Marlec set a slim folder on the lectern and pushed it toward Aurelia.
The paper inside rustled with neat columns: names, birthplaces, notations on favored edicts, a smattering of tutors' remarks, and oddities the recruits thought flattering. Aurelia skimmed it, eyes lifting at the length.
"How many are we looking at?" she asked.
"There are about three hundred registered," Marlec said, his tone flat and steady. "We will not accept this number. With proper screening, we'll reduce it to roughly two hundred or one hundred fifty by the end of the day."
Seris whooped softly from beside him. "One hundred last year." She said, bright as a struck bell. "So you can see, this is a very different appetite. The Spire has curious consequences."
Aurelia let her fingers hover over the crisp columns, feeling the faint pressure of names and lives beneath her skin, like a pulse.
Three hundred...
The number repeated in her head until it had weight.
Could I read that many echoes in a day without the lines between them blurring?
Could I hold so many pasts and not lose myself in the weight of them?
Marlec noticed her displeasure. "You don't have to read the entire dossier," he said. "Just take notes on the important points, or you can skip reading it altogether. Pay attention to the tutors instead. People reveal their true selves better through their actions than through their writing."
Seris bumped her shoulder with conspiratorial cheer. "And anyway," she added, "nothing beats seeing the hands at work. The paper is polite. The person is loud."
Veyron inclined his head. "Observe," he said. "Remembrance will do the rest. Let your eyes find what matters."
Aurelia tucked the folder beneath her arm like a small responsibility and forced her shoulders to lift.
At that moment, the intake door at the far end of the hall opened with a soft, ceremonial creak.
A line of candidates filed through, some tentative, some square-shouldered, many with the wide, stunned look of people who had traveled for hours and felt the world's center shift beneath them.
They spread across the floor in a scatter of hope and fear.
The hall, which had been a platform for proud returns, softened and focused into the small, electric moment of beginning.
Veyron stepped forward, robes settling into the hush, and let his voice carry across the hall.
"Welcome, aspirants. You have come here despite what our academy has recently endured. That you stand before these gates now is no small thing. It is a choice.
"I will not pretend the Academy is untouched by tragedy. We have paid a price, we still bear the aftershocks. And yet you have chosen to learn an art that shapes kingdoms, that binds communities, and that can keep ruin at bay. For that choice, whatever your reason, power, love, curiosity, or the desire to build a different life, we are honored to teach you.
"Here, your fate will begin to be written. You will be assessed not by birth or bravado but by your ability, your ingenuity, and your mastery of craft. Three trials await you. Succeed, and you will be bound to Aramont as full students of the Arcane Academy. Fail, and you will be deemed unready for what this place requires.
"Do your best. Be honest in your hands and clear in your heads. We will begin shortly."
Stone floors slid, panels whispered, and the far end of the hall peeled open to reveal a long, irregular course laid out with ramps, narrow ledges, wobbling platforms, slick troughs, and sigils that pulsed faintly when someone stepped near them.
Lanterns swung to new brackets so that light caught the obstacles at angles that hid footing and shimmered on the runes.
Professor Marlec stepped forward and set a shallow chest on the lectern. It creaked open on a small, silvered hinge, and the scent of old wood rose out.
"Trial One," he announced. The word landed like a bell. "The Burden."
Paper parcels, each stamped with the Academy seal, floated into the hands of the aspirants by a minor, polite conjuration.
When the students peeled them open, a scatter of fragile objects revealed themselves: a glass orb, a carved wooden statuette, a coiled brass sphere with a delicate crystalline key, a length of embroidered tapestry compacted into a wooden roll, a small iron cube with a shimmering, unstable seam.
Each burden looked, in the same breath, precious and absurdly inconvenient.
Professor Selvara of the Scholar Path's Division clapped her hands together, "Each of you will carry one 'burden' across the course," she called, her eyes scanning the group. "I created these burdens myself. Some are heavy. Some are fragile. Some will unsettle you. Keep it intact. Break it, and you fail the first trial."
A ripple of nervous laughter ran through the ranks. A young man tried to balance his orb like a child with a toy, and a woman hugged her rolled tapestry to her chest as if it were a sleeping thing.
Veyron's voice took the platform and, as always, gathered attention without need for flourish. "You may use any means you possess. Aether shaping, Aura bracing, barter with another candidate, so long as the "burden" arrives at the finish whole," he said. "Deliberately discarding, smashing, or otherwise destroying your burden will be considered a failure. The burden is not merely an object, it is a test of judgment, restraint, and resourcefulness."
