The second morning started before the sun had properly risen.
Not because I couldn't sleep — I slept fine, better than the first night. But something made my eyes open on their own when the sky outside was still dark blue, and after lying there for a few minutes without being able to fall back asleep, I decided to just get up.
Vera's module was on the desk. Start at ten percent capacity. Every morning before class.
I sat on the floor on the side of the bed — not on the mattress, not in the chair. The floor had a different kind of stillness to it, something about being close to a surface that didn't move.
I closed my eyes, took a long breath, and tried to access the element.
Lightning isn't a calm element to approach. From Richard's memories, accessing it always felt like reaching for something that was moving — not a still object you could just pick up, but something more like a river current you had to catch with your hands right before it passed.
Right now, that current was there but deeper than usual. Further from the surface.
I didn't force it. Just approached — like approaching something wild, slowly, without any movement that could be read as threatening.
A small spark at the tip of my right finger. More stable than yesterday. Warmer.
I held it for ten seconds before letting it go.
Ten percent. Nothing more.
Good.
Lisa was already in the corridor when I came out to wash my face — standing near the window at the end, looking out at the garden that was still half dark, with a steaming cup of something in her hand.
She turned when she heard my footsteps.
"Young Master is up earlier than usual."
"Practice." I pointed back toward my room with my thumb. "Vera's instructions."
Lisa nodded, then glanced left and right down the corridor that was still empty — a movement that had apparently become its own habit for her — before speaking more quietly.
"The name Young Master asked about last night," she said. "I already know."
I stopped. "Already? How?"
"There's a student from my year in the east dormitory who knows a lot about faces around this academy." Lisa raised her cup slightly. "I ran into her when I went to get tea earlier. I asked in a way that didn't look like asking."
In less than an hour after waking up, before breakfast.
"His full name is Soren Aldgate," Lisa continued. "Fourth year. Water element magic specialization. His family is from the Castern territory — a small region in the south, near the trade routes connecting to several eastern port cities." She paused briefly. "What's interesting — he's not a student who stands out. Average grades, not active in anything. But he hasn't missed a single day since he enrolled two years ago."
I processed that.
A student who didn't stand out but had never missed a day. Not a profile that drew attention — quite the opposite. The profile of someone very deliberately trying not to draw attention.
"Anything else?" I asked.
"One small thing. His dormitory friends say he goes out at night often — not breaking curfew, but always right at the last minute before the dormitory doors are locked. And always alone."
Always alone. Always at the last minute.
"Thanks," I said. "Let's keep this between us for now."
"Of course." Lisa nodded, then glanced at her cup. "Does Young Master want tea before breakfast?"
"Don't need it."
"I'd recommend it. It's cold this morning."
I looked at her for a moment. "You don't have to recommend, you can just ask if you want to get me some."
Something very thin moved at the corner of Lisa's mouth. "I'll get you some."
Breakfast went the way it usually did — but with one small difference I noticed immediately when I sat down.
Felix Voss was in the dining room.
Not unusual in theory — all students ate here, no rule against it. But the night before Felix hadn't been in the west dining room, and this morning he was sitting alone at the most corner table, his back to most of the room, with a plate that looked barely touched.
Glen noticed him too. Didn't comment, but I saw he didn't steer the conversation toward anything that might drag the Voss family name into it.
Eric was his usual self — calm, eating breakfast efficiently, half listening to the table's conversation.
"What class do you have this morning?" Glen asked Eric.
"Magic formulation practice. You?"
"Advanced combat strategy theory." Glen made an expression that clearly showed zero enthusiasm. "Three hours again."
"Same instructor?"
"No. New one. Apparently stricter than the last guy."
"Apparently according to who?"
"Everyone who already met him yesterday at the brief intro." Glen grabbed more bread. "Word is he used to be active military. Not a career academy instructor."
New instructor with an active military background.
In the same semester as an incident that almost dragged the kingdom into war.
I didn't say that out loud. Just filed it away.
"What class do you have this morning?" Glen turned to me.
"Individual magic practice with Vera first. Eight o'clock."
Glen nodded. "Follow-up evaluation?"
"Something like that."
Vera's practice room was in the west wing, second floor — a smaller room than the regular classrooms, with polished stone floors and walls lined with magic-absorbing material so that anything practiced inside didn't bleed out.
Vera was already there when I arrived, right on time. She was checking something in her thin notebook, didn't look up when the door opened.
"Close the door."
I closed it.
"Sit in the middle of the room. Whatever position is comfortable."
I sat cross-legged on the floor — a position that felt more natural than standing for this type of practice, based on Richard's memories.
Vera finally turned, looked at me briefly with an expression that was hard to categorize — not assessment exactly, more like someone comparing what they were seeing now against notes they had in their head.
