Chapter 10 — Steps Under the Arch
The morning I left for the Academy smelled like rain and fresh oil. Rain because Lunaris wakes to cloudbanks that slide in from the whitewater coast; oil because Father had the city crews working through the night, greasing the tramlines and polishing the lantern-housings along North Causeway. He said the city should gleam on days that mattered. He never said who they mattered to.
Mother adjusted the fall of my cloak until the crescent embroidery of our district sat straight between my shoulders. Her fingers were quick, practiced, the way they had been when I was small and fidgeting before formal dinners. She didn't speak until she finished. "You packed the ledger?"
"I packed three," I said.
She smiled like that answered something else. It probably did.
Father didn't come to the doorway. I found him where he always was at first light: on the east balcony, looking over the roofs to the river where the barges nose through fog. He didn't turn when I stepped beside him. The river made a sound like paper being torn and mended at once.
"The Academy's not a temple," he said. "It won't make you anything you aren't bringing with you."
"I know."
"It will try." He glanced at me now, the lines at his mouth deeper from a week of council arguments. "And the council will try. You'll hear words like legacy and expectation and decorum thrown like stones. Let them scratch you, not cut you."
I could have told him I'd weathered worse. That this was my second life and I planned to spend it sharply. Instead, I watched a barge's wake break the river's mirrored surface and reform behind it, uncomplaining. "I'll send letters."
"You'll send results," he said, but the edge had no teeth. He reached into his coat and took out a pen I had never seen—old, weighty, the barrel inlaid with faint runic lines that didn't resolve into a language I knew. He set it in my palm. "Your grandfather carried that during the reforms. It isn't a Sigil artifact, before you ask. It's a tool. Don't forget how much can be done with one."
"I won't," I said.
When I looked up, he had already turned back to the river, as if my leaving were just another tide to track.
The tram hummed under my boots like a caged animal as it climbed through the tiers of Lunaris. On lower streets, apprentices in blue smocks hauled crates of sigil glass and salt; above, banners snapped between spires, the fabric stitched with guild crests—forge and plough, book and blade. The city smelled like smoke and citrus peel and the ozone tang around a newly sealed rift. The smell had been common enough these past months that the apothecaries sold nose-salve to dull it.
Two wardens in panelled armor stood in the tram's forward car near a glass box filled with churning mist. One of them, bored, tapped a tuning-fork against the frame. The mist shivered and rose in a spiral, then settled again. "Harmonics are low," he told his partner. "We're fine."
Students filled the car—some with new boots that squeaked, some with boots that had been mended twice over, black thread against black leather. Nobles talked loudly because silence made them feel ignored. Commoners talked loudly because silence made them feel watched. I kept my ledger open on my knee, the old pen balanced on its spine, and wrote three lines:
Transit rift detectors now standard in public trams.
Wardens running harmonic checks, not timer boards.
Ether saturation stable in northern routes; southern routes flagged last week.
When you write a thing down, it proves you saw it. It doesn't prove you understood it. But the first step toward understanding is honest inventory.
The Academy's arch could be seen from two stations away and still you didn't understand its size until you were under it. Stone walked itself up into the sky and pretended it had always been there, bones of the world poking through grass. Under the arch, the air shifted. The noise from the lower courtyards softened as if sound itself were reminded that this was a place for measure.
A line of lanterns burned along the path to the front court, blue-white and steady. I felt myself straighten without thinking. The trees lining the walk had been trained to bow toward the center like pages turning. Beyond them, the main building rang like a struck glass when the wind caught its latticework.
There were more non-humans at the gate than I had expected this early in term. Two elves moved like falling water through the crush, their hair braided with silver cords; a dwarf with a scar down his throat argued, cheerfully, with a registrar about tool permits; a beastkin boy with fox ears kept his distance from everyone, eyes on exits. They wore their differences like armor, and sometimes like weight.
Inside, the front court swayed with voices. A banner announced Welcome Conclave in the Great Hall; another, smaller, announced Safety Protocol: Ether Harmonic Lecture – Attendance Mandatory. A third, narrower still, announced Donation Opportunities: Restoration of the Old Library. No one read that one twice.
I made for the Great Hall, because that is what you do when crowds try to decide for you. The Hall had been carved from old stone and new glass—a rib cage and a lung. Light fell in angles across rows of seats. I took one near the back and watched the front fill with faculty. Their robes looked expensive until you saw the worn cuffs and the finger-ink.
