The great hall glittered like a captured constellation.
Long tables sagged under platters of roasted boar, sugared figs, candied roots, and steaming pies, goblets clinked ceaselessly, spilling a warm, cinnamon-laced haze into the rafters.
Lanterns swung from rune-chains and threw lazy pools of light over banners, Arcane's sigil blazing at the far end, while students and tutors clustered in bright, boisterous knots.
Laughter rolled down the hall in waves. Someone had set up a small band of fiddles and a drum, the music stitched itself into conversations until the whole room moved as one.
Aurelia drifted through the crowd with Lysandra hooked on one side and Kael at the other.
Lysandra's hand never stopped gesturing, an endless parade of stories, each louder and more ridiculous than the last. At the same time, Kael listened with that patient, half-amused expression he wore when everyone else's drama bent into something useful.
Aurelia let the sounds wash over them, the warmth, the noise, the strange, domestic peace of a thing won.
Near the raised stand, a cluster of students stood up and called for attention.
Lucien stepped forward with the casual gravity of someone used to being looked at, and the hall fell into a hush that was almost ritual.
Someone began a chant—first a murmur, then a roar: "For Lucien! For Lucien!" The cry rolled and swelled until it became a chorus, led by boys who wanted to be braver by borrowing his name.
Headmaster Veyron raised one hand, and the noise thawed into respectful applause. "To strategies well learned," he said, voice crisp and amplified by the room's faint Aether, "to tutors who did not sleep, to students who fought and thought, to victories earned together." He finished with a sweeping bow toward the Arcane contingent, and a glass was held high on every table.
Lucien, called forward then as Arcane's greatest commander in Phase II, smiled and accepted the applause with a soldier's composure.
"Good evening, everyone.
Today, I want to highlight the three keys to success: leadership, luck, and discipline.
Leadership isn't just a title, it's about inspiring and empowering others to achieve a shared vision. Great leaders uplift their teams and create a culture of collaboration.
Luck does play a role in our journeys, unexpected opportunities can arise. However, luck favors the prepared. When we work hard and stay open to possibilities, we can seize those moments.
Finally, discipline is crucial. It builds resilience and shapes our habits. Success often requires consistent effort, even when motivation fades.
Let's embrace strong leadership, recognize the influence of luck, and commit to our discipline as we journey ahead. Together, we can accomplish amazing things.
Thank you."
The room cheered until even Aurelia's tired cynicism softened. Arthur clapped with steady hands, and Cassian and Mirielle exchanged quiet, proud glances from their table.
Sebastian stepped forward from the back of the hall, the faint clamor of applause dimming as he drew near.
His sleeves were rolled up, his expression calm yet carrying that quiet warmth Aurelia had known all her life.
Without a word, he reached out and gently patted her head, his hand lingering just long enough to dishevel her hair.
"I'm proud of you," he said, voice low but steady, words that meant more than any toast or title could.
He let out a chuckle, eyes distant for a moment. "I remember these days… back when I won the Convergence Tournament."
Aurelia looked up at him, surprise softening her features. "You won it too?"
"Of course I did," Sebastian replied with a grin, patting her head again. "And now I'm glad my little sister's name will follow mine on that banner."
Aurelia couldn't help but smile, the ache in her chest easing just slightly beneath his touch.
The festivity swallowed the awkwardness of the day, the cavern, the duels, the guardians, the sudden holes in the ground.
Stories multiplied, each retelling a little grander, while students leaned close to swap technical points and bragging rights.
Lysandra dragged performers into a clumsy dance, and Kael sat back and chalked small diagrams on the edge of his slate between bites of bread, ever the practical observer.
Aurelia laughed with them, the sound surprised her by how genuine it felt.
Yet beneath the laughter, a small blankness tugged at her thoughts, the same faint ache as a missing chord.
It hadn't left, the banquet's warmth only made it more obvious. She found herself drifting toward quieter edges of the hall to breathe.
For a second, the hall dimmed at the edges. A flash, no more than a whisper of a scene, skated across the inside of her mind, an inked star on a forehead, a voice saying a name she could not place, a pressure of being lifted and told to forget.
The fragment vanished like a dream you try to hold at dawn. She swallowed and forced it away with a practiced calm. Parties required faces, puzzles could wait for quiet.
Lysandra leaned in conspiratorially and whispered something about the fashionably extravagant mask Lucien had promised to wear, and Aurelia smiled.
Kael, watching, caught the movement and gave her a look that said he saw the hollow and didn't press; sometimes seeing was enough.
Later, when heads were fuller of wine and the hall had begun to thin into quieter groups, the Arcane table rose to present a final toast.