He paced a slight arc, letting the words settle. "Do not assume raw force will serve you. Some burdens will punish brutality, others will neutralize clumsy enchantments. The runes embedded in the course will respond to Aetheric spikes and to certain patterns of aura, be mindful."
Marlec added, voice even, "We will judge not only whether you succeed, but how you choose to succeed. The method matters."
A young candidate in the front row, callused hands, a mend in his sleeve, tested the weight of his burden and said under his breath, "This feels like carrying a life."
Seris beamed. "Exactly!"
Selvara stepped forward then, her presence quieting the room without effort. She regarded the gathered aspirants with a look that was neither kind nor cruel, but keen, measuring.
"We do not call them burdens because they are fragile," she said evenly. "Nor because they are heavy, awkward, or difficult to protect."
She paced once before the line of students, boots clicking softly against the stone. "They are called burdens because they mirror the weight you already carry."
A hush settled, the kind that pressed against the ears.
"Regret. Expectation. Guilt. Duty. Fear. Love." Selvara's gaze swept across them. "The things that shape how you move through the world. The things that slow you, or drive you, or break you if you are careless."
She stopped and raised one hand.
"These relics have already had time to linger in your presence," she said. Snap.
The sound cracked through the hall like a switch being thrown.
"You may notice a change."
Aurelia felt it even from the platform, the sudden, subtle wrongness in the air. Some students stiffened. One staggered as if the floor had tilted. Another blinked rapidly, clutching their burden closer to their chest.
Her eyes sharpened. "What they represent has formed."
For one student, the relic seemed to drag at their arm, muscles trembling as if they'd been carrying it for hours. For another, their breath came shallow, chest tight, eyes unfocused. A third stared at their burden as though it were accusing them of something only they could hear.
"They will affect you," Selvara said. "Mentally. Physically. Spiritually. Not all at once. Not in the same way. Life is rarely so considerate."
She folded her hands behind her back. "Protect it. Transport it. Endure it."
A thin smile touched her mouth. "Just as you already do."
What had been neutral objects shifted, not in size, but in truth. Edges dulled or sharpened. Surfaces altered. Weight redistributed with a wrongness that tugged at the eye.
Aurelia inhaled sharply.
A smooth brass cylinder in a student's hands darkened, its surface clouding as if tarnished. Hairline cracks appeared along its length, like stress fractures in stone. The student staggered, not due to weight, but because it pulled him into a familiar posture, shoulders forward, head bowed.
A small wooden box, warped at the corners, rattled faintly in the girl's grip, something inside knocking insistently. She froze, eyes wide, as if afraid that opening it, even by accident, would mean she couldn't close it again.
A length of chain, previously neat and coiled, slackened in a boy's grip and then dragged, its links stretching just enough to scrape stone. Not longer. Just… unwilling to stay gathered.
Seris leaned forward, eyes alight. "Oh," she murmured. "That's cruel."
A stone tablet in another student's arms grew etched with shallow grooves, like tally marks cut by an unsteady hand. Each step forward drew another faint line. The student noticed. So did everyone else.
Aurelia felt a chill crawl up her spine.
She watched a relic shaped as a simple iron ring deform slightly, no longer circular, but subtly bent, as if it had been forced into a shape it never quite fit. The student holding it kept adjusting his grip, trying to make it sit right. It never did.
Around them, the hall had gone quiet.
This was no longer subtle. No longer private.
The burdens were visible now, bridges that could not be crossed without remembering the last fall, doors that would not stay shut, weights that demanded familiar postures of endurance.
Her eyes swept the course, assessing the way students adapted, or failed to.
Aurelia swallowed.
She could see it now. Everyone could.
These were not metaphors.
They were pieces of life made solid, and they would have to be carried, intact, across moving ground.
Veyron gave the signal.
Nothing happened.
Not a single candidate stepped forward.
No surge of motion, no rush of ambition. Two hundred students stood frozen at the threshold as if the floor itself had turned to glass.
The obstacle course waited, platforms shifting, sigils pulsing faintly, but the first barrier was not the stone or the gaps between it.
It was the weight in their arms.
One student tried to lift a foot and failed, not because the ground resisted, but because their body hesitated, muscles remembering a thousand moments of stopping short.
Another swayed, eyes unfocused, as if staring at something only they could see, layered over the course ahead.
A third let out a sharp breath and nearly dropped their relic before clutching it back to their chest, knuckles white.
Aurelia's chest tightened.
This felt uncomfortably close to her own Aspect.
Remembrance let her touch the past, trace echoes, feel the residue of what had been.
