The lecture hall smelled of dust and cold stone, with a thin tang of ozone from the warding sigils that ran like pale veins across the ceiling. Students sat in tiers of carved benches, faces tilted, quills poised like tiny spears. At the center of the room Professor Halden stood like an obelisk of judgment, his voice a rasp that carried to the rafters.
"Power without purpose is not a gift," he said. "It is a wound waiting to be opened."
Elarion listened the way one listens to church bells—distant, inevitable. The words were not new; they were the town's breath made eloquent. Still, tonight they felt heavier. Halden's eyes swept the room and paused, as if measuring each young soul for weight.
"Better a Blank," Halden said, and his voice dropped so low it seemed to scrape the stone, "than a failed Wanderer who becomes a thing that kills in the dark." The sentence landed like a verdict. Conversations thinned; fingers stopped mid-scratch. Somewhere, a candle guttered.
It was one of those academy nights where lessons were also warnings. Halden moved to a projection of diagrams—runes and pathways braided like the roots of an old tree. He spoke of ritual frames and Purpose threads and the way a soul must find its own cord to tether power. He spoke in clinical terms; he spoke of failure like a natural law.
"Evolution must be earned," he said. "The Rite requires will, clarity, and a covenant with what you become. Fail in any part, and the cost is paid by your bones and your name."
Elarion's fingers curled on his quill. The word name slid under his skin. There were names at this academy that opened doors and names that shut them like iron lids. His own—unlit, whisper-thin—felt like a hole in the ledger.
A stir ran through the back benches. Someone had been dragged in from a neighboring class—a boy from the practical wing, face pale and eyes bright with fever. He was babbling about a ritual he had attempted on his own, about a sigil he'd copied from an old ledger, about how his Purpose had shown him in midnight dreams. He said the words like a prayer. He had the raw hunger of a Wanderer who wanted to be more than a shadow.
"He should've waited," a student behind Elarion muttered.
"He wanted it," another replied. "You can feel it—he wanted the power more than the rule." Their whispers were like moth wings.
Halden's expression did not change, but the room grew taut. "Bring him forward," the professor ordered. Two attendants hauled the boy to the floor in front of the dais. He sagged on his knees, hands clawing at the stone, whispering the syllables he'd memorized. His lips moved too fast, the phrases tumbling like loose teeth. The old wards on the floor hummed in response, complaining like strained ropes.
"This is not your rite," Halden said quietly, almost sadly. "You played at a covenant and cannot repay the promise."
The boy's eyes rolled back. For a heartbeat, nothing seemed to happen. Then the air around his shoulders shivered as if some invisible cloak had been tugged. He screamed—no human sound, but a tearing of something larger—and his voice folded into a dozen small, broken cries that echoed from the walls.
Elarion felt the sound prickle along his arms. The boy's skin darkened; veins burned like black ink. His limbs convulsed in shapes that were not meant for a human skeleton. Where the hands had been there sprouted irregular bone-curving talons. The boy's mouth stretched, and from it poured not words but the cold, dry whisper of hunger.
The transformation was a lesson written in flesh.
Halden moved then, with the quick, terrible patience of a man who had seen this before. He cast a binding cord—a line of silver light that cut the air and wrapped around the writhing shape. "Seal and name!" he intoned. "Name it to bind it!"
Students flinched. In the old rules, naming anchored existence; without a name the thing could drift and become worse—an unmoored hunger. Halden's voice cracked as he threw syllables onto the wards, but the thing the boy had become screamed and rolled, the voice of its hunger scraping the bindings raw.
"You are not a child to be saved by pity," Halden spat, and it sounded like a sermon, "you are an example." He raised his staff. The binding flared and then broke with a sound like thunder swallowed whole.
The creature tore free and lunged. For a single, impossible second the classroom became theater: dust in the shafts of lantern light, the thin metallic scent of panic, the flash of a chain in Vaelreth's hands. Vaelreth moved—quiet, precise. His Umbra Chains flew, not as brute instruments but as questions asked of the world. They snaked around the thing's throat and legs, constricting with a sound like cloth dragged over stone.
