The room fades around us, and my father pulls me back into the main hall before I can react. This is what I have always known. The other kids would show their magical capabilities when I was growing up in various ways. Turning their water into absinthe in school. Lighting their homework on fire, sometimes on accident. Levitants would hang their bullies over the bridge until they repented. I had never shown even a hint of magical ability. Despite being the Grandmaster's daughter.

As we step out of the chamber, I take a breath to speak, but my father cuts me off before I can even form the words.

"You will divide your time between assisting me and training with the adversaries," he states. His voice is as firm and unmoving as stone.

The Adversaries. Lower magicians, powerful in their own right but unfit for the highest circles of magic. Why? Why would he send me there? My stomach churns, but I nod, swallowing my questions. My father's strides are swift, his black robes slicing through the gloom as if the shadows themselves recoil from his fury. I scramble to keep pace, the cold seeping through my slippers from the flagstones matching the ice clotting my veins.

"You will report to my study at dawn," he says without turning, his voice a blade honed by centuries of command. "Afternoons will be spent with the Adversaries in the western barracks. Their commander expects you tomorrow."

I stumble, the words a physical blow. "The Adversaries? But they're—"

"Lesser magicians, yes." He halts so abruptly I nearly collide with him. When he faces me, his expression is a mask of frost, but his eyes—stars, his eyes—burn with something raw. Something like fear. "They deal in combat magic. Practical skills. You'll learn discipline there, if nothing else."

Discipline. As if my failure stems from laziness, not the yawning void where magic should live. I bite my tongue until copper blooms, choking back the question that claws at my throat: Why do you care to mold me now? The High Judge's rasping voice slithers through my memory.

"Your daughter will not be your undoing. But the spire..." She'd said it so casually, as if announcing the weather, while the other judges cackled like crows over carrion. My father had gone deathly still, his knuckles whitening around the hilt of the ceremonial dagger at his hip—the one that had slit a hundred throats during his rise to power.

"Father," I dare to whisper, "What did she mean? About your... undoing? What spire was she talking about?" A muscle feathers in his jaw. For a heartbeat, I see it—the flicker of the man beneath the crown. The one who once taught me constellations on summer nights, his voice softening as he traced Cassiara's Bow in the sky. But then his mask reforges, harder than before.

"The old ones speak in riddles to amuse themselves." He resumes walking, the click of his boots final as a coffin sealing. "Do not shame me further by dwelling on their games."

The academy's grand hall is nearly empty when I return, the last stragglers lingering near the arched doorways like ghosts reluctant to cross into daylight. Moonlight streams through stained glass, painting the floor in fractured hues of amethyst and sapphire—colors meant to represent magic's glory. Now they feel like a mockery.

"Tia!" Celine's voice is a balm. She descends the central staircase in a ripple of rose-gold silk, her healing magic trailing her like fireflies. Atlas follows, his hands tucked into the pockets of his charcoal-gray tunic, the casual stance at odds with the storm in his eyes.Celine crushes me in a hug that smells of lavender. "We heard. Oh, stars, Tia—mortal." She says it like a prayer, not a curse. "What does this mean for you now?"

Atlas slings an arm around my shoulders, his touch deliberate. Grounding. "Means every noble in the six courts will be clawing at your door by week's end. Mortals are rarer than phoenix feathers, love."

I stiffen. "They're slaves, Atlas. Glorified scribes."

"Not you." His fingers tighten, sparks skittering where his skin meets mine.

"The laws are clear. No magician can compel a mortal. No charms, no blood binds, no thralls. You're the only ones who can walk among us untouched." Celine nods, her braids catching the light like spun gold. "The High Healers have three mortals in their ranks. They're treasured—protected. Their hands can mix poisons without risk, handle cursed relics..."

"And their minds can't be infiltrated by mind-wielders," Atlas adds, a shadow passing over his face. He knows better than any the horrors of mental invasion; his younger sister had her memories shredded by a Dusk Legion interrogator last winter. I shake my head, stepping back from their warmth. "I don't want to be a relic. I want—"

"Power?" Atlas arches a brow. "You've got something better. Autonomy. You think the rest of us aren't bound by our gifts? That Lirial wouldn't sell her soul to be free of her shadow-bond?" Celine swats his arm. "Be kind."

