Beneath the dome, light was cut into orderly geometry and cast onto white marble like a vast net. The graduation summoning at holy Lumiere never lacked witnesses: the Empire's most powerful families occupied the tiered dais, while robed youths ringed the floor, trading glances sharpened to points—here to watch a "prodigy" crowned, and to wait for a "prodigy" to slip.
Lucian stood at the center of the circle.
The spotlight felt like a heated nail driven through his shoulders, pinning him beneath a thousand eyes. He could hear the audience breathe, the faint swing of a cathedral pendulum somewhere beyond the walls, and the whisper of his own blood moving under skin. It wasn't poetic exaggeration. It was a habit honed by years of work: dividing attention into tiny, manageable units and placing each one on something controllable—something that could be checked.
The circle's lines were drawn in a mixture of silver dust and black salt. Twelve soul-crystals were set into its rim like twelve hearts cut open and still beating. Each crystal carried ancient directional marks meant to constrain the shape of the Veil's breach, to keep whatever crossed from being torn apart by the edge. Lucian's gaze moved from one to the next as if inspecting rivets on a construct about to be displayed—angle, density, grain, the decay curve of residual glow. Nothing was wrong.
He didn't rely on prayer. He relied on measurement.
"Lucian Valentine," the cleric presiding over the rite intoned softly. The amplification array took his voice and made it solemn, inevitable. "By Empire and Sanctum as witness, you will take up your crown."
Crown. The word rang through the hall like metal tapped against porcelain. On the dais, nobles leaned forward as if a sacred bone dragon's silhouette had already begun to swell behind the Veil. For the bloodline supremacists, it would be proof in the shape of a creature: the purer the lineage, the greater the capacity, the more readily the dead would kneel.
Lucian knew another answer.
To him, "carrying capacity" was not a blessing. It was a physical property—something to be analyzed, reproduced, altered.
Powerful undead were difficult to refine not because they were powerful, but because they already contained too much of themselves.
Native soul-residue sat like impurities, occupying most of the vessel so that external commands could only skim the surface.
Bone dragons, wraith knights, monarchs of the dead—each was parchment already written on.
At best, you could scribble in the margins.
What he wanted was blank paper.
This time the Empire believed he would receive a sacred bone dragon.
By every visible measure, he had earned it: talent, papers, experiment logs, a mentor's endorsement. Even the Church had been forced to admit in public that his grasp of undead architecture was unusually sharp.
People called him the future chief of constructors, promised him a gilded medal of genius, promised him a seat at the Imperial Institute—promises settling toward his brow like a crown descending in slow motion.
The circle began to turn.
The first thread of soul-light erupted from the center, shedding fine gold dust. It looked like sunlight through cathedral glass—like metal filings caught in a hidden current. A restrained gasp rose from the audience: golden mist was one of the signs. It meant the breach was stable, the soul-residue strong, the response to blood immediate.
Lucian wasn't seduced by the color.
He didn't see "miracle." He saw a waveform. The pulse frequency was slightly too high, like an overexcited heart. He forced his attention deeper, letting his perception run along the silver lines, through every turn, over every shallow groove of every symbol. A clean model assembled in his mind: if standard soul-throughput was the baseline, the input here was excessive.
Someone was feeding the circle too much power.
So it would look like a sacred bone dragon.
He drew a slow breath. The air tasted faintly bitter with black salt. He set his palm at the edge of the center, as if soothing a machine on the verge of self-destruction.
"Blood," the cleric said, close enough that the breath of the word brushed Lucian's ear.
Lucian lifted his right hand. A pale scar crossed his fingertip—earned the first time he cut a soul-crystal to measure its internal fractures. He disliked reopening old wounds. Wounds were variables. Pain was noise. But the rite demanded blood. Blood was the oldest anchor, the clearest statement to whatever waited beyond the Veil: who was calling, and who would pay.
He drew the silver knife across his finger.
As the bead of blood formed, he felt the circle "answer"—the subtle shiver of a mechanism acknowledging a switch. And in the same instant, a detail that should not exist stabbed into his awareness: a minute drag in the circuit.
Not a break in the lines. Not a cracked crystal. It was more like a needle pressed into a fast-turning gear: the gear didn't stop, but one tooth caught—so briefly most people would never notice, so faint even a seasoned mentor might miss it. In Lucian's world, tiny deviations were everything.
He looked up.
