The bell rang before dawn, a low bronze note that rolled through Elysium like distant thunder. It vibrated in the bones and in the stones, warned sleepers, woke schemers, and called the dutiful to heel. Thaddeus was already standing at the Moon Tower window when it sounded, katana balanced across his palms, shadows braided around his wrists like fingerless gloves. The courtyard below was a gray pool of mist. Torches guttered; banners hung limp as breath.
Aurora stepped into the threshold, her silver hair unbound, a habit she reserved for mornings that mattered. "They'll be waiting on the east field," she said. "Calvane made a point of telling no one the trial's shape. Uncertainty is the first test."
"Then we'll pass it before breakfast," Thaddeus said, letting the blade slide home with a clean whisper. The shadows loosened and settled at his heels.
They walked in silence down the spiral steps. The tower's air tasted of old ink and cold iron. On the ground level, servants moved like quiet currents, leaving baskets of hard rolls and pears, skins of sweetwater. Thaddeus took none. His stomach was calm; the cool in his chest was the kind of anticipation he trusted. Hadn't the shadows taught him that stillness, properly held, is not emptiness but coiled motion?
Elysium's east field lay where lawn gave way to scrub and young pines. Professors stood in a line like unsheathed blades. Students gathered in clusters—sleepy, eager, feigning boredom. Bows on backs. Spearheads glinting. Gauntlets flexing. Sunlight had barely broken the ridge, but the Solgards still found a way to stand in a brighter patch: Evan's hair threw back the dawn like a challenge, Emily's white-and-gold caught what little light there was and made more.
Thaddeus and Aurora joined the semicircle as Professor Calvane stepped forward. The wind tugged at the glyphs stitched down his sleeves, making them seem to swim. "Today," he said, voice carrying without effort, "you leave the controlled spaces. The academy wards will still watch you, but they will not hold your hand. The exercise is a retrieval. Your teams will enter the Verdant Labyrinth and recover a sigil-stone from one of the inner shrines. The maze shifts. The currents are not all of air."
A murmur there—Stormhaven heads tilted in reflexive interest, Clearwater eyes sharpened.
Calvane continued. "You will be placed in mixed teams of four. Balance is the second test. The third is trust. You will discover it or fail without it."
A professor with a ledger read names, and the courtyard's soft noise broke into rustles and glances and swallowed curses. When Thaddeus heard his, he didn't flinch.
"Team Seven: Thaddeus Moon. Serenity Clearwater. Jacob Rosewood. Ashley Emberhart."
Shadows, water, earth, fire. A circle married by accident or design.
Serenity caught his eye across the group with the briefest nod—there and gone, a pebble under a current. Jacob wiped his gauntlets on a linen cloth and grinned as if someone had promised him a boulder to punch. Ashley spun her spear once and let the butt rest on her shoulder, sparks the color of old embers ticking along the haft before winking out.
On the far side, Evan was paired with Selene Stormhaven, Lily Rosewood, and James Clearwater. Calvane's mouth did not move, yet Thaddeus felt the shape of intent. Another balance. Another fulcrum.
"The Labyrinth opens at the edge of the east wood," Calvane said. "You will enter by your gate when it presents. Return by any you can force, but return intact. Bring one sigil-stone. Break none. Time is not a score, but the maze does not respect dawdlers. Begin."
They moved.
The east wood accepted them without drama, branches a lattice of damp shadow and birdsong. Then the ground sloped—and the world did what Elysium liked to do best: pretend it was merely stone and root, then peel back its skin to show the warded bones underneath. A hedge rose, not from seed or pruning but from spell, hazel and laurel braided with copper wire. Paths unfolded and folded with the logic of tides. The air smelled of green things crushed under older memory.
Four gate-mouths breathed in the hedges, and one of them breathed for Team Seven. It opened wider as they approached, leaves curling like a yawn revealing its throat.
"Lovely," Ashley said brightly, rolling her shoulders. "If we get swallowed, I call the teeth."
"No teeth," Serenity said. "Roots. Listen."