"I am being kind." He grins, all sharp edges and mischief, but his eyes soften as they meet mine. "When I'm Head Magistrate of the Guidekeeps, I'll hire you as my personal scribe. Promise I won't work you too hard. Maybe one day off a decade."

The joke lands like a dagger.

Endless days in a shadowed study. Ink-stained fingers. Atlas's voice dictating edicts while I scratch his words onto parchment, invisible, erasable—

"Don't." My voice cracks. "Please." His grin dies. "Tia—"A bell tolls in the distance, its mournful note reverberating through the stones. Celine pales. "The healers' summons. There's been another attack on the northern border." She squeezes my hand. "Come to the gardens tonight. We'll talk more."

Atlas hesitates, lightning flickering in his palms—a nervous habit since his manifestation. "You're not alone in this," he murmurs. Then he's gone, chasing Celine's retreating figure.

The celebration ball unfolds like a living tapestry of the six courts' decadence. Moonlight spills through the arched windows of the Hall of Echoes, its silver beams catching on the crystal chandeliers. Nobles glide across the floor in robes embroidered with sigils. I see Lirial in her obsidian gown, its hem pooling like spilled ink as she stands flanked by her parents. Lord Morn's face is a mask of carved oak, his fingers restless on the hilt of the shadow-forged dagger at his belt—a weapon rumored to have slain one of the Aevarin, the immortal stewards who once ruled these lands. Lady Morn's smile is thinner than a sickle moon, her eyes darting to the faint tendrils of darkness curling from Lirial's sleeves, as though even her daughter's magic might stain their family's waning prestige.

I weave through the crowd, the scent of sylvain wine and fire-roasted peacock feathers sharp in my nose. A trio of musicians pluck vairous strings, their melody twining with the laughter of magistrates' heirs. My fingers brush the locket at my throat—the only relic I have of my mother, its silver surface etched with the phases of the moon. She died birthing me on the night of the Black Eclipse, when the moons bled shadows and the Veil Between Worlds grew thin. They say her scream echoed through the Obsidian Spire, so potent it shattered every mirror in the western wing. Now, seventeen years later, the mirrors still hang cracked in those corridors, their jagged edges glinting like teeth. A reminder. A warning.

"Tia."

Lirial's voice is a serpent sliding through silk. She steps into my path, her shadow-bond writhing at her feet like a living thing—a gift (or curse) from the Shade Lord her family still worships in secret. Behind her, the frescoed walls depict the War of Shattered Chains, where mortal rebels broke the Aevarin's grip on this realm. How fitting.

"I hear you've been relegated to the Adversaries." Her smile is all venom. "How... fitting for the Grandmaster's mortal daughter."

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The crowd stills, goblets frozen mid-sip. Even the musicians falter.

I tilt my chin, the locket burning against my skin. "At least I'm not bound by shadows—or to a family that licks the boots of forgotten gods."

Her magic flares, tendrils of darkness lashing like whips. The air reeks of charred ozone and the metallic tang of the Void. "Better to be bound by shadows," she hisses, "than to be a hollow vessel, forever echoing with the absence of power."

The words carve deeper than she knows. My mother's ghost haunts every corner of this court—the woman who wielded storm and steel until her magic burned too bright, until her womb became a pyre. Now I am the ash left behind.

"We'll see whose shadow is longer when-" I falter.

"Enough."

The temperature plummets. Frost spiders across the wine in nearby goblets as my father materializes beside me, his presence a winter storm given flesh. His eyes, twin chips of glacial ice, fix on Lirial. "Return to your shadows, child. This is not the Dusk Legion."

Lord Morn steps forward, bowing with lethal grace. "A thousand apologies, Grandmaster. The girl forgets her place." His gaze flicks to me, lingering on my locket. "Though it seems... legacy is a fickle thing."

