They stood on the dock while the clockwork airship breathed steam and hissed, brass ribs gleaming like a drowned sun.
The vessel's propellers churned the morning mist into ribbons that caught the light.
Aurelia watched the hull's slow rotation with careful, private attention.
Lysandra's grin split the quiet. "If your appetite for stories still holds," she said, repeating Aurelia's line from the tournament with theatrical relish, "we'll find a captain who takes passengers."
Aurelia smiled. Of course, she remembers. She remembers everything I forget in the morning. The little comfort tightened around her like a warm cloak.
The plan hadn't come from rumor or youthful wish—Headmaster Veyron had announced it plainly in the great hall two days before: a sanctioned transfer-student excursion to the Imperial Spire Kingdom.
A chance to see a sister kingdom up close, he'd said, voice carrying across rows of startled faces.
History, industry, and the arts of different eras.
The notice had set the academy humming, and even Marlec had looked pleased.
The students' reaction had been immediate and noisy, buzzing with questions, bargaining over who would share bunks, and bets about who would be daring enough to ride on a rune-worked gondola.
Aurelia remembered hands raised, votes split, the way Lysandra had already begun compiling a list of shops to raid.
"It's an education trip," Veyron had added, almost gently, "but also, an exercise in diplomacy." The last word had landed with a subtle weight.
Now, watching Lysandra's bright face, Aurelia's expression hardened a fraction. "Do you think they'll hold a grudge?" she asked, quiet enough that only the two of them heard. "After the Convergence? We did win—convincingly."
Lysandra waved the worry away with a dramatic flick. "Forget the students. If anyone's sulking, we'll distract them with pastries and spectacle. I'm here for the sights." Her eyes already catalogued possibilities, the spire's glass promenades, the market stalls lined with contraptions.
Kael, slate tucked under his arm, added another angle. "I'm looking forward to the technology. That revolver display—" He mimed the quick, precise movement the Spire's student had used in the tournament. "—there's craft in how they fuse mechanics and runecraft. I want to see the workshops."
Aurelia nodded, but the knot in her chest didn't loosen.
It's diplomacy, she reminded herself in the same tone as Headmaster Veyron. Not a parade.
She tried to imagine the Imperial students watching them disembark, cataloging them the way she'd been cataloged not long ago.
We'll be ambassadors then. Be steady. Be small where you must. Be bright where you can.
The captain they found was a woman with a laugh like a bell and arms inked with navigation runes.
She agreed to take paying passengers, provided the students didn't mind a little crowdsourced work on the rigging.
Lysandra cheered, and Kael inspected the ship's gear with the professional curiosity of someone already scheming to reverse-engineer a mechanism.
Aurelia's hand rested on the rail, feeling the ship's faint, constant hum, like a heartbeat that belonged to the world itself.
As the gangway swung up and the quay fell away, the city's silhouette shrank beneath them, and the Imperial Spire rose like a staggered crown on the horizon.
Aurelia felt the same small, hollow uncertainty from the weeks past, but above it something steadied, resolve, perhaps, or the dull bright edge of purpose. We go to learn. We go to see what else the world can teach us.
They came down through a bank of cloud like a ship cutting through silk.
The Imperial Spire filled the horizon as the airship tethered, its tiers of glass and brass wound into a column, feathered with terraces, and its gears turned as if they remembered an old ritual.
Steam hissed from the valves, and chains of cogs clicked in a steady, ornate march.
Lanterns burned with pressurized oil, bridges spat polite puffs of vapor as clockwork sentries swept the promenades.
It was a kingdom dressed in brass and invention, and proud, orderly, and brazen about it.
Aurelia watched from the railing with Lysandra at one elbow and Kael at the other.
The city smelled of hot iron, citrus oil, and the sugary smoke of street vendors' confections.
Where the Academy's Aether felt like an ocean of breathing light, the Spire's currents were channelled into machine-tempered veins: compressed, patterned, confident.
At the port, they were met by an official party in leather and lacquer: the Spire's etiquette was its own craft, salutations precise, clothing tailored to accommodate tool-belts and goggles, hands callused from turning nuts and calibrating glyphs.
Their guide stepped forward with a grin that had the warmth of someone showing off their favored invention.
"Welcome to the Spire," Instructor Dareth Ilyon said, voice bright as bell-metal.
He wore a vest embroidered with tiny gear motifs and a lanyard of brass keys. "You picked us well. If you enjoy craft, you'll feel at home." He offered a palm, his manner was frank and genuinely pleased, not the measured politeness of a court but the proud courtesy of a master artisan.
They filed into the Machina Workshop, a cathedral of pistons and glass.
Here, the Spire taught how to bind Aether into architecture: conduits like crystalline ribs, core-vessels nested in brass cages, rune-circuits hammered in with hammers tuned to frequency.
