News traveled faster than banners.
Within a single dawn the whisper that had been a rumor in the academy courtyard became a roar across the continents. Messengers with wings of spirit-beast and couriers on wind-chariots carried three words that tasted like thunder: Kael is alive.
Masters put down their cups mid-sip. Clan elders gripped the arms of their chairs until their knuckles whitened. Traders told the tale between stalls; tavern keepers repeated the line with an extra pinch of disbelief. Even in the high courts of Azura, between the tapestries and the formal courtesies, the rumor pulsed like a heartbeat.
Princess Elira heard it the way people hear an impossible thing: first as a trickle, then as the flood.
She ran.
Not literally—this was not a sprint across paved streets. She moved like something summoned by the world itself. The palace corridors blurred past in a gold flash as attendants scrambled to keep up. She did not wait for guards, nor for a carriage. Spirit winds wrapped around her, and the silver phoenix the Azura court kept for emergencies rose to bear her across the sky. The royal city of Azura shrank beneath a cascade of light; the great walls of Auralis rose and the Mystical Academy's towers came into view like dark teeth. By the time the phoenix's wings folded and she alighted in the academy courtyard, her hair was wind-torn and her cheeks wet with tears she had not yet allowed herself to shed.
The academy was a storm of action when she arrived. Students and instructors clustered around a golden-form figure standing amid the smashed training grounds. Bodies lay where they'd fallen; someone had already begun to tend to the wounded. The air hummed with the residue of power—peasants would have said the sky itself was nervous.
Elira's boots struck the ground hard. She cut through the crowd as if the air parted in respect. When she reached the place where the figure stood—the one who carried Kael's face and the stillness that had broken the intruders—she stopped a breath away.
Gold eyes met hers.
For a moment time forgot to move.
She stepped forward without thinking and struck his chest—hard, impulsively—with a palm that left a tremor. "Why?" she cried, not bothering with courtly tone. Her voice was small beneath the roar of the crowd but it struck him as if it had been a bell. "Why did you leave me? Why did you not come back? Every night I thought you were gone, Kael. I—" Her voice cracked. Tears spilled free, and suddenly the princess—so poised before kings and councils—was a child with the same raw, open grief that lived in humbler places.
Around them, the academy stood like a hushed theatre. Some of the students wept. Others tried to step between the princess and the man they thought had been lost. Everyone had a different idea of who Kael had been: a miracle, a ghost, a curse.
The body that had been fashioned by dragon-fire—Kael's clone—caught her like a gentler wind. He did not flinch beneath the slap, nor did he tear away from the heat of her grief. He wrapped his arms around her, careful and slow, as if learning how to hold what had been broken.
"I'm here," he said softly—his voice the same as Kael's, or close enough for the heart to accept. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I made you cry."
The princess clung to him, sobs shaking her shoulders. "Don't—don't ever leave me again," she whispered into his collar. "You don't know what it felt like—every night I thought—" She broke off, and a laugh crawled out of her throat that had equal parts pain and relief. "I'd wake and press my face into the pillow because it smelled like your robe and I'd pretend."
Someone near the academy—an elder who had watched the court for decades—murmured, "She always loved him. It was never the court's business."
But not all eyes were soft. The Veynar name, which had once been a small, comfortable thing, now pulsed like a signal flare. Nobles and elders in distant halls leaned forward in the carved chairs of their courts. Ambition smelled opportunity.
Inside the pocket-dimension, at the edge of a black lotus lake, the real Kael watched in a way he had not allowed himself to until that very breath.
He had given his face and his memories—enough to pass—to the vessel walking below. He had watched it speak and hold and apologize. Watching felt like clutching a glass in hands that were not wholly empty. It hurt like a living thing.
He whispered, a sound that belonged only to the private world he occupied, not to the crowd below. "I didn't want you to be hurt again," he said, and the words were an offering and an apology both. "In this regression you will live. I will not let them make you weep for me. If I must tear the very pillars of Faith again and again to keep you safe… I will." He swallowed; his voice grew hard like polished iron. "I'm sorry I made you cry. I will not leave you again. Not for any god, not for any fate."
Back in the courtyard, the clone raised his head and steadied the princess. His voice, hewn from the syllables Kael had fed him, promised what he could not truly feel in full: "I will not leave you. No matter what."
The line landed and the princess cried harder, this time with the clean, bone-deep relief of someone who had been given a promise in a world that too often broke them.
King Aldros of Azura arrived within the hour, his retinue trailing like a comet's tail. He dismounted with a speed that surprised the courtiers; old men can rush for what they love. When he looked at the figure who had restored the academy's safety, his face split into a grin that could light halls.
"My son-in-law!" he boomed, joviality cutting through grief like a blade. "What a treasure the heavens have returned to me." He slapped the academy master's shoulder with loud approval. "You have an eye for talent, it seems. The Academy has judged well."
The Academy Master, robes dusted with blood and ash, bowed with the deep humility of one who knows the cost of praise. "It was not just the academy. The boy… he fought like someone who had tasted the fire of life and come back. He deserves more than schoolrooms."
Word of the king's blessing traveled as quickly as the rumor that had birthed it. Messengers bearing the tale galloped outward: Azura claims Kael as kin! By midday the councils of Auralis were abuzz; by night the other continents' masters had put down their instruments of counsel.
Not all responses were praise. For every shout of joy, someone hissed indignation. Grief turns many hearts feral.
