Day five.
I woke up at dawn. Same as day two, three, and four—not because I'd set an alarm or developed discipline, but because the mana core had opinions about sleeping past sunrise and expressed them the way it expressed everything: with pain.
The grinding pulse behind my sternum was quieter now. Not gone—never gone—but the screaming of day one had settled into something more like a persistent complaint. A coworker who disagreed with everything you did but had accepted that you weren't going to quit.
I sat up. Assessed.
Legs: sore, but functional. The muscle ache from the first few days had shifted from "everything is on fire" to "everything is deeply unhappy but willing to negotiate." My arms still trembled when I raised them above my head, but the trembling had a rhythm now—predictable, manageable, something I could work around instead of work against.
The black veins were at their morning minimum. Gray lines tracing the underside of my forearms, retreating toward the elbows. The tonic from last night was still doing its job. I had my window—three, maybe four hours before the corruption crept back.
I got dressed.
Six minutes.
One minute faster than yesterday. The button trick was muscle memory now—brace forearms on knees, use thumbs, work from the bottom up. The boots went on without a break. Small victories. The kind that don't sound like victories until you remember that five days ago, this process took eleven minutes and ended with me sitting on the floor with my head between my knees.
I ate breakfast when the servant brought it. Same older woman. Same avoidance. Same tray placement. The soup was thicker today—some kind of grain in it, and chunks of meat that tasted like nothing I'd eaten in either life. Dark bread. The green tonic.
I'd started looking forward to the tonic.
Not the taste—the taste was still mint soaked in battery acid, and it still made my eyes water on the way down. But the effect. That warm hand pressing against the cracked thing in my chest, easing the grind, pushing the veins back. Three minutes after drinking it, the world sharpened. The constant background noise of pain dropped a few decibels, and for a brief window, I could think without static.
Not the other Static. Regular static. The kind that comes from a body in constant low-grade agony.
...Although the other Static had been quiet since day three. No buzzes. No pulses. No dead-channel hum between my thoughts. Just silence.
I didn't trust the silence.
But I couldn't do anything about it, so I filed it under "problems for later" and went outside.
***
The walk to the training yard had become a route.
Out the door, left, down the corridor, through the side passage I'd found on day two—the one that bypassed the main hall and the guards—down the narrow staircase, out through the servants' entrance near the kitchen. Seventy meters. Seven minutes.
Seven minutes.
Down from nine on day two, eight on day three, seven-and-a-half on day four. The improvement wasn't strength. It was efficiency—shorter steps on the stairs to reduce joint stress, leaning into the wall on the turns instead of stopping to balance, timing my breathing so I didn't have to pause.
Park Jiwon wasn't an athlete. Wasn't a fighter. Wasn't talented, gifted, or particularly brave.
But he was a systems optimizer.
And a body was just a system with bad documentation.
The courtyard was cold. It was always cold—this was apparently a mountain in the northern region of wherever-this-was, and "cold" was less a weather condition and more a philosophical commitment. My breath came out in white clouds. The frost on the training yard walls was thick this morning, crystalline patterns spreading across the stone like something was growing there.
I walked to my spot. The section of wall where the frost was thickest, on the north face, where the sun never reached. Three wet patches from yesterday had frozen over again overnight—the stone didn't remember what I'd done. Neither did anyone else.
I pressed my palm to the wall.
Cold. Immediate. That sharp, clean bite that sank through the skin and settled into the bones.
And—
The core pulsed.
Softer than day two. Not weaker—softer. The difference mattered. On day two, the pulse had been desperate, a broken thing straining to respond. Now it was... smoother. Still cracked. Still grinding. But the gears caught faster, the alignment came earlier, and the mana—that faint electric hum beneath the skin—reached my fingertips in twenty seconds instead of thirty.
I held.
Twenty seconds. Thirty. The frost under my palm began to change. Not melting yet—softening. The crystalline structure losing its rigidity, the white turning translucent at the edges.
Thirty-five seconds.
Forty.
Melt. A patch the size of a coin. Water on stone.
The core spasmed. I pulled my hand back. Pain in the wrist, climbing toward the elbow. The veins darkened half a shade.
