The academy dreamed when it slept.
Aurora could feel it now — the castle breathing through the stone beneath her feet, pulsing with unseen magic. At night, the walls whispered louder. Doors that stayed closed by day opened with the right intention. Floors shifted when no one watched.
It was past midnight, but sleep wouldn't come.
The fire still lived in her veins from the duel. Her hands had finally stopped shaking. Her magic hadn't settled — it hovered, waiting.
Calling.
She rose, pulled on her cloak, and left her room without a sound.
The halls were quiet. The shadows deeper.
But she wasn't alone.
The corridor behind the Sigil Archives had always been sealed. At least, that's what Willow had told her when they passed it earlier that week.
But tonight, as Aurora walked past the long gallery of spell-etched scrolls, she felt it.
A warmth.
A tug.
She paused beside the door.
It was carved in a spiral pattern — like the mark in her dreams. The pattern pulsed faintly now, lit from within.
The door was no longer locked.
She placed her hand against the center, expecting resistance.
Instead, the door opened soundlessly inward.
Beyond it: a narrow staircase spiraling downward into darkness.
A whisper breathed through the gap.
"Aurora…"
The staircase wound down forever.
Cold air curled around her ankles. The walls were bare stone, slick with condensation. No lights, but the glow from her palm — faint, violet-gold — illuminated just enough to keep going.
She should have turned back.
But something below was waiting for her.
Something old. Something that remembered her.
Finally, the stair ended at a chamber carved from the bones of the mountain.
A single altar stood at the center.
Above it floated a relic — a shard of mirror, cracked and rimmed with gold and black stone, suspended in a web of runes that crawled slowly around it like living ink.
As Aurora stepped forward, the relic pulsed.
She didn't touch it.
She didn't have to.
The mirror fragment recognized her.
It flared — then spoke in her own voice.
"Aurora Aestrael."
Her knees nearly buckled.
The name wasn't just a sound. It was a memory—a cut into her soul.
The runes flared wildly. The air grew heavy. Her breath fogged.
She stepped back.
But not fast enough.
The relic surged. The web snapped
A pulse of raw magic exploded outward — not violent, but piercing.
It tore through the veil that wrapped her.
And something remembered her.
Above, in the observatory tower, Atlas Thorne awoke with a start.
His warding crystals flared white. Pages flipped open on their own.
The name "Aestrael" burned briefly across a sealed scroll — then vanished.
He rose from his desk, heart pounding, hand gripping the hilt of the shadowblade at his side.
She's opened something.
Back in the chamber, Aurora stood still.
The relic had dimmed again, floating peacefully.
But now, above it, a sigil burned in the air — not one from any known house. A new one.
A spiral, wrapped in flame, pierced by a single vertical thorn.
Her chest ached.
She turned and fled the chamber.
But the door closed behind her. Locked.
And in the darkness above, a dozen ancient eyes blinked open — not of beasts, but of wards long forgotten.
Watching her.
Marking her.
Awakening.
She didn't speak of it the next morning.
Not to Willow, not to Ethan — not even to Atlas when she passed him on the bridge beneath the mirror garden.
But she knew.
Something inside Aetherwyn had felt her name.
Not just Aurora.
Not even Lane.
Aestrael.
And whatever she had touched — it wasn't finished with her.
That afternoon, she received a summons.
A handwritten note on gray parchment, sealed with an unfamiliar sigil.
No name. Just:
"Meet me at the Moonwell. Come alone."
Her hands trembled as she folded the note.
She didn't recognize the mark. But something in her blood did.