There was a commotion in the Floridae mansion that afternoon, the kind that started at the servants' stairs and rolled upward like a wave.
Zoe was already running by the time she hit the first floor, pushing past two startled maids without a word of apology, her brown hair coming loose from its pins with every step, a letter clutched in both hands.
She took the last flight of stairs two at a time and threw open Mira's door without knocking, her green eyes wide enough that Mira was startled before a single word had been said.
"Young lady—" Zoe's voice cracked on the second word. "Young lady, you've been admitted. To Artemis. Mira, you are going to Artemis Academy — they've admitted you."
Mira didn't move; she laughed. "That's impossible."
"I know it's impossible, but I've read this letter four times on the way up here already. It's true." Zoe shoved it into her hands. "You have no element. No rank. Nothing on paper. Minimum entry is Elemental Mage — everybody knows that. My own cousin didn't get in with an energy level of a hundred and forty and a Water manifestation, and they've just—" She gestured helplessly at the letter, at Mira, at the entire absurd shape of the morning. "They've let you in — a girl who just manifested days ago."
The seal was real. The handwriting was real. Mira's own name sat at the top of the page in ink so fine it looked etched rather than written, and for a moment she simply stared at it, waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something that made sense.
"Have these old men really lost their minds, or am I the one finally seeing things?" Mira looked at Zoe, as confused as everyone else in the Marquis's mansion. A girl with no manifestation, no measurable rank, admitted to the most powerful institution on the continent. Every maid in the mansion was fairly certain the master-and-servant duo had finally lost it.
But the truth was, the letter hadn't been forged. It was real. And it had started three days ago, if it had started anywhere at all.
In the mortal realm, mortals could wield magic much as the gods and immortals did — and, given enough time and power, could ascend to join them by manifesting the Source fully. The Source was the boon of life in this world, flowing endlessly down from the Godly Realm, and it was thanks to the Source that anyone could use magic at all. It lived inside every living thing except the dark shadows. Nobody knew who had created it, or where it had first come from — perhaps only the oldest gods still held that answer. Three realms had formed around wherever the Source flowed strongest: the Godly Realm, the newly risen Immortal Realm, and the mortal realm below both.
A mortal whose Source reached level ten could manifest the magic sleeping inside them. Most nobles carried strong bloodline talent and manifested it early because of it. A rare few never gathered enough Source energy to cross that line at all — commoners, mostly, or the occasional unlucky noble. Mira was the plainest example the Elysia Empire had ever produced.
That evening had turned cold early, though the candles crowded around her desk kept the chill from mattering much. Mira's black hair had come loose from its pins hours ago — she looked nothing like a noblewoman in her prime — and her golden eyes hadn't left the page in front of her for the better part of an hour. Even without enough Source to matter, she'd never been an entirely ordinary mortal; she'd been drawn to poisons since she was small, long before anyone thought to wonder why. She was three chapters into A Practical Study of Rare and Untraceable Poisons when Zoe knocked twice and let herself in without waiting for an answer.
"Dinner is served, young lady." Zoe's eyes caught the book's spine before Mira could turn it face-down. "Does the Marquis know what his daughter reads all day?"
"Papa knows what I read, Zoe." Mira closed the book anyway, marking her page with a pressed leaf that had long since given up being green. "He's never asked what." Something flickered across her eyes, faintly disappointed, before she recovered and gave her maid a nonchalant smile.
"Perhaps he should." But Zoe was already at the wardrobe, running a critical eye over the dress Mira had worn all afternoon. "You can't go down looking like you fought the armchair and lost, young lady. Give me one moment."
Ten minutes and one hairpin crisis later, Mira was presentable enough to be handed down to dinner. The Florida mansion was huge and well lit, unlike Mira's candlelit room — its walls detailed with paintings and ornate design, though Mira always stopped at the same one on the wall near the dining hall. No matter how many times she'd seen it, she frowned at it as it had personally disappointed her.
"Young lady," Zoe called, and Mira finally stopped staring and moved on.
The dining hall of the Floridae mansion was luxurious, scented faintly of flowers and warm light. The table was long, with Ronan at its head, Silvia beside him, and Lizie and Eric already seated, waiting for Mira to take her place.
Ronan was smiling when Mira came down — the easy, unguarded smile he wore most evenings with no particular reason behind it, just a father glad to have his children at the same table. It didn't last past the second course. He set down his glass, and Eric, the youngest, sat up straighter without quite knowing why.
"The Temple sent word this morning," he said. "The yearly prayer for the nobility falls on the full moon this cycle. Your mother and I will attend, as always." A pause — the kind Mira felt a beat before she understood why. "They've asked that Mira attend as well, this year."
Lizie made a small, delighted noise into her soup. Eric looked between his father and his sister as though trying to decide which of them deserved more awe.
"Me?" Mira said. It came out flatter than she meant it to.
"You're eighteen now." Silvia's voice carried the particular gentleness she used when a subject was tender. "Eighteen-year-old daughters of the nobility are expected at the Temple of Glory. It's tradition."
Mira knew what the tradition actually meant, even if no one at the table wanted to say it plainly over the soup. Eighteen was the age at which a Source finally settled — the age a family presented their newly-ranked daughter to the temple, to show what each house's descendants had become.
She had nothing to present. Everyone at the table knew it.
"I'll go, Mom," Mira said, and meant it, mostly. "I've never seen the Maya shrine, only paintings. I'll come with you." Her interest in Maya was an old thing — she'd been fixated since she was a toddler, and it had never once faded the way most childhood fascinations did. Her parents had assumed for years it was simply a love of fairy tales. Only slowly had they realised it ran deeper than that, closer to obsession, and that no matter how many times she heard the same story, she came back wanting to hear it again.