Recovery. Two minutes. Breathing.
Second hold. Same wall, fresh frost, different spot. This time the alignment came at fifteen seconds. The melt at thirty-eight.
Fractionally faster. Fractionally larger—maybe a centimeter wider than the first. If you measured it. Which I did. Because measuring was all I had.
Third hold. The core was flagging now—I could feel it, the way you feel a battery dying in a flashlight, the output dimming before the cutoff. Pressed my hand to the wall. The cold bit. The core reached.
Thirty seconds. Thirty-five.
The melt came. Same size.
Core empty. That hollow, silent feeling behind my sternum—not pain, absence. The engine shutting off. Fuel tank dry.
Three reps. Three patches. Done.
I slid down the wall and sat on the frozen ground.
This had become ritual. The post-training sit. Legs stretched out, back against the stone, breathing into the cold air while the body processed what I'd just asked it to do. I'd sit here for twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, letting the exhaustion settle, watching the compound wake up through the archway.
The training yard was still empty. It was early—most of the estate's residents didn't start their routines until after the second bell, which was about an hour from now. I'd learned this by observation over five days of sitting in this exact spot. The first people to enter the yard were usually the guards, who came in pairs, warmed up with blade drills, and left. Then the household staff crossed the far end on their way to the storage buildings. Occasionally someone in heavier armor—an officer, maybe—crossed through without stopping.
Nobody came to this end of the yard. Nobody trained at the north wall. Nobody used the short swords on the bottom rack.
This was the dead zone. The corner of the estate that nobody cared about.
I fit right in.
***
I was fifteen minutes into my recovery sit, mentally reviewing the day's data—alignment time decreasing, melt speed holding steady, corruption advance consistent at half a centimeter per session—when I heard footsteps.
Not the guard pattern. Not the servant shuffle. Not Hagen's measured, even tread.
These were lighter. Quicker. And uneven—fast, then slow, then fast again, with the distinctive rhythm of someone walking toward something they weren't sure they wanted to reach.
I looked up.
A girl stood at the archway.
For a disorienting half-second, I thought I was looking at a photograph of myself that someone had cleaned up in an editor.
Ash-white hair—the same shade as mine, exactly—except hers was brushed, maintained, pinned back with a silver clasp that caught the gray morning light. Pale eyes—same color, same shape—but sharper, brighter, with the clarity of a body that had been sleeping in a warm room and eating full meals for its entire life. Same bone structure. Same jawline. Same proportions.
Caelum Ashworth, if someone had given a shit.
She was young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Dressed in a fitted coat with the Ashworth crest—not the servant version, the family version, with silver threading along the collar that glinted when she moved. A rapier hung at her left hip, thin and elegant, the kind of blade that rewarded technique over brute force.
She was staring at me.
No—at my hands. At the frost-covered wall behind me. At the three wet patches that were already starting to refreeze in the cold air.
"...You're training."
Her voice was higher than I expected. Young. And surprised—not the manufactured surprise of someone performing an emotion, but the genuine article. The slight widening of the eyes, the fractional parting of the lips, the momentary stillness before the brain catches up with the observation.
She hadn't expected to find me here.
She'd expected to find the room. The bed. The body lying in it, staring at the ceiling, the way it had been for—
How long? How long had the old Caelum been lying in that bed before I arrived? Weeks? Months? Longer?
Long enough that his sister—because that's what she was, the resemblance made it undeniable—had internalized "Caelum" and "bed" as synonyms.
"Lyra."
The name came from the body, not the brain. My mouth formed it before my mind authorized it—muscle memory, stored deep in the throat, worn smooth by repetition. Caelum's vocal cords knew this name the way my hands knew how to hold chopsticks. Automatic. Underneath thought.
Something crossed her face. Quick. Controlled.
"You remember me."
The way she said it—the slight upward inflection, the careful neutrality designed to hide what the question actually was—told me this wasn't small talk. This was a test.
'Did the destabilization damage his memory?'
'Is he still in there?'
'Is this still my brother?'
