The hall smelled of sweat and iron, benches carved with sigils, a low murmur of students who'd come for demonstration more than instruction.
Today's exercise was intended to be orderly, involving the exchange of techniques and learning through observation. It was set up as a spar between the two kingdoms when discipline nearly held.
A hand shot up before the professors could call names.
A student from the Spire stepped forward, shoulders stiff with challenge. "I request a personal duel with Aurelia Caelistra." He spoke loud enough that the buzz in the room fell into a notch of interest.
Aurelia recoiled, but her face remained expressionless. I don't want to duel. "Who are you?"
The student flushed, anger and nerves colliding in his jaw. He opened his mouth, stopped, then forced the name: "Tavian Rourke."
Aurelia's blankness intensified, she had no immediate picture of him, and that stung, evoking something like anger in his eyes.
Tavian's temper flared at the cold reception, but he swallowed it down, voice sharper now. "I faced you in the 2v2 trial of the tournament."
Recognition snapped into place for her then, the revolver, the cylinder's smooth click, the way the bullet sigils had sung.
"You disarmed me last time because my runes were… unfinished," Tavian said, edge showing. "Not this time. They've improved. You can't just take my gun and call it done."
Aurelia breathed out, a slight, tired sound. She let herself sigh rather than say no. "Very well," she answered, voice steady enough to carry. "We duel."
"All right," she said. Lucien chose that instant to slap her on the back. "Show them, Caelistra."
The shove sent a flare of annoyance through her. "You did that last time!" she snapped
Kael fell into position near her, a quiet promise in his glance. "Don't lose," he murmured. Lysandra leaned forward, bright and encouraging.
Arthur stood with sword half-drawn, expression neutral and expectant. "Show them the potential of swordsmanship," he said.
Aurelia drew her sword. Black metal met moonlight in a private, mindful ritual.
She threaded Aether along her wrists, felt it hum under her skin, and let the harmonics answer.
The black edge sighed and took on a cold, lunar sheen, soft silver-blue like moonlight frozen in steel.
Gasps rippled through the ring, some faces were startled, some openly reverent.
She held the blade at her hip and met Tavian's eyes. She did not smile. She did not look away.
"We begin when the professors call the start," she said. Her voice carried like a promise that did not need to be loud.
Around them, the academy held its breath, curious, cautious, and suddenly sure that this duel would teach more than technique.
A bell rang, low, ceremonial, and the professors counted down.
"Three… two… one—begin."
Tavian's eyes narrowed. He drew his revolver in a single, practised motion, the runes along the barrel flared blue, then red, then a sequence of colors that tasted of weather and flame. He fired.
Aurelia didn't lunge. She watched the bullet like a small star, traced its arc, then let her blade meet it.
Where the projectile struck, the steel did not merely block, it answered. The round screamed against the edge and spun harmlessly into the dirt, the air around it hissing as the incendiary charge failed to find purchase.
Oppose with the opposite element, she thought automatically, then felt the problem. No...not this time.
Tavian's runes changed between shots, he had learned to vary charge and timing.
If I chased an opposite for every strike, I'd be forced into a reactive dance until he reloaded.
As she deflected a bullet, her gaze was drawn to the leather pouch he wore at his hip.
I could do the easy thing, slice the pouch, spill his cartridges, end it before the second breath.
She pictured the neat arc of leather and brass hitting the marble and the fight unspooling into a simple lesson.
It would be clean. It would be quick. But deep down, I know it would leave me unsatisfied.
The image from the spire, Lucifer's bloodied sword, the Spire's ruin, still ached behind my eyes like a fever.
Aurelia wanted a distraction, something to burn the aftertaste of that vision out of her chest.
So she didn't cut.
To everyone else, she looked odd, placid, almost sleep-drunk. Students leaned forward, puzzled, and a few professors exchanged irritated glances.
Lucien's voice cut across the room like a blade. "Focus, Aurelia!" he snapped.
Tavian's face folded into a mask of insulted pride. "Dozing in the middle of a duel?" he sneered, thumb brushing the cylinder with the practiced flourish of a man who'd spent too many evenings polishing tricks. "Don't underestimate me."
The first was a tongue of flame that screamed toward her.
Aurelia met it with a breath of raw Aether, no crafted element, just the world's current shaped into a resisting wall.