The Rector was built like a sparrow, thin and upright. His voice didn't carry so much as it folded space toward itself. "Welcome," he said. "You are here because you made a promise to your households and to yourselves. Some of you promised to rise. Some of you promised to endure. Some of you promised to make sure no one had to make either promise again."
A ripple of laughter ran through the room. The Rector didn't smile. "You will hear much about Sigils. You will hear more about power than about cost. Remember both. You are in no danger of forgetting the first."
He gestured and the wall behind him unclouded to reveal a cage of glass and brass in a side chamber, separated from us by a thick pane. Inside the cage, mist boiled against the glass like something thinking about waking. The hall went quieter.
"This is a controlled rift pocket," the Rector said. "It is not a dungeon. It is a lesson. We use it to teach you the difference between a threat and an inevitability. Note the glyphs along the braces. Note the frequency counter. Note that there is no timer."
I had to stop my hand from writing inevitability down like it was an instruction, not a word. The frequency counter ticked; the glyphs along the braces were warded with the basic sealing set I'd seen Father approve for municipal use last year, but doubled, with a crossbind that looked like a dwarven hand had touched it. No timer board. Because timer boards lied. They had always lied; it only took months of people noticing to admit it.
The Rector lifted a tuning rod. He tapped it against a brass rail and the controlled pocket responded in a gentle swell, like a throat clearing. "Harmonics," he said. "You will learn to hear. You will learn to map resonance to strain. When saturation crosses a threshold—the one our instruments argue about more than we do—you will respond. Not because the hour hand told you, but because the world did."
As if on cue, one of the low, patient chimings from the pocket turned sour. The mist gathered into a rope and pushed at the glass, not hard, not persistently. Just enough to be noticed. Students leaned forward in all the places where curiosity outran caution.
On the brace, two of the crossbind glyphs faltered, flickered, and re-lit. My hand wrote on its own: Glyph stutter, third rail, presence of counterfeit ink?
No, not counterfeit—wrong mix. Cheaper resin. You could fake the glow if you got the proportions right. You couldn't fake lifespan.
A faculty member moved to the brace too fast, trying to tweak the runes back into full shine. The rope of mist pressed again. Someone two rows down from me hissed, "Is this part of the show?"
The Rector didn't look alarmed. He lifted his hand slightly. The wardens posted beside the pocket held their positions, palms open. A wisp of mist found a hairline crack at the top seam and slithered out into open air like a moth that had learned to swim.
You can tell the difference between a classroom scare and a real problem by the way the instructors breathe. They hadn't planned for this. They'd planned for the first ten steps, for the demonstrations and the consequences. Not for the fourth brace to stutter, not for the wisp to find the seam.
People are taught to scream at monsters and to stay quiet at speeches. The room tried to do both. The wisp turned its blank face toward the students, tasting us for what we were. Panic rose with the clean logic of a tide.
At the back of the room, a side door stood open for equipment carts. If the room surged that way, the stairs would jam and someone would go down. The wisp would follow heat and noise and breath.
"Seats," I said, softly enough that only the four students around me heard. Then louder, leaning forward, not yelling, not challenging the voice from the stage. "Wardens will handle it. Breathe. If you run you feed it."
The boy by the aisle who had already half-risen looked back at me, at the wisp, at the Rector, and sat. The choice ran down the row like a line being drawn. It reached the second row and died there, because the second row wanted to help with their hands, not their patience.
The Rector flicked his rod twice. The wardens moved. A clear film like condensed air slid from their palms, sheathing the wisp, denying it purchase. It writhed, curious more than violent, and hit the film again. The brace hissed, the glows steadied.
The wisp's casing dulled until its movement slowed; a faculty member reached up with a cage on a pole and coaxed it inside. The door clicked shut with a tidy sound. The room exhaled as if the wisp had stolen our breath and was paying it back now in installments.
The Rector lowered his hand. "You will learn the difference between fear and response," he said, as if he'd planned the lesson exactly that way, and maybe now he would pretend he had. "You will learn to spot the wrongness that precedes the wrong."
I turned my head. At the base of the brace where the glyph had stuttered, a maintenance worker stood half-shadowed, the brim of his cap low, his hands tucked under a canvas roll. I would not have looked twice if not for the ink stain that crept up the inside of his wrist where the gloves didn't cover. Not ink. Dye. A rough, dark ring made of concentric notches. It looked like a mark that never decided if it wanted to be a circle or a chain.
