The Hall of Practical Arts hummed with a tension far sharper than the awe of the Vein Ceremony. Where potential had been revealed, now identity would be declared. The polished Mana stone Pillars stood like silent judges the around the circular chamber, their surfaces dull under the Bright gold sun.
Archmage Valerius surveyed the thinned ranks of aspirants. Two had already withdrawn, their spirits broken by the public verdict of their veins. His gaze, lingering on Kael, was no longer merely grave it was haunted by the memory of cracking crystal.
"Potential is a seed," Valerius's voice boomed, echoing off the stone. "Today, you reveal the nature of the tree that seed contains. Your Attribute the fundamental affinity of your soul. Channel your essence into the pillar. It will resonate with truth. Let that truth guide your path."
The ritual began, a procession of destiny.
"Ellora Campbell"
A girl stepped forward, her red curls a stark contrast to her pale face. At her touch, the pillar didn't glow it breathed. Ethereal forms shimmered into being: a flickering flame fox, a whispering vine-sprite, a crystalline moss-turtle. A soft murmur of wonder spread. Spirit Summoning. A magic of communion, not domination. Ellora's relieved smile was a small sun in the tense hall, her blue eyes bright with validation. She was a speaker to the unseen, a maker of gentle pacts.
"Daniel Frost Bane"
A Boy with white hair moved next, a study in controlled silence. His fingertips met the pillar for Esoteric Arts. Light drained from the space around it, sound muffled into a profound hush. From his touch spiraled tendrils of absolute darkness not smoke, but solidified void weaving into a defensive sphere, a blade, a lock. Shadow Manipulation. The art of absence and precision. He withdrew, his red eyes scanning the crowd, already calculating the new variables. He was a strategist of the unseen margins.
Then came the storm.
"Sora Aster Valeric"
A girl approached as if she was walking to a gallows. Her feather light touch detonated the pillar. One side erupted in a joyful, controlled torrent of Flame. The other warped, the air fracturing like glass, reality bending in a silent scream of Space, Dual Attribute. The crowd gasped, a genius, a living paradox of dragonkin fire and alien dimension. Sora stumbled back, clutching her hand, looking more terrified than triumphant, her amber eyes wide with the burden of her own nature.
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
"Lisa Ambrose Tempest"
The next person was called and she shattered it. With the grace of a born sovereign, she placed one hand. Ice exploded not a spread, but a violent, instantaneous glaciation, hoarfrost racing with razor-sharp intent. Before the shock settled, her other hand descended. Fire roared to life beside it, a focused jet of annihilating white heat. Dual Attribute: Ice & Fire. Not a paradox, but a declaration of dominion over opposing fundamentals. She held the impossible balance for three heartbeats, her emerald eyes cool and challenging, then released it. A sheen of sweat was her only concession to the effort. She had not revealed an affinity; she had staged a coronation. Power, absolute and ambitious, was her truth.
Archmage Valerius's face was a mask of profound disquiet. A spirit whisperer, a shadow binder, and two dual attribute prodigies. This cohort was rewriting the academy's history before their first lesson.
He called the final name. The air turned to lead.
"Kael Osborn."
Every whisper died. Kael walked forward, feeling the weight of two hundred stares like physical pressure. The memory of the cracked Lens was a ghost on his palms. He stopped before the central General Resonance pillar, its purpose to categorize the uncategorizable.
"Just be what you are," Vaelthryx's thought flowed into him, not as a command, but as a steadying tide."Let them see the confluence."
Kael placed a single hand on the cool stone.
For a moment, nothing. A held breath.
Then, the pillar awoke.
It did not cycle through elements. It sang with them all at once.
Eight pure, perfect strands of light crimson fire, azure water, ocher earth, crystalline air, violet lightning, silver ice, gold light, and obsidian shadow coalesced from the pillar's core. They did not clash. They harmonized. They wove around his hand in a slow, beautiful, terrifying dance of primordial unity. The air in the hall grew heavy, charged with the scent of ozone, petrichor, magma, and starlight.
The pillar itself began to change. Its dull grey surface shimmered, momentarily displaying the flawless, geometric lattice of its own internal mana structure, a structure that was now mirroring the perfect order emanating from Kael.
The technician at the monitoring console jerked back, his face white. "Archmage! The readings… it's not possible! He's not accessing the elements, he's resonating with their primordial source state! The pillar is registering perfect coherence across all eight base frequencies! The attribute matrix… it's proposing a classification: 'Sovereign Affinity' or 'Primordial Concordance.' The mana isn't being shaped, it's aligning to him!"
Kael removed his hand. The symphony of light vanished. The pillar returned to inert grey, but for a moment, a ghostly, intricate mandala of all eight elemental symbols was etched in light upon its surface before fading.
The silence was absolute. This was not the chaotic, terrifying anomaly of the Vein Ceremony. This was something worse, for those who understood, perfect, effortless authority. It wasn't a lack of control; it was a control so absolute it defied the need for specialization. He didn't have an attribute. He held the source code of magic itself.
