Headmaster Veyron moved through the doorway like a man arriving at the edge of a storm, steady, courteous.
He did not sit, he let his coat fall back and kept his distance, as if respecting a private border.
"Aurelia," he said, and the name was simple enough to be an island in the middle of whatever tide had been pulling at her. "I wanted to speak with you."
She looked up, palms clasping her knees. The room smelled faintly of lemon and old parchment, the same neat, institutional smells that had accompanied the visitors.
Tell me something plain. Please let me know either way so I can put it in a drawer and lock it.
Veyron folded his hands. "First, you will not be detained in chains. We will keep you under observation for a period, both medically and archivally. That is the procedure. I am not here to make that worse than it must be."
Aurelia's laugh came out too small. "Procedure," she echoed. "That word keeps a lot of dangerous things polite."
"It does." His eyes were not unkind. "Second: your Aspect is stirring. It is—" he paused, "—powerful, and it has begun to manifest outward effects: light dampening, echoes in the Aether, spontaneous resonance with local currents. That is why we are cautious."
So they know what the echoes feel like. She kept her voice level. "And who am I when it's awake? Am I the bright Aurelia that smiles with friends, or the one I see in nightmares, the figure called Lucifer in those dreams?"
Veyron looked at her with sincerity. "You are Aurelia Caelistra," he said, his voice soothing. "You are the woman who trains, who holds a blade, who reads the night currents. That is who you have been and who you will be. But an Aspect is not simply a name you wear. It is a language the world can use to speak through you."
Aurelia blinked. Language? She wanted a more straightforward answer: Am I a savior or a weapon? He did not offer it.
Her mouth hardened. "So why does my soul sound like someone else's memory? Why does my mind give me a face I don't recognize when the moon changes?"
He let out a soft breath. "There are several explanations, none tidy. An Aspect translates a core concept, such as oaths, closure, mercy, or greed, into language the host can understand. Sometimes that language borrows imagery already lodged in the psyche, a face from a story, a voice from a dream. Other times, the weave itself provides frames, old patterns that the Aether remembers and offers as shorthand."
The Aether remembers stories, she thought, both fascinated and sick. It borrows ghosts like lending clothes.
Veyron watched her closely. "There are rarer possibilities. Trauma can leave impressions in the weave. A powerful external force can resonate an idea within a soul and shape how an Aspect first expresses itself. And, in the most unusual cases, there are other minds, old and deep, that have hooked into the currents and left imprints. I will be truthful, we do not have a complete catalogue for what you experienced."
She forced a laugh. "So, maybe I'm possessed by the devil. Maybe the Aether's reading from an old book. Maybe I am a walking omen."
"You are none of those, not by definition." He spoke carefully, every syllable seemed chosen to avoid sealing fate. "An Aspect amplifies. It does not make choices on your behalf. It offers a voice, a tool. What you choose to do with that voice is still your own responsibility."
Responsibility. To what? To people who call me a friend? To the shadow in my dreams?
"Will I hurt people?" she asked, quiet and immediate.
Veyron's face folded with something like a measured grief. "It can be dangerous when an Aspect surfaces unexpectedly. The world around you can react. That reaction can harm others. That is why we must understand the pattern, and why we must be cautious."
She pushed on. "Who is watching us? Professor Marlec or Seris. Envoys? People you trust?"
He hesitated only a second. "There are watchers with interest, senior faculty, external envoys, and scholars who catalog phenomena. Some of them will be kind. Some of them will be frightened. That is unavoidable. I will, however, make one promise, I will not let them make of you an object before you have had a chance to be a person."
Aurelia blinked, surprise flickered through her. He could have said anything. He made a promise.
"And what about the voice? The eclipse I saw?" Her throat tightened. "Was that me… or was it someone else using me as the stage?"
Veyron's gaze drifted as if to some map pinned in his mind. "I saw what you caused. It was the world's breath adjusting to something new. Whether the imagery was 'your' choice or something coaxed from outside, there's ambiguity. What matters is how you act next. We can study the mechanics. We can teach you how to control yourself and help you ground your resonance. But healing will not be purely technical. It will be moral and practical. You will need allies who know you, not only whisperers who catalog the strange."
Allies, she thought. Kael, Lysandra, Lucien… The image of their faces steadied something in her chest.
"You said I wouldn't be chained," she said. "Will my friends be allowed to come? Will they be allowed to help?"
Veyron's expression eased. "They will. I will authorize visits. We will not hide you from those you trust. And I will direct our best to work with you. They will not treat you as an inevitability. They will treat you as a person."
Silence settled between them for a moment, measured, not empty.
