CH 1 — AIDEN HOLT

CH 1 — AIDEN HOLT

I froze the moment I stepped into the corridor. Why wouldn’t I? My parents hid every shred of fame they had, and I was the one who paid for it in a school that let questionable things slide like water off stone.

The Imperial code was explicit enough that even the dumbest student could look up and understand things like Section Twenty-Five B of the Article of Defense: “Superior skill, training, or awakening of individuals could count as an aggravating factor in sentencing.”

I pushed up my glasses. Today’s dish: an Awakened squaring off with a kid who had no grip on reality.

The blue academy robes lining the vaulted hallway made it feel like we were about to perform some forbidden ritual. Every student held their breath and waited for the punchline. Kael stood over the kid he’d chosen as today’s entertainment, boots planted as though he already owned the stone beneath them.

I stayed exactly where I was—not because I enjoyed the show, but because stepping forward was the fastest way to become the next act. My father would’ve intervened without a second thought. Thankfully, I wasn’t him. I didn’t subscribe to the ridiculous idea of rescuing people—or inserting myself into matters way above my power bracket. How could I, when most days I barely rescued myself?

As if sensing my thoughts, Kael turned back and swept through the crowd until he found me. He put on that borrowed nobility the Ten Houses drooled over, then spoke.

“What are you staring at, short-sprout?”

I was taken aback that he found me in the crowd, but then again, his insult matched exactly where his eyes were aimed. I didn’t talk. That would be stupid. I just bit my tongue until I tasted blood, shifted a little, and went back to watching the two of them.

The kid on the floor—Jayden—saw Kael’s attention shift and gained what I liked to call “foolish confidence.”

“I—I will become an Imperial Hero!” he blurted. “I swear it by the Emperor!”

The corridor exhaled, but Kael didn’t.

The first slap cracked against the vault doors, sharp enough to make the sconces tremble.

“Your father said that too,” Kael murmured. “Monsters picked their teeth with his ribs.”

Another slap. Another collective flinch. I lifted my tablet reflexively, some useless shield between me and reality, when I should’ve walked away. I liked seeing these incidents so I could acclimate myself to the way the Empire walked—and stop thinking I was somehow superior just because of my father—though it wasn’t having any effect. It was usually around this time that a hero appeared.

And as if on cue, a boy spoke.

“Hey! Put him down!” someone shouted. “You’re not even a pureblood. How does a House name make you that stupid? Last I checked, you walk the same tiles as the rest of us.”

I squinted, expecting the beating to come sooner. Mister Defender of the Week was in the worst position to be talking at all until he gained enough meat to hide all those bones. Oblivious to that fact, he charged forward—skinny arms, full-breasted courage.

Kael merely shoved Jayden aside, met Robin mid-swing, and folded him with a single hit to the ribs. Robin dropped, gasping as if he were trying to breathe glass.

I stayed at my safe distance, watching because stepping in fixes nothing. It only shifts whose bones get tested.

Kael grabbed Jayden by the hair. “Try something else. Be someone else. Better that than dying in a crater three months after graduation.”

By the time he let go, Jayden’s face looked like wet clay someone had stomped on.

Unfortunately, that was when the door slammed open.

Warden Marwen filled the threshold like judgment incarnate—tall, braided silver hair, cobalt collar stitched with the Ten-House sigil that meant _don’t screw with me_.

“ENOUGH!”

Even Kael twitched.

Her voice could’ve frozen lava.

“Children—children of the devil—can’t I walk ten steps in this academy without someone bleeding?” Her gaze scanned the carnage, then locked on me.

“Aiden Holt. How could you let this happen? Your father is the greatest—”

“The greatest what?” I asked.

Marwen’s jaw flexed.

They were bullying him, but I couldn’t understand how it was supposed to bother me. He’d bullied weaker kids. Why should I care when the food chain finally turned on him?

A hush spread; even the walls held still.

Marwen stared long enough for regret to consider forming inside me. It didn’t.

