The invitation arrived without a seal.
No crest. No signature. Just a single sheet of pale vellum slipped beneath Luke's door sometime before dawn.
Auxiliary Seminar
Attendance: Mandatory
Casting: Prohibited
Demonstration: Prohibited
Below it, a location—three levels beneath the western archive—and a time that did not align with any public schedule.
Luke folded the paper once and slipped it into his coat.
Invitation only, he thought. No witnesses.
The room was not a classroom.
It was circular, shallow-stepped like an amphitheater carved from stone that drank sound. A dozen seats ringed a low central platform. No lectern. No wards on the walls—only a faint pressure that suggested attention had been arranged elsewhere.
Seven people were already present.
None wore Academy colors.
Luke recognized no crests, no affiliations—only the careful neutrality of those who did not wish to be identified. They looked at him the way scholars looked at a dangerous text: with curiosity sharpened by restraint.
A woman stood at the center.
She was not the one from the administrative chamber.
"Sit," she said, gesturing to an empty seat. "Names are unnecessary."
Luke complied.
"This is not an examination," the woman continued. "It is a discussion. You will answer what you can. You will decline what you must."
One of the seated figures leaned forward. "And if he refuses?"
"Then we learn something else," the woman replied.
She turned to Luke. "You wrote that the lattice fails because it insists on completeness."
"Yes."
"Explain," another voice said, calm and distant, "without proposing an alternative."
Luke considered the constraint. Nosolutions. Only boundaries.
"The lattice," he said, "treats uncertainty as error. It collapses variance into noise and discards it."
"Variance is dangerous," someone said.
"Variance is information," Luke replied. "Dangerous only when ignored."
A murmur passed through the room.
The woman raised a hand. "You also noted the role of the observer."
"Yes."
"Define it," a different voice pressed. "Carefully."
Luke chose precision over speed. "The observer is not external. Measurement changes the system it measures. The lattice denies this interaction."
Silence followed—not the absence of sound, but the presence of thought.
One figure chuckled softly. "That borders on heresy."
"It borders on accuracy," Luke said.
The woman studied him. "If observation alters structure," she asked, "why hasn't this been catastrophic?"
"Because the lattice constrains how observation matters," Luke replied. "It narrows the margin until the effect is negligible."
"And you," another voice said, "exist outside that margin."
Luke did not answer immediately.
"I exist," he said at last, "where the margin hasn't been written yet."
A pause. Then a different kind of attention settled over the room—focused, deliberate.
The woman nodded once. "Next question."
They did not ask about power.
They asked about limits.
How many assumptions could a system hold before it broke?
Which contradictions were structural, and which were contextual?
What happened when definitions outlived their environments?
Luke answered some. Declined others.
Each refusal was noted.
Not as defiance.
As data.
When the seminar ended, there was no dismissal.
The woman simply said, "That will be sufficient."
As Luke stood, one of the figures spoke for the first time.
"Be careful," the voice said. "People who describe margins are often mistaken for those who wish to erase them."
Luke met the speaker's gaze. "I don't want to erase anything," he said. "I want it to admit what it refuses."
The figure smiled faintly. "That is far worse."
Luke left without ceremony.
In the corridor beyond, the pressure lifted—slightly.
Elowen waited by a pillar, arms folded. "You were gone longer than scheduled."
"It wasn't scheduled," Luke said.
She exhaled. "That's not comforting."
"They didn't want spells," Luke added. "They wanted definitions."
Elowen's eyes narrowed. "Then you gave them ammunition."
"Or mirrors," Luke said.
She studied him for a moment. "Do you realize what you did?"
"Yes."
"And you still did it."
"Yes."
Elowen shook her head. "They won't move against you openly now."
Luke started walking. "They don't need to."
"Because?" she asked, keeping pace.
"Because they've started comparing notes."
They stopped at the stairwell.
Elowen lowered her voice. "That many factions in one room?"
Luke nodded. "More than the Academy."
Her jaw tightened. "Then this stopped being an academic problem."
Luke looked back toward the hidden seminar room, already swallowed by stone and silence.
"It always was," he said. "They just needed the right language to admit it."
As he descended the stairs, Luke felt it again—the margin, thin and unfinished, stretching ahead of him.
They were no longer observing to classify him.
They were observing to decide where he would be allowed to exist.
End of Chapter 5