The fire struck the pulse of it and folded away, its heat swallowed by the neutralized current.
The second came as a razor gust, a blade of wind meant to cut the sinews of balance.
She let the raw Aether ripple at the edge of her blade, the wind met a pressure that refused to yield and wavered into harmlessness.
Third, a pellet cloud that exploded into choking shale and grit, earth-imbued shrapnel.
Aurelia struck the ground with a faint twine of Aether, and the dust fell upward around the projectile, a brief reverse gravity that robbed the shard-spray of momentum. The fragments clattered into the yard without bite.
Fourth, lightning leapt, bright and spidered, fast, hungry. The current she held fragmented the bolt into harmless filigree, trailing the energy into the blade's fuller where it hissed and died.
Fifth, frost, glass-slick cold meant to lock joints and slow breathing, arrived in a silver bead. Aurelia's blade hummed, sending a warm counterwave of Aether that vaporized the bead into a mist before it could cloak her boots.
The sixth was acid, a bright, corrosive, bright-green smear meant to strip metal and flesh alike. For that, she didn't bother with ornament. She met it with the same raw current and pushed: the acid vapour dispersed, a hiss and a scent of scorched alloys.
From the stands, it looked almost impossible. To them, Aurelia's body moved with a prescience that split time, anticipation made visible.
Teachers whispered, and a few students breathed as if watching a familiar actor perform a trick.
Kael and Lysandra, close enough to see the tiny signs, exchanged a quick, private look.
"She's reading him," Kael said, "Not seeing the future, but listening to his past."
Lysandra's nod was a fierce, bright thing, "Echoes, like she does in practice."
Aurelia felt each impact as a note slipped between the strings of the world, instead of answering with another element she replied with the bedrock of Aether itself, neutral and patient.
And as the volley ended, a small calculation ticked through her head: six cartridges, a click of the cylinder, the practiced reach to the pouch.
Reload time, six seconds if he's fast, seven if he isn't.
Tavian's fingers moved toward the cylinder, his eyes flared with focus. Reload now, and the memory-echo of him, the way he shifted his hip, the slight flinch from the left shoulder when he aimed, rose like a map.
She could see the cadence of his reloading in a dozen past duels, a quick twist, a single swallow of motion, a tuck of the elbow.
The yard held its breath. Tavian snapped the cylinder out, thumb quick, then paused, heart beating a fraction faster than the rhythm of a man who'd expected to be rushed.
He reloads the same way every time, she thought, the knowledge arriving not as a flash but as a slow, clear film of other duels.
Tavian's elbow curved out when he drew the cylinder, and his right foot slid back an inch to brace. His left hand habitually dipped to his pouch a fraction of a second before his thumb pressed the cartridge home.
Aurelia didn't have the years of practice with this yet. She hadn't learned to hold both the memory and the improvisation without bleeding from the effort.
So I lean on what I do have: wits, breath, the small arithmetic of timing. I read a shoulder, a breath, a footfall, then I let muscle and instinct do the rest.
He could defeat my vision if he thought to strip the habits I read. Change the hand, change the breath, practice a different reload, any of those would turn my map into blank parchment.
But he hasn't realized it yet. He's still polishing tricks that look like tradition to me. His tells are still there, foot, elbow, pouch, breath, and they are enough.
If he figures it out, I'll have to stop reading his past and start reading his choices in real time.
She danced through the storm of cartridges. Sword, harmonized Aether, echoes of Tavian's past. Three tasks, one mind.
For a breath, she felt like she was doing well, like the moonlight settled in the blade and every action followed without delay.
Then her thoughts sharpened into a knife-edge, overwhelming her with an influx of information she couldn't process all at once.
Aurelia's eyes stung, chilled and burning simultaneously. Too much…into…the past, she realized in a panic that came too late.
The world blurred as the last echo she'd reached for expanded, crashing into her nervous system like an overloaded circuit.
A thin ribbon of red slid from the corner of each eye.
The bullet she'd been tracking, one Tavian had fired in the microsecond when his hand moved to a spare cartridge, finished its arc.
It struck her in the lower stomach with a sound like a bell in cloth. Air left her in a hiss. Warm spread under her ribs.