She dismissed us with the usual threats of “formal reports” and “appropriate consequences”—which translated to paperwork no one would read and a warning everyone would forget.

Kael wiped the blood from his knuckles on his robe, unbothered. Jayden limped away, cradling what was left of his pride. The spectators scattered quickly, eager to pretend they hadn’t witnessed anything.

I didn’t move until the corridor thinned to silence again. My pulse had settled, but something brittle still clung to my ribs—resentment, maybe. Or the sharp aftertaste of being mistaken for someone heroic.

Marwen’s glare lingered behind my eyes long after she’d stormed off with Robin.

Great. Another day, another accusation of moral responsibility.

By the time I dragged myself toward my next class, the academy had already swallowed the incident whole. That was this place in a sentence: bleed in the morning, study by noon, pretend none of it mattered. Nothing life changing ever happened.

And so I walked into Mana Theory, pretending exactly that.

---

Class happened. Technically.

Instructor Relda stood at the front like a monument someone forgot to dust. Her robe was the same washed-out taupe she wore every day, and her hair bun looked like it had been sculpted by spite alone. A single chalk glyph hovered behind her—an outdated mana diagram flickering because she refused to learn how to stabilize projection spells.

“—and so,” Relda droned, tapping her chalk against the board with the rhythm of someone punishing it, “the Third Ten-House Treaty clearly states that unrestricted sage path channeling is grounds for expulsion, if not mandatory confinement. As we reviewed last week—Holt, are you awake?”

I blinked. “Define awake.”

A few students snorted. Most didn’t bother reacting. They were already in their natural classroom habitat: zombified.

Half the class had mastered the delicate art of sleeping upright with eyes open—a skill rumored to be more advanced than half the curriculum. A couple of Fire-track students covertly passed a mana spark back and forth under their desks like a forbidden toy. Someone in the back was drawing an anatomically questionable dragon in their notebook.

My tablet displayed the lesson notes, but the words swam like they were trying to abandon ship.

Relda continued anyway, as if enthusiasm were a crime she couldn’t legally commit.

“Now, the Ten Houses have historically regulated mana control through accords intended to—” She cut herself off to glare at a student whose head had tilted past the acceptable sleep angle. “Joran. Sit upright or I’ll have you practice grounding techniques until your arms fall off.”

Joran nodded, eyes still closed.

I lasted ten minutes.

Ten.

Then I stood.

No one noticed at first. Not even Relda. She was deep into a speech about “responsibility” and “order” and “the sacred duty of maintaining internal mana equilibrium,” which was funny considering her own equilibrium seemed permanently lopsided.

I walked down the aisle between desks. Still no reaction.

Only when I reached the door did Relda pause, one brow lifting with the slow irritation of a glacier deciding to move.

“Holt,” she said, “where do you think you’re going?”

“Maintaining my internal mana equilibrium,” I said, as if that explained everything.

A few students woke up long enough to smother laughter.

Relda sighed—the ancient, exhausted kind that suggested this academy had drained her lifespan in advance.

I left anyway.

CH 1.1 THE WATCH

After Mana Theory, the corridor still felt like it had Kael’s fingerprints on it. Marwen’s glare clung to my ribs like a bruise. I needed height, solitude—somewhere the world couldn’t accuse me of being anything. So I climbed.

The ceiling groaned softly as I pushed the loose panel up and slid myself into the crawlspace. Heat rolled out like someone had stored the sun up here. Below me, the alchemy room ticked and hummed with its usual chorus of warm glass and cooling metal.

I dragged my stash closer—blanket folded into the illusion of comfort, crooked lantern hooked to a beam, a spread of scrolls I kept meaning to read but never did. The smallness of the space pressed around me, but in a way that felt chosen. Something I controlled.

Aiden Holt, master of ceilings. It sounded better than being a hero or pretending to want to be one.

I sat until the echo of Kael’s slaps faded out of my skull, until the world shrank back to something I could put in a jar and set aside.

Then I slid the watch off my wrist.