"You already practiced on your own this morning?" she asked.
I was slightly surprised. "How did you know?"
"There's residual elemental resonance around your body. Faint, but it's there." She closed her notebook. "Ten percent like I instructed?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Ten seconds."
Vera nodded — a nod that gave no information about whether that was good or bad. "Today we're not doing condensation practice. We're trying something different."
She walked to a small shelf on the side of the room, picked up an object — a small crystal, no bigger than a thumb, clear with a blue tinge at the center — and brought it over.
"This is a resonance crystal," she said, placing it on the floor in front of me. "It responds to any elemental magic directed at it by showing a vibration pattern that can be read." She straightened up. "I'm not asking you to activate your magic. I'm just asking you to think about it. Picture the lightning current you normally access — not do it, just picture it."
I stared at the crystal. "What's the goal?"
"To see where your actual blockage point is right now. Whether it's at initial access, at condensation, or at output." Vera sat in a chair she'd placed a few steps away from me — close enough to observe without interfering. "Magic trauma doesn't always leave uniform damage. Sometimes the access is intact but the output is limited. Sometimes the opposite."
Magic trauma.
I filed that term away. Vera had used it a second time now, and it was increasingly clear she wasn't using it casually.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, and did what she asked — not accessing, just picturing. The current that usually felt like a moving river now felt more like a river whose flow had been partially redirected somewhere else. Still there. Still moving. But not fully available.
On the floor in front of me, I didn't need to open my eyes to know the crystal was responding — I could feel it from the small change in the air around me.
"Open your eyes," said Vera.
I opened them.
The crystal was vibrating in a pattern that wasn't fully symmetrical — one side more active than the other, with intensity that rose and fell unevenly.
Vera watched that pattern for almost a full minute without saying anything.
"As I suspected," she said finally. "Your access is still intact. The blockage is in the middle condensation channel — here." She pointed to one spot on the crystal where the vibration was most inconsistent. "Not permanent damage. More like a channel that closed itself off as a protective response after being hit by a magic explosion at close range."
"How long to fully recover?"
"Depends on how well you follow the module." Vera set her paper down. "If you force it — longer. If you follow it — maybe six weeks. Maybe eight."
Six to eight weeks with limited capacity.
Given what I was currently dealing with, that wasn't a fun piece of information.
"Is there a way to speed it up?" I asked.
Vera looked at me with an expression that said she'd already predicted that question. "There is. But the method carries risk for your current condition and I won't recommend it." She stood. "The next question that usually follows is whether it can be done without supervision, and the answer to that is also no."
I didn't push further on that.
"Instructor Vera."
"Yes?"
"One thing unrelated to today's practice." I chose my words carefully. "The analysis notes you made after the incident — do they still exist?"
The room was quiet for two or three seconds that felt longer than they actually were.
Vera looked at me without her expression changing. But something in her eyes was different from a second before — more alert, more measuring.
"Where did you hear about that?" she asked.
"From someone I have reason to trust."
"Someone you have reason to trust can have a lot of different definitions." Vera slowly closed her notebook. "And the question itself is information — because only certain people know those notes ever existed."
"I'm one of the people who was on the target list that night," I said. "My name was on the paper found in Harlen Voss's bag. I have reason to want to know everything there is."
Vera was quiet for a while.
I didn't fill that silence. Let her decide on her own.
Finally — "The notes exist." Short, no frills. "But I won't hand them to anyone just based on a request. For something like that, I need to be sure that the person receiving them knows how to use them and won't make the situation more dangerous than it already is."
"How do I convince you?"
Vera looked at me for a few more seconds. "For now — you can't. Not yet." She walked toward the door, opened it, the signal the session was done. "But the fact that you asked about it the way you did, and not some other way — that already gives me something to think about."
I stood up, grabbed my bag, and walked to the door.
"Tomorrow, same time," said Vera before I stepped out. "Bring the module."
"Understood."
In the corridor outside the practice room, I stopped for a moment.
The notes exist.
Vera didn't deny it. Didn't hand them over either. But she didn't fully close the door.
Not yet.
I started walking toward the dining room for lunch when someone appeared from around the corridor bend ahead — and I stopped half a step before walking into them.
Aldric vas Alvan.
No visible escort. Book in hand, same uniform as any other student, walking in a way that was clearly trained to look no different from anyone else in the same corridor.
We stood face to face in a corridor that happened to be empty at this hour.
One second.
Two seconds.
Then Aldric spoke — voice quiet, tone casual, like two old friends who just happened to run into each other.
"Richard Raybak."
"Your Highness." I gave a short bow — formal but not excessive, like what was in Richard's memories for informal situations with fellow students at the academy.