If Vaelreth's intervention had been slower, a dozen young bodies might have been rent. He tightened the chains until the creature's struggles dulled; the thing was trapped and not dead, eyes still holding the faint ember of the boy who had tried to claim a name too soon.
Silence fell after. It was the kind of silence that tasted like a warning. Students sat frozen, their faces pale. Some wept quietly; others stared as if looking away might unmake what they had seen.
Elarion's ink-stained hand shook. He had watched. The instinct to reach, to help, to do something had been almost unbearable. Instead he had done nothing—an absence noted and accounted for. Halden's gaze swept him and lingered just a second longer than polite. "Names mean weight," the professor said, his voice low enough that it was almost a whisper. "And weight crushes those who cannot carry it."
Outside, the sky over Duskmire was a blanket of ash. Inside, the academy registered the cost in a ledger that would never be entirely closed. The thing the boy had become was carried away—ropes and wards and the hush of heavy boots—and the students were left with a new lesson stronger than any lecture.
As the hall emptied, Vaelreth loosened his grip on the chains and walked to Elarion's bench. He said nothing for a long moment, then placed a hand on Elarion's shoulder, grounding and sure.
"You saw it," Vaelreth said. It was not a question.
Elarion nodded, throat tight. "Gods," he whispered. "We could have stopped him."
Vaelreth's fingers were cold. "We didn't. That's the world." He let the words hang. "Remember this: names can save you, and names can bury you. Choose whether you let your name be weight or shield."
Elarion let the words sink in, and for the first time the hollow under his own name felt less like emptiness and more like a place someone could put something—if he dared name it.
The lecture had barely ended when a tremor passed through the hall. A door at the side groaned open, and two instructors dragged in a student by the arms. His uniform was half-burned, charred glyphs crawling up his skin like brands. His lips moved soundlessly, repeating fragments of a rite.
"Another one?" someone whispered. The sound rippled through the benches like a shiver.
Professor Halden's eyes hardened. "Put him in the circle."
The attendants obeyed, lowering the boy onto the ritual seal etched into the floor. Runes glowed faintly, reacting to his fevered mutterings. His eyes darted wildly, pupils blown wide.
"I… I almost had it," he gasped. "The symbols spoke. They promised me—" His words broke into guttural syllables no one in the room recognized.
Elarion's gut turned cold. He didn't need to know the language to understand its weight. It was the sound of hunger given shape.
The boy convulsed. His body bent at wrong angles, joints cracking. His skin split in places, thin fingers elongating into hooked claws. A second mouth ripped open along his cheek, teeth gnashing like an animal tearing raw flesh. His screams became layered, half-human, half-something else entirely.
A Nightwoomb.
Students recoiled, benches scraping against stone. Some screamed. Others covered their mouths, too horrified to make a sound.
Halden didn't flinch. "Bind it."
The assistants snapped chains of warded silver around the writhing form. The monster thrashed, shrieking with voices that didn't belong in the human throat. Its claws scraped the wards, sparks of black fire erupting with every strike.
Elarion couldn't look away. His breath hitched, his right eye burning faintly—as if recognizing what stood before him.
"Failure," Halden said, his voice colder than the chains. "This is what awaits a Wanderer who dares a Path unready. Better a Blank than this. Remember it well."
The words struck harder than the sight itself.
Elarion's hands clenched in his lap. For years, being Blank had meant ridicule, invisibility, worthlessness. But as he stared at the restrained abomination writhing in its own broken purpose, he realized there were worse fates.
Failure wasn't emptiness. Failure was corruption.
Failure was losing your name, your self, until you became nothing but hunger and ruin.
The Nightwoomb let out one last, piercing cry before Halden's staff came down, sealing its distorted form into silence. The smell of burnt flesh and iron filled the hall. Students shuddered, some sobbing quietly.
Elarion remained still, his chest heavy. His classmates looked at him sometimes with pity, mostly with disdain. A Blank. A nothing.
But tonight he understood:
Uselessness was mercy compared to becoming that.
He whispered the word to himself, the syllables bitter on his tongue: "Nightwoomb."
The name carried weight, and with it, a shadow that would never leave him.