Blackspire rose like a black fang against the bright sky.
It was strange—how the weather shifted so violently between districts.
Down in Five, the world had been drowning in ash and ice.
Here, the sun shone warm against his skin, casting golden light over polished stone and towers carved from shadow.
Ezra squinted against the sudden brightness, his vision struggling to adjust.
The Academy wasn't just a building.
It was a fortress.
Carved from ancient volcanic stone, reinforced with seamless plates of shadowed metal, it squatted atop the hill like a living thing.
The ground itself seemed to hum with restrained power, and the very air was thinner—crisp, sharp, clean in a way that felt unnatural after the filth he was used to breathing.
At every archway, glyphs older than memory pulsed faintly—wards that would burn anyone who didn't belong.
Ezra tucked his stolen papers deeper into his coat and drifted toward the gathering crowd.
The other candidates were already forming near the entrance.
Hundreds of them.
Ezra's worn-out boots and threadbare coat marked him instantly.
He felt their stares, tiny and sharp, like needles pressed into his skin—curious, pitying, disgusted.
Most of them wore tailored uniforms: armor-stitched jackets, silk-lined coats, crests stitched onto their sleeves in gold, silver, blood-red.
He recognized the symbols of the great Houses:
Laurent. Silva. Leichstein. Eisenberg. Vale.
Arkanis's noble bloodlines.
The future warlords and magisters.
The ones who ruled in the King's name, long after the crown had become little more than a hollow threat.
Ezra was nothing but street filth standing among them.
A mistake waiting to be corrected.
He adjusted the scarf around his throat, forcing his breathing to steady.
Eyes down.
Head low.
No one notices the dog if it doesn't bark.
A heavy chime rang out from the Spire's gates—deep enough to shake dust loose from the stones.
The massive iron doors groaned open.
A figure stepped through.
Tall. Severe. Dressed in void-black armor trimmed with molten silver, a long cloak dragging behind him like a shadow given form.
His voice rolled out across the plaza without magic, without amplification—sharp and commanding, meant to be obeyed.
"Candidates. Welcome to Blackspire.
For those of you who are ready—step forward.
Those who aren't can turn back now. There is no shame in fear.
Only in wasting our time."
The gates yawned wider, the black stone mouth of a beast preparing to devour them.
Ezra moved with the current of bodies.
Head bowed.
Heart hammering like a blade on an anvil.
They spilled into the first courtyard—an open arena, its obsidian tiles blackened and cracked from generations of trials.
No lush gardens.
No banners of welcome.
Only a battlefield waiting for blood.
Figures stood along the walls—watchers cloaked in muted robes, their faces hidden behind blank masks. Instructors. Evaluators. Executioners, if need be.
The candidates were herded into lines without a word.
Above them, massive glyphs carved into the stone began to pulse—softly at first, then stronger, each beat like a second heartbeat drumming into their skulls.
There were no explanations.
No rules announced.
The silence itself was the first lesson:
Ezra shifted nervously, feeling the ripple of uncertainty pass through the gathered candidates.
A few muttered to themselves.
Others fidgeted, glancing sideways.
No instructors spoke.
No guards barked orders.
The masked figures along the walls simply watched, unmoving.
And then—
The world pressed down.
It was not a sound.
Not a blow.
It was like the very air had thickened into lead.
Ezra staggered, catching himself against a nearby candidate who immediately shoved him off with a sneer. Around him, the others faltered too.
Some stumbled to their knees.
Others cried out—a few clutching at their heads with gasps of pain.
The pressure grew heavier.
Like invisible hands gripping your skull and squeezing.
Ezra's ears popped violently. A thin, hot trickle slid from one nostril—blood.
Across the courtyard, a boy dropped fully to the ground, writhing, a dark pool forming beneath his face as blood leaked from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes.
Screams broke out—but no one came to help.
The candidates were drowning in it—this invisible, crushing weight that set every nerve on fire, that forced them onto the ground, that made even breathing a battle.
Ezra grit his teeth hard enough that his jaw ached.
Stand.
Endure.
Or die.
More collapsed, their bodies trembling on the bloodstained stone. Some tried to crawl toward the walls.
Those who did—
The watchers moved.
Silent and sudden, the robed figures by the edges of the courtyard drifted forward. They didn't strike, didn't speak.
They simply laid a single gloved hand atop the skulls of the fallen.
And in an instant, the candidate went limp.
Ezra didn't want to know if they were dead.
He didn't need to know.
His legs trembled violently beneath him. He could barely stand—but he refused to fall.
Above them, the glyphs carved into the courtyard walls pulsed faster now—bright, hot, white.
Ezra's vision blurred around the edges.
He could taste blood in the back of his throat.
He stumbled again—and this time, he forced himself upright with sheer, stubborn rage.
He wasn't going to die here.
Not now.
Not before he even had the chance to claw his way higher.
Not before he made the bastards up there see him.
