The carriage came for him at dawn.
It gleamed like polished obsidian under the pale red light of morning, its surfaces so smooth they reflected the fog as a living thing. Two soldiers waited beside it — or rather, constructs made in the shape of men. Their movements were too precise, their breathing too measured. The Empire no longer wasted blood on duty it could automate.
One saluted stiffly.
"Squadron Leader Arata," it said in that hollow, mechanical voice. "By decree of the Magisterium, you are summoned to the Imperial Academy of Aeromancy and Tactical Sciences. Departure is immediate."
Arata stood in the doorway of his home for a moment, staring at the silent walls. The air still carried the faint metallic scent of the previous night's storm. The cracked mirror in the bathroom had yet to be replaced, and for a heartbeat every time, his reflection there seemed to watch him leave.
The Moonstone from the priestess and the scale from Darwin rested at his throat, worn not out of habit, but necessity.
He tightened his coat and slung the satchel over his shoulder. It held only three things—a journal, the obsidian shard, and Rhea's letter.
"The blade is almost done. It hums when I work on it — like it's trying to speak. I'll send it when it stops singing. If it doesn't… perhaps it was never meant to be wielded."
— R.
The words haunted him as he stepped outside. He shut the door behind him and didn't look back.
The city unfolded beneath a ceiling of low, unmoving clouds.
Rammasett at dawn looked almost sacred — spires glowing in faint crimson, temples whispering their hymns to the First Flame, the sound of a thousand disciplined lives waking to prayer.
But as the carriage moved, Arata saw what lay beneath that peace: the trembling lights of the power lines, the quiet hum of the Divine Engine below the streets, and the smell of metal in the air.
The Empire called it divinity. He called it denial.
As the carriage veered east, the neighbourhoods grew emptier.
Temples gave way to towers; towers to walls. Even the fog seemed denser here, drawn to the earth like a wound that refused to close.
The soldier opposite him finally spoke, voice steady, emotionless.
"You will find the Academy unlike the army, sir. Here, devotion replaces discipline."
Arata's jaw clenched. "And what replaces humanity?"
The soldier didn't answer.
After three hours the Academy rose from the mist in all it's majesty..
Black towers curved upward as if clawing toward the sky, stitched together by bridges of bone-white stone. Faint light pulsed through its walls these were not lanterns, but veins, alive and breathing. Even the gates seemed to tremble with the hum of the power that slept beneath them.
A structure predating the Rammasett empire, from the days of the united continent, when there was no war. The golden Epoch for Mankind.
Arata stepped down, boots echoing against the marble.
The air was colder here, dense with energy that prickled against the skin.
At the registration table stood a thin clerk, half-hidden beneath his hood, a single sigil burning faintly in the centre of his forehead.
"Name?" the clerk asked.
"Arata."
The clerk checked his list, then dipped a quill in shimmering red ink and handed it over. "Sign here."
As Arata wrote, the ink hissed faintly, he felt it bite his skin through the nib.
When he handed the quill back, a thin cut marked his finger, already glowing faintly crimson.
"Welcome to the Academy" the clerk said. "Your blood now belongs to the Flame."
Arata forced a smile. "It never belonged to me… it's good to see so many prospective owners."
The Orientation Hall felt like a cathedral built to contain silence.
Twenty cadets stood in two rows, uniforms perfectly pressed, faces pale beneath the rune-light. The ceiling stretched so high that the chandeliers looked like constellations frozen mid-fall. The air smelt faintly of incense and steel.
The ceremony began without announcement.
A Sub-Magister stepped forward. He was tall, skeletal and his face was covered by a mask of glass that reflected the light in fractured patterns. His voice was slow and deliberate.
"You may think you are here to learn" he said looking at the twenty candidates, who were barely twenty years of age. "But you are here to be unmade. The Flame refines by destruction. The weak will be unfortunately destroyed. The strong will endure."
A ripple moved through the room, not of motion, but breath.
Arata's hand twitched, he recognised the cadence of the words. They were not instruction. They were liturgy.
The Magister's gaze passed over the crowd.
When his eyes fell on the front row, he paused though just slightly.