"Don't need that here." Aldric glanced left and right down the corridor — a quick, trained movement. "We have about three minutes before this corridor gets busy again."
He already knew the corridor's traffic schedule.
"Alright," I said.
Aldric looked at me directly. His grey eyes weren't any different from what I'd seen from a distance in the administration building yesterday — calm, measuring, with a layer of something underneath that wasn't immediately readable.
"The letter from my secretariat reached you before you came back here," he said. "I didn't know if the situation would allow for a direct conversation until I saw you yesterday."
"The situation allows for it," I answered.
"Good." Aldric shifted his position slightly — a movement that looked relaxed but actually put his back more toward the wall, a position that let him see both ends of the corridor. "I'll get straight to it because time is limited. There's something I need to tell you that I can't communicate through official channels."
I waited.
"The official investigation concluded with what you already know. Three suspects, a severed command chain, weapons sourced from Valdres." Aldric spoke in the same tone someone would use to read out a report summary — efficient, no unnecessary emotion. "What's not in the official report is one detail I found myself."
"What detail?"
"The night of the incident — twenty minutes before the first explosion, I received a message." Aldric looked at me. "Not through any official communication channel. Not from anyone I knew. The message was slipped into the notebook sitting on top of the chair at my assigned table in the hall."
Someone knew where Aldric would be sitting. And had access to put something there before the event started.
"What did it say?" I asked.
"Three words." Aldric paused briefly. "Don't sit here."
The air in that corridor felt like it changed quality — still the same, still autumn cold, but something different about the way I was breathing it.
Don't sit here.
Someone tried to save the Crown Prince. From the inside. Before the explosion.
"You moved seats?" I asked.
"I moved three rows back with a reason I made sound ordinary." Aldric gave a small nod. "If I hadn't — I would've been at the center point of the first explosion."
The one that killed eight people and injured thirty-seven others.
"Who wrote the message?"
"I don't know." Aldric's tone didn't change. "The handwriting wasn't familiar. No markings of any kind. Just those three words."
"Why didn't you report this to the royal investigation?"
"I did report it." And for the first time, something in his voice shifted — thin, but there. "My report was received. Noted. And didn't appear in the official conclusions."
I stared at him.
Aldric's report about the message disappeared from the official conclusions.
Vera's report about the modified residue disappeared from the official conclusions.
Two reports. Two different pieces of information. Same outcome — gone.
"Someone is choosing which conclusions make it in and which don't," I said quietly.
"Yes." Aldric looked at me. "And the number of people with the authority to do that in an official royal investigation isn't large."
At the end of the corridor, the sound of footsteps started — still far, but enough to signal that three minutes were almost up.
Aldric straightened his posture, returned to his normal way of standing. "I don't want this meeting to look like more than two students who happened to cross paths in a corridor."
"Understood."
"But I want to meet again. In a more planned way." His eyes held on me briefly. "You know the archive library under the south wing?"
"Yes." From Richard's memories — a room rarely visited because its collection was mostly old documents not relevant to the active curriculum.
"Day after tomorrow. Two in the afternoon." Aldric was already walking in the opposite direction, his voice dropping to a final whisper. "Come alone."
Then he was gone — walking down the corridor with exactly the same ordinary gait as before he'd stopped to talk to me, opening his book, looking like a student on his way somewhere.
Three seconds later, the first group of students appeared from the end of the corridor and filled the space that had just been empty, and that moment dissolved into the normalcy of an ordinary day like it had never happened.
I walked to the dining room with a head fuller than before.
Don't sit here.
Someone on the inside knew. Someone chose to save Aldric but not reveal their identity. Someone who knew enough about the plan that night to know which seat was dangerous — but chose to give a warning instead of stopping the incident entirely.
Why not stop it completely?
First possibility — they didn't have enough power to stop it, but enough access to warn.
Second possibility — they didn't want their identity exposed by openly preventing it.
Third possibility — they needed the incident to happen. But didn't need Aldric dead in it.
Why would someone need the incident to happen but not want the Crown Prince to die?
I stopped in front of the dining room door.
Inside, the sounds of lunch conversation mixed into a familiar hum. Outside, the corridor was busy again.
Everything looked ordinary.
And somewhere inside all this ordinary-looking normalcy, someone who knew about the plan that night is still walking around free.
Maybe eating lunch right now.
Maybe passing through the same corridor.
Maybe already seen me today and I had no idea.
Damn it.
I pushed the dining room door open and walked in.
Glen waved from the usual table. Eric was already there, as usual earlier than everyone else.
I sat down, picked up the menu, and started day two the way ordinary days were started — because until there was a better way, that was what could be done.
Look ordinary. Move ordinary.
And behind all of it, keep collecting pieces that hadn't found their place yet.