Artisans in leather aprons tuned pressure valves, apprentices with soot on their cheeks etched micro-glyphs into crystal cores that sat on pedestals like sleeping beetles. Every surface bore the fingerprints of making.
A demonstration began. A senior student, sleeves rolled up, goggles pushed to his forehead, set a conduit within a gilded frame.
He threaded a necklace of micro-runes and sang a low, mechanical cadence.
The conduit drank the air. Light travelled through the crystal in clean bands, gold unspooling into measured pulses that powered a small automaton to graceful motion.
Around the workshop, engineers applauded the efficiency, the Spire prized refinement and repeatability as much as any spell.
Kael's breath caught with obvious delight. He leaned toward Aurelia and mouthed, "Imagine compressing Aether like that, spellcartridges, runic batteries." His hands were already sketching invisible diagrams in the air.
Aurelia felt the workshop's hum with the same attention she used on opposite chords of magic.
Her Aether, a soft, silvery thread, skated along the edge of the machine's pulse.
For a single, delicate beat, the gold band in the conduit thinned at one angle, taking on the faint milky hue of her touch.
A technician glanced up and, smiling, made a tiny adjustment; nothing alarmed, nothing out of place.
In the Spire, the marriage of gear and current was expected. Interaction like that was a compliment.
Here the world is taught to obey, she thought, not with dread so much as fascination. They bottle the current and make it worthwhile. It's beautiful in its own narrow way.
They moved down aisles of clockwork familiars, brass birds that wound their heads like pocket watches, mechanical hounds that folded compact as accordions. And to an exhibit of engines: piston hearts that could be threaded with runic seals to steady a city's Aether flow.
The students demonstrated how the Spire made the air itself an instrument, how their engines cultivated Aether into tools that never whimpered.
It was a culture that revered order and the tidy triumph of craft.
The contrast felt cultural more than adversarial. Where Arcane students treated currents like music, improvisatory and alive, the Spire turned those currents into symphonies that could be scored, notated, and replicated.
The difference was not wrong; it was simply a matter of temperament and priority.
Students here took pride in machines that never sang out of tune.
Dareth lingered by the exit with the effortless amiability of a host. "The Spire does not fear magic," he said, clapping his hands. "We channel it. We refine it. If anything here seems unusual, please let us know. We're builders, we like a puzzle."
The Spire unspooled itself before them: a living manifesto of brass and steam and careful, clever art.
They were visitors in a place that prized certainty, and the city returned their admiration with open shows of craft and hospitality.
The welcome ceremony unwound like a well-oiled contraption: brass sunlight, clipped fanfares, and the polite angles of the Spire's elite.
Eyes followed Lucien first, because he carried the look of a court, all ease and engineered charm, and then drifted to the rest of the Arcane delegation, cataloguing them, the scholar in the shadow of his slate, the fire-eyed swordsman, the two laughing girls who'd just won a war and tried to act like children now.
They see the victory first, then they measure the threat, Aurelia thought, smiling with the ease of someone used to being watched.
A woman with copper braids and precise speech stepped forward to offer the thin welcome, almost a question. "We trust the Convergence yielded illuminating results, your faculty performed admirably."
The compliment was thinly plated, beneath it glinted the steel of a question.
How did your school, devoted to the old currents, manage to outpace the Spire's engines?
Lucien smoothed the moment with charm. "Progress is a conversation, not a contest," he replied, and the crowd applauded the line while the implication lingered.
Seris moved among the officials like a careful instrument, pleasant and measured.
She leaned close to the students and murmured, "Keep your guard soft. Watch tone and posture more than words."
Her words rested for a heartbeat on Aurelia's shoulder, mentor's steadiness.
The tipping point came when a junior minister suggested a public demonstration, a friendly exhibition of technique to soothe citizens' worries.
Aurelia narrowed her eyes. A demonstration could be a spectacle, and a spectacle could be shaped into an accusation.
Lucien smiled and accepted before Aurelia could answer, charm made practical. "A demonstration is civic," he agreed. "We shall oblige."
Around her, not a few Spire students brightened. For them, it was a chance to showcase their engineering to the world, to prove to Arcane that their reign of gears still had teeth.
The formalities broke into smaller clusters. While courtiers plotted and professors traded veiled questions, Professor Marlec, calm, diplomatic in Veyron's stead for the exchange, cleared his throat and steered the students toward something less theatrical and more useful.
"Collaborative projects," he announced to both academies, "an exchange of methods. Learn each other's strengths. Build something that proves cooperation is stronger than suspicion."
Better to make friends with gears than enemies with tongues, Aurelia thought, and followed the arc of students into the Spire's workshop halls, rooms of copper and glass where steam hissed like a steady heartbeat.
Veyron's pupils joined the Spire's classes for the afternoon. Their assignment: merge an elemental spell with a mechanical framework, Aether Engineering, Spire-style.
