They stepped past Aurion's Gate.
The amber light of Elyra Vale rolled over them like a tide of molten glass, thick enough to choke on.
The wind carried the wet-metal smell of Lumin Blades clashing in child hands and the sound of steel on steel mixed with the thin, high whine of Seiki pushed past its limit.
Recruits no older than six drilled in perfect rows under the watchful eyes of white-robed instructors, their blades carving arcs that left glowing after-images in the air.
One boy stumbled, took a knee to the ribs from an instructor, and did not cry.
Rei's stomach folded in on itself.
The world vanished.
He was two days old when the ward-speakers mounted on every spire screamed hymns at full volume, a wall of sound that induced stress and caused emotions to be scrambled.
Midwives in white robes stood in a circle, eyes shining with religious fervor, hands clasped in prayer as the infant convulsed.
Lieutenant Tetsuya Kurayami (stoic enforcer, face carved from granite, the man who had crushed Pact skulls with his bare hands) signed the birth ledger without looking at the cradle.
Captain Akiko Kurayami (ruthless tactician, beloved by the elite, vine-embroidered cape snapping in the wind, the woman who had burned three villages to secure a supply line) stood over the infant, arms crossed, nodding at every wail.
"Cleanse the soul," she said, voice flat as a blade.
They left him for the council to train, so he learned the word "purity" before he learned the word "mother."
He was two when the hand-to-hand circle was cold marble under bare feet.
Ten toddlers faced one instructor whose knuckles were stone.
Rei's fist met the man's palm, and his wrist snapped with a wet pop, bone shards grinding against bone.
The instructor smiled.
Akiko watched from the balcony and clapped once, a single sharp sound that meant pride, while Tetsuya signed the injury report: "Promising."
Rei swallowed the cry and learned that pain seemed to please others.
He was six when one thousand children marched in perfect rows across Solarii's training fields, Seiki humming in their veins and amber auras bright enough to cast shadows on the ground.
They could drop a grown guard with their Seiki.
The Council called them the future.
Rei called them friends.
Others called them elite killers.
Then came the beginning of the 7th year — one cruel month.
They handed each child a scroll with an address and a promise to return after visiting.
Rei walked the sky-bridge alone, heart hammering against ribs that still remembered his parents hadn't spoken to him since he was two days old.
The gate opened.
Lieutenant Tetsuya Kurayami stood in full armor, helm under one arm, eyes on the horizon.
Captain Akiko Kurayami waited beside him, arms crossed like a wall.
Rei opened his mouth to say the word he had practiced for thirty nights.
"Mom... dad."
Her knee drove into his gut, so air exploded from his lungs.
The force behind it sent him tumbling into the street, where he tasted blood and crystal dust.
"Get lost, whelp," Akiko said, voice flat as a blade.
"I've greater duties for the Order."
Tetsuya never bothered to look up at his son.
Rei curled on the pavement, ribs screaming, and told himself it was normal.
He slept on Mirae's floor that night, a friend from his class.
Mirae pulled her thin blanket over both of them and mourned his bruises with stolen medicine from the infirmary, whispering names of birds she had never seen but swore existed beyond the spires.
She drew a picture on scrap paper: two stick figures under a blue sky, no walls, no gates.
She taped it above the bunk.
"When we grow up," she whispered, "we'll run away together."
Rei believed in her the way children believe in stars.
After the month ended, a horn called the students back.
Four arenas waited, each a bowl of earth ringed by floating balconies where the Council sat in white robes, faces calm as statues.
Two hundred and fifty children per bowl.
One rule: only one emerges from each arena.
They called it the greatest honor to the Order.
The gates slammed, and dust rose in choking clouds while Lumin Blades made of Seiki flickered alive in tiny hands.
Rei moved because standing still meant dying, and he did not want to die, and he wanted Mirae's hand in his.
He lost her in the swirl of Seiki and screaming.
He found her again in the middle, where the dust was thickest.
She lay on the ground, bleeding out from her throat, gasping for air.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered.
The Lumin Blade edge slid between her ribs like it had been waiting its whole life for this moment.
She looked surprised, then empty, and folded on the ground like a paper doll the wind had forgotten.
The dust drank her blood while Rei screamed until his throat tore, and he kept screaming while the others fell.
He lost count after the 50th throat, the 100th scream, the 200th body that looked like Mirae in the dust.
A boy with a broken arm lunged, blade first.
Rei parried and twisted so the boy's own momentum drove the blade through his own throat.
Blood sprayed in a hot arc across Rei's face while the body jerked and gurgled.
A girl with pigtails charged, tears streaming, blade high.
Rei sidestepped and brought his elbow down on the back of her neck — the crack was soft, like stepping on a twig — and she dropped dead from impact.
Another child, face already swollen from earlier blows, swung wildly.
Rei caught the wrist and twisted until the shoulder popped from its socket with a wet pop, then drove his blade through the boy's eye so the brain burst like a grape and the body jerked once and went still.
The dust was red now, thick as mud, sucking at his boots.
He waded through it, blade singing, until the last child fell with a gurgle, throat opened ear to ear, and blood bubbling like a spring.
Two hundred and forty-nine small bodies cooled around him in a perfect circle.
When the dust settled, he stood alone.
The Council clapped, a polite ripple of sound that echoed off the balconies like rain on bone.
The guards dragged the four survivors away before the blood dried.
Four altars waited with four children lying upon cold stone.
Chants rose in layers, pressing down until bones hummed.
The Void opened beneath him with black sky and no ground.
Angels in gold and demons in rust circled but did not speak.
The other three at the altar received their angelic wills easily.
Rei was another story.
The council stood perplexed.
In the Void, for Rei, all Demons and Angels alike seemed to be fearful of him.
Rei lay on the altar emotionless.
After a long while, the angel Uriel came before him.
Uriel's light wrapped him, warm and proud, a father's hand on a shoulder that had never known one.
Something else laughed in the dark, a red thread slipping between the blue, thin as a vein.
He woke on the floor, gasping.
One eye sapphire.
One eye crimson.
Blue-white fire licked the ceiling until marble blistered.
The Council's faces turned the color of old ash.
One word passed their lips.
Demon.
They let him keep the flames because even they feared what they had made.
The light came back.
Rei blinked, and the memory released him.
He was standing in Elyra Vale, amber meadows alive with the clash of child blades and the low hum of Seiki drills.
Hajime's hand gripped his shoulder, gold Seiki flickering worriedly at the edges.
Izumi's vines curled gently around his wrist, thorns retracted, pulse steadying his own.
"You okay?" Hajime asked, voice low.
Rei's answer came out small, the voice of a six-year-old who had never been allowed to be one.
"I killed my only real friend."
A runner skidded to a stop on the crystal path, helm tucked under one arm, eyes wide at the Eclipse Commander on his knees.
"Commander Kurayami, the High Regent summons you to Solarii at once. A skybridge convoy leaves within the hour."
Rei looked up.
The meadows were beautiful.
They had always been a graveyard.
He took one step forward, and the amber light swallowed him again, but this time he walked into it on his own feet.