The threat hangs unspoken. My father's hand tightens on the hilt of Duskrend, the blade that ended the Aevarin's last prince. "Leave us."

I don't resist as he guides me from the hall, past murals of gods and martyrs, beneath the watchful eyes of stone gargoyles whose wings still bear scars from the war. The corridor to our chambers is lined with mirrors—all intact here, their surfaces swirling with captive starlight. Yet as we pass, my reflection wavers. Not a girl, but a smudge of smoke. A flicker of something else. My red hair dancing like fire behind the trails of wind my looming father left as he walked.

"You court danger," my father growls.

I halt, staring at the hollow in the glass. I dare not look up at him. It was foolish of me to even think of responding.

"The chambers," he says, turning away. "Now."

As I walk away, the mirrors whisper. And in their depths, the smoke stirs.

The spiral staircase to the library's east wing groans beneath my slippers, its ancient stones worn smooth by centuries of scholars fleeing into silence. Moonlight bleeds through the arched windows, gilding the shelves in liquid silver, but even its cold glow cannot soften the hunger of the tomes here. They watch from the shadows, leather spines etched with glyphs that writhe like living things when touched by mortal hands—a language forbidden to all but the judges and the dead.

My sanctuary waits at the apex: a crescent-shaped window seat cradled between a treatise on bone divination and a star chart singed at the edges, as if someone once tried to burn the constellations from its pages. Below sprawls the kingdom, its bones laid bare under the night's gaze. To the east, the Obsidian Mountains pierce the clouds, their peaks crowned with temples older than the Vale bloodline. To the west, the Ashwind River carves a serpentine path through the valley, its waters blackened by the ashes of the gods who drowned there. By day, this window frames a tapestry of order—soldiers drilling in sunlit fields, Bloomwrights coaxing golden grain from soil still stained with ancient wars. But tonight, the world beyond the glass hums with a different truth.

The Temple of Ash dominates the horizon.

Even from leagues away, its presence is a fist around my throat. By daylight, it is a ruin—crumbling arches, pillars choked by ivy, a monument to forgotten prayers. But when the moon rises, the stones breathe. Faint blue veins pulse beneath its surface, runes glowing like submerged stars, and the air above its shattered altar shimmers as though something unseen strains against the fabric of the world.

Father once called it a grave. "The gods buried there are best left sleeping," he'd said during our last chess game in this alcove, his queen slicing through my pawns with merciless precision. The memory stings. His visits ceased after my seventeeth birthday, when the dreams began. When the Temple started whispering.

Now, the judges' verdict coils in my skull like smoke. Touched by the Old Ones.

Mortals are omens wrapped in skin—rare, coveted, cursed. The laws carved into the Celestial Vault decree their protection: Those who cannot fight back will feel no wrath. But parchment is a flimsy shield. Last winter, a mortal scribe in the Dusk Legion's employ vanished from her chambers, leaving behind only a single slipper filled with black sand. They found her three days later, wandering the Wailing Steppes, her eyes hollowed out and her tongue replaced with a scroll bearing the High Commander's seal. The truth, like all things here, bends to power.

A gust slams the window, carrying the scent of petrichor and decay. The Temple's runes flare in response, their light searing my retinas.

Tia.

The voice is not a sound but a vibration—a plucked chord in the marrow of my bones. The vision crashes over me:

Cold stone beneath my palms. A crown of shadows weighing on my brow. The altar ahead, slick with blood that is not blood, and beyond it—a spire. The Eidolon, jagged and impossibly tall, its apex vanishing into a storm of smoke and ash.

"You feel it too, don't you?"

I whirl, heart clawing up my throat.

The figure leaning against the bookshelf is a paradox of shadows—there and not there, like smoke given sentience. Hooded robes cling to a form too fluid to be human, and where their face should be, darkness pools endlessly. Their voice is a chorus, layered with whispers that itch at the edges of understanding.

"The Temple hungers," they murmur, gliding forward. Moonlight fractures around them, repelled by the void they wear as a second skin. "But you already know what it wants."