He felt eyes and turned away, already moving. The door took him without a sound.
I didn't write that down. Not yet. Some things you hold in your head where paper can't be stolen.
After the lecture, the Hall bled out into the courtyards again. It had started to rain, light needles under a sky the color of iron. The stone drank it in until the flagstones glowed. Students congregated under the eaves to talk about the wisp as if talking would keep it in the cage.
A noble girl with her hair arranged like a battle plan bumped my shoulder and then didn't apologize, just looked me up and down. She knew me. Everyone did. Titles travel faster than people. "The porcelain prince made a speech from the cheap seats," she said to her friend, not to me. "Adorable."
I offered nothing back. You can starve a fire with air or with nothing. She was used to people feeding her.
Dorm assignments were posted in the Antechamber of Accounts where the bursars could watch you take your fate with grace. My name sat on a middle-tier list. I found my room without trouble—a narrow space with a bed, a desk, a window that made the courtyard look like a painting practice. The blanket smelled like soap and dust. I set the ledger on the desk and the pen on the ledger and the rain drew lines on the glass like more writing.
I had been given more space than the boy down the hall with the patched jacket and less than the girl at the end with the crest on her door. That was fine. Space has nothing to do with room.
The day stretched to afternoon. I walked the campus until the map in my head matched the one on the plaques. The Old Library wore scaffolding like jewelry; the New Library wore the smugness of clean glass. The practice yards smelled like wet leather and stone dust. A board near the yards listed the week's mandatory courses: Ether Harmonics I, Sigil Theory, Ethics and Administration, Physical Forms. The elective column was longer: Comparative Rune-Craft; Field Logistics; Guilds and Governance.
Ethics and Administration would be a blood sport.
By evening the rain decided to become mist and the lanterns came on along the walkways. The Academy didn't get darker at night so much as it became a different kind of light. Faculty moved like intentions in long coats. First-years moved like the beginnings of sentences.
I found the memorial by accident. It was small, tucked into the angle where the Old Library met the Records Annex, a space no one needed to pass through unless they were lost or looking for quiet. The memorial was a long, low wall with names etched into it, hundreds of them: students, wardens, faculty. At the end, a plaque: For those who took the steps and did not return. May the world they meant to fix remember them by the fixing, not the falling.
I stood there until the mist beaded on my lashes. The ledger stayed closed in my hand. What would I write? That the names were carved shallow on purpose so the stone could take more later? That someone had left a small bundle of dried forest herbs at the base of the wall, an elf's prayer for safe passage? That I thought of all the times in my first life I had walked past memorials and only counted the flowers?
I didn't believe in omens. I believed in patterns and pressures and the way a bad decision repeats until it gets loud enough to name. But I believed in promises. I believed more in promises kept privately than the ones made under banners. I put my fingers on the stone and thought of Father on the balcony and Mother straightening my cloak. I thought of the maintenance worker's stained wrist, and the brace that had flickered, and the wisp that had found the seam because something invited it.
The Academy bell marked sixth hour. I let the names go. The courtyard was almost empty when I crossed the cloister toward the dining hall. I didn't make it there.
A boy about my age stepped out from under the covered walk where the rain couldn't find him. Not a noble, not a commoner the way people meant those words when they tried to root you somewhere with them. He wore the uniform like someone who had worked to afford it and then taken very good care of it. His hair lay flat from the hood he'd just pulled back. He had a satchel too heavy for comfort and a nose that had been broken once the wrong way.
"I saw you in the Hall," he said, as if we were continuing a conversation I'd missed the start of.
"Half the school saw me in the Hall," I said.
"You noticed the braces," he said. Not a question. He scratched the inside of his wrist absently as he talked, where the skin is thin and the veins make maps.
"I noticed someone did the minimum for the budget and called it acceptable," I said. "And that the minimum holds until it doesn't."
He smiled without humor. "You talk like an accountant and a ward captain had an argument and your mouth is where they filed it."
"Some of us were raised in city offices," I said, which is almost the same as growing up in a battlefield.
His eyes flicked to the ledger in my hand, to the pen on top of it. "You're the prince," he said, like he was testing if the words would make me flinch. "Of the Lunaris District."
"Of my part of it," I said.