Aurelia's inner thoughts were a small, fierce engine, Promise, not prophecy. Actions, not names.
She lifted her chin. "Tell me what to do."
Veyron offered a kind smile. "Rest. Keep your routines. Eat. Let us monitor without suspicion. And, when you are ready, we will teach you to ride the currents you fear. You are not alone in this, even if it sometimes feels like that."
He left with a slight bow, and the bed creaked as she turned her knees into a pillow.
Through the thin walls, she heard the faint echo of students in the corridor, laughter, and the clatter of daily life.
The world outside the observation room went on. Inside, a quiet war of questions settled like dust.
Headmaster Veyron came in the next day, and sat opposite Aurelia with ceremony, elbows light on his knees, as if the room's weight could be borne by two people instead of one.
"I've heard what you told the advisors, but I wish to hear it from you personally, if you don't mind. How did it begin?" he asked simply. No parchment, no recorder, only his voice, patient and unassuming.
Aurelia folded her hands around her knees and looked at the floorboards between them.
The words crystallized out of the fog of memory like a shard pulled from water.
Half a moon, a blade, like a voice cutting through the dark.
She swallowed. "It was a dream at first," she said aloud. "Or a memory pretending to be a dream. I woke in the middle of the night because someone called my name, an odd voice, old, yet mine. Then the sky changed."
She didn't speak the word "Lucifer", the name had become only a sour taste in her mouth.
"The sun went thin and the light… bent. The air was heavy, as if something were pressing the world flat. I saw the moon where there should have been daylight. Then there was a… a field of noise, fragments, like broken songs, then a blade, and then a sense that if I didn't stop, everything might end."
Her voice shook once, then steadied. "After that, things have been wrong. Mirrors fog, lights hesitate, and sometimes I hear whispers, words turned inside-out. I don't know whether I'm making them up, or whether the world is leaking."
Veyron listened without interrupting. When she was done, he tightened his fingers and let a long breath go through his mouth.
"That's the right place to start," he said. "Not everyone remembers the shape of a first break. Most people only feel the fracture later, when the pieces refuse to lie still." He folded his hands again, the gesture holding more questions than answers. "You did the right thing coming to Halden, to Edda, to Corin. The academy's role is not only to teach discipline, it is to steady the things that can't safely be left to chance."
If my Aspect wakes in the wrong way, who will suffer?
Veyron's eyes softened. "Aspects are responses as much as they are gifts," he said. "They do not come with instruction manuals. Some answer a clear call, a hunter's instinct, a healer's patience. Others arrive as riddles. That does not make them curses. It makes them things to learn. To be shaped, not feared."
He touched the table with the pad of a finger, then looked at her with the steady kindness he used with the frightened students who could not find their footing. "You do not have to shoulder this alone, Aurelia. And the moment you want a voice in the room beyond mine, ask, and I will bring it."
The offer landed like an anchor. Aurelia felt, briefly, that steadiness she'd been missing since the moon first slipped into day. She rose and tested a small, ironic smile.
"Thank you," she said. "For the… anchor."
He inclined his head. "You are one of ours," he said quietly. "Whatever that becomes, we will meet it together."
As Veyron stood and left, the corridor swallowed his footsteps. Aurelia watched the door close and, for the first time in days, allowed herself to breathe without counting the edges of everything.
Together, she thought, and the word felt both like balm and a challenge.
-
Corin leaned his shoulder against the cool wood of the door and let out a short, tired breath. "I've done my fair research on your Aspect," he said, "I hoped it would be simple like manipulating the light of the moon, like the incident suggested. But… it may be more worrying. I think it's the Concept of Remembrance, woven through a moon."
Aurelia felt the room tilt in the tiniest of degrees, not from the floor but from some slow tide inside her skull. Remembrance. The word settled like ash on a page she had not meant to open.
She watched Corin's jaw tighten, watched the way his hand flexed against the wood as if the door were a book of facts he couldn't close. Remembrance means the past can be pulled or pushed.
Corin's voice was softer now, like someone handing over something fragile. "That would explain the things you've been seeing, the fragments that pop up out of nowhere, memories that weren't there before, the way echoes arrive where there should be silence. The mirrors fogging when you look, voices you hear but can't place…" He let the sentence trail as if each item counted like a toll taken from the air between them.
Aurelia felt each example land against her like a coin. Fragments, she thought, doors opening into rooms I remember entering but don't.
Aurelia took a breath, her curiosity edging into urgency. "So I can manipulate the past? If I can remember it, can I change it?"
