Under the bright, ordinary sky of the Academy, everything looked as if nothing at all had happened.
Students clustered on the marble steps, voices spilling like warm water.
Professors moved between them with the practiced calm of people who taught catastrophe into comfortable schedules.
Flags fluttered, lamps threw neat circles of light. The courtyard smelled of dust and ink and the faint tang of Aether that always hung about places where people practiced too hard.
Aurelia walked among it all and felt like an impostor in a portrait.
The world was the right color, the right temperature, but there was a hairline split running across the varnish of everything, a tiny, almost invisible fracture that made the scene tremble at the edges.
It's peace, she told herself, and peace has claws if you press it the wrong way.
She noticed the cracks first. They were nothing anyone else would point out, a narrow web of fissures in the marble underfoot that caught the light oddly, like fault lines in some miniature map.
Mirrors in the practice hall reflected faces with a delay, a fraction of a second out of step, making the blink of an eye feel like a question.
Once, in the common room, a silver tray fogged where her shoulders brushed it, though the room was warm as summer.
Small things. Accidents, someone would have said.
When she passed the long training window and caught her reflection, the glass showed her two breaths, the one she took now, measured and ordinary, and another, a second later, already moving away from her.
For a moment, she felt as if she were watching a picture of herself being revealed.
Her powers had not vanished so much as receded into oddness.
It flickered. It slipped out through sleep and raw emotion, little flashes in the dark where dreams she had never had blossomed into full, obscene panoramas.
At times, she woke with the taste of iron on her tongue and a memory that was not hers, a field of black glass, a name burned into a throat.
Whispers threaded through those hours, too. Not a coherent voice so much as fragments, half-words, reversed phrases, a punctuation of meaning that folded back on itself. …end…/…remember…/…not yet…
They bled at the margins of her mind like a letter burning at the edges.
Objects seemed to respond to her in strange ways. A candle's flame leaned away when she passed, a basin of water trembled as if in surprise, and mirrors fogged up in sympathy when she felt something akin to shame.
Light bent around her shadow with the polite curiosity of a thing that could no longer be quite certain whether it belonged to the world or to its margins.
Aurelia kept herself busy to keep the fissures from widening.
She buried the uncanny inside work: hours of practice with the blade until her arms ached, late-night study of rune theory until the scribbles on her slate blurred into neat knowledge, patient instruction of students who needed the small mercies of being taught not to fear the strange in themselves.
Routine was a bandage she could wrap once and check the next day.
Helping others was the safest shape for her hands to take.
Students, awkward and eager, terrified of failures that would define them, followed her instructions with the wide, undemanding trust of people who believed adults were whole.
If you teach them steadiness, then maybe steadiness will find its way back to me.
Yet at night, the whispers returned, and the mirrors grew more clever.
Once, while patching a torn sleeve by lantern-light, she paused and realized the light over her work had dimmed to a slow, lunar silver.
The calm was not comforting. It was an observation.
She shook her head and laughed at herself, an attempt to be ordinary that tasted like metal.
Lysandra caught her on the way to the practice yard, bright as a thrown spark. "You're blink-and-you-miss-it quiet today," she chirped, looping one arm through Aurelia's. "Professor Marlec's been running drills. We should go cartwheel the embarrassment out of his face."
Aurelia allowed the smile because the motion helped. If she could answer with a laugh, the world would be the right color for a little while.
If she could put her face to work and her hands to a sword, she could feel the harmonies steady under her like tuning a string.
Kael watched them go, shoulders already tense for the drills. His eyes found her again, and there was a question in them he did not voice.
They were supposed to be practicing basic forms, footwork, and simple cuts to keep muscle memory sharp, and the academy's training yard carried the hush of people who were pretending fatigue away.
Aurelia moved with a blade's efficiency, no wasted motion, each angle measured.
Kael matched her, his posture less show and more study, eyes always on the hinge between intent and action.
When he directed his Aether through a practiced defence, Aurelia gave the smallest of responses, a slip inside a parry, a half-step that read like instinct.
For a breath, everything was ordinary. Then, for a breath more, the edge of her sword passed through his guard as if the metal had behaved like light.
Kael's hand froze an inch from her blade. The sound of the world distilled into a pointed silence, the hollow whisper of steel meeting nothing. He blinked once, as if refocusing a lens.
Aurelia's chest tightened. Not again, she thought, surprise folding into a well-paced calm. It's slipping, but I can still pull it back.
"Did you feel that?" Kael asked, voice low enough that only she could hear.
She swallowed, tasting iron at the back of her mouth that wasn't from blood. "A ghost," she said, and forced a small laugh that wasn't entirely a lie. "A misstep. I'm fine."
He didn't return the laugh. Instead, he watched her like someone checking a coiled rope. "You moved like you weren't anchored," he said. "Your footweight shifted before the strike, it was like you were answering something that wasn't in the yard."
He noticed. The thought was bright and nasty at once. He noticed, and he didn't tell the others. He's being careful for me.