The yard gasped. Professors swore. Tavian's hands froze on the cylinder, shock draining color from his face, even he didn't expect that to land.
Aurelia heard none of it at first. She tasted copper and thought of tempo. She blinked, palms damp, and then found she could stand.
She smiled, ridiculous and shaky, and straightened as if she'd only learned a new step. "That didn't feel very good," she told them, voice steady enough to carry.
Aurelia dragged a trembling hand to her stomach, found the warm, contorting metal of the bullet, and, to a gasp from the ring of students, hauled it free. Blood ran between her fingers and pooled on the ground.
She did the thing no one expected: she drew Aura.
It flared from her like an internal sun, warm, tight, a living compress. Fingers that had steadied swords now pulled at the wound.
Aura is not Aether, it is self, body, will.
She braided it into quick, hot stitches and felt the wound shift under her touch.
Around her, professors shouted that blending Aura and Aether was deadly, outward forces clashing, tearing at the core of a caster. Seris's voice cracked something sharp about feedback and burnout.
But there was another voice, sharp and analytical, from the edge of the yard, "Echocraft," Marlec barked, "She's letting ambient Aether echo into the blade, she isn't forcing the flow through her body. Her Aura can act without immediate opposition."
Aurelia felt the wound close like a curtain pulled in, warm smoke rising where her hands moved.
The stitch held. Her breath returned, ragged but working. She blinked blood from her lashes.
Tavian fumbled with the cylinder. He started reloading, shaking with each hand.
Aurelia's decision snapped into place like the final click of a well-set trap. No rest yet. She let the Aura that had sealed her wound harden into kinetic force, muscle, and will braided into movement. She launched.
Speed came like a bright rope, Aura augmented her limbs, every pivot and drive sharpened.
Tavian's reload was clumsy in the face of that surge. He had to clear a spent shell, free his pouch, and jam cartridges in. Aurelia closed the gap between them in three measured strides.
He fired a desperate round, water this time, meant to shove her off balance. She met it on instinct, not on memory.
Reflex took over, with her body and Aura in command. The water-slick round struck the flat of her blade, and she deflected it, meeting its momentum with sheer, precise force, the blade ringing under the impact.
Her left hand shot forward and closed around the revolver's frame in the same motion.
For an instant, the world hung in contact, his fingers cramped on the cylinder, her palm on the cold metal.
Recoil tried to pry them apart. She felt the tiny give of his muscles, the panic, the tremor of his will.
Leverage, she thought. Take the pivot.
Aurelia channeled every ounce of Aura into that grip point, not to burn, but to focus strength like a wedge pressing into brittle iron.
The revolver's cylinder groaned under the strain, and with a sharp crack, it fractured at her thumb, splintering into pieces. Sparks flew, and the acrid smell of gunpowder filled the air. Tavian cursed, his face in disbelief.
The gun jerked free in her grip, useless and ruined. She rotated the barrel until it pointed away, then let the sword's tip find the soft line at Tavian's throat.
Silence folded in, heavy and immediate. The students whooped, some applauded, while others stared in stunned silence. Professors' voices surged, whistles about audacity, exclamations about how she'd used Aura and Aether together.
Aurelia turned toward Tavian, still brushing a faint smear of dried red from beneath her eye. Her expression was as casual as if they'd merely exchanged study notes.
"You can send the bill to House Caelistra," she said lightly, nodding toward the crushed scrap of what used to be his revolver.
Tavian's jaw clenched so hard the muscle twitched. For a heartbeat, he looked ready to snap back at her in front of the entire arena, but he swallowed the words.
"I don't need your support," he ground out. "I can pay for the repairs myself."
She raised a brow, amused.
"It wasn't support. It was courtesy."
That only made it worse, his ears went red with irritation. But he managed a stiff nod, holstering what remained of the fight's dignity, and turned away with a sharp pivot of his boot.
Lucien, who'd been hovering at the edge of the circle, stepped forward with a handkerchief pressed between two fingers.
He held it out with an old-fashioned, unnecessary courtesy. "Here," he said. "For theatrics and stains."
Aurelia accepted it, tapping the fabric to her palm and then smiling. "You're quite the gentleman," she replied, voice wry.
Kael elbowed through the lingering gatherers, eyes sharp. "What happened? You went pale for a second."
