncertain. Yet whenever she passed him by, that same faint smile flickered across her lips, and for a moment, the weight in his chest lifted.

From afar, Jade noticed everything.

At first, it was confusion—Rose excusing herself from lunch earlier and earlier, brushing off plans with polite apologies. Then curiosity, then unease. The day she followed her friend, she found the answer waiting under the willow: Rose seated beside Kai, a book open between them.

Jade stood at the edge of the courtyard, fingers curling around her sleeve. That boy again. The thought burned quietly in her chest. But behind it, deeper still, something else stirred—a hollow ache she didn’t want to name.

She left before either of them noticed her.

And so, the days continued, and Kai could no longer hide them fully. The cracks beneath his robe had crept higher, faint and web-like. The ache in his chest turned constant, yet he smiled when he saw her walking across the lawn, eyes now touched with steady gold.

He didn’t know which of them was running out of time faster—only that somehow, it no longer felt like he was facing it alone.