They listened. The Labyrinth had a rhythm. It wasn't a heart-beat. It wasn't wind. Thaddeus realized—reluctantly—that it was irrigation, water drawn and released through channels beneath the ground, breathing the maze open and shut. Water memory, old and deliberate.
"Clearwater," Thaddeus said, a concession and a request.
Serenity's eyes took the light and made it calm. "The shrines are dead centers of their own small spirals. We should not push against currents; we should ride them across. Jacob—touch the hedge."
Jacob did as asked and flinched, not from pain but surprise. "It… hums." He pressed his palm again. "Feels like… a stalled avalanche, if you told it to roll uphill."
"Weight will move the old way," Serenity said. "Shadows can cut corners. Fire will make doors, but only once before the maze notices. Save that for not-dying."
Thaddeus let the shadows slip from his wrists to his ankles. They pooled and spread thin, a sheen across leaf mold. The maze had shadows of its own, but these would prefer him. He sent one out and it returned, a dog with briars in its fur. The path to the right pulsed open every seventh breath. The center slope was a lie. The left route narrowed and opened with the same rhythm as the irrigation pulse.
"Left," Thaddeus said.
"Agreed," Serenity said at once.
Ashley stamped the butt of her spear on the ground, and the spark that jumped was not playful. "If we get pinched, I carve us a window."
"Window, not doorway," Jacob grunted. "Doorways, the maze… eats."
They moved with the current. The hedges admitted them then pressed benignly at shoulders and hips, making a sound like rain on paper. Twice the path pinched to a sleeve and they slipped sideways into a seam of dimness that barely had room to name itself. Twice the ground ran with shallow water and Serenity waded without breaking stride, leaving swirls that spelled not-quite letters.
At the first bend with sky, they paused. Overhead, crows pivoted like iron filings under a magnet.
Thaddeus listened for a second note in the Labyrinth's rhythm. He heard it. Beneath the pulse of water and leaf and copper, something that did not belong—silence that was too shaped. He looked at Serenity and found her already looking.
"You feel it," she said.
"An absence pretending to be a room," Thaddeus said.
Ashley scowled at the hedge. "Speak plain, please. Do we stab it?"
"Not yet," Thaddeus said.
Jacob's laugh was quiet, a rock rolling. "Yet."
The first shrine did not look like a shrine. It looked like a clearing that had decided to be polite. The ground flattened and the hedges made a round mouth. In its center a waist-high pillar of limestone wore a crown of wet moss, and on it rested a stone the size of a child's heart, veined with silver, humming under the audible world. Sigil-stone. It threw no light, yet the clearing had more of it.
"Too easy," Ashley said, voice gone skeptical.
"Correct," Serenity said. "Watch the perimeter."
Thaddeus did not reach. He extended a shadow like a tongue and brushed the stone—the way one nudges a covered blade to tell if the sheath is empty. He expected resistance. He expected nothing. What came was a withdrawal. Not the stone, but the space around it drew back like breath taken before a shout.
"Trap," Thaddeus said.
"Of course," Ashley muttered.
Jacob took one step, then stopped when Serenity's hand flicked like a quiet command. "No weight within the ring. Watch the ground."
Thaddeus let his shadow lap closer. The stone did not reject him; it did not welcome him. But something under the pillar failed to recognize what he was. That would be useful. He gave the shadow a little more length, so it grew thinner and colder, and slid it down the pillar's side like a ribbon drawn along bone. He found inscription cut below the moss—a spiral of glyphs like river eddies. His eyes couldn't read it; the shadow could. It showed him eddy, eddy, eddy… break. The break lay under the pillar's back-left edge.
"Lift from the back-left," he said.
Jacob smiled as if someone had invited him to do the only honest thing in the world. "With pleasure." He sank a gauntleted hand into the earth, not like digging but like asking, and the dirt parted. He pressed the underside of the pillar and lifted. His other hand braced. The pillar rose a fraction without complaint. The ground did not shout. The hedges did not coil.
"Now," Serenity breathed.