I retreat until the window digs into my spine. "Judge Lirien."

A laugh like shattering glass. The hood falls back, revealing not the crone from the ceremony, but a creature of terrible beauty—skin the color of midnight, hair a cascade of living starlight, eyes twin abysses where galaxies are born and die. Her smile splits her face too wide, teeth gleaming like shards of a broken mirror.

"Clever girl," she croons. Frost blooms where her fingers brush my cheek, burning as they trace the line of my jaw. "Your father would cage you in parchment and politics, but the Eidolon Spire sings for you. It always has."

I flinch. "The judges said it's a myth. A children's tale."

"A lie," she hisses, sudden as a viper's strike. The air thickens, pressing down until my knees buckle. "The Spire is the heart of the Temple, and the Temple is a lock. For five thousand years, we have kept the key from the hands of greedy kings and fools. But you..." Her clawed hand splays over my chest, and the hook behind my ribs pulls. "You are the first mortal born on the Spire's alignment. The first who might survive the trial."

"Trial?" The word tastes of ash.

She leans close, her breath a winter gale. "To claim the Spire is to claim the power of the Ones Who Came Before. But power demands sacrifice. Enter the Temple unprepared, and the Spire will devour you. Your mind will unravel. Your loved ones will rot from the inside out, cursed by the echoes of your failure. Even now, your little lightning-wielder and his golden healer walk the edge of a blade they cannot see."

Atlas's laugh flashes in my mind. Celine's hand steady on a dying soldier's brow. No.

Lirien's grip tightens, her nails almost drawing blood. "And your father? He is doing everything he can to turn you into his little desk jocky."

Pain crossed my heart at the mention of my father. "He only wants to protect me from people like you, who will enslave me."

"Enslave?" Judge Lirien scoffs. Her starlit hair ripples as if stirred by an unfelt wind, her void-like eyes narrowing at the mention of my father. "Protective?" She laughs, the sound like icicles shattering on stone. "Is that what you call shackling you to ledgers and courtly manners? Tell me, Tia Vale—when he looks at you, does he see a daughter? Or a problem to be managed?"

My spine stiffens. "He's kept this kingdom standing for a century. His decisions are for the greater good." Even as I say it, the words taste stale. I remember the way he'd stared at me after the judges' verdict—not with disappointment, but calculation, as if reassembling broken pieces into a new weapon.

Lirien's clawed finger tilts my chin upward, her touch leaching warmth from my blood. "Your father is a man who loves cages. The ones he builds for others, and the ones he's trapped within." She nods toward the window, where the distant lights of the Dusk Legion's encampment glitter like predator eyes. "His alliance with those butchers proves it. He thinks himself their master, but chains chafe both ways, little mortal."

I wrench free. "He's trying to protect our people—"

"From what? The truth?" Her voice drops to a venomous whisper. "Why do you think he never let you near the Temple archives? Why he burned every text mentioning the Eidolon Spire?" She steps closer, her shadow swallowing the moonlight. "The Spire's power could unmake his fragile peace. Could unmake him. And you... you are the match poised above his kindling."

A cold realization slithers through me. Father's late-night meetings with Legion commanders. The way he'd barred me from council sessions after he knew my dreams began. Even our chess games here—had they been lessons in strategy, or warnings? Kings sacrifice pawns to protect their thrones.

Lirien presses her palm to the window, her reflection warping the Temple's silhouette. "You revere him. A sweet, mortal weakness. But ask yourself—when the Spire's call grows too loud to ignore, will he stand with you? Or will he become the first blade at your back?"

The vision returns unbidden: *Father in his war room, maps of the Temple ruins spread before him, his dagger pinning a parchment marked with a single word—*Eidolon. His eyes lift to mine, colder than the glaciers beyond the mountains. "You will not go there, Tia. That is an order."

Judge Lirien smiles, reading the conflict in my silence. "The Temple's trial will demand everything—your loyalty, your love, your lies. But to rise, you must first decide whose hands you trust to let go."

She spins to leave, I in abject shock, am now more afraid to sleep than ever before.