"...Should I not?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes kept moving—my face, my hands, the wet wall, the sword rack where the short blade was still slightly out of alignment from my first day. She was cataloging. The same way I cataloged. Same habit. Same family. Same architecture of observation, built by the same household, refined by the same silence.
We were, it occurred to me, probably more alike than either of us knew.
"Helena said your core destabilized again," she said. Careful. Each word selected and inspected before delivery. "She said you might have... cognitive difficulties."
...
'Cognitive difficulties.'
I turned that phrase over. Felt its edges.
Helena had told the family that the core collapse might have damaged my mind. A pre-built explanation. If the new Caelum acted differently—spoke differently, asked questions the old one wouldn't have asked, made eye contact when the old one stared at the ceiling—there was already a narrative ready. Brain damage. Deterioration. Don't read into it. Don't investigate.
Cover story. Laid in advance. Airtight.
Helena really was something.
"My cognition is fine," I said.
Lyra looked at me. I looked at her. The silence between us stretched—not hostile, not warm. The silence of two people standing on opposite sides of a gap that neither of them had dug but both of them had spent years learning to live around.
"You've never trained before," she said. "Not once. I've never seen you in the yard."
"Things change."
"In a week?"
"In less."
Her weight shifted. Left foot to right. The unconscious redistribution of a person who wanted to step closer and hadn't given herself permission. Her hand rested on the rapier's pommel—not gripping, resting. The posture of someone who carried a weapon the way other people carried keys. Habitual. Part of the body.
"The entrance exam is in five weeks," she said.
"I know."
"For Astralion."
"I know."
"Caelum." She said my name the way you'd say a word you were testing for cracks. "The entrance exam is a seventy-two-hour Battle Royale in a Rift Domain. One thousand applicants. Five hundred pass. People die."
She delivered this the way Helena would have delivered it—level, clinical, controlled. But there was one difference. One detail that Helena would never have allowed.
Her hand had tightened on the rapier.
Not a lot. A millimeter of pressure. The knuckles whitening at the second joint. The kind of involuntary micro-tension that the body produces when the brain is trying very hard to be calm and the rest of the system disagrees.
She was scared.
Not of me. For me.
'...Huh.'
"You have four mana," she continued, and now there was an edge in her voice—not anger, something sharper, the frustration of someone who cares about an outcome they've been told is none of their business. "Your core is cracked. You can barely stand. The weakest applicants will be F-rank with stable cores and basic combat training. You're F-minus. Your core is actively trying to kill you. Do you understand what—"
"It means I'll be the worst person there."
"It means you'll die."
Flat. No theater. A fifteen-year-old girl standing in a frozen courtyard telling her brother he was going to die, delivered with the same polished steadiness Helena used, because she'd grown up in the same house and learned the same lessons about keeping your voice level when everything was breaking.
But her hand was still tight on the rapier.
Helena's hands never tightened on anything.
"Why did you come here, Lyra?"
She blinked. The question landed somewhere she hadn't braced for—I could see the recalibration happening in real time, the prepared conversation crumbling and something unrehearsed taking its place.
"I came to see if you were alright."
"No, you didn't."
"..."
"If you wanted to check on me, you'd have asked a servant. Or the physician. You came in person, alone, at dawn, before the second bell, before the staff rotates and the corridors fill up. You came when no one would see you. Which means there's something you want to say that you can't say through channels. Something Helena would hear about if you used the household network."
Silence.
Her jaw tightened. Her eyes went sharp—not hostile, startled. The expression of someone who'd been looking at a puzzle they thought they'd solved and realized a piece had changed shape.
"...You're different."
"Cognitive difficulties."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile—the involuntary twitch of something that wanted to be a smile, killed on contact by fifteen years of training in the Ashworth method of emotional suppression.
"Helena is the one who pushed for the enrollment," she said. Quieter. Her eyes flicked to the archway—checking, confirming they were alone. "Not Father. Father wanted to wait until the physician cleared your core. Helena argued that waiting was a waste. That you'd never be cleared."
...
"She wants you to fail the exam."
I knew that. Helena had all but said it. But hearing it confirmed—and hearing the part she'd omitted, that the father had wanted to wait and Helena had overruled him—sharpened the picture.
