The teacher was explaining Latin pronunciation with the patient thoroughness of someone who understood that most people in this room had never studied it and intended to leave nobody behind.
Clyde understood it already.
He sat at his desk with his notebook open and his pen resting against the page and his attention somewhere else entirely. The words tempus auge were already as familiar to him as his own name at this point, the chant for the Clockwork card worn smooth by repetition, and listening to the foundational explanation of consonant sounds in a divine language he had already used in a life and death situation was producing a very specific kind of restlessness in him.
Ascension, he thought. The barrier is there. The chains are all broken. Everything is ready except the thousand shillings or the ten purified cards or the scholarship that requires exceptional grades at an academy I enrolled in approximately three hours ago.
The teacher moved to the board and wrote out a phonetic guide.
Clyde closed his eyes, pressed two fingers against his sternum, and went inward.
The ichor dimension received him the way it always did, the absolute dark, the card floating at the center of it with its horizontal infinity and its twelve constellation points and its six-pointed star. The barrier below it, transparent and completely solid, the gate between where he was and the next phase.
He looked at the card for a moment.
Then three things detached from it.
Stars, small and bright, drifting away from the card's constellation ring with the unhurried quality of things that had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it. Three of them, moving outward through the dark toward him, trailing faint light.
His instinct was to move sideways.
He started to, and the stars stopped.
They hovered in front of him, each one about the size of his closed fist, patient and luminous, the light of them carrying something that the cold analytical part of his mind recognized as frequency information, compressed into visible form.
He reached out and touched the first one.
Chemical analysis.
The knowledge arrived immediately, the ability describing itself through the contact the way Hollow Edge had described itself through repetition, through use, through the accumulated resonance of time spent together. The Hollow Star's ability to read molecular and chemical structures through perception rather than testing, the same thing that had activated in Soren's lab when he had looked at the liquid in the glass tube and seen its skeletal structure.
He touched the second.
Ichor analysis.
Detecting and reading the Divine Ichor signatures of other people, the ability that had activated when he had focused on the white-haired girl and glimpsed her inner world before the chain shattered. The stalking ability, as he had mentally categorized it, which was uncharitable but accurate.
He touched the third.
Lunar flow analysis.
Something different from the other two, broader, the ability to read the state and movement of Lunar Ichor through people, objects, and environments, a perception layer that went beyond identifying what someone's Divine Ichor was and into reading how their Lunar Ichor was currently moving, where the flow was strong, where it was strained, where the resonance was holding and where it was beginning to slip.
That one is actually useful in a fight, he thought. That one tells you things about an opponent that they cannot easily hide.
The three stars drifted back slightly and then, instead of returning to the card, they formed new shapes. Each one expanded outward into a constellation, a pattern of points in the dark, most of them dim and unlit, a few burning with the light of established ability.
The lunar flow analysis constellation had five empty stars.
The ichor analysis had seven.
The chemical analysis had three.
He looked at the three constellations hanging in the dark of the ichor dimension and thought, what even is this place?
Then Aurelian's hand landed on his shoulder.
Pat.
He came back to the classroom.
The teacher was still at the board. The other students were still copying the phonetic guide. Nobody had noticed anything because from the outside, Clyde had simply been sitting at his desk looking at his notebook.
"You spaced out again," Aurelian said, quietly.
"I was in the inner world," Clyde said.
"The what?"
"The inner world. Where the Astral Card is. The dark space."
Aurelian nodded slowly. "That is not the technical name for it."
"What is the technical name?"
"The Ichor Dimension." Aurelian said it with the tone of someone producing a term that had been argued about extensively before being settled on. "Ancient people had no framework for it so early texts just called it the inner world or the space within, which are both technically accurate and completely unhelpful. The current understanding is that it is a dimension adjacent to the physical one, where time and space operate under different rules." He paused. "Some researchers think it might actually be the domain of the gods. The outer edge of it, accessible to Ichorborn through their Astral Cards."
Clyde thought about this.
"That would explain why looking at another person's Astral Card through my perception briefly connected me to their dimension," he said.
"Probably yes."
"Three stars came off my card," Clyde said. "They represented my abilities. Each one formed into a constellation with empty slots."
Aurelian looked at him with the focused attention he brought to information he found genuinely interesting. "How many slots?"
"Five for lunar flow analysis. Seven for ichor analysis. Three for chemical analysis."
"Those are the ascension slots for each ability," Aurelian said. "The more you develop and use each ability, the more constellation points fill in. When all the slots in a constellation are full, that ability reaches its ceiling within the current phase."
"And after that?"
"After that you can go beyond the ceiling." Aurelian glanced around to make sure the teacher was still engaged with the board. "We call it Stellar Resonance, when an ability breaks through its constellation limit and generates something entirely new. The new ability that forms is unique to your specific frequency, your personal ichor signature. Two people with the same Divine Ichor would produce completely different Stellar Resonance abilities because their Lunar Ichor frequencies are different."
"So the constellations are the roadmap," Clyde said.
"Exactly. Fill the constellation, break the ceiling, get something the world has never seen before from anyone else." Aurelian smiled. "Which is also why the Academy tracks exceptional students so closely. A Stellar Resonance ability is genuinely unpredictable and genuinely powerful and the families of this school would very much like to know what their heirs are going to produce before anyone else does."
Clyde looked at the empty spaces in his three constellations as he visualized them.
Fifteen empty slots total across three abilities.
That is a significant amount of development between here and Stellar Resonance, he thought. And I am sitting in a Latin pronunciation class that I already know.
Low profile, he reminded himself. Exceptional grades. Scholarship. Holy spring. Ascension. In that order.
Aurelian reached into his coat pocket and produced an envelope.
"This arrived before we came to class," he said, setting it on Clyde's desk. "From Aldric."
Clyde looked at the envelope. The handwriting on the front was Aldric's, precise and economical.
He picked it up.