Night fell like a heavy lid over Silver Star. In the broom closet at the lowest level of the Weaver's corridor tower—an abandoned, forgotten cubby—only a single contraption breathed: a tiny thermal cycling rig, cunningly modified and muffled until its hiss was almost a secret. It sat miscast as an old water heater, and its barely audible sibilance was the metronome to which Elara worked.
Through the vent's narrow slit a thread of starlight leaked in. She bent over a quartz crucible and an illicit set of precision glassware smuggled from the alchemy rooms, every movement careful and precise. The air tasted of ice-orchid's cold clarity and the copper-sour tang of bloodstalk; underneath both there was that strange, singed aftertaste as if stardust itself had been burned and exhaled—an odor that made the scalp tighten with apprehension and hope at once.
What she brewed was a gamble on a razor's edge: a pseudo-awakening catalyst she had deduced by cross-referencing a battered notebook titled Breaths from the Blighted Soil with the splinters of knowledge lodged in her own alien mind. She called it the Stellar-Core Solidifier.
Her theory sat on a blade of conjecture. Leon's failed awakening and the subsequent blighted resonance, she suspected, were not the result of empty talent; if anything, his core had shown a rare and dangerous high-resonance plasticity—a nervy receptivity to any power. The tidal pull of the awakening ritual had not guided him so much as slammed a flood of star-energy into an unformed lattice. The nascent structure broke and, in the gap, abyssal corrosion had slipped a toe in—what the Academy would call pseudo-blight. If she could form, even briefly, an implacably stable shell around the embryo of his core—a scaffold with stubborn anchoring—then the star-energy might settle, cohering just enough to give him the faintest, directionally correct condensation: the first seed of a Vigil.
Failure meant ruin. The potion could shred Leon's mind, invite irreversible corrosion, even light a trail back to her and burn everything she had built. But the ruined streets of the Slag wards were a brand on her memory; stagnation was a sentence, and the cost of inaction sometimes outweighed the cost of the gamble. Desperation sharpened the hand.
The formula called for odd things: the pure ice-heart jade she'd won from Cecilia—ground to an ultra-fine powder as a stabilizing matrix; several strains of mutated moss prized for tensile life-activity and energetic adsorption; and, finally, a drop of Elara's own fingertip blood. Her alien soul's essence, she had hypothesized, flowed in that blood a peculiar dampening quality—a capacity to soften the arc of violent energies into something that could be held. It was the wager she made with the world.
On a moonless night, when the nightwatch's patrols thinned and the corridors slept, she led Leon into the broom closet. He regarded the vial that floated at the center of the crucible's light—azure as a trapped nebula, flecked with tiny suspended crystals—without hesitance. His face, thin and weathered, showed not fear but an absolute trust and a desperate resolve.
"Miss Elara," he said, voice stripped of anything performative. "Whatever comes, thank you for giving me the chance." He tipped the vial back and drank it.
Time lengthened, each second pulling like taffy. Leon's body convulsed. Beneath his skin it felt as though cold fire and burning frost met and tore at one another; his jaw clenched until his teeth starred white, a guttural moan crawled from his throat, veins spiked at his temple. Elara held both hands over the hollow of his spine, not to channel a raw surge of spirit—she dared not—but to lend him the simpler, fiercer tether of her own natural pact: a steadying will drawn from the wilds, a calm and stubborn pulse like bedrock. She radiated that in the only way she could—pure intent, an undulating pressure of will that made the Solidifier's influence sink slow and certain toward his dantian.
Then, with the abruptness of something small and wondrous being lit, Leon shuddered. His eyes snapped open. For a single breath the pupils glimmered with a faint, stable ember of dark red light—so faint one might have missed it, and yet it was there: pure, steady, unmistakable. He roared—not in rage but in a raw startled affirmation—and flung a fist at the nearby iron tool chest. The blow dented steel with an audible, shameful authority. It was nothing like a true first-tier Riftsmasher's strike, but the pulse of physical sharpening was real, and beneath it, for the first time, Leon could feel something else: a warm, tiny core of strength that belonged to him.
He had made a beginning. Even if it was the most fragile of first steps, it was a step onto the Vigil's road.
When the convulsion ebbed, Leon collapsed like a rag and lay trembling, drenched in sweat. But his eyes blazed. "I… I felt it," he said. His voice cracked with a kind of stunned worship. "Like a candle in wind, but it was mine."
Elara let breath leave her in a long, involuntary exhalation. Triumph and exhaustion braided in her chest. This was more than an academic vindication of forbidden recipes. This was proof she could cleave a seam of possibility into fate. She handed him pre-measured tonic vials—high-energy nutrient draughts and basic conditioning serums she had prepared days earlier—and spoke with the sternness of someone who had watched miracles become the most dangerous kind of secret.
"You must hide this," she instructed, voice low. "Train slowly. Do not shout it into the world like a bell. Let it grow in secret."
He nodded, hands shaking as they took the vials. His gratitude was a thing that could have been used to worship, and that gratitude settled across Elara like a small, heavy cloak.
Outside, the dark remained absolute. She looked up at that blank sky and the crack of expectation opening in her chest. "This is a seed," she told him quietly. "In Ashen Gorge we will bury it deep enough that it may take root."
She meant the joint practicum. Through the slivers of information she'd filched via dangerous channels—some favors owed to Cassian/Rook, a whispered bartering in the Brotherhood Below—she had learned the Academy intended to pitch fledgling teams closer to the true teeth of the Gorge. The recent uptick in blight activity meant that the exercise would not be mere theatre; it would be a field test, a taste of real war. That made it a risk, yes—but also the most obvious hunting ground for rare reagents and forbidden curios that might never show themselves under the Academy's polite lights.
Danger and opportunity braided together. Elara had placed a first, small bet. The next move would demand everything.