It asked gently. It observed. It witnessed.
This trial took something similar and made it present, unavoidable, and embodied.
Where her Aspect charmed, this imposed.
Where she listened, this demanded.
It was… crueler.
A student near the middle of the course finally moved, one step at a time. The relic in her hands remained light, but her breathing grew shallow, as if she were climbing a familiar hill.
Another student followed, jaw set and shoulders squared as if bracing against an unseen wind. Movement spread in hesitant, stubborn ripples.
Veyron watched in silence, his expression unreadable. Aurelia did not look away.
The test hadn't begun when Veyron spoke. It truly began the moment someone chose to move while carrying what they could not set down.
And whoever passed this trial would not be those who moved fastest or shone the brightest. It would be those who knew how to keep going.
A single step broke the paralysis.
A girl near the middle of the crowd lurched forward, not with confidence, but with stubborn resolve. Her breath came tight, shoulders hunched as if she were bracing against an unseen current. Each movement looked earned.
Thin iron bands clasped her wrists and ankles, dull and worn, their surfaces scoured by countless imagined impacts.
Every step dragged. Every jump demanded effort that pulled a tremor through her legs.
She stumbled on a shifting platform, caught herself, then pushed on anyway.
Murmurs rippled through the observing gallery.
The girl reached the next platform, breath shaking, sweat darkening her collar. She paused, only a heartbeat, then lifted her head and kept going.
Professor Leonhard of the Martial Path exhaled slowly. "She's not fast."
"No," Selvara agreed. A thin, approving smile touched her lips. "But she's moving."
Aurelia let her Aspect unfurl, light and probing, not to touch but to observe, and slipped into the student's past.
A young noble whose presence at the Academy had already sparked whispers.
At first, the images aligned with the gossip: early promise, instructor affirmations, and a reputation for natural talent.
But as Aurelia delved deeper, the narrative shifted. The "talent" others praised was merely a facade.
She had no natural talent, she simply worked harder than anyone else. She woke before dawn, trained until her hands bled, and refused the comforts her status could have afforded.
Where others saw grace, Aurelia recognized relentless practice, a log of hours, and stubborn corrections.
The cuffs made sense.
They were the weight she had learned to carry, the discipline she had bound to herself long ago, and the constant pressure she accepted as the price for not only keeping up but surpassing her peers. What had once been invisible now had iron and form.
Aurelia drew back, breath soft.
Of course, she thought. She's been wearing them all along.
The next candidate stepped forward, a young man with flour dusting his hair and hands. In one careful motion, he balanced a stack of impossibly tall bread loaves, pastries nestled between them like fragile jewels. Each step made the tower wobble precariously, threatening to topple under its own weight.
Aurelia watched, brow raised, as he muttered under his breath and used Aether subtly: a puff of cold air to firm a soft tart, a nudge of gravity to steady a leaning loaf.
The crowd murmured in surprise and admiration, noting how he moved with both precision and creativity.
The burden wasn't just heavy, it was every expectation of legacy, every loaf he was told to carry in the family bakery, now condensed into this precarious, living stack of doughy ambition.
The course kept changing, and the relics kept humming in their carriers' hands, fragile, awkward, insistently present.
Next stepped forward a girl whose gaze seemed to hold the night itself. Constellations danced in her eyes, shifting subtly as if aligning with the world around her.
They were not illusions cast by the course, they were inside her, shifting and re-forming.
In her hand was a delicate globe suspended by an invisible current, filled with shifting, miniature constellations that mirrored the patterns in her gaze.
The globe bobbed and spun around her, responding to every step she took. It seemed almost alive, tugging at her balance subtly, forcing her to anticipate its movements.
Aurelia let her Remembrance sift through the traces the girl left in the air, practice runs, small rituals learned by rote, nights lying awake studying star maps until her shoulder ached.
The echoes were neat and disciplined, the constellations in those eyes were not a whimsical birthright but an answered question asked and answered again.
The image that unrolled for her was of a child tracing stars on a table, of her father tapping runes beside a window and saying, "See how the hunter points to aim?"
Those constellations, if Aurelia's reading was correct, meant more than pretty tricks.
Constellations carried meaning: guidance, aim, shelter, tides. To wield them was to call on that meaning in tidy, practical arcs.
This was no mere manipulation of Aether. Each movement, each adjustment of her relic across the course, corresponded to the constellations she saw, guiding her footfalls, stabilizing her balance, whispering solutions to the obstacles in her path.
Around the platform, the professors had gone still.