The pressure continued, relentless.
Minutes—or hours—seemed to bleed together.
Until, at last, as suddenly as it began—
The weight lifted.
Ezra sagged forward, bracing his hands on his knees, gasping air like a man nearly drowned.
All around him, the courtyard was different now.
Thinned out.
Of the hundreds who had entered, barely half still stood.
Ezra straightened, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his sleeve.
His head throbbed. His limbs shook.
But he was still standing.
The remaining candidates staggered into loose lines, breathing hard, blood streaking their faces and staining the dark stone beneath their feet.
No words of congratulations.
No promises of glory.
Only survival.
From the far end of the courtyard, a new figure approached.
A senior.
It was obvious from the way he moved—casual, loose, the weight of experience draped over him like a second skin. He didn't limp. He didn't bleed. He didn't even flinch under the watchful gaze of the robed instructors.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Wolfish.
His uniform was pressed sharp despite the heat of the courtyard, the black fabric stitched with silver trim to mark his station. Dusty brown hair fell in a messy halo around his head, wind-tossed but somehow still boyish. His tan skin gleamed with a sheen of effortless health, his muscles flexing visibly under the fitted sleeves of his academy jacket.
But it was his eyes that locked Ezra in place.
Piercing hazel.
Alive with something wild.
Something dangerous.
The senior flashed a slow, lazy grin at the battered candidates—sharp-edged, predatory. A grin that said he had survived what they hadn't even begun to imagine.
Ezra swallowed thickly.
He hadn't seen anyone like him before—not in the slums, not in the broken districts, not even in his desperate dreams.
The senior's gaze swept over them, assessing, dissecting, dismissing most without a second thought.
When his eyes brushed over Ezra, they lingered for the barest fraction of a second longer.
Then he moved on.
"Listen good, because I'm not repeating myself," the senior said, hands shoved casually into his pockets. "You've been sorted. Assigned dormitories. Assigned squads. Assigned fates, if you want the real truth of it."
He turned, beckoning them to follow with a crook of two fingers.
"Move."
The candidates obeyed, stumbling forward like broken things.
Ezra kept his head low, his legs trembling with exhaustion but moving anyway.
As he trudged forward, he finally caught a better glimpse of the others who had survived.
They stopped inside a squat stone building tucked along the side of the main courtyard. It wasn't grand like the soaring towers outside—no gold trim, no elaborate carvings.
Just stone. Heavy. Solid.
A place meant for shelter, not pride.
The Iron Quarters.
The place where they'd be sleeping—if they survived long enough to sleep at all.
Ezra took it all in through a haze of exhaustion: the worn training fields beyond, the cracked fountains, the tattered banners swaying overhead.
Ezra didn't care.
He barely registered the cracked floors or the low ceilings or the long rows of iron-framed bunks stacked against the walls. His whole body screamed for rest, for warmth, for something—anything—that didn't feel like death breathing down his neck.
A roof over his head.
Food he didn't have to steal.
For now, that was enough.
The survivors were crammed into a stone hall just inside the Iron Quarters.
Bare walls. No beds yet. No furniture. Just cold grey brick stretching in every direction.
The heavy doors slammed shut behind them with a thunderclap that made Ezra flinch.
The senior who'd led them—the wolfish one—lounged casually by the doorway, arms crossed.
He looked like he was enjoying himself.
"Line up," he barked. "Now."
The candidates stumbled into ragged rows, breath misting the air. Some were still bleeding openly. No one offered to help them.
Ezra found himself sandwiched awkwardly between a boy who looked to pretty for his own good and a girl with sharp red eyes who looked like she could shatter his ribs with a sneeze.
The senior strolled lazily in front of them, hands in his pockets.
"You're the ones who survived the First Selection," he drawled. "Congratulations. You're tougher than you look. But don't get comfortable. Most of you will still be corpses before winter."
A few of the stronger candidates straightened their spines.
Ezra stayed perfectly still, eyes down.
"Here's how it works," the senior continued. "You'll be assigned squads. Squadmates eat together, train together, bleed together. If one of you fails, the whole squad fails."
His smile sharpened.
"If you hate each other, too bad. Work it out. Or die."
He jerked a thumb toward the back of the room, where a table had been set up — battered slates scrawled with names and assignments.
"Squad rosters are posted. Find your squad. Introduce yourselves. And try not to embarrass yourselves in the next two hours."
The senior turned and sauntered away without another word, disappearing through a side door.
The room stank of sweat, blood, and wet stone.
Ezra drifted forward with the others, steps dragging, stomach turning sour. His head still throbbed from the trial in the courtyard—the crushing weight of it, the way it had pressed against the inside of his skull until he thought he would split open.
In front of him, a battered table stood crooked against the wall.
A single slate was nailed to it, names scrawled in chalk—half-smudged by trembling, bloodied hands that had come before him.
Ezra leaned in, squinting through the haze behind his eyes.