He looked as if he wasn't sure whether to salute. He didn't. "Good. I don't like saluting. I'm in the scholarship cohort. Logistics track." He stuck out his hand as if we were already colleagues, or as if he needed that to be true. "Name's—"
A bell inside the dining hall cut him off. The sound held the shape of bread and steam and a hundred conversations trying to be heard. He lowered his hand with a small, rueful shrug at the timing. "Eat first," he said. "Then talk. If you try it the other way around here, you'll starve before you get an answer."
He moved past me into the light. The satchel bumped his hip. He didn't look back.
I watched the swing of the door after he had gone and thought about introductions that begin before names. There was nothing in the ledger that could capture the way a person takes up space when they are used to apologizing for it. I made a note anyway: Scholar cohort speaks straight. Find them.
Before I could follow him in, someone else moved along the cloister, half-hidden by a wash of shadow. The figure paused near the old iron drain, glanced left and right, and knelt as if tying a boot. When they rose, something small remained in the mouth of the drain—thin, flat, and dark, like a pressed leaf.
I crossed after the figure vanished. The thing in the drain was a sliver of oiled paper, the kind used for wrapping delicate mechanisms. I unfolded it carefully. A circle had been inked there in a quick, sure hand, notched around like a gear or a collar. Inside the circle, a dot. Around the circle, four short lines at the compass points.
It could have been anything. A personal mark from a kid trying to prove he was part of something he didn't understand. A wardens' shorthand for a broken seal. A doodle.
The oiled paper had the same faint smell as the wrong glyph resin—cheap pine sap, stretched with too much solvent. I folded the paper again and slid it into the ledger, between blank pages. Some things you hold in both places.
When I finally entered the hall, the steam and sound hit like a soft blow. Bread. Stew. Face after face. Nobles were grouping themselves by old feuds. Commoners were grouping themselves by the way they ordered food, by who looked lost, by who held a tray like a shield.
I took a bowl and sat at an empty table where the lantern made a circle of gold around plain wood. I ate until my hands remembered they were hands and not instruments. While I did, I listened to how a school talks when it doesn't know it's being listened to.
"…heard the rift was staged and they just lost control on purpose to see who bolted…"
"…my uncle says the desert caravans saw three harmonics spike in one night—no timer, just the ground humming…"
"…they're saying a cult's been marking valves and drains with circles so the right things fail at the right time…"
"…don't say cult out loud…"
Later, in my room, the window rattled once, hard, as if the night had knocked to see who was awake. I set the ledger open and lined up the pen north-south on its spine. The pen's runes glowed faintly—not power, not promise, just a reminder that someone had carved intention into a tool and passed it down for hands to learn again.
I made three lists.
People who watch without being seen: workers with stained wrists; scholarship kids who carry too much in satchels; noble girls who think volume is armor.
Things that hum before they hurt: braces; river; a city when it's too quiet.
Promises that don't need witnesses: results; letters; the way a name sits on stone.
At the bottom I wrote in small letters, because it felt like something that shouldn't take more space than it needed: Second chances are not permission slips. They are debts. Pay them.
The Academy bell marked ninth hour. A notice slid under my door at the same time, paper like the kind used for assignments. I picked it up, sure it was a class schedule I had already memorized. It wasn't.
Aptitude Harmonization: All first-years will undergo pre-awakening assessment at the end of month one. Metrics recorded: focus, field awareness, harmonic sensitivity, directed will. Awakening ceremonies scheduled separately per cohort thereafter.
At the bottom, someone had added in handwriting, not the bursar's printed neatness: Do not mistake early awakening for achievement. Mistake late awakening for lack, and you will die earlier of the two.
I lay back on the bed the Academy had given me and watched the lantern-light shiver in the old glass. Somewhere beyond the wall, someone laughed the kind of laugh people make when they show bravery to their friends. Somewhere beyond the gates, the city hummed and would go on humming whether or not the Academy heard its song.
I thought of Father's pen. I thought of the maintenance worker's mark. I thought of the way the Rector said inevitability and turned it into a choice. I thought of names on stone.
I closed the ledger.
The rain stopped so quietly that I didn't notice until the silence itself woke me. The night felt balanced on its toes, deciding which way to fall. Tomorrow would be classes. It would be rubrics and readings and drills until our hands forgot how to move without counting. It would be the first small places where a person could betray what they wanted to be for what they thought they had to be.
I slept, and in my sleep there was a page with nothing on it, white and wide and waiting. Not a void. Not an ending. A beginning, perishable and sharp as a new blade, asking what I would write there when the world stopped pretending to be a lesson and became itself.