The spires of Elorynth Academy rose like obsidian fangs through the shroud of morning fog, their mirrored surfaces catching the first light of dawn and flinging it skyward—as if defying the gods themselves.
They did not simply reach for the heavens; they stabbed at them, daring judgment.
Of the five great academies that stood within the heart of the Imperial Capital, Elorynth was the eldest, the most venerated, and by far the most merciless. It was not a place of nurture, but of culling—a crucible where weakness was not corrected, but crushed. Tradition here did not whisper. It howled.
It was by royal decree—whether divine inspiration or calculated cruelty—that Elorynth had been chosen to host this year's entrance trials.
The decision came swift and without warning, and the implications struck like a blade across the throat of decorum. For the first time, the sanctified halls of Elorynth would open not only to the cloaked scions of noble blood, but to common-born contenders—the meek, the muddied, the undesired.
The announcement did not ripple through the city. It tore through it.
To the proud, it was a blasphemy.
To the hopeful, a snare dressed in gold.
To the rest, Elorynth remained what it had always been—an altar of dread, where ambition was sacrificed daily.
The stone walkways of the academy stretched out like veins of time itself—ancient and cracked, each slab etched with runes long since faded from mortal memory.
Their once-sharp edges had been dulled by centuries of footsteps, yet the weight of their legacy pressed into the soles of all who dared tread them. Faint whispers seemed to bleed from the carvings—fragments of forgotten incantations or curses, impossible to decipher, but impossible to ignore.
Above, blood-red and tarnished gold banners hung from blackened iron poles, their fabric dancing lightly in the morning breeze. The emblem of the twin dragons—one skeletal, the other living—coiled menacingly around an hourglass suspended in mid-drip. Time was never still within these walls. It watched. It waited. It devoured.
The academy gates, towering things of wrought obsidian and ironwood, loomed open like a gaping maw. They were rarely unbarred, and their openness today felt unnatural—like the calm eye of a storm that had not yet arrived but was certain to swallow all who stepped through. On either side stood guards clad not in functional armor, but in relics of war—ceremonial plate etched with symbols of war, death, and penance. Their visors remained down, faces hidden, their silence more unsettling than any warning. Statues or sentinels—none could say.
Crossing the threshold felt less like entering a place of learning and more like trespassing on sacred, dangerous ground.
Emil stood before the gaping archway, its shadows deep and waiting. At his side stood the three who had shaped him—his father, Alexander, and his two mentors, Liz and Raphael. The moment felt suspended in time, heavy with finality.
Alexander's hand found his shoulder, firm and comforting, full of fatherly hope and affection. His eyes—those weathered eyes—held the storm of a man who had braved loss and sacrifice, now forced to release the last piece of himself into a world that devoured the unguarded.
"This is where we part," he said, his voice rough with the restraint of unspoken fears. "I've watched you grow sharper than any blade I've ever seen, and brighter than any spell I've ever heard. You've nothing left to prove to me, Emil. But now…" He nodded toward the academy gates, where destiny seemed to breathe and wait. "Now, it's time you let them see it. Let them tremble. It's what your mom wanted, to see you blossom, and this place will help with that...You just have to show them what you have shown me all your life my son."
Liz stepped forward, her expression unreadable beneath the sharp arch of her brows. She knelt—not as a gesture of softness, but precision—adjusting the folds of his collar with a magician's care. "Don't you dare shrink here," she murmured, eyes locking with his. "You are not just the sum of your lessons. You are a raging storm, contained and controlled, like every magical formula we have studied. Be proud. Be terrifying."
Raphael scratched the edge of his beard, grinning like a man who'd seen fire and walked through it laughing. "Let them choke on their own arrogance. Split their illusions wide open. Noble or not—remind them that monsters can wear the face of a boy."
Emil allowed a small grin, faint but dangerous. "I'll try."
Alexander's grip tightened—once, hard enough to ground him in memory. "No," he said. "Don't try. Do."
Then, just as suddenly, the hand was gone. Liz rose and stepped back. Raphael folded his arms and gave a solemn nod. The three remained behind him, statues of pride and fear and hope forged into flesh.
Emil turned.
With one final breath, he stepped through the archway alone.
Inside, the academy opened like the vaulted ribcage of some long-dead god. Ceilings soared high above, impossibly wide and steeped in magic, where light shimmered through floating chandeliers and runed sconces hissed with cold flame. The marble beneath his boots echoed with every step, each click another heartbeat in the cathedral of ambition.
Candidates—commoners and nobles alike—pressed together in shifting tides, herded by robed attendants of cobalt and ash. The air reeked of perfume, tension, and entitlement. The sheer grandeur surprisingly didn't intimidate Emil.
It sharpened him.
He knew what it meant to fulfill the desire of his recently deceased mother, to grow, to blossom, to stive forward. He knew that for the longest, there was innocence and play, but something deep down, especially after last night's dream where he trained unlike ever before with the unnamed swordsman...The time for child like anything was over.
As Emil walked deeper into the heart of Elorynth, the atmosphere thickened like a storm-laden sky. The distinctions became stark—etched not in words, but in posture, presence, and silence. The common-born clung to the edges of the hall like shadows, their shoulders hunched, eyes darting with a mix of reverence and dread. Whispers passed between them like dying embers, barely daring to breathe in a place not made for them.
The nobles, by contrast, prowled. Draped in immaculate uniforms that shimmered with stitched enchantments, they moved with the ease of predators in a den they had ruled for generations. Their laughter echoed sharp against marble and magic—soulless, polished, cruel. The scent of perfume and pride clung to them like rot beneath gold.