Ashley slid the spear head like a wedge, not to pry but to prop. Thaddeus sent his shadow under the stone and curved it. It cupped, then held. The sigil-stone came free without voice.
For two breaths they were a perfect figure—earth bearing, fire bracing, shadow lifting, water waiting. Serenity opened her palm. Thaddeus placed the stone on her skin. It should have been cold. It was neither. It hummed against her lifeline, and the hum spread up her arm, through her shoulders, across her collarbones, into the air between them. A breath caught in Thaddeus' throat without his consent.
Then the hedges exhaled.
The absence they had felt at the gate did not explode. It unfolded. The clearing's light dimmed by a fraction you would only feel if you loved night, and Thaddeus did. The dimness was not darkness; it was subtraction. A space where light should have been and was not. His shadows reared like horses and tried to leave his feet.
"Down," he said, and they obeyed, but they did it with the stubbornness of beasts who thought their master had grown foolish.
The thing that unfolded did not have a shape. It had a logic: the way steam kisses glass and then erases what you were looking at. He had seen scars like that on paper where void sigils had been copied badly. He had not expected to see it breathe.
"Back," Jacob said, voice flat now.
Serenity drew a line of water out of the air as if peeling silk; it arced and became a thin pane between the thing and them. The not-shape did not strike it. It simply reached for the place where the pane ended and made more ending there.
"Void," she said.
Ashley swore once and it was not theatrical. "I thought the professors didn't—"
"They don't," Thaddeus said. "Others do."
"Cult?" Jacob asked, like taking a stone into his hand to weigh it.
"Yes," Thaddeus said, and some part of him spared a bitter breath of satisfaction that the word said aloud made them all sharper.
The thing moved the way frost takes a window when you blink. It was closer without crossing. It chose the seam between Ashley's pane and Serenity's elbow and began to unremember the air there. Serenity stepped right, water drawing with her, and the pane held—barely. The sigil-stone on her palm pulsed, pulse met pulse, and the pane brightened.
"I can thicken it," she said, "but not if it keeps changing…"
"Hold," Thaddeus said, and he stepped.
Shadows can flee. They can also occupy. He sank into the edge of his, not to vanish but to widen. The ground under his feet went slick with absence that was his, not the thing's. He could draw it like ink if he stood exactly so. He misliked that: how similar the doing felt.
"Ashley," he said. "Window."
"What am I cutting?"
"The moment between its moves."
Ashley's grin came back, razor-clean. "Now that is a Moon sentence."
She reversed her spear, and the sparks that licked up the haft weren't playful; they were discipline shaped into fire. She didn't stab the thing. She planted the spear where his shadow made the ground thinner and drew a rectangle into the air, swift and sure, a carpenter sketching a door. The fire didn't burn. It defined. The edges of the window glowed without heat—warmed space, not cut hedge.
"Jacob," Thaddeus said.
The Rosewood heir set his feet as if earth liked him best when he weighed her down. He put one gauntleted hand at the window's bottom edge and one at the top. "On you."
"Serenity," Thaddeus said, and he didn't order; he asked. "Let it chase you. Slowly."
She nodded, her mouth a calm line, the water-pane shivering into a thicker sheet. The void-thing pursued—not because it had eyes, but because it liked endings, and the pane kept refusing them.
Thaddeus held the edge of the not-shape in his own absence and felt it pull. It was a frightening sensation, because it wanted to be the same. He let it decide that for one heartbeat only. When it leaned more toward him than the pane, he said, "Now."
Ashley flipped the spear and struck the window with the butt. The warmed frame snapped inward like a snare. Jacob shoved up and down at once, and the frame slammed shut. The thing slid through the window with the obscene elegance of silk drawn through a ring.
The frame became a box and the box became a claw Jacob could hold. He did, grimacing as his gauntlets hissed faintly. The not-shape writhed like a bad thought and lost ground all the same. Ashley chalked glyphs at the corners with the spear tip, each a little sun. Serenity took one choking breath and breathed out a word he did not know but recognized as Clearwater inheritance; the box's seams glossed like water turned to glass. Thaddeus pressed his shadow's absence against the last seam, not to feed the thing but to convince it that ending lived elsewhere. The pull lessened. The box held.
