They didn't announce it.
No horns. No sigils burned in the air. No Council seal to sanction the violence.
Just two marked sons, alone beneath the Academy's oldest stone — where the glyph-lines of battle training once crossed before the Trial of Blades was outlawed.
Where too many had died with no one to remember them.
The glyphs beneath their feet pulsed dimly, ancient and half-faded.
Not summoned by magic — but memory.
Vhentyr Cael'theron moved first.
Not a shout. Not a flourish.
Just a precise lunge — twinblade drawn, both edges crackling with judgment. One side shimmered in gold, the other in blackened silver, like sunlight refracted through a verdict.
Lyric barely dodged.
The sword scraped a stone glyph and erased it clean off the floor.
"You don't even fight like one of us," Vhentyr said, circling. "What god watches over you? Which law lets you walk free?"
Lyric didn't answer. His chest burned.
Not the mark they all knew — but the second. The one he'd never spoken aloud. It throbbed under his skin like something stirring in its sleep.
He raised his hand.
The glyphs beneath him reacted.
They should've flared in House Velastra's colors — emerald and frostwhite — the hues of clarity and containment.
But instead—
Teal. Silver. And something deeper. A color not seen, but remembered.
Vhentyr froze.
The glyphs around Lyric bent backward, folding in impossible ways — as if space itself had been written wrong and now struggled to recall what it once was.
"That mark," Vhentyr hissed, eyes wide. "That's not… That's not of any house."
"No," Lyric said quietly, voice shaking. "It isn't."
Then the mark flared.
The forbidden one.
And the air around them fractured — memory bleeding into light, into sound, into things neither boy had ever spoken of aloud. A voice that echoed through marrow, old and cold and grieving.
"You are not your house. You are not their god's.""You are mine."
A shadow moved in the upper terrace — unseen, but watching.
A figure robed in sea-silver and tide-thread, cloak whispering with embroidered waves.
House Oryllae.
Eyes narrowed. Silent. Measuring.
Then, in a whisper of saltwind, gone.
Back in the arena, Vhentyr staggered.
His soul sigil flickered.
The blade trembled in his grip, its silver side — the edge of deception — briefly brighter than the gold.
He looked at Lyric.
Not with fury.
With doubt.
And for a second, that was almost worse.