At the center of the dais sat Prince Edward in a gilded chair. The young prince wore ivory ceremonial cloth, the Church's sun-mark at his collar, too bright—like a blade polished past practicality. He did not clap. He did not lean forward with the others. He only let the corner of his mouth rise, as if watching a play whose ending he had commissioned.
The drag came again, and it matched the prince's casual motion of adjusting a sleeve.
Blood still fell from Lucian's finger, sinking into the gold mist like ink into boiling water. To the crowd, it was the rite's crescendo. To him, it was data. Two hypotheses snapped into place: the circuit had been given a mismatched medium, forcing a phase shift at a node; or a soul-crystal had been replaced by a near-identical cut, stable just long enough to pass inspection.
Either way, the outcome had been set.
He did not speak. Not from fear, but from a lack of proof. An accusation without evidence would become another joke, and jokes were the Empire's favorite currency.
The golden mist suddenly collapsed, as if clenched in an unseen fist. The hall dimmed for a heartbeat. Everyone stopped breathing.
Then the Veil opened.
No vast bone wings unfurled. No dragon skull rose with the weight that makes air vibrate. The center exhaled only a smear of grey dust—not gold soul-mist, but a dull plume like rotted ash. When it cleared, a humanoid skeleton stood on the marble.
It was soot-colored and rough. Three ribs were missing on the left side. A fracture split the collarbone where something had been pried apart without care. Its neck vertebrae weren't seated properly, leaving the skull at a faint tilt, like a hastily assembled reject. It tried to stand tall and nearly failed; the hip joint slipped against the femur with a rasping complaint, a sound like an old hinge laughing.
Silence held for half a beat.
Then laughter broke like a flood over a shattered embankment.
"That's—Lucian's sacred bone dragon?" Someone lifted his voice on purpose, laughing until he wheezed. "So the Sanctum's 'golden mist' can spit out trash!"
"A skeleton missing ribs? Even graveyards don't keep those."
"Bloodline theory was right after all. Look—his blood is—"
Mockery came layered with deliberate softness and bright excitement. The excitement was ancient and filthy: the pleasure of watching someone fall from a height. Lucian recognized a few voices—students who once asked him about rune ordering, juniors who once waited outside the lab for his signature, now eager to prove their distance from his failure.
Footsteps descended the stairs.
His mentor—the man who had once slammed a hand on a table during a defense and declared Lucian would rewrite undead construction—looked as if all blood had been drained from his face. He stepped to the edge where everyone could see him and avoided Lucian's eyes as if avoiding a corpse that had begun to rot.
"The rite has failed," his voice rang through the amplification, cold as iron. "Lucian—your medal of genius is revoked. Effective immediately."
A gilded badge was removed from its case. Light struck it and flared for an instant—a last, small piece of irony. The mentor's gesture was slow, formal, like a surgical cut: severing Lucian from his "future," severing him from the paths the Empire permitted.
Lucian did not move.
His gaze did not follow the medal. It remained fixed on the skeleton at the center. Others thought he was stunned, swallowing humiliation. Only he knew what his mind was doing: verifying.
That skeleton had just endured a throughput meant for a sacred bone dragon. A common low-tier scrap would have crumbled into powder. Joints would have blown apart. Bone would have spiderwebbed with burn-scars, even the faint ember of soul-fire unable to hold.
But it hadn't.
It stood crookedly, its empty ribcage pointed at the spotlight like an advertisement for cheapness. Yet the bone surface—at least to Lucian's senses—was wrong in a way that mattered. No expected cracks. No collapsing grain. Even the vibration of its fibers sat in a strangely stable band, as if the material had been treated with care, built to spread impact along longer paths.
Lucian stepped forward.
The cleric started to block him, but the mentor stopped the attempt with a glance. In that moment Lucian was no longer the celebrated prodigy. He was a disposable failure—outside the rules, and therefore "safe." No one worried a failure could leave a mark.
He crouched and touched the skeleton's forearm.
Cold as stone. More precisely: stone compressed toward an extreme density. The surface lacked the chalky looseness of common scraps; it carried a fine hardness, as if the material had been ground by pressure across a long age. Blood still seeped from his finger. When it met the bone, he felt a faint loss of warmth—as if something had been taken. Not flesh. Not blood itself. Information bound to blood.
The skull shifted a fraction, the tilt growing more pronounced, as if it were trying to "look" at him. There was no personality in the motion, yet there was a mechanical response: it was receiving instruction. The source of that instruction simply hadn't been established.
Laughter rose again.