They stood shaking with stillness for a count of ten.
Then the Labyrinth sighed again, but this time it was the good exhale of a room that has had a fire opened and a window cracked. Birds remembered to call.
Serenity lowered her arm. The sigil-stone looked no different. Thaddeus knew it was. He felt it, the way a bruise feels heat that skin cannot see.
"Are you well?" he asked, and the question surprised him.
"Yes," she said, and the answer surprised her. She closed her fingers around the stone. "It resonates more strongly now. The shrine woke it… the void announced it."
Jacob lifted the box with both hands, an awkward cradle. "What do we do with it?" he asked.
"Bring it," Thaddeus said. "If the professors did not set it, they'll want to see who did."
"And if the who is still watching?" Ashley asked.
"Then we show them we are not charming to hunt," Thaddeus said.
They left the clearing with the same care a victorious army uses to quit an enemy city—heads up, feet placed, listening. The maze changed its path-lips for them twice more; both times Serenity felt the current before anyone else and shifted them into the easy water. Once they stopped short as voices approached from a crossing—Evan's crisp command, Selene's wind softening it, James' clipped assent, Lily's measured correction. Their shapes ghosted behind leaves and wire. Evan paused; Thaddeus felt his attention like a hand put on a table you are on the other side of. The gate turned and hid them from one another. The maze has a sense of theater.
When Team Seven reached the field again, the east light had decided to be morning for real. Teams trickled out by other gates, some with stones, some with empty hands, one with a student's sleeve torn and a rueful professor already cooling a burn. Evan's team emerged almost on the same breath as Thaddeus'. Their stone glowed a different hum—paler, wind-burnished. Evan's eyes went to the box in Jacob's arms at once, then to the line of stress at Serenity's mouth, then to Thaddeus' hands, where the shadows had not fully forgiven him and lingered like ink stained into whorls.
Professor Calvane did not sigh. He did something rarer: he frowned. "Report."
Thaddeus said, "The shrine was standard. The labyrinth currents were old Clearwater craft. The sabotage was not."
Calvane's frown did not deepen nor ease. "Show me."
Jacob set the box down and stepped back. Serenity touched one seam with two fingers and murmured that Clearwater word again. The gloss loosened. Ashley wiped a corner sigil with a crack of the spear-butt. Thaddeus placed his palm over the remaining seam and refused it—not to end it, but to let the professor hear how the ending had been taught. The box opened like a book that would rather not be read.
The thing inside tried to remember how to be out. Calvane moved one finger and a lattice of force sprang around the box, neither sun nor shadow nor any discipline Thaddeus knew. The not-shape strained and found no purchase. It curled and uncurled like a fern that decided light had been a rumor.
"Void-working," Calvane said, not loudly and not for the crowd, yet the words rippled through them all the same. "Not ours. Not sanctioned." His gaze skated the line between the heirs and the professors on the ridge, those who liked to watch from behind glass. "Catalogue it. Seal it. We will speak of this later."
Evan took a step he disguised as idle. "Who would set void in a controlled trial?"
"Someone who wished us to fail," Serenity said before Thaddeus could, and her tone was a bowl placed firmly on a table. "Or wished the sigils to wake loudly."
Emily stood at her brother's shoulder. "Or wished to see who would handle it best."
Thaddeus did not look away from Calvane. "We returned with the stone and the thing that wanted it. That is sufficient for a morning."
Calvane's eyes flicked to him, and for a half-second Thaddeus saw something under the professor's restraint—a recognition, not precisely approval. "It is," Calvane said. "Teams will log their paths and findings with the wardens. Eat. And then rest. The Labyrinth remembers those who rush back too soon."
Students broke into chatter—praise without hugs, rivalry without shouts, questions that pretended not to be. Jacob clapped Thaddeus once on the shoulder, the weight of it honest. Ashley leaned her spear against him for a fraction of a second in a gesture that wasn't quite affection and wasn't quite an apology for wanting to stab everything first. Serenity stood too still, which meant she was listening to something that did not speak in the air.