Something crossed her father's face too quickly to name. He knew what was coming — that he'd be telling the same story again tonight, the way he always did when she asked.
"Tell me about her properly, Papa," Mira said, her eyes bright. "Not the nursery version. I want to hear it again." Ronan had never once managed to refuse her this.
Ronan considered it the way he considered most things — slowly, choosing each word before it left him rather than after. "Maya Immora," he said finally, "was a warrior born into a noble house in the Divine Realm, much like this one, though I doubt her father expected her to become what she became. She didn't ascend to godhood by blood the way most immortals do. She earned it — battle by battle — until even the heavens had no choice but to call her what she'd already made herself into."
"And the shadows," Mira said. "The ones from the underworld."
"A thousand years ago, they rose against the Source Stone — the very thing every living Source in this world descends from. If they had devoured it, nothing you or I have ever known would exist." Ronan's voice had gone quieter, the way it did whenever he wanted something to actually be remembered rather than simply heard. "Every god the heavens had gone to that battlefield. It wasn't enough. It was Maya who ended it — alone, with her flame, by every account that survives."
Eric had stopped eating entirely, chin propped on both hands, and even Lizie — who had heard this story more times than she could count — was leaning so far across the table that her elbow had landed in the butter dish without her noticing.
"And then she disappeared." Mira had heard this part a hundred times, and it never sat right, no matter how many times she turned it over. "Nobody. No explanation, Papa. Is it really true that she doesn't exist anymore?"
Silvia took a slow sip from her wine glass, and over the rim of it, gave the table a look that was half fond and half exasperated. "You children," she said, "how many times are you going to listen to the same story and still lean in like you don't already know how it ends?"
"Oh, let them," Ronan said, with the same easy smile from earlier, before turning back to his daughter. "No one has ever explained it," he continued. "The heavens searched for years. Some say she simply walked away from a world that had already asked everything of her." He didn't finish the sentence the way the old stories usually did — with the colder word, the one about betrayal — and Mira noticed the omission without knowing what to make of it. "Whatever happened to her, she's the reason the nobility still kneels once a year and prays to her."
Silvia reached over and covered her husband's hand with her own, briefly, and said nothing at all, which was somehow louder than if she had.
The portrait of the Maya shrine hung near the dining hall, the way it had for as long as Mira could remember — Maya rendered mid-battle, flame caught frozen in the paint, a face the artist had clearly guessed at more than known. Mira stopped in front of it longer than she meant to, the way she always did, and still had no answer for why.
"Young lady," Zoe said. "Are you somewhat disappointed with the goddess?"
Mira smirked. "Nope. I'm disappointed with the artist."
Zoe's face paled. "But young lady, this was painted by—"
Mira cut her off. "He painted Maya so tacky." Her disgust was entirely genuine. Zoe swallowed whatever she'd been about to say in his defence.
Later, in Mira's room, Zoe entered with a jug of water and noticed at once how unusually quiet Mira had become.
"You've gone quiet, young lady." Zoe didn't look up from the linens. "That's usually a bad sign."
Zoe had the decency to look only slightly caught. "I heard enough, mistress." She set the last pillow in place and came to stand behind Mira's chair, taking over the hairpins with practised hands. "I'll say what I wouldn't say earlier. The whole capital is going to be watching you, not the shrine, at that Temple."
"I know."
"I don't think you do, entirely." Zoe's hands paused. "I've heard the maids two houses over call you the Marquis's hollow daughter. I wanted to slap someone."
"You'd have gotten yourself banned from an entire noble household."
"But it would be Worth it." There was no real humour left in Zoe's voice now. "I don't understand it, young lady, if I'm honest. Every healer this family has ever produced says your Source is there. Just sitting quietly, waiting on something. That isn't how it works for anyone else I've ever known."
"I know." Mira had heard the same thing for eight years now, and meant it more than Zoe could have realised. "I've tried every morning since I was seven."
"I know you have." Zoe's voice softened, dropping some of its careful distance for just a moment. "I'm not saying it to be unkind. I'm saying it because I don't want you standing in that Temple pretending you don't hear what they whisper."
Mira looked down at her own hands in the mirror's reflection — at fingers that had never once, not on the coldest morning of her life, produced so much as a spark of anything. The source was supposed to be simple. It flowed down from somewhere above the world, and it settled into a person the way breath settled into lungs, and by eighteen it had a name and a colour and a place in the world's understanding of you.
Water. Light. Earth. Wind. Fire. Source energy could manifest into almost anything — the power of an element, or, more rarely, a spirit bonded to it — but everyone alive walked through exactly one of those five doors by the time they came of age.
Mira had never walked through any door at all.
And yet — this was the part she'd never said aloud, not even to Zoe — she had never once felt empty. The healers always measured the same thing: energy level nine, one point short of the ten Manifestation required. Source existed in everyone. Hers simply wouldn't cross that line.
She simply had no idea what it was waiting for.
"Get some sleep, young lady," Zoe said at last, setting the final pin aside. "Whatever's waiting for you at that Temple, it can wait until morning."
Mira nodded and did not say that she wasn't entirely sure sleep would help. The Floridae name had carried four generations of healers before her — Water and Light, gentle hands and gentle magic — and she had none of it, not a single measurable drop, no matter how many mornings she'd tried. She blew out the candle and lay in the dark.