Forty-nine nights after the awakening
The restricted wing was colder than a tomb and twice as quiet.
After the awakening the different houses returned and factions returned, the tale of the common rank heir of house Voss represented many things whether mockery or scheming.
Father didn't talk to me that night, two days later he left going back to the borders,
mother seemed to be slowly distancing herself from me she had less time more often, often going out of her way to use the baby as an excuse, she was getting more and more distant, a voice speaking colder by the day, all of these are factors that have led me to this point.
Only one candle still burned on the long reading table, its flame trembling as though it, too, knew what I was about to attempt. The black-bound book lay open like a dissected heart, pages of shadow-drake hide gleaming wetly in the low light. I had read the rite so many times I could recite it in my sleep. Tonight I would perform it awake.
I had prepared for weeks with the meticulousness of a man planning his own execution.
Forty-nine days of deliberate mana starvation, because of this I haven't touched my core since Awakening.
Forty-nine times I whispered lies to myself in the dark: You felt the surge. You saw the frost. You have it within you.
The blood circle was perfect. Three concentric rings, twelve radial spokes, every drop placed exactly where the diagram demanded. My fingertips were still raw from the silver needle. The void-salt crystal waited in its obsidian dish, no larger than a child's tooth, yet heavy as guilt, the amount of connections had to use to get this mysterious material, according to my sources they were only three crystals in the entire world.
It smelled faintly of deep graves and older winters.
I stripped to the skin. The night air knifed across my ribs; every bruise and half-healed cut from the training yard stood out like accusations. I folded my clothes with mechanical neatness, an adult habit the original Lydan had never possessed, and set them aside. Then I sat cross-legged in the centre of the circle, knees on frozen stone, spine straight as a spear.
The crystal went onto my tongue.
It tasted exactly like the moment you realise the cliff edge has already crumbled beneath your feet.
I closed my mouth, sealed my lips, and began to count heartbeats.
One.
Two.
Ten.
Thirty…
The burn started in the lungs first, then slid down every meridian like molten wire. I welcomed it. Pain was proof I was still fighting.
Sixty… ninety…
Vision tunneled. The candle flame became a distant star. My pulse slowed, each beat a hammer blow against the inside of my skull.
One hundred twenty.
The circle ignited. Not with fire, but with absence. Black light that swallowed colour and sound. My blood on the stones turned to ink, then to living shadow that crawled up my calves like frostbite in reverse. Books on the shelves crackled as moisture flash-froze inside their pages. The temperature plummeted so fast the iron candlestick groaned and split down the middle.
One hundred fifty.
The pain transcended pain. It became a single pure note that vibrated in every bone, a chord struck on the strings of my soul.
And in that perfect, agonising clarity, the lie finally shattered.
Not the seal, there had never been a seal.
Not the dragon, there had never been a dragon.
The memory itself.
It unfolded in front of my mind's eye with the brutal precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
The real awakening, forty-nine days ago:
I stood before the crystal orb, small hands trembling on cool glass.
Nothing happened for three long heartbeats.
Then the orb glowed a dull, sickly grey, the colour of old ash, of disappointment, of a future already written in minor key.
No indigo storm.
No silver threads.
No frost racing across marble.
Just grey.
Elara's voice, gentle and merciless:
"Young Master Lydan Voss… no elemental resonance detected. Potential tier: Common."
The silence that followed had been absolute. Not the hush of awe, but the hush of a funeral where the corpse is still breathing.
Father's jaw had not clenched in dread; it had clenched in shame.
Mother had not turned away in sorrow; she had turned away so no one would see what expression she was making.
And in that silence, my adult mind of knowing I had once been competent, once been respected had recoiled so violently from the truth that it manufactured an entire heroic delusion in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
A glorious, tragic, perfect lie:
Ice and Shadow.
Imperial tier.
A sleeping god bound by cosmic injustice.
Every detail had been supplied by my own denial, the gasps of the crowd, the frost on the table, the way Elara's eyes had widened. I had written the scene myself and then believed my own fiction so completely I was willing to die for it.
Tonight I almost did.
The realisation hit harder than the void-salt.
My body convulsed. The circle's black light winked out as though someone had pinched a candle. The "living shadows" were only ordinary darkness. The shattered books were the ones I had hurled across the room in a tantrum three nights earlier and then refused to acknowledge. The frost on the windows had been there when I arrived; I had simply needed it to be new.
The void-salt crystal melted in my mouth at the last second.
There was no surge of power.
No dragon uncoiling.
Only a ten-year-old boy kneeling naked in his blood.
And that changed something in me,
Because the truth was so much smaller than the lie, and therefore infinitely heavier.
I was Common.
Grey.
The lowest measurable rung on a ladder whose second rung 'Mundane' was already considered an embarrassment for a ducal heir.
There had been no conspiracy.
I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough for the candle to drown in its own wax. Long enough for the frost patterns on the windows to melt into tear-shaped streaks and refreeze. Long enough for the keep's great clock tower to strike four, then five, then six.
Eventually the only thing left was hollow quiet that follows a storm a storm that had broken me,
a storm that had changed me.
I sat up slowly. My limbs felt borrowed, my skin too tight with dried blood. The circle looked pathetic now (red-brown smears on grey stone, nothing mystical at all).
I began to clean.
I scrubbed the blood away with a rag and bucket of water I fetched from the reading alcove, working until my fingers bled fresh and the stones were merely wet instead of accusing. I gathered the scattered pages of the black-bound book, carried them to the hearth, and fed them one by one into the embers. Centuries of forbidden knowledge curled, blackened, became harmless ash. I watched every sheet burn, because some doors are better left closed.
The void-salt crystal I swallowed dry. It tasted of nothing now.
When the library was tidy again, when no trace remained of the night I had almost killed myself, I dressed in my discarded clothes. They were stiff with frost and smelled of sweat, but they were mine.
Then I did the only thing left to do.
I walked to the shelves and selected a different book.
It was bound in plain brown leather, the title stamped in cheap gold foil:
Elementary Mana Circulation for Common-Tier Students, Third Edition.
I carried it back to the table, opened to the first page, and began to read by the grey light of dawn,
The spark within me had changed from denial to determination