His gaze snagged on the names, heavy as stones:
Silas
Ezra Valentine
Cassian Von Leichstein
Octavia Eisenberg
Zhao Runin
Asli H.
The letters swam for a moment before sharpening again.
He felt his stomach twist into a tighter knot.
Leichstein. Eisenberg.
Even the poorest in District Five knew those names.
The Leichsteins: warlords wearing the Empire's face.
The Eisenbergs: industrial kings, gilded in steel and blood.
Old blood. Noble blood.
Born in silk sheets and sharpened on golden swords.
The kind of people who wouldn't even spit on a slum dog like him.
Ezra's mouth tasted like rust.
And here he was.
The gutter boy.
Slotted between them like a mistake waiting to be erased.
He swallowed hard, the taste of old blood still clinging to the back of his throat.
He pulled back slightly, letting his eyes drift across the others—his squadmates. His new executioners, more likely.
The first was a girl—relatively tall, sharp, folded in on herself like a blade sheathed too tightly.
Straight black hair fell past her shoulders, glossy and perfect even after the trial, not a strand out of place.
Her skin was pale, almost translucent in the dim light, her narrow eyes lined with faint black kohl that made them look colder, sharper.
When she moved, she didn't twitch or fidget—she slid, weight balanced perfectly on the balls of her feet.
Like a fighter.
Or a predator.
She caught him staring and tilted her head slightly, like a crow considering a corpse.
Another boy stood to his right, lazily twirling a strip of cloth between his fingers.
He looked like something the gods might've dreamed up on a better day—platinum blond hair twisted into a careless bun, green eyes gleaming sharp beneath arched brows.He was the kind of beautiful Ezra had only seen in the posters District Five used to plaster over the tram stations—models advertising weapons and promises no one could afford.
Platinum blond curls pulled carelessly into a loose knot.
Green eyes—bright, brilliant, gleaming like gemstones dug straight from the earth.
Even bruised and dirtied from the trial, he moved like he belonged here.
Like he was already above it.
Ezra turned his eyes away again.
Farther down, a figure leaned quietly against the wall—barely moving.
A boy draped in shadow.
Ink-black curls fell over a face too smooth, too still—until Ezra noticed the faint, silken blindfold tied across his eyes.
Beauty marks dotted his skin like constellations.
He didn't glance around, didn't fidget, didn't do anything but breathe.
Ezra stared for a beat longer than he should have, unease coiling low in his gut.
A boy with hair the color of blood and eyes like sharpened glass scoffed from across the group.
"Well, well. Looks like we've picked up a stray," he drawled, voice slick with mockery.
The girl beside him—small, pale, hair tied into messy pale blue pigtails tinted pink at the ends —barely glanced up from picking at her nails.
She looked almost too delicate for a place like this. Porcelain-thin. Breakable.
But there was something sharp curled underneath the lazy way she moved, something that didn't belong to dolls or glass.
Ezra cleared his throat awkwardly, the sound rasping in the heavy air.
"Ezra Valentine," he said.
Voice rough from disuse.
From fear.
"District Five."
The silence that followed was heavy.
Immediate.
District Five was a brand.
A warning stamped on his back for all of them to see.
No one answered right away.
Then the boy—the one with the blood-colored hair and the dangerous smile—gave a lazy, mocking tilt of an invisible hat.
"Cassian Leichstein," he said, dripping false courtesy.
"District One. Try to keep up, peasant."
The blue-haired girl finally bothered to look up, her expression a perfect, hollow mask.
"Octavia Eisenberg," she said, voice flat. "District One."
Then promptly lost interest again, going back to inspecting the dirt beneath her nails.
Ezra shifted, feeling the weight of their stares—even the ones too proud to show it.
He curled his cracked fingers into fists at his sides, willing himself not to show anything more.
The others didn't speak right away.
The girl with pin-straight black hair gave a short nod.
"Rin."
No family name.
No district.
Just Rin.
As if anything more would have been a waste of breath.
Cassian's gaze flickered to Rin, a lazy smirk crossing his lips, but there was something underneath it—something darker. He walked toward her slowly, the type of approach that made your skin crawl, that made you feel the weight of the world settling on your shoulders.
"You're not from here, are you?" he said, his voice low, a little too sweet for comfort. "I've seen your kind before."
Cassian let out a soft, almost amused chuckle before turning back toward the others.
The boy with the silk blue blindfold tilted his head slightly,He didn't even push off the wall when he spoke.
"Asli."
Simple. Dismissive.
And finally , the pretty boy to Ezra's right spoke up giving a small nose barely noticeable as he spoke .
" Silas"
Ezra looked at them again.
Really looked.
Not truly.
None of them were.
Foreigners.
Outsiders.
Just like him.
In the ways that mattered.
The six of them stood there, breathing each other's exhaustion, sizing each other up like wolves in a pen.
Waiting to see who would bare their teeth first.
Squadmates.
Whether they liked it or not.