It was always cold—too cold for something that had been pressed against my skin for so long. I turned it over in my palm and looked at the scratches on the glass, how they aligned into tiny arcs like something had tried to claw its way outward.

It was Dad’s gift, sent with the words: “Make it useful.”

He hadn’t even signed the note.

I brushed my thumb along the band. The leather wasn’t just ugly—it was stiff and uneven, like it had been repurposed from scraps. The only beautiful thing about the watch was the centerpiece itself. It was magnificent.

I unfolded the blanket and picked up a rune-sealed jar I’d stolen from Dad’s workspace.

I hesitated. This kind of thing was dangerous. A fraction of the Wildworld wasn’t understood, and even Awakened had only recently stopped being treated like accidents—so this was forbidden territory. Still, I had to know why he sent it instead of waiting to give it to me in person.

I set the watch beside the jar. The lantern’s light slid strangely over the metal, bending in ways light shouldn’t.

My fingers hovered above the seal. Words I wasn’t supposed to know crawled up from the back of my mind like insects under a stone.

I whispered them.

“We are the shadow, sharp and still—”

The rune warmed, then hummed, and suddenly the watch twitched.

Just once.

I jerked back. My skull hit the crawlspace roof. Dust rained onto my shoulders.

“Not real,” I muttered. “Not real, not real—”

But the jar pulsed again. And something inside the watch answered.

A throb.

My throat tightened, and I reached out—not because I was brave, but because curiosity is its own form of self-harm.

My nails scraped the jar’s seal as the hum sharpened.

Then—
I opened it.

Everything went wrong in the same heartbeat.

The air collapsed around the watch, dragging warmth away like a tide peeling back from shore. My breath fogged. The beam above me crackled with frost.

And then a voice slid along the back of my neck—quiet, thin, smoke without fire.

“Feed me souls.”

My hand snapped away as if burned. The lantern sputtered. The jar’s rune went dead.

Silence slammed shut around me—thick, suffocating.

“No,” I whispered.
The word ghosted into the cold.

The watch sat on the blanket, heavier than before. Waiting. Listening.

My pulse hammered so loud it felt like the crawlspace was echoing it.

I snapped the jar closed. Stuffed the dead rune under the blanket. Wiped the cold sweat off my palms onto my robe.

Breathe.
In.
Out.
Pretend.

It didn’t help.

Something had spoken.
And worse—
Something had heard me speak back.

I didn’t know how long I sat there, hunched over the lantern like it might shield me from the truth. The crawlspace seemed to tilt. My vision tunneled.

A sound reached me.

Footsteps. Dozens. Rushing. Panic-thick.

It wasn’t class-change noise.
It wasn’t even fire-drill noise.

Doors slammed open below. Shouts overlapped. Someone was yelling orders.

I leaned toward the ceiling grate, heart clawing upward.

A voice bellowed through the stone:

“TERION IS IN AURELLIA!”

CH 1.2 - TYBURN HILL

I didn’t leave the crawlspace so much as fall out of it, a ghost wearing my own skin. Everything below felt too bright, too loud, too real after what I’d heard. I kept walking anyway.

The first bell struck like a blade against the sky.

One long, metallic note that vibrated through the Academy’s bones—and mine. I froze in the hallway just outside the crawlspace hatch, the cold of the watch still clinging to my wrist like a shackle.

The second bell followed heavier.

Students poured from classrooms, dorms, courtyards—pulled toward the sound as if the bells had hooked strings into their ribs. Blue academy robes flashed in the cold light. Boots pounded the stone. Voices rose, questions stumbling over panic.

By the time the third bell rang, the air itself felt thinner. The center bells hadn’t tolled three times in fifty years—not since the last execution. Aurellia wasn’t like other countries. A code was usually sent to people’s devices for matter like this but when the bells sounded, it meant something had already gone wrong.

I slipped into the current of bodies.
Not running.
But moving with the same numb inevitability as everyone else.

The watch pressed against my pulse, pushing thoughts I didn’t want, but I tried not to think about it.
Or the cold, or the fact that the rune-seal—a spell designed to contain the kinds of things students shouldn’t even know existed—had gone dead the instant I opened the jar.