They ended the session without ceremony, still breathless, cheeks flushed with the honest lightness of exertion.
"You two look like you just planned a crime," she grinned, bounding forward. "What did I miss?"
Aurelia opened her mouth, then closed it. She considered telling Lysandra about the blade, about the weird, half-formed echoes that trailed at the edges of her hearing, but Lysandra's laugh was a small, warm pressure that pushed panic back. Later. Not tonight.
A day later, the crack was quieter and stranger, it wasn't steel that misbehaved but time's edges.
The bell above the lecture hall tolled, one, two, and Aurelia heard it again a breath later, delayed and softer, like a memory replaying itself a fraction late.
She found she could not say whether the later sound was the bell or her memory of the bell.
The uncertainty made her hands shake when she poured ink for notes.
The real proof arrived on a morning as ordinary as any, an apprentice from the Scholar's Wing, a quiet boy who always carried too many scrolls, passed Aurelia in the corridor and, without thinking, murmured a phrase that had been hitching itself through her dreams for nights now.
"…and the moon knits silence with its teeth," he said, then blinked as if realizing the weight of words he'd never been given.
Aurelia startled. The boy's face went blank, he had no idea why his throat had furnished such a strange sentence.
How many times have these whispers stolen across other mouths? Aurelia wondered, pressing the heel of her palm against her sternum as if to quiet a drum. Are these fragments leaking outward, or am I bleeding inward?
—————
They came not as interrogators, but as people she chose to see, faces she already knew from the calmer corridors of the academy.
Small kindnesses first, then questions she hadn't known how to ask on her own.
Archivist Halden came the earliest. His office smelled faintly of ink and wax, and he always kept an extra chair free beside the fire for whoever needed to sit without speaking.
He didn't call it "therapy." He called it "sorting memories."
When Aurelia appeared at his door that evening, he greeted her with a quiet smile and a cup of bitter tea.
"What do you remember from that night?" he asked, not as a record-keeper, but as someone untangling a string.
Aurelia stared at the flames. The pieces, she thought. Not the whole. Half a moon, then a blade, then something breaking open inside the sky.
"Does it matter?" she said at last, forcing a half-laugh that wasn't steady.
Halden wrote nothing down this time. "Only if it's still hurting you," he said. And for once, she couldn't tell if he was talking about the memory or the moon.
Edda, the clinical adviser, had a gentler way. Her hands were constantly in motion, smoothing papers, straightening vials, adjusting her scarf as if restlessness kept her grounded.
Aurelia found herself in Edda's care after another restless night, pulse racing from dreams that dissolved when she tried to name them.
"Have the dreams changed?" Edda asked, fingers resting briefly on Aurelia's wrist, her tone carefully balanced between curiosity and concern.
Aurelia hesitated. "They come thinner now," she said. "Strangers, fragments. A moon where there should be a sun."
Edda nodded, neither alarmed nor reassured. "Sometimes the mind uses the familiar to make sense of what it can't yet name," she said softly, then wrote something small on her pad, a word Aurelia couldn't see.
When she left, she lingered at the doorway for a heartbeat too long, as if listening to the quiet rather than the patient.
Corin was last, an envoy attached to Headmaster Veyron's office, though everyone treated him more like a problem-solver than an official.
He helped smooth out disputes between professors, arranged permissions for fieldwork, and somehow always found time to fix the flickering lights in the north wing.
He met Aurelia under the pretense of a routine check.
"Do you still see the moon?" he asked, his voice mild.
Aurelia wanted to say no, to keep things simple. Instead, she admitted, "Sometimes. Not always."
"Good," Corin replied, scribbling something on a folded piece of parchment. "We'll just make a note of it. Nothing serious. Patterns can tell us what the world's doing when we aren't looking."
She nodded, grateful for his calm, but when he left, the room felt smaller somehow, as though each word she'd spoken had been quietly filed away somewhere beyond her reach.
Not examined, she thought, watching the empty doorway. Just… catalogued.
Small things shifted around her in careful increments.
Mirrors in the women's wing misted and cleared when she passed.
A portrait in the main stairwell once tilted an inch toward her and then straightened with no explanation.
A junior scholar who worked in the archives began quoting the odd lines she had half-heard in sleep, and when she corrected him, he apologized and was bewildered.
Only Kael watched without the politeness of an observer.
He watched like someone watching a tide line, noting where the sea met the sand and what it took with it.
Once, halfway through a lecture, he tugged the sleeve of his robe and murmured, "You aren't alone in noticing."
I don't feel alone, Aurelia thought, and the thought was both comfort and alarm. But being noticed feels like a weight.
—————
It broke in a classroom so ordinary its walls still smelled faintly of ink.
Professor Marlec lectured about the patterns of Aether, a dry, technical thing he taught with a knife-edge humor.
Students kept careful notes, Lysandra doodled impossible gowns in the margin, and passed them to Aurelia with a conspiratorial grin.
