Chapter 7: The Myth of the Void
The silence in Dorm 0 was suffocating.
Instructor Lorien's gaze locked on the spot where Elder Tianrue's staff had once been. In its place, the false staff pulsed faintly — flawless in shape, perfect in weight, carved with the same runes. Yet every fiber of it screamed wrongness. It was not wood or metal. It was a rumor given form. A tangible lie.
Elder Tianrue stood pale, ashen, hollow. For centuries he had wielded his void staff — not as a tool, but as an extension of his soul. It was his truth, his proof of mastery. And now that truth was gone. Erased. Replaced with a counterfeit born from whispers. His mastery meant nothing. He was not a weaver of void. He was its victim.
Fae's trembling voice broke the silence. "It didn't destroy his staff. It… convinced the world it never existed. It rewrote reality with a story."
The words made Lorien's stomach twist. Rage surged in her veins, a cold fury to mask her fear. This was no student. No rogue. This was something parasitic. A myth that devoured myths. "We need to report this," she said firmly, though her hands shook at her sides. "This… Ghost isn't hiding. It's feeding. It's rewriting truth itself."
When the report spread, disbelief met it at first. A void staff, a sacred artifact, gone? Replaced with a replica of threads? Absurd. Impossible. Yet Elder Tianrue was no liar. His loss was undeniable. The legend began to shift.
The whisper of the Ghost became a roar.
Students who had merely misplaced memories were now terrified. If a myth could erase a master's legacy, what could it take from them? Their treasures? Their histories? Themselves?
Selan Myris seethed. For her, it was not fear but insult. A stain upon the Academy, upon her lineage. Her arrogance hardened into steel resolve. She no longer sought a culprit — she sought a pattern, a truth beneath the whispers. Her eyes, cold as winter skies, burned with dangerous clarity.
Joric, meanwhile, was ecstatic. Amid chaos, he saw his chance. While others hunted shadows, he would find a person. The rumors were his map, the dorms his trail. Foolish and blind, he clung to the dream of being the first to reveal the Ghost. To him, fear was fuel. Heroism was within reach.
And high above them all, Kairo Vale watched from the roof of a crowded dormitory. Dorm 0 was empty now — a husk, a monument to his presence. He no longer needed to be there. The students themselves carried his myth like wildfire. The Academy's walls trembled not from blows, but from belief.
He allowed himself a flicker of satisfaction. The instructors were reacting exactly as he wished: with fear, with suppression, with failure. The rumor was free now. It was no longer his alone. It belonged to the Academy. It belonged to the world.
But then—he felt it.
A disturbance in the myth-layer. Not born of the Academy. Something sharper. Distant. Precise.
A new presence.
Cold. Deliberate. Searching.
Not a student. Not an instructor. A woman. Her mind cut through the myth-layer like a scalpel through flesh. From high orbit, aboard a ship that glided above the planet, her thoughts sliced through the fabric of rumor, tracing the thread of the vanished void staff.
She was no ordinary investigator. She was a myth-layer analyst. A specialist.
Her name surfaced unbidden from the Codex of Myths — one he had hoped never to cross.
Vaelira Thorne.
For the first time, Kairo felt unease. His whispers had traveled farther than he intended. Beyond the Academy. Into orbit. Into her hands.
This was no longer a game of whispers. This was a war of minds.
And on the very first move, he had already been seen.
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