He stepped closer. "The stone?"
She opened her hand. The sigil-stone had no lines he could name, but when he looked at it for a count of five, he could not help but see one: a very thin crescent scored near the edge of the palm-sized face, so light it might have been a flaw in the rock.
"Eclipse," he said.
"Not full," she said. The wind tried to carry her voice and failed. "A piece that expects others."
"Pieces in other shrines," he said.
"Pieces in other places," she corrected. "Or already taken."
Aurora found them then, her expression smoothed to nothing polite or cruel. "You're bleeding," she said to him, and he looked down and found he was—a shallow crescent along the inside of his wrist where the shadow-bracelet had bitten when he held the seam. He had not felt it.
"It's small," he said.
"Small things rot if you ignore them," she said, already binding it with a cloth she had not been carrying a moment ago.
Serenity watched Aurora's hands and then lifted her gaze. "The library," she said, quiet enough to fold in the air. "Tonight? Or is that reckless?"
"Both," Thaddeus said.
"Then both," she answered, which should have irritated him. It steadied something instead.
Evan and Emily moved past with their team, not so close that a shoulder would brush, not so far that distance could be mistaken for deference. Evan's fingers tapped once on his estoc's hilt—a little rhythm that said I saw what you did and I will answer it later. Emily did not telegraph. She met Thaddeus' eyes and granting nothing, took nothing, then gave the faintest tilt of chin toward Serenity's closed hand as if to say: Do not let your new current drown your old tide.
After the formalities—the wardens' dry questions, the admission of a hedge that had pretended to be sky, the acknowledgment of void work without inviting panic—Team Seven disbanded at the edge of the field. Jacob went to find food the way a man who lifts pillars deserves to eat. Ashley, who talked like a bonfire and fought like a forge, surprised him by saying nothing sharp at parting. She touched two fingers to the window-callus on the staff and left smoldering footprints in dew that did not burn the grass.
"Rest," Aurora said, which was also a command.
"After," Thaddeus said, which in the mouth of anyone else would have been refusal. From him, it was an itinerary.
They crossed the quad where students were already telling revised versions of what had happened, as if saying a thing with more fear or more glory could make it truer. Elysium's towers looked down like old judges promising lenience and delivering something else. Somewhere behind too-clear glass, the headmaster was absent as always—present in the way a weight is, even when you do not see the stone.
On the Moon Tower landing, Serenity touched the stone once to her own wrist as if testing heat. "Tonight," she said again.
Thaddeus nodded. "Tonight."
"And if the one who set the void is already waiting for us there?"
He let the shadows gather and then thin, the way he did to tell them the difference between exercise and knife-work. "Then we greet them properly," he said.
Serenity's mouth curved—not a smile. A consent.
Aurora laid her palm briefly against his shoulder, pressure gentle, warning heavy. "If you walk between currents," she said, "remember which shore is yours."
"I do," he said, and for now, he believed it.
The bell that marked mid-morning rang. It did not sound like thunder this time. It sounded like a blade set on a table between two people who might share bread or the other. The day moved, pretending to be ordinary, and the maze's green breath dried in the sun. But in Thaddeus' palm the healed cut tingled, and in Serenity's hand the sigil-stone hummed once, as if reminding them: the eclipse does not need the sky to begin. It needs only pieces willing to find each other.
And somewhere—in a room with too many locks, or a shadow under a colleague's cloak—someone who had taught a void to crawl felt the smallest pull, the string in their web tremble with a caught fly that had teeth.
Thaddeus sharpened his stillness and let the shadows taste the air. Tonight, the library again. Tonight, answers or more careful lies. Tonight, the first line drawn where others could not see it. He had never liked tides. But he found, to his irritation and relief, that he did not mind a current so long as he chose where to step out.
He turned from the field and started down the corridor with Aurora on one side and, three paces back, Serenity walking as if she had always known this hall. The academy breathed. The day feigned ease. Thaddeus counted the breaths to evening and did not lose count.