Chapter 2
Vesper Ash had never understood why her parents chose a name that sounded like a shadow, like the last flicker of a dying flame. To her, she was nothing but ordinary—a face in the crowd, an echo easily lost in the noise of the world. Yet the world itself had never been ordinary. Wars erupted, cities fell, strange silences swallowed entire places, but none of it had ever brushed against her. Until now.
She had finished school with no shining medals, no grand achievements to her name. Scholarships, she knew, were for people who shone brighter than her. Still, she filled out applications endlessly, scattering them like messages in bottles across a vast ocean, never expecting one to return.
When the letter finally arrived, she almost missed the weight of it, almost ignored the name of the place—Obscura Academy for the Arts. A school she didn't remember applying to. A school farther away than she had ever dared to imagine. Yet it came with a dormitory assignment, a place within Aeternum Hall. To an orphan who had drifted through life unseen, it felt less like an acceptance and more like an invitation—one she could not refuse.
Vesper had always believed she was average, painfully so. Others like her found homes, families, mentors, paths that anchored them. She had found nothing, and so she wandered. But now, for the first time, something reached for her.
And so she reached back. With all her ordinariness, she clutched at the extraordinary, not knowing that the name she carried, the path she had chosen, and the place she was going would change not only her life, but the world itself.