Aurelia folded her fingers around the handkerchief and breathed slowly, the motion steadying the tremor in her voice. "I overloaded," she said plainly. "I was juggling swordplay, Aether, trying to read Tavian's past and predict his moves, and it all spiked at once. My head couldn't keep up." A glance at Lucien, then Kael. "I shouldn't have leaned on that… precognition while I was doing everything else. It's a tool, not a shortcut. It's brutal on the mind when you force it."
Lysandra pushed in next, no hesitation, no patience, her glare sharp enough to cut through the leftover smoke.
"What were you thinking?" she hissed, grabbing Aurelia's shoulders, eyes scanning her face as if expecting cracks. "You overworked yourself! Does it hurt?"
Aurelia blinked. "…Which part? My brain overloading, or the bullet in my chest?"
"Both, idiot!" Lysandra snapped, cheeks flushed with worry.
Aurelia raised both hands defensively. "It didn't hurt too badly—"
Lysandra immediately clamped a hand over Aurelia's mouth, eyes narrowed to slits. "Are. You. Lying?"
Aurelia's eyes curved into a smile above Lysandra's fingers.
When she peeled Lysandra's hand gently away, she said, "I'm not lying. I healed it with Aura?"
"That doesn't erase the pain," Lysandra shot back, voice wobbling despite the anger.
"It only stung a bit," Aurelia reassured, then let a proud smirk form. "And the satisfaction of crushing his revolver with my bare hands absolutely made up for it."
Lysandra groaned into her palms. "You are impossible."
But Aurelia's fingers tightened slightly around the handkerchief Lucien had given her.
Distraction, she told herself. Punishment.
A reminder of the vision that still burned behind her eyes, the Spire in flames, the figure at its center, wearing her face.
If I can bleed here and feel the pain, then maybe I can forget the one I saw burning everything down.
If only for a little while.
Arthur stepped close with a soft sigh, already rolling up his sleeves.
"You're experienced with Aura," he said, leveling a look at her, "but not skillful with it yet."
Before Aurelia could argue, his hands ignited with a controlled, simmering red Aura. It was precise, not the volatile flare hers had produced, but a sculptor's chisel of light. He pressed his palm gently against the bullet wound.
A hot pulse.
A breath of iron and smoke.
Tissue knitting back together as if time had reversed itself.
In seconds, the wound sealed perfectly, skin smooth, no blood, no scar.
Only a faint wisp of smoke curled up into the air between them.
Aurelia blinked, impressed despite herself.
"…Thanks," she murmured, testing the spot, unbroken.
Arthur only shook his head.
"You're reckless," he muttered, "Shouldn't the match have stopped when you were shot?" He frowned, anyone could have argued the same.
Aurelia let out a short laugh. "I had time," she said simply. "He was still reloading. I could feel the cadence, how long it took him to find a fresh cartridge, the twitch in his shoulder when he flicks the cylinder closed. I knew the margin was mine."
Lysandra's face went white, then red. "A bullet to the head, Aurelia? What if—"
"—It's a spar," Aurelia cut in before Lysandra could spiral. "Not the end. I wasn't trying to die today."
Kael leaned in, voice quieter than the crowd. "But if it had been a real fight? If it mattered?"
Aurelia's fingers found the rim of Lucien's handkerchief again, twisting it absentmindedly. "I could've cut his pouch," she said, shrugging. "Made it a different fight. I didn't because—" She looked at each of them, slow and steady. "—I wanted to test the limits. See how my precognition holds under pressure. It taxed me, yes. I misread the overload. Lesson learned."
Lucien's face gave nothing away, then, deadpan, he said, "Seems the experiment backfired."
The words hit a wire inside her. Aurelia's mouth tightened. Patronizing and useless. Of course, he'd say that. She opened to answer hotly, but Lysandra interrupted first, fists on her hips.
"You could've cut off his ammo and ended it swiftly and cleanly. You chose to play with your head instead, are you insane?" Her voice trembled with anger, with fear for what could've happened.
Aurelia scratched at the back of her neck, an embarrassed half-grin breaking through. "It would have been too easy," she said, more defensively than she intended. "Besides, if I can withstand this, then perhaps I can endure whatever comes next. Maybe that's worth a bloody belly for a lesson."