Aurelia tried to listen. The words held, the diagrams made sense.
Then a three-word phrase slipped into the room like a wrong note and hung there: the moon returns.
At first, nothing seemed different. The sun outside the great windows kept to its business, and light spilled across the oak floor.
But Aurelia felt the phrase like a pebble in her shoe, insistently present.
Her pulse quickened. Her palms warmed. The edges of the parchment on her desk blurred as if seen through steam.
Focus on breath. Breath, blade, step. The training rituals she had used a thousand times rose like a ladder.
A student at the back with a pen behind his ear laughed softly at something a friend whispered.
The sound stretched like taffy, its echo arrived half a second late. Pupils blinked and then looked at one another.
Behind Marlec, the window light dimmed a fraction as if someone had drawn a cloth between the sun and the room.
Aurelia's face felt the chill before her mouth formed the thought. No—not now.
Her guardian reflex was not to lash out. It was too steady. She stood, an instinctive apology on her tongue, and walked the aisle to the blackboard where Marlec had sketched a spiral of diagrams. Her fingers smoothed the chalk as if smoothing a wrinkle.
Marlec turned. He must have seen her look. His expression shifted, from concern to something almost like calculation.
For a second, their eyes met and something, a memory, a pulse, a heartbeat, moved between them.
Marlec's hand reached across to steady her, touching her shoulder.
It should have been nothing. It should have been a teacher's hand.
Instead, a flash split the room. The air folded like a page, and Aurelia saw the nightscape again, not as memory but as a map: the moon swollen and wrong, light unthreading, the world like glass beneath a dropped stone.
She felt it not as an image but as a pressure, a weight that bent breath.
Threads of Aether that had been quietly unreeled hissed like distant storms.
Marlec's face went still as the images slid by him, too. For one terrible instant, he saw what she had seen alone. His eyes went wide, then hard. He stepped back, as if knocked.
I didn't mean—Aurelia thought, shocked to hear the thought form itself. Her mouth moved, and she could not be certain whether the sound that came out was hers or something borrowed. I didn't mean to.
The room reacted like a struck bell. A book slid from a desk and hung in the air for a breath, paused, then fell.
The light through the windows trembled and briefly went muted, not a shadow but a dimming, like a hand passing over the sun.
Mirrors down the corridor fogged. A smear of something, not blood, not smoke, but very like both, arced across the chalkboard and bled into the spirals Marlec had drawn.
Murmurs broke out, somebody shouted. Kael's voice reached her over the chaos, close and tense, "Aurelia!"
Students moved instinctively into formations, some fled, while others formed small protective circles around their friends.
But before anyone could make sense of the moment, the polite, careful people who had been watching arrived as if on cue.
Envoy Corin pushed through a small cluster of students with a quiet authority.
Edda had already taken a stance and signaled toward the side doors.
Halden, ledger clutched under his arm, looked at the smeared blackboard as if it were a page that had to be transcribed.
Marlec was the first to speak, his voice a brittle instrument. "Containment protocols," he said. "We cannot risk—"
Before the sentence finished, there were hands, gentle, practiced, not shackles, guiding Aurelia out of the hall.
The clinical adviser murmured, "For observation," as if the words would make everything practical and rational again.
Aurelia could not move freely, the world was a painting being rolled up beneath a careful, terrible hand.
She struggled, but there was no violence in the motion that carried her to the small, sunless private wing that served the academy as a place for delicate illnesses.
The room was lined with white curtains, stitched sigils in the ceiling monitored currents, and a ring of learned faces that did not belong to students.
They're watching, she thought, and the phrase was neither surprise nor fury but a cold acceptance. They always were.
Kael tried to follow. Lysandra's cry reached her, ragged and bright. Lucien demanded answers. Hands, kind hands, closed the door.
"You are not bound," Edda said softly as the door eased closed, and for a moment, Aurelia thought relief had entered the room. "You will be observed and kept safe. Friends are allowed to visit. We need to ensure everyone is—stable."
Safe, Aurelia repeated inwardly, tasting the neatness of the word like ribbon. Observed is the only word I hear.
She lay on a narrow bed beneath stitched sigils that hummed low.
The air smelled of lemon and old paper. A small paper sat on a side table with a neat stack of questions, "When did it happen? What did you see? Did you touch anyone?"
Outside the glass, a dozen faces passed, students and professors, friends and the three polite observers who'd come for tea and left with a file.
On the far side, where the pane was thick, Lysandra's expression hardened to a blade. Kael's hand pressed to the glass, and in that single contact, she found an anchor she would hold to when dark threads worried at the edges of sleep.
A heavy step sounded, and the envoy Corin addressed the window as if speaking to a council.
His voice carried, "We will monitor and determine risk. For the moment, she will be kept under containment."
They watch and they measure. Not the thing itself, the thing that might become it.
But when the bed settled and the room dimmed to a practical light, she could not help the last, unwanted thought that threaded through her.
If they have been watching, they have seen more than I know.