The ring lay in my palm, a circle of cold platinum. The closed eye was not carved; it was grown into the metal, the lid a perfect, seamless curve, the lash lines delicate as frost. It held no magic I could sense, only a profound, watchful stillness. The 'V' inside was an afterthought, a signature.
Victus? No. His signature was a spider, subtle and woven into everything. This was different. This was an emblem. A statement.
Someone knew about the door in the ice cellar. The door that had responded only to my touch. Someone knew about the Star-Eater.
The void in my chest didn't hum with alarm. It grew utterly silent, a listening silence deeper than any I had felt before. It wasn't fear. It was recognition.
…watcher…
The word surfaced from the abyss, not as a whisper, but as a fossilized fact.
I slipped the ring into a hidden pocket. I did not wear it. To wear it was to accept the connection, to step onto a board whose rules I didn't know. For now, I would observe.
My lessons with Lyra took on a new, sharper edge. I stopped asking about Glimmerblight and sympathetic resonance. I began asking about history. About heresies older than the empire.
"Tell me about the Starless Veil," I said one night, as she calibrated a delicate astrolabe made of bone.
Her hands stilled. She peered at me over her lenses. "That is not a term used in polite company. Or impolite company that wishes to keep its head."
"I'm not polite company."
A slow smile touched her lips. "No. You are not." She set the astrolabe down. "The Starless Veil is the oldest heresy. Older than the gods this empire claims to worship. It is the belief that our world, our reality, is just… a scrap. A bit of flotsam caught in the wake of something vaster and darker. That the stars we see are not lights in a heaven, but holes poked in a lid, letting in the glare from whatever furnace burns beyond."
Her words painted a picture that resonated with the Star-Eater's memory—the single point of light, falling into the abyss.
"And the things beyond the Veil?" I asked, my voice flat.
"Hungry," she said simply. "According to the myths, they are beings of absence. Concepts given form. The End of Things. The Silence After the Song. Your mother… she believed they were not monsters. That they were fundamental forces, like gravity or time, but perceived as hostile because they are antithetical to life, which is a process of building and sustaining."
A fundamental force. The End of Things. That is what slept within me.
"Are there… people who worship these forces?"
Lyra barked a laugh. "Worship? No. You don't worship a hurricane. You might try to understand it, to channel it, to hide from it. There have been cults, yes. Secret societies throughout history. They go by many names. The Keepers of the Final Silence. The Echoes of the Void. They are usually rootless, small. And they are always, always exterminated when found. For the empire is built on creation, on mana, on light and growth. The Void is its absolute enemy."
I thought of the closed eye. A symbol of not seeing? Or of seeing what others could not?
"Have you heard of a symbol? A closed eye?"
All warmth drained from Lyra's face. She stood up abruptly, knocking her stool over. "Where did you see that?"
"In a book," I lied smoothly.
She stared at me, her green eyes sharp with real fear. "That is not a symbol of a cult. That is the sigil of the Oculate Imperative. They are not worshippers. They are… custodians. Jailers. If they are here, in this palace, then they believe a breach has occurred. Or is about to occur." Her gaze drilled into me. "What have you done, boy?"
Her reaction told me everything. The Oculate Imperative knew about breaches. They knew about things like the Star-Eater. The ring wasn't an invitation from a fellow heretic.
It was a warning from a warden.
"I've done nothing," I said, the perfect, emotionless truth. The Star-Eater was not something I had done; it was something I was.
Lyra paced, her robes whispering against the stone. "If they are here, all my work, this temple… it is ash. They do not negotiate. They excise. They are the empire's silent, final answer to the Void." She stopped, turning to me. "You must be more careful than you have ever been. Your power is the very thing they exist to erase from the world."
The game had changed again. I was no longer just a pawn between princes. I was the prize in a secret war between forces that saw the universe in terms of creation and annihilation.
I left the temple that night with a new imperative of my own: uncover the Oculate agent before they uncovered me.