This wasn't indifference. This was strategy.
"If you fail," Lyra continued, "you go to Greymoor. Permanently. Father agreed to that condition. Helena's condition."
"And if I don't fail?"
The question sat in the air between us. Stupid. Absurd. An ant asking what happens if it wins the arm-wrestle.
She didn't laugh.
"If you don't fail... you're at Astralion. Under Academy jurisdiction. The family can't touch you without political consequences. Four years."
Four years outside this house. Four years where the Ashworth name was a crest on my collar instead of a cage around my neck. Four years to understand this world, this body, this system, and the buzzing in my skull that got louder every time reality skipped.
"That's why she wants me gone," I said. "Not embarrassment. Control. If I'm at Greymoor, she manages me. If I'm at Astralion, she can't. The enrollment isn't punishment—it's a bet. She's betting I'll fail and she'll get what she wanted anyway."
Lyra stared.
Five seconds. Ten. Her expression was layered—surprise, reassessment, something warmer underneath that she was trying very hard to keep underneath.
"You're really different."
"People keep telling me that."
"The old you..." She stopped. Reconsidered. "The old you wouldn't have seen that."
"The old me didn't have much to look at."
That landed. A flinch—small, controlled, instantly suppressed—but there. Because it was true, and she knew it was true. The old Caelum had been a body in a room, and she had walked past that room every day for years without opening the door.
I didn't push it. Guilt, in someone who was already standing in your corner, was a resource, not a weapon.
"Lyra."
"What."
"Thank you for telling me."
She looked away. The mountains. The snow. The cracked training dummy that still hadn't been replaced and at this point was beginning to feel like a metaphor for something.
"Don't thank me. I didn't do anything."
"You came."
"..."
"Nobody else has."
Quiet. The wind moved her hair. She pushed it back with the hand that wasn't on her rapier—the hand that was free, that she could have used to reach out, if reaching out were something Ashworths did.
It wasn't. But the impulse was there. I could see it in the way her fingers hesitated at her temple before pulling back.
"Five weeks," she said. Turned. Walked toward the archway. Stopped.
"...Caelum."
"Mm."
"Eat more. You look like a corpse."
"Noted."
"And don't die."
She left. Quick footsteps, fading. The training yard settled back into its cold, empty quiet, and I was alone again with the frost and the wet patches and the hollow silence of an empty mana core.
***
I sat there for a long time.
The information sorted itself into categories the way it always did—automatically, compulsively, the filing system that Park Jiwon had built over twenty-two years of watching and never being watched back.
Helena: active threat. Engineering failure. Controls the household, the staff, the narrative.
Father—Revan: passive. Either controlled by Helena or indifferent enough to produce the same result. Wanted to wait. Was overruled. Didn't fight it.
Dante: eldest son. Graduated first. Unknown. No data.
Rowan: second son. Ranked ninth. Unknown. No data.
Lyra: sister. Conflicted. Scared. Came alone. Brought information she shouldn't have. Hand tightens on the rapier when she talks about me dying. Growing up in the same cage but in a different cell.
Professor Hagen: instructor. Saw the wet spots. Gave three sentences of guidance. East wing, third floor.
The Ashworth household: a machine designed to produce strength and discard waste. I was classified as waste. The machine was functioning exactly as intended.
Five weeks to prove the classification wrong.
With four mana, a cracked core, three daily frost-holds, and the analytical brain of a dead twenty-two-year-old Korean convenience store clerk.
...
I pressed my palm to the wall one more time. The core was empty—had been for an hour. Nothing happened. Just cold stone and cold skin and the silence of a system with no fuel.
But tomorrow there would be fuel again.
And I'd melt three more coins.
And the day after, three more.
And the day after that.
Not because I believed it would be enough. Not because I had a plan, or a goal, or the kind of burning conviction that characters in stories were supposed to have.
Because the alternative was Greymoor.
And Lyra had asked me not to die.
And that was, for now, enough of a reason to keep pressing my hand to the wall.
...
The static buzzed.
Once.
Faint.
Closer.
I didn't ignore it this time.
I listened.
It didn't say anything.
But it didn't leave, either.