Arata followed the motion and saw her.
She stood straight-backed and still among the others.
Dark hair cut short, eyes sharp and unreadable, her uniform collar slightly open against the rules of dress. There was something deliberate about the way she breathed it was calm, measured, as if she were synchronising herself to a rhythm.
When the Magister's gaze lingered, she inclined her head, not submissively, but as if acknowledging an equal.
That was his second sight of Nebula.
She couldn't have been more than a year older than him, but the way she carried herself made time irrelevant.
Arata recognised the sturdiness in her posture. It was the kind soldiers acquired when they abandoned the hope that freedom and a good life were ever meant to coexist.
As the ceremony ended, the cadets were divided into groups.
Arata joined the eastern dormitory line. The corridors leading there were narrow and humming with life, not to be confused with human life, but the low resonance of the structure itself. Every footstep was echoed, warped, as if the walls were listening.
Someone brushed against him. "Oh! Sorry!"
A young woman steadied herself, clutching a bundle of papers to her chest.
She had soft blond hair and wide eyes that darted nervously toward every corner. "Flora" she said quickly. "Flora Rathore."
"Arata."
"Rathore?" he asked in continuation. "As in—"
"You may know Anant Rathore. My brother." Her smile wavered. "He serves on the Southern Front."
"I was also there for a very brief period of time, You brother is an excellent fighter." As he said that he started to help pick up her papers. Arata noticed faint lines glowing under her wrist they scars that pulsed with residual mana, just like the veins on Rhea's body.
She saw where his eyes lingered and rolled down her sleeves.
"They said it's a side effect of the dragon blood infusion" she said quietly. "It should fade, eventually."
Their dormitory was nothing more than a row of beds set into the stone wall. The air carried faint static, remnants of enchantments woven into the architecture.
Every so often, a rune flickered and hissed, as though testing itself.
Nebula stood at the far end of the corridor, speaking quietly with an instructor. Her voice was calm, unhurried. The instructor nodded with visible discomfort — it was clear who held the gravity in that exchange.
When she turned, her gaze found Arata instantly. She didn't look surprised.
"First-year?" she asked, her tone flat but not unkind.
He nodded.
"We met each other at the military headquarters, Sargent…. What is your name?" she asked
Before he could reply, she was called away "Talk later, Rookie" boots tapping softly on the stone.
Flora exhaled the breath she'd been holding.
"That's Nebula" she whispered. "She's a year ahead of us. Highest resonance score in the Academy's history. They say her synchronisation with the wyrmblood reached ninety percent in her first trial."
Arata frowned. "And they kept her here?"
"Graduates can stay for a second term if they're… valuable" Flora said. "The Academy, aka the Flame doesn't like letting go of it's brightest sparks."
"Or its most dangerous" Arata murmured.
That night, after the dorms had fallen asleep, Arata sat by the window, the obsidian shard resting in his palm. Outside, the towers glowed faintly, each one pulsing in perfect rhythm with the others.
The Academy was alive.
Its heartbeat was steady and slow, as if it were sleeping—dreaming of something vast.
He thought of Rhea's letter again.
It hums when I work on it.
He imagined her coughing, forcing another strike of the hammer, each blow echoing the same pulse that surrounded him now.
Down in the courtyard, Flora's laughter drifted faintly upward. It was a small sound, trying to be human in a place too devoted to find time for it.
Nebula passed beneath the lanterns, her steps silent, her shadow long.
Arata turned the shard over in his hand. It pulsed once—faintly.
The same rhythm as the Academy.
The same rhythm as the city.
The same rhythm as his own heart.
"The world burns quietly, brother. Listen closer"
He didn't know whether the whisper came from the shard, or from the blood inside him—blood that had begun to hum after that eventful night at the ruins.
He looked out across the towers and saw a city running on blood, disguised as faith.
And he was about to train to spill more of it—so the faith would not crumble.
So the two religions, Sun and Night, could continue to preach and give hope.
At last, he understood what Kohler had meant.
The Academy wasn't a school.
It was a crucible, meant to test who was strong enough to keep a fragile society from breaking.