At the borders and halls where rising stars had once been tutored, the news was a razor. Parents who had received funeral notices and set up shrines with the faces of their dead now found themselves stealing breaths of bitter salt. They had lost sons in Mystica—bright boys, sisters of talent—and watched Kael, once called a commoner's son and now spoken of like a prodigy, rise to Tier Three at eighteen.
"Tier Three?" an elder spat at a teacup. "That child? He had no place. He is a fluke of fate. Our heirs died in those trials." Her voice shook with grief and accusation. "This is not natural."
Rage moved like stormwater. Houses whispered of betrayal. Some clans—those whose children had not returned from the Secret Land—sent envoys with faces like white knives. "Explain," one envoy demanded, arriving with the thick-backed arrogance of grief that had calcified into entitlement. "How did a seemingly talentless child take what our children could not? We lost a boy who was destined to be a continent master, and he—who?" The envoy's words were not meant for explanation; they were a summons to recompense.
The Veynar clan felt the pulse of envy and fear alike. In the Veynar hall the elders debated. There were those who claimed the clan should bow to Azura—to the king whose blessing could shore up power. There were others who feared the attention: gods move like wind; where wind blows, knives soon follow. Clan Head Veynar said little, only watching Kael's name burn its way through the channels of gossip. Younger faces in the clan looked to Darius with hunger and to the princess with devotion; the palace drama had made the family a banner now visible from distant peaks.
Darius, who had once practiced a thousand smiles and paid in cologne and pride, stood among the mourners in the academy with a face carved for grief. He folded his remaining hand tight inside his sleeve as others bowed around him, and played the part of the wronged brother with an ease born of desperate practice. In his chest a darker satisfaction burned. He had wanted Kael gone; he had wanted the path to the princess clear. The sight of her in Kael's arms stung like salt, but it also satisfied a hunger he hid behind ribboned sorrow.
He's not here. He's not here, Darius told himself on repeat like a mantra and a prayer. Soon the path will be clear.
But the narrative now had momentum. Paper burnished with gold and ink carried narratives: Kael, eighteen, Tier Three — ascender to the immortal way. A hundred emissaries wrote it poorly, some wrote it with tendrils of pride, others with tongues of poison. Whether truth or exaggeration, such claims reshape reality—masters must respond, and plans pivot like ships.
In the Great Halls of the Mystical Continent, masters convened urgent meetings. Questions were raised with the thin politeness of men who would later strike one another in the alleyways of influence. How had Kael risen so quickly? Was the Immortal Book's mark truly his? If so, what did that mean for the balance between mortals and gods? The Steward's rumor—his vow to return in fifty years—hung like a rag of threat in the room. Gods do not like to be wrong; they like it even less when mortals become inconvenient.
At night, clandestine letters traveled between those who smelled advantage. There were plans to test the clone—subtle experiments disguised as calls for conversation. There were invitations to feasts, some genuine, some traps. The world had grown thinner around the boy's name; pressure focused like a needle.
Back at the academy, the students slowly regained voice. They begged the clone—begged Kael—to remain, to teach them, to watch over the school. He nodded, and his smile was quieter than before, shaded by knowledge he did not share. He looked out, where the princess had finally calmed and now sat with her hands folded in laps of royal cloth, and he felt a tug he could not name: loyalty, perhaps, or the perfect imitation of it. He had a body that bore the scent of jasmine and a mind stitched from memories the real Kael had given. The illusion was convincing enough that hearts mended.
At dusk, when the academy gates were sealed with new wards and the battleground had been scoured clean, the king convened a small council. "He will be my son-in-law," Aldros declared with the triumph of a man who stakes a claim on fate. "He will be honored, taught, and given place at court."
The academy master bowed. "If it pleases your majesty. His presence here will stabilize the region. Young Kael's return will be a rallying banner."
They did not see the hollow beneath the crown of this decision—the rust of resentment in other halls, the growing list of graves at the edge of Mystica that would not be erased by royal favor.
Later, as the courtyard emptied and the golden light faded, the copy of Kael walked to the edge where the lotus pool in the pocket-dimension had no equivalent. He looked upward toward the unseen world where his original watched. His voice was quiet, and only those closest could hear it.
"Stay safe," he said to the princess and to the friends who had once thought him dead. "I will be here."
Inside the pocket-realm, the original Kael closed his eyes and tasted both triumph and a strange grief. He had given them warmth and a throat full of promise. The world below was safer for the time being—but safer at a cost. He had split himself into two ropes and thrown one across a chasm; the rope on which he hung thinned with every breath.
Dreadfang stood on the ridge, watching the horizon where the banners of Auralis fluttered like small flags of fate. "The political tides will churn," the dragon said, voice like shifting plate. "They will test you through your vessel. Do not let the flames of envy consume the innocent."
Kael nodded, feeling the weight of the Immortal Book like a coal against his chest. "I will not run. I will not cower. And if the heavens come to take what I love, I will tear them down until they cannot rise."
Dreadfang's laugh was a low rumble, not skeptical and not encouraging—only the sound of an old thing that knew both ruin and rebirth in equal measure. "Then begin to temper. The road you choose will need bones of iron and the patience of the mountain."
Far below, in the courts and in the smoke-filled rooms of the masters, plans moved like knives. The world had a new axis now: a boy of eighteen with the mark of the Immortal Book, a princess whose love had hardened into vow, a king who claimed kin by marriage before the ink had dried, and a trail of dead rising stars whose families wanted answers.
The first threads of war had been stitched that day; whether they would become a tapestry or a funeral cloth depended on what the boy in the pocket-dimension would make of the power he now carried.
Kael looked once more at the horizon where gold had vanished into dusk, and he whispered, not to anyone and not for any witness. "Then let them come."