"He's negotiating with garbage!"
"What, is Lucian going to apologize to it?"
From the dais, a gaze pressed into his back like a knife. Lucian did not need to turn to know it. He repeated the name in his head: Edward. Prince. Heir of bloodline supremacy. A boy who wore rules like a crown.
His fiancée, Elena, stood near the cleric's seats. The white of her sanctified robes went almost translucent under the lights. Her expression was controlled—so controlled it looked carved. But her hands trembled, knuckles whitening with effort. She descended two steps and stopped a few paces away.
"Lucian," she said. Her voice was light, nearly a prayer.
He did not answer. Not because he felt nothing, but because he would not allow emotion into the system while the system was still being evaluated.
Elena raised her hand. In her palm lay a small token—a black-silver ring, its inner band etched with the vow they had once drafted together. Not "eternal love," but something closer to a contract between researchers: no deception, no waste of each other's time. Lucian had believed that was strong. Rational. Durable.
She set it on a ceremonial tray. Metal rang with a clean, final note.
"The Church and my family…" She hesitated, searching for words that might make her less vile. "I can't—"
"I understand," Lucian said at last, his voice calm in a way that did not belong to someone being stripped alive.
He did understand. He understood what "can't" meant: her position, her backing, the light she served—and the trade beneath that light. The world did not run on vows. It ran on cost and conservation. Today's cost was his legitimacy.
The mentor's sentence struck again, each word like a nail into a coffin lid.
"Lucian Valentine. For the failure of the rite and endangerment of its stability, you are stripped of Institute eligibility, your enrollment is revoked, and you are exiled to the Ashen Wastes as a border gravewarden—term indefinite."
Indefinite. Until death.
Someone in the hall exhaled in satisfaction, as if order had been restored. Lucian heard his heartbeat remain steady. His world shed its ornaments, leaving only a core that could be calculated: he had been pushed to the edge, and edges often meant raw material—freedom—laboratories beyond surveillance.
He stood. The skeleton swayed as he did, as if tugged by an invisible line. Lucian's eyes fell on the missing ribs: an unfinished structure. An emptiness people laughed at. An emptiness that also meant capacity—space that could be filled, rebuilt, inscribed.
He did not speak rebellion here. Rebellion without proof only made an enemy safer. He wanted proof. Law. A chain of cause and effect that could be repeated.
After the rite, the crowd scattered like crows after a meal. Attendants swept up soul-dust from the circle. Clerics murmured prayers as if nothing had happened. Lucian was permitted to take his "contracted entity"—the trash the Empire had declared him worthy of. To them it was another humiliation: forcing a failure to carry his failure out of the hall.
He stepped into the antechamber and closed the door, sealing out the noise. His tools were laid out on a table. His scalpel—worn from endless rune incisions, still sharp—rested where he had left it. Lucian slid it into its sheath with a neat, unhurried motion, as if tidying the last thing in the room that still belonged to his control.
The skeleton stood near the door, head still slightly canted, fingers curling without purpose. It had none of the bright soul-fire, none of the pressure of native residue, not even the common stench of decay. It simply existed—quietly—like a material placed in the wrong category.
Lucian walked up until his eyes aligned with its empty sockets.
"Stand," he said.
Its knees rasped in protest. It wobbled, close to collapsing again. Lucian placed a hand on its shoulder bone, his touch as light as a calibration weight.
"Don't give them the last laugh," he said, calm and hard enough to pin the air in place. "We're leaving."
The skeleton straightened its spine. It still didn't stand well, but it stood. A sliver of dying spotlight leaked through the door's crack and drew a thin line across its grey bone—like the last surviving glint of a shattered crown.
He pulled the door open. Laughter still rolled somewhere down the corridor, the last foam of a receding tide.
A guard assigned to escort him cleared his throat, impatient. Lucian packed the scalpel and a few fine silver pins into a worn satchel and snapped the clasp shut.
He stepped across the threshold without hesitating. The skeleton kept to his side. Bone feet clicked on stone—clean, hollow beats that refused to sound ashamed.
He didn't look back. The first question was already written in his head: without tearing the Veil any wider, what was this frame's upper limit for throughput?
On the map, the Ashen Wastes were exile. In his mind, they were a laboratory no one could enter without permission.
He lifted his hand. Dried blood still stained his fingertip. He let it slide over the skeleton's forearm like a mark for a first baseline.
"Keep up," he said—softly, as if speaking to himself—and started walking.