Near a column of polished brass and bone-white stone stood four of them—three boys and a girl, her silver-blonde hair braided through with gold thread, a circlet resting atop her head like a crown she hadn't earned but demanded. Their laughter died as Emil approached, not from respect, but from interest—a curiosity one reserves for something out of place, or beneath notice.
One boy stepped into Emil's path, his smile a blade wrapped in silk.
"Well," he drawled, eyes sweeping Emil like filth on a boot, "did the stables empty early this morning, or have the gates grown tired of filtering out the filth?"
The child continued.
"My name is Franc Celvax of the prestigious Celvax house. I would ask your name, but why bother only learning half a name I will forget soon. Everyone knows only nobles have last names as it is their duty to carry the weight of legacy on their shoulders. One can always tell when something is missing or does not fit in... Enjoy your brief time here as you will never again set foot either here or in front of so many noble presences you scum."
Emil met his gaze at that comment—not with a spark of defiance, but with something colder. A stillness so complete it became its own form of violence.
Another noble sneered, his nose wrinkling as though Emil's presence offended the very air. "Gods above, I can smell it. Dirt. Sweat. Desperation. The stench of wanting what you'll never deserve. Just because you are better dressed than the rabble here...Do you think it gives you the right to be among us?"
The girl tilted her head, lips curling into something between pity and revulsion. "Do you even know what an exam is, little stray? This isn't a gutter brawl. It's a test for minds, not mongrels."
Emil said nothing.
He didn't need to.
From the dark vault of memory, his father's voice rose—not gentle, but forged in the fires hope and care. A desire for excellence and an inspiration to guide his response.
"The nobility of the world survives by crushing the will of those beneath them. When they try to bury you, do not waste breath on words or fists. Answer them with what you've always had. Power. Make them choke on the truth they can't deny—that you were never beneath them. Only beyond."
A smile tugged at the corner of Emil's mouth—small, sharp, and unsettling.
Without a word, he stepped around the boy, moving past him like a shadow passing through fire.
The noble flinched—not from fear, but from something worse. From not being able to provoke a reaction.
His jaw clenched. His pride stung. But he remained silent.
And Emil kept walking—into the jaws of the trial, and toward the reckoning that waited.
The testing hall stood like a sanctum of reckoning—immense, unfeeling, and drenched in the cold hush of expectation.
Desks stretched in endless, militaristic rows—each one a dark monolith of obsidian-lacquered wood, its surface etched with ancient glyphs so worn by time they resembled scars. They bore the weight of countless generations, their silent testimony carved into every splinter. Towering stained-glass windows loomed above, casting fractured spears of light onto the floor—light not meant to illuminate, but to dissect. It was the kind of brilliance that revealed every flaw, every tremble.
Upon each desk sat a single parchment, thick and yellowed like preserved skin, stamped with the cruel seal of Elorynth—two dragons entwined in eternal hunger around an hourglass drained of sand. Hovering beside each page, bone-white quills bobbed in the still air, their tips glistening with a dark, ceaseless ink. These were not tools of learning. They were instruments of exposure—ready to carve the contents of a soul onto parchment.
And then came the children.
They entered in cautious lines, names called out with judicial clarity, each syllable falling like a verdict. Some walked as if pulled forward by strings of duty. Others swaggered, cloaked in false bravado. But once within the hall, all were equal in the eyes of judgment—and all were silent beneath the crucible weight of tradition.
When Emil's name was called, it was not loud. It didn't need to be. It rang with the quiet inevitability of prophecy. His place awaited him—centered, unmistakable. Not a place of prestige, but of scrutiny. There, in the crucible's heart, he would burn—or forge.
He sat.
He did not fidget. He did not breathe deeply. He simply waited—stone amid storm.
And the silence swelled—not peace, but pressure. Not calm, but coiling tension. It fell across the room like an invisible net, drawn tighter with every heartbeat.
Then the doors opened with a low groan—more a wound than an entrance.
She entered.
Archscribe Helien.
The Steward of the Scriptorium Sanctum.
The woman whose words were law and whose laws were scripture. Her name had been inked into the bones of Elorynth itself.
She did not walk so much as glide, her robes trailing behind her like spilled night. Black velvet kissed with silver thread shimmered with every step, forming impossible runic constellations that blinked and shifted when not directly looked at. Her face was pale and spare, every line honed with purpose. Her eyes—sharp and dry as cut glass—moved across the room with chilling precision, dissecting, assessing, never doubting.
Long strands of white-blonde hair, woven with rings of iron, fell across her shoulders like the trappings of both a scholar and an executioner. She did not need a sword. Her mind was the blade.
When she spoke, her voice was low, smooth, and cold—a wind over frostbitten stone.
"Welcome," she said, her tone neither cruel nor kind, only certain. "Today marks the beginning of The Written Expanse. A test designed not to reward memory, but to unravel illusion. You will be tested on historical nuance, tactical critique, riddles in dead tongues, and logical snares crafted to choke the unprepared."
She stepped forward, her boots silent against marble.
"This is not to measure potential. This is to strip falsehood. Those who come hollow will leave shattered."
A pause. Purposeful. Crushing.
"Those without foundation," she said slowly, "will be unmade."
Then—without flourish, without warning—she raised one gloved hand. The gesture was simple. Final.
"Begin."
A hundred sealed envelopes stirred, trembling as if breathing their last, before unraveling in a sound like rustling leaves and ancient whispers. The exam emerged like a summoning.
And in that instant, the trial did not begin.
It claimed them.