Lucien lifted his goblet toward the cheering students and said words that made even the advisers lean forward, a promise that they would hold to one another, to their studies, and to the name they had forged in the cavern. Glasses rang, the sound was bright and triumphant.
Aurelia lifted her cup, watching the dust on her palm catch the lanternlight, glimmering like tiny fragments of the night sky.
The laughter, the music, the stories, they all blended into a warm blur around her, like a dream that refused to end.
By the time the banquet faded and the night surrendered to the pale gray of dawn, she found herself half-carrying, half-dragging a very drunk Lysandra down the cobbled path, with Kael grumbling beside her.
Lysandra mumbled something incoherent about "celebratory duels" before slipping into soft snores against Aurelia's shoulder.
Aurelia chuckled, adjusting her grip. Her eyes wandered upward, drawn to the silver coin of the moon hanging faintly in the dimming sky.
"The moon is beautiful, isn't it?"
"You're right," Aurelia replied softly, smiling. "The moon is lovely tonight… must be the mood from the banquet, right?"
Kael blinked, turning to her. "Who are you talking to?"
Aurelia glanced at him, puzzled. "You just said the moon was beautiful, didn't you?"
He frowned. "I didn't say anything."
For a moment, Aurelia just stared at him, then gave a quiet laugh, shaking her head. "Maybe I'm drunk too… just like Lysandra."
Kael sighed, though there was a trace of concern in his tone. "Try not to be. I don't want to carry both of you back."
Aurelia smiled faintly but said nothing, her gaze lingering on the moon just a little longer, even as something about it felt… familiar.
She eased Lysandra onto her bed and smoothed the blanket over her with practiced gentleness.
Lysandra muttered something sentimental and promptly fell asleep; even the pink-diamond dress of her thoughts had gone slack.
Outside the thin door, the academy breathed in low lanterns, and the distant music was a faraway heartbeat.
"I'll be meditating for a bit," Aurelia told Kael.
He gave her an awkward, worried nod, half encouragement, half a plea to be careful. "Okay," he said, and it sounded too small in the big night.
He watched her go with the wary attention of someone who has learned the world sometimes moves faster than you expect.
The halls had softened, torches guttered, and the tapestries hung like memories.
Aurelia walked without hurry, feeling that hollow tug under her ribs again, the missing note, the absent line of a song she ought to have known.
She could not chase it with the clatter of voices, it required the hush between thoughts, the space where the world's current might whisper.
She found the pond without meaning to, a black glass tucked beneath an old willow.
Moonlight spilled across it, a thin silver sheen on still water.
She knelt and watched her reflection lean forward with her, the soft jaw, the pale cheek. For a breath, the face was ordinary, then slid.
Something older surfaced in the glass, hair like coal, eyes like ink, a coat that drank the light.
The other Aurelia wore a blade streaked with dried red across its edge, and a trace of blood lay on her cheek.
The expression was not triumph or sorrow but a brutal, practical coldness, the look of someone who has counted the cost and decided it was worth paying.
Aurelia started back, heart pounding against her ribs.
The willow's leaves whispered, the pond stilled. Her fingers instinctively went to the mark on her forehead, where a faint star Thessa had inked, and beneath the skin, it flared with a pale, private glow.
It was brief, an ember that died before she could fully feel it.
When she forced herself to look again, the pond held only the familiar pale face.
The black-haired woman had vanished like a breath in cold air.
She found reasons for the trick of the water, not enough sleep, the strain of the trials, the heady flush of victory, and the bruises she'd barely felt until now.
You're tired, she told herself. You've been pulling the Aether thin for days.
She laughed, but it had no humor in it, and pushed a hand through her hair, chasing away the cold that clung to the edges of her thoughts.
Aurelia sat cross-legged at the pond's edge and folded her hands, an old ritual she knew like a map.
The syllables came soft and slow, not a whole chant, only the first lines: Eyes of Wisdom… Harmonic Flow… She let the breath steady, felt the Aether settle like dust on a shelf.
Nothing dramatic answered, only the ordinary hum of the academy night and the faint, steady pulse that was always there when she reached for it.
When she rose an hour later, the mark on her brow had cooled, and the ache in her chest had drawn back to a distant echo.
The halls were still when she returned to the dorms, moonlight tracing soft silver lines across the floor.
Kael was already asleep at his desk, slumped over a pile of notes and unfinished sketches of Aether runes.
Lysandra lay sprawled across her bed, one arm hanging loosely over the side, her hair tangled in the pillow.