Corin looked at her, his brow furrowing slightly, "To manipulate the past is to manipulate the present and the future as well. The past is the foundational layer, everything builds on it, and it inevitably influences what comes next. The past holds its own rules, and bending them might unravel the threads holding everything together."
He paused, letting his words settle between them. "Your Aspect doesn't move time," he said. "It moves memory. It gives the Aether a language for the past, just as a prism gives color to light. What you do, likely, is call those colors out, sharpen an old hurt so it becomes vivid again, coax a buried kindness to the surface, or trace echoes until they take on shape. People will believe what their minds can see. So yes, you change the present, because people act on what they remember. But you don't take a noon and make it never have been noon."
Aurelia closed her fingers until she felt the faint ache of her own pulse.
That ache was an anchor, it said she still existed between breaths and was not yet a wish. So it's influence, not erasure. A crooked mirror rather than a vanished hall.
"Can you teach me to control it?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Corin offered a wry smile, shaking his head gently. "Control isn't something I can teach you. The memories, they are the signature your inner voice writes onto the thread of Aether. Only you can decide which to wear and which to conceal. They may surface unbidden, bringing to light the truths you'd rather keep hidden, nudging you toward certain revelations over others. That kind of understanding goes beyond any lesson you could learn from a book." He lightly tapped the door, emphasizing the gravity of his words.
—————
Edda came in without ceremony, the flap of her cloak quiet on the threshold, before she sat opposite Aurelia. She held a torn edge of paper folded into her palm.
Aurelia blinked at it as if the scrap had been placed there by a trickster. "What is this?" she asked.
The ink along the ragged edge was a smear of brown, a suggestion of letters rather than letters themselves.
Edda's eyes were steady. "A remnant," she said simply. "Not random. I found it in the library stacks, an acid-eaten page from a binding no one could name. I want you to try something." She tapped the paper with the pad of her thumb. "Use your Aspect. Listen to the thing's past. Let the memory of its making come through you."
Aurelia's first impulse was to refuse. Small, safe, ordinary, she reminded herself, this was neither a bell nor a scent, it was a thing with history.
Yet the scrap felt like a promise in her palm, if she could coax a paper's past into being, perhaps she could learn the rules of the voice that answered her.
Aurelia inhaled, soft and methodical, and let the cold that sat under her ribs open like a door.
She called nothing grand. She asked only for the memory of a hand folding a sheet, the tang of glue warmed by breath, the faint tang of ink.
Her Aspect answered with something gentler than a tide, a silvering, like moonlight pressed into the fibers.
It seeped from her like breath, and over the torn edge, it pooled and moved, thread by thread, until the ragged fibers knit themselves together.
Aurelia felt the small, clinical thrill any apprentice felt when a rune took hold, precise and dizzying, immediately followed by a low caution.
When the last seam sealed, the paper lay whole and clean.
The faded script across the sheet steadied into lines that were older than everyday speech, a scroll of ancient text revealed where there had been only suggestion before.
Aurelia had the sensation of having opened a locked closet and found a uniform folded and waiting for her.
The words did not make sense, at least, not yet, but the pattern of their ink hummed with provenance, a scribe's hand, a scholar's correction, a marginal note erased so long ago that the ghost of it remained like a watermark.
Edda watched with an expression Aurelia had come to recognize as factual tenderness. "Interesting," she murmured. "Not every memory will hold like that. Some curl up and die when you touch them. Others—" She inclined her head. "—are patient. They let themselves be read again."
Then, practically, Edda folded the scroll's edge and set it between them. "Do you have any other abilities you know of? Anything else the Aspect does that surprised you?"
Aurelia thought of the mirrors, of Lucifer's face, of the ways echoes had arrived in courtyards and bells.
She thought of the cedar and the lullaby and of the way moonlight had poured through paper.
Aurelia shook her head slowly. "I don't know," she said. The answer tasted both accurate and incomplete.
There are things I have not seen, and things I do not want to know. How much of my life is waiting to be named?
Edda's hand found hers for a moment, a brief, warm clamp. "Then we proceed as if you are still learning, and that is exactly the right assumption." Her voice carried no sermon. "Until we map the full scope of what your Aspect can do, containment and careful practice are not punishments."
Her gaze sharpened. "And if anything feels like more than a memory, if it feels like a force or a presence, you tell me first."
Aurelia let Edda's assurance settle around her like a shawl.
It did not make the nights disappear or dull the image of the darker woman in the mirror, but it put tools between her and the unknown.
Listen, call small, know what answers. She smoothed the repaired scroll with fingers that still trembled a little, and folded herself around the new lesson: memory could mend more than loss, it could, if steered carefully, keep them all from harm.