I tried not to think.
Period.

Instead I let the crowd carry me toward the main gates.

---

Wind tore across the moor as we spilled onto the frost-bitten path leading toward Tyburn Hill. Students huddled together instinctively, robes snapping in the cold.

Soldiers of the Combined Seat were already out—lined along the fences in polished armor, visors down, spears upright.

That didn’t make sense. If it was an execution, the Dominion had to approve it—not just in Aurellia, not just in the founding countries, but in all its colonies. But there wasn’t a single unit of the Empire’s warforce deployed.

Even more suspicious was that the Ten Seats had chosen soldiers from their Combined Force for this. It was the usual case of the strong silencing what they wanted quiet—but on this scale?

I almost felt sorry for the person I hadn’t yet seen. But then again, you shouldn’t go around fighting the powers that be.

I kept my head down and followed the procession.

Every student knew the route. The Academy drilled it into us: the path to the execution grounds, the protocols, the etiquette, the expected emotions.

It was where examples were made—and what better audience than the young ones climbing the ladder.

Honor, respect and fear.
The Dominion never said that part, but they didn’t need to.
The whole system was built on it.

The path curved past the stone chapel. Its doors yawned open, candles shuddering in the draft. Two boys knelt inside—small, thin, wrists chained to the floor. Frost clung to the metal links, spidering outward in delicate patterns that pulsed faintly with mana.

Burn Boys.

They would stand beside the execution platform and be burned, their bodies acting as conduits for whatever might slip free when the rope snapped a soul loose. Some people still called it ritual or superstition, but everyone who paid attention knew better. After the Ald War, shadows didn’t always stay attached to bodies. Sometimes they moved first. Sometimes they remained after.

The boys didn’t look up. They never did. Their breath fogged the air in uneven bursts—too cold for the chapel’s temperature, as if something inside them was drawing heat away.

People said they absorbed the fragments. The wild pieces.
The parts that didn’t want to stay dead.

Stupid fables, if you asked me.
Except the chains were already frosting over, and the air around them hummed like a held breath.

I kept walking because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant remembering the crawlspace.

The path climbed. Tyburn Hill rose before us—bare, wind-scoured, merciless.

The closer we got, the more the crowd pressed inward, forming a funnel toward the crest. The ground trembled under so many footsteps. The smell of cold iron filled the air.

Then we reached the top of Tyburn Hill.

---

The execution platform dominated the hill—a wooden structure reinforced with steel braces, the triple gallows rising above it like three fingers of a skeletal hand. The ropes swayed gently in the wind, measuring time in slow, deliberate arcs.

Behind the platform, half-buried in the soil, lay a broken warhead. A Dominion relic. A reminder that even dead weapons could watch.

Soldiers checked seals.
Clerks copied signatures onto parchment.
Carpenters secured beams with trembling hands.

And the crowd parted just enough for me to see him.

The condemned.

He stood beneath the center rope, head bowed with blood dried in dark patches across his cheek and collar.

He wasn’t shackled they didn’t shackle heroes even the fallen ones.

Something twisted in my chest—recognition before understanding.

The world narrowed until there was only his face.

Dark hair streaked with white.
A jawline shaped by too many sleepless nights.
A mouth that never quite smiled, even when it tried.

Except now.
He was smiling.

My breath lodged in my throat. A cold deeper than the watch’s weight spread through me.

No.
No.
This wasn’t—
It couldn’t—

A hand closed around my shoulder.
My mother.

Her nails dug into the fabric of my robe. Not hard. Just enough to keep me standing.

I turned my head slightly. Her face was tight. Her eyes red. Her lips pressed together as if holding back a scream.

She didn’t speak.
Neither did I.

Because the man on the gallows lifted his head.
And for one suspended, impossible moment—

He met my eyes.

Something inside me broke—quietly, like a bone giving up after being bent too far.

My mouth moved.

"...Dad?"