Aurelia smiled faintly at the sight, at the ordinary calm after so much chaos.
She moved quietly, placing a blanket over Kael before slipping beneath the covers beside Lysandra.
The warmth of another heartbeat near her own grounded her more than any meditation could.
She exhaled, her whisper barely audible in the dark.
"It's just an illusion," she murmured to herself. "Just a reflection."
The words felt fragile, uncertain, but she clung to them anyway as she let her eyes drift shut.
Outside, the moonlight rippled once across the windowpane, soft and steady, watching.
She fell asleep to the soft, even breathing of the bunk beside hers, Lysandra's chest rising and falling like a careless tide, and the world folded out from under her.
Darkness opened like a throat. The abyss smelled of iron and old snow.
She stood on nothing, the edges of the void razor-bright, and across that emptiness a shape stepped into the light: herself, and not herself.
The other Aurelia wore a coat of night, her hair was darker, her eyes colder. A blade, wet and black along the edge, hung at her hip. The exact reflection she saw in the pond.
Aurelia's throat tightened. "Who—who are you?" she demanded, voice small in the vast dark.
The other smiled without warmth. "Names pile up and fall away," she said. "I have held many. I cannot remember all of them. Most call me Lucifer, the Fallen."
The name echoed in Aurelia's head like a distant bell.
Something familiar nudged at the edges of memory, but it didn't coalesce.
She shoved the creeping cold aside with a fiercer question. "I don't care about titles. Who are you? Why do you look like me?"
Lucifer cocked her head, curious as if studying a specimen. "Because I am you," she answered simply. "Or what you will become. The Harbinger of Death and Despair."
"No." The word came out sharp, disbelief and fury braided together. "I am Aurelia Caelistra. Rowena and Sebastian's sister. Child of my mother and father. A Caelistra of the Academy. Friend to Kael and Lysandra. Rival to Lucien." She spoke the names as if they were anchors, small, solid facts to lash herself to.
Lucifer's expression did not shift at the litany. Instead, she regarded Aurelia with an amused, almost affectionate tilt. "Aurelia," she murmured, as if tasting the syllables. "So that's my original name. It sounds…nice."
She cocked her head. "Aurelia," she repeated, tasting the syllables. "Such a neat, fragile word for what you will become." Her voice slid like a blade. "I am what happens when the world chooses the wrong hunger. I carry what you refuse to feel."
Aurelia tried to step back and found no ground for her feet.
The other moved as if drawn by a current, easy, inevitable, and in that motion raised the bloodied sword.
The sight of it sent a cold that had nothing to do with the cavern's air through Aurelia's teeth.
For a second, she wanted to call out to Kael, to Lysandra, but sound dissolved in the void. She could not speak, her throat closed.
"You're lying," she breathed. "I won't be you."
Lucifer's eyes sharpened. "Is that defiance? Cute." She took a slow step closer until the point of her blade hovered impossibly near Aurelia's heart. "I don't ask for permission. I offer a truth. You are a crossing of currents, a place where echoes meet. Either you will bind them, or they will bind you." Her blade brushed the air, and the world thrummed like a struck bell. "Remember. Or become."
Something cold, memory or promise, Aurelia could not tell, slid across the hollow in her chest.
A momentary shimmer, a forge at midnight, a hand slick with blood and iron, a laugh not entirely unfamiliar.
Images cracked and fled like fish frightened by a net.
For a breath, she felt her name unravel and knot into a darker one, and panic flared.
Lucifer's expression softened for an instant, almost tender. "You will know me soon enough."
Thessa's star flared once more against Aurelia's forehead, warm and steady as a hearth.
A voice, silk and river-stone, threaded through the void, "This is an illusion meant to make you feel despair. It is not the truth."
The dark figure softened, then folded like a page, where threat had stood, there remained a vision of another kind, Aurelia, older, but not broken, surrounded by Kael, Lysandra, Lucien, and the others, each face calm and real.
The stranger smiled at her, gently and with certainty.
"This is the path you may walk, not the shadow you feared," the voice said, then withdrew as if pulling a curtain closed. The black plain exhaled, and silence returned.
Aurelia blinked into daylight and a hand on her shoulder.
Kael's face hovered above hers, sleep-roughened and half-alarmed. "You were muttering," he said. "You okay?"
Her tongue felt thick and slow, the dorm room smelled faintly of rose oil and spent wine, and Lysandra curled in the blankets beside her.
Beneath damp hair, the star on her forehead still throbbed, a warm pulse against her skin.
Aurelia let a small, tired smile lift her lips. "I had a nice dream," she said, voice small but steady. "About all of us."