Aurelia and Kael were partnered with Ardent Caleus, a local inventor whose gloves were permanently stained with ink and soot.
He wound copper around a crystal filament like a man braiding rope. "You Arcane folk treat Aether like a song," he said, bright and blunt. "We treat it like a pattern. Repeatable, measurable, dependable. No improvisation, just precision."
Aurelia tilted her head, "And if the pattern fails?" she asked silently.
"Then you recalibrate the equation," Ardent replied, smiling. "Magic shouldn't rely on luck."
Their project was simple on paper, a levitating lamp powered by steam and a measured wind flow.
Ardent sketched tolerances, Kael worked the pressure valves with that quiet, sensible efficiency he wore like a second skin.
Aurelia followed the wiring, set the runes to sing in the machine's key, and then something small and unintended happened.
Her silver Aether braided itself through the lamp's circuitry in filaments finer than the copper windings.
The light did not simply float, it pulsed like a heartbeat, pale as moonlight rather than the warm gold the Spire favored.
Ardent's hands stilled. He peered at the glow with pure, unguarded wonder. "That's… not steamlight."
"It's mine," Aurelia admitted softly. "I didn't mean to—"
"No, it's beautiful," he said, and for once the word carried no thinly plated meaning, only awe. "You didn't power the lamp. You synchronized it. That's not resonance, that's harmony."
Across the room, Professor Dareth watched, lips a thin line. He made a note on his tablet, no immediate suspicion, only curiosity. Harmony, he wrote, then underlined it once, like a question he would answer later.
Aurelia watched the lamp's pale pulse and felt something slight shift inside her, not a revelation, but a promise. If they want proof, we will give it to them, on our terms.
The days that followed fell into a rhythm, strange and metallic yet compelling.
Steam hissed through brass veins overhead; gears turned where trees might have grown in Elyndra.
The Imperial Spire's capital was a city built upward rather than outward, each tier a new layer of invention.
Sky-trams hummed along glass rails; clockwork birds carried messages across copper domes.
At night, when the air cooled, the streets shimmered with phosphor mist, industrial starlight caught between engines and enchantments.
Lysandra pressed her face to every window they passed. "It's like the future decided to settle down and build itself," she said.
Kael's eyes followed the pipes that disappeared beneath the street. "It's like the Aether got disciplined," he murmured, half-admiring, half-wary.
Aurelia could feel that difference everywhere. The Aether currents here were sharper, threaded through conduits and mechanisms rather than left to wander freely.
When she drew upon them, they answered, but only after a pause, as if asking for credentials first.
Her own silver-tinted Aether shimmered faintly against the city's structured pulse, like moonlight rippling over iron.
The Spire students, though polite, made no secret of their curiosity. "Raw Aether manipulation?" one of them whispered during a lecture. "Without a regulator crystal?"
"It's how we learn control," Aurelia said, smiling as though it were obvious.
The boy blinked, impressed and faintly horrified. "That's dangerous."
Marlec had taken to lecturing in the evenings, turning their shared dormitory hall into an improvised classroom. "Remember," he said, drawing sigils into the air with practiced precision, "the Spire treats Aether as a resource to be governed. We treat it as an ally. Respect both approaches, but let neither rewrite your foundation."
Aurelia listened, though her thoughts wandered. The lamp's pale pulse lingered in her mind, the way Ardent had said harmony instead of power.
She'd seen that same look of wonder in his eyes again, every time they worked together.
He began asking questions not from textbooks, but out of curiosity. "Do you ever think Aether feels?" he'd asked once.
"Feels?" she echoed.
He nodded, turning a small pressure gauge between his fingers. "Like, when you cast, it reacts differently to each person. We assume that's about control or focus, but what if it's… awareness?"
Aurelia almost laughed at first, but then she remembered the way her Aether had begun to shimmer differently after her Aspect awakened. The way it responded was more than obedient.
Maybe it wasn't awareness. But it was something.
That night, she stood on the balcony of the Spire's dormitory tower, looking out across the labyrinth of brass and light.
Steam rose like breath from the city's veins. In the distance, the Imperial Palace gleamed, a colossal structure of white stone, girded by gold pipelines, where, rumor had it, even the throne hummed with machinery.
Lysandra joined her, barefoot, half-asleep. "Can't rest either?"
"No," Aurelia murmured. "It feels like the city's awake even when we're not."
Lysandra grinned. "Then maybe it dreams for us."
Aurelia smiled faintly, though her gaze lingered on the skyline. "Maybe."
Somewhere below, a clock tower struck midnight. The chime rippled through the metal bones of the city, blending with the quiet hum of machinery.
For a heartbeat, the sound and her pulse aligned, perfectly synchronized, like that lamp of silver light.
And for the first time since arriving, Aurelia felt the Spire's rhythm answering her own.