Kael turned and walked back. The stares were no longer of fear or confusion, but of dawning, religious terror. They had seen a master of two elements and called it genius. What did you call this?
In the cold quiet of the provisional barracks that night, Kael lay staring at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. The excited buzz from the other dormitories discussions of spirits, shadows, and dual geniuses was a distant hum. For them, today had been about finding their place.
For him, it had been about confirming he had none.
His thoughts, treacherous and heavy, slipped their leash. They fled the stifling awe of the hall, soaring over continents, back to the soot-stained brick and muddy despair of the Iron Concord's lower ring.
'Did they come for them?' The question was a cold knife twisting. Had Imperial Inquisitors, hunting the "reactor anomaly," kicked down the orphanage door? Had they terrified little Mara, who hid behind his leg at loud noises? Had they made Liam's stutter lock his throat shut for days? Mistress Caelia's kind, weary face swam before him, strained with helpless defiance.
His flight to freedom felt like a betrayal. He had traded their safety for his own chance. The guilt was a physical chain, heavier than any the Concord had forged.
And from that well of familiar shame, a new, more terrifying question erupted, fueled by the day's revelation of impossible, effortless power.
'Who made me like this?'
The idea of poor, sick parents was ashes now. No common illness, no mundane tragedy, resulted in a child who could make ancient mana sing in perfect harmony. The note with just his name felt less like an abandonment and more like a severance, a desperate cut from a lineage too dangerous to claim.
'Who gave me this?' He thought of the impossible Black and Gold storm under his skin. 'Who left a child with a storm in his veins and a name on a scrap of paper? Were you running from something worse than Imperial guards?'
'What were you running from that was worse than leaving your own child? Or… what were you hiding me from?'
Deep in the bond, in the silent space where two consciousnesses bled into one, Vaelthryx contemplated the storm.
The dragon had observed the mortal displays with distant interest. The spirit caller was a pleasant echo of older pacts. The shadow binder had a useful, tactical mind. The dual attribute girls were sparks of significant potential, one a chaotic star, the other a forged blade.
But Kael's display… it was not a display. It was a revelation.
The perfect, harmonious elements. That was the Celestial legacy. The cold, orderly comprehension of cosmic laws. The ability to see the universe as a sublime equation. It was the power of his mother's blood.
The memory of the Black and Gold veins was not a visual memory for Vaelthryx; it was a taste, a resonance. The Gold was familiar in the way a hated enemy is familiar. It tasted of the Celestial Realms, of the arrogant, orderly beings who saw dragons and mortals alike as chaotic vermin. It was a taste he had not encountered in millennia, not since the great schism when the realms were sealed.
The Black was different. It was a memory of blood. Not the stolen, screaming blood in the reactors, but the sworn blood of the Pact. The Black was the signature of the Escates line. The only humans who ever fought dragons not to enslave, but to earn a dialogue. Their blood held an echo of dragon fire and ancient honor, a shadow dragons could recognize.
Yet, the power to manifest it, the raw, world-bending force that made the pillar itself sing and reveal its secrets… that was the Draconic legacy. The primal, chaotic power of creation and destruction given will. The strength of his father's blood, and of the bond they now shared.
These two essences Celestial arrogance and Pact-bond legacy were absolute opposites. They should annihilate each other. They should have torn any mortal vessel apart at conception.
Yet in Kael… they swirled. They coexisted in a turbulent, living truce. They hadn't made him a god or a monster. They had made him a boy who worried about orphaned siblings and wondered about missing parents.
"This is no accident," Vaelthryx mused, the thought a slow tectonic shift. "This is design. Or cataclysm. A union forbidden by the laws of both his heritages."
"They are not mixed," Vaelthryx realized, the thought a seismic shift in his ancient mind. "They are synergized. The Celestial mind provides the perfect blueprint. The Draconic spirit provides the limitless power and mortal will to build it. He is not a hybrid. He is a synthesis."
This changed everything. He was not merely a key to a dragon's chains. He was a living paradigm shift. A being who could, in theory, command the foundational forces of reality with the ease others breathed. The potential was no longer just for revolution, but for re-creation.
And yet, echoing through this monumental potential, Vaelthryx felt the boy's quiet agony. The guilt over orphaned siblings. The lonely yearning for a past that never was. The fear of the unknown shadow that was his origin.
The most powerful mortal artifact to walk the world in an age was haunted by the most human of ghosts.
For the first time, Vaelthryx did not just see a means to an end. He did not just see a convergence of power. He saw the heart that held it, and understood that this heart with its compassion, its loyalty, its mercy was the final, crucial, unpredictable component. It was the element that could temper celestial perfection with mortal meaning, and draconic fury with purpose.
The revelation was complete. The Sovereign had been revealed, not just to the academy, but to himself, and to the dragon bound to his soul.
The game was no longer about admission or ranking. It was about survival, understanding, and the terrifying burden of a crown not yet claimed.