Marlec's pen scratched faster than usual. Seris's eyes were wide, the delight of discovery making her fingers twitch. Selvara watched with the solemnity of someone who reads rare things.
"An Aspect," Marlec murmured, more to himself than anyone. The word had weight, it was an index of meaning that the faculty felt rather than announced.
Aurelia straightened, heart a little quicker. She had seen runes and precise Aether, and she had seen power that was raw and bludgeoning, but she had never watched an Aspect unspool its language so plainly in a newcomer.
The implications were immediate and electric, the Academy's year had just become more interesting than anyone had predicted.
The twins stepped forward, each holding their glass pendulum as if it weighed nothing.
They exchanged quick grins, believing this challenge would be easy. Having done everything together their whole lives, transporting a fragile relic across a course couldn't possibly be more difficult.
For a heartbeat, their movements were perfectly synchronized, instinctively mirroring each other the way they always had. A shared rhythm. A shared breath. A shared confidence.
Then a misstep.
A shared glance.
A small laugh.
The pendulums swung too close.
They brushed.
A thin, almost inaudible crack whispered through the air, spiderwebbing across the surface of both pendulums in a delicate, devastating fracture.
Both twins froze.
One of them blinked. "What—what caused that? We barely touched them."
The other lifted his pendulum, frowning. "Did we step on something? A sigil? A trap?"
Then they noticed it.
The pendulums were drifting toward each other again, slowly, insistently, like two magnets drawn together.
Even when the twins held their arms steady, the glass weights tugged inward, straining toward the other.
One twin's eyes widened. "It's… pulling."
The other twin swallowed. "No. They're pulling toward each other."
They both instinctively took a step back.
The pendulums stilled.
The cracks stopped spreading.
A heavy silence settled between them as the truth clicked into place.
One twin whispered, voice trembling, "We can't stay close."
The other nodded, jaw tight. "We have to stay apart. Otherwise…"
They stepped back from each other, the pendulums hanging straight and still once more, fragile again, but now marked, warning them with every faint shimmer of cracked glass.
The lesson was immediate and cruelly clear.
What had always been easy, moving together, was now the very thing that would break them.
The burden demanded caution. And independence.
The twins hesitated before leaping onto separate platforms, eyes flicking toward each other.
Aurelia could feel the pull of past bonds, the invisible thread that had dictated every step they took together.
Now, without the comfort of relying on one another, every movement was uncertain, every balance precarious.
Their pendulums swung gently, threatening to collide, and they flinched with each shift of weight, forcing themselves to adjust without guidance.
Muscles tensed, breaths came in sharp bursts, and small slips were barely corrected before disaster struck.
The faint fractures along the glass glinted in the light, a constant warning that a single misstep could undo them.
Aurelia watched, heart tightening, as the twins navigated the course alone.
Their coordination wavered, their eyes flicked nervously to the other, but they did not reach out.
Every step was a test of independence, every swing of the pendulum a reminder that they could no longer lean on the mirrored strength of the other.
By the time they reached the far end, sweat dampening their foreheads and arms shaking, the pendulums were still intact, but the strain showed in the way they exhaled in unison, relief mingled with newfound awareness.
They had learned, painfully but clearly, that closeness came at a cost, and that to succeed, they had to walk their paths apart.
Hours passed, though it felt like minutes from Aurelia's vantage above. One by one, the students pressed forward, balancing, leaping, and bracing against the shifting course.
The burdens tugged at them in unexpected ways, some heavier than their arms could hold, some awkward and lopsided, others subtly oppressive, testing mind and spirit alike.
By the time the last participants crossed the final platform, the first trial had drawn to a close. Of the three hundred who had started, fifty were eliminated.
Some had broken their relics in desperation, the fragile objects shattering under the strain. Others could not bear the weight and remained frozen at the starting line, eyes wide with fear or indecision. A few had quit, stepping back and laying down their burdens, unwilling to endure any longer.
The platform was quiet now, except for the faint hum of residual Aether from the trial.
Aurelia exhaled, the tension of observing so many struggles finally leaving her shoulders. She let her Aspect settle, the faint glow dimming as she glanced at the students who had persevered, their determination carved plainly into their stances and strained expressions.
Veyron's voice cut through the air, calm but firm. "The first trial is complete. Those who remain will advance. Prepare yourselves for the next challenge."
The survivors shifted, adjusting their grips on their burdens, some exchanging silent, exhausted glances, others straightening their posture as if steeling themselves for what would come.
Aurelia stepped back from the platform, letting the weight of the trial settle in her mind, already anticipating what the next stage would demand.