My conduit-tapping took on a frantic new purpose. I wasn't looking for anger or ambition anymore. I was looking for stillness. For a presence that, like my own, might leave a cool, quiet spot in the raging river of palace mana.
It was agonizingly subtle work. The Void Lens, used for such fine detection, was a constant drain. I supplemented it with Lyra's potions and began small, controlled sacrifices of raw materials—a copper coin turned dead and grey, a lump of wax rendered inert—to fuel the search without consuming myself.
Days passed. The ring burned a hole in my pocket. I practiced the Seventh Principle, which Lyra had finally taught me: The Principle of Concealed Action. Making the void's work look like something else. Using a catalyst to make a magical failure look like mana-feedback. Using sympathetic resonance to make a wall crack seem like mundane settling. It was the art of the ghost in the machine.
I used it to cover my tracks, to make my sensory probing of the conduit look like natural eddies and fluctuations.
And then, I found it.
Not in the noble quarters. Not in the barracks.
In the Royal Archives.
A small, windowless scriptorium, deep in the oldest part of the palace. A place of dust and forgotten lineages. There, amidst the endless drone of copying scribes, was a zone of perfect, unnatural calm. A scribe who never sneezed, never fidgeted, whose quill scratched with metronomic precision. An old man with milky, sightless eyes who was said to have memorized every charter since the empire's founding.
Blind Master Orin.
To my void-attuned senses, he wasn't there. He was a human-shaped hole in the world's noise. He didn't suppress his mana; he had none to suppress. He was, like me, a negation. But where my negation was active, hungry, his was passive, absolute. A sealed vault.
The Oculate warden.
He was waiting. Watching. Not with eyes, but with a perception built on the absence of everything else.
I could not approach him. I could not probe him directly. Any use of the void near him would be like shouting in his silence.
I had to draw him out. To make the Star-Eater's vessel do something only it could do, but make it look like an accident. A bait he couldn't ignore, but that wouldn't lead back to the Hollow Prince.
I went to the one place in the palace throbbing with unstable, volatile magic: the Alchemical Laboratories, under the control of Valerius's faction. A place of fire, explosion, and ambitious, careless apprentices.
Using the Principle of Concealed Action, I spent three nights preparing. I sacrificed a small silver bracelet, turning it into a lump of dead weight, to fuel the working. I used Glimmerblight residue to subtly weaken the mana-conduit feeding the lab's main containment ward. I adjusted the ward's frequency, using sympathetic resonance, making it resonate discordantly with the volatile Earth-and-Fire mana of a particular, unstable experiment—a novice's attempt to create everlasting embers.
On the fourth day, as the sun reached its zenith, the discordance reached its peak.
I was in a distant courtyard, visibly tending a patch of medicinal herbs under Elara's watchful, confused gaze—a pathetic prince engaging in a harmless hobby.
The explosion was not violent. It was a deep, resonant thump that shuddered through the stone, followed by a geyser of iridescent, magical fire that shot into the sky before winking out. No one was badly hurt—a few singed robes, one apprentice with luminescent green hair. But the containment ward had failed in a very specific way: it hadn't burst. It had unraveled. The mana composing it had simply… ceased to cohere, dissipating like smoke.
The signature of the failure was not of overload, or clash of elements. It was of dissolution.
An hour later, as the chaos was being settled, I sensed it.
A movement in the stillness.
Blind Master Orin left his scriptorium. He walked with a slow, unerring pace, his staff tapping, not because he needed it, but as a signal. He walked directly to the site of the failed lab. He stood amidst the soot and the chattering apprentices, his sightless face turned upward, as if sniffing the air.
He knelt. He brushed his fingers over a scorched stone where the ward's anchor had been.
He felt the nothingness I had left behind.
His head turned slowly, not towards me across the palace, but in the general direction of the forgotten wings. The north.
He knew. Not who. Not yet. But he knew the breach was not just a rumor. It was here. And it was active.
The hunt was on.
And the hunter had just stepped into the light.
---