The bells of Crownspire Academy rang in fours, the sound climbing the morning like rungs. Second year. Summoning day. My palms itched the same way they had the afternoon I first learned to pull air slow and taste the coppery pinch of mana at the back of my tongue.
On Aethra, one in a thousand can pull mana at all. You can live your whole life never meeting two like that outside an Academy. My mother used to say it wasn't a lottery ticket; it was a garden plot you had to weed every morning. Breathing, posture, focus. The world gives you a trickle. You earn the river.
I breathed as the first year taught us: four counts in through the nose, hold for four, six counts out. Mana slipped across that rhythm like dew sliding down a leaf. Too thin for my taste, but mine. The air over high-city Althryn was cool enough to sting my throat, steeped in the smell of old stone and wet iron from last night's rain. I buttoned my vest, slipped my notes into my satchel, and paused at the windowsill where a clay pot sat in a square of sun.
The flower inside wasn't just a flower. It was Lark—a small white, star-petaled thing with a shimmer under the green, the faintest suggestion of a hand if you weren't sure hands existed. When I threw my awareness wide, I felt the quiet thrum of a bond that wasn't mine. Lark was bound to my mother, Mira Riven, and had been since before I could walk. A plant-spirit familiar. Lark coaxed seedlings awake, warned of blight, and—on good days—leaned toward me as if we understood each other.
"Don't tell me you're nervous," I said. "You got to skip the public part."
Lark's petals shivered. A speckling of dew rose from the soil like the spirit's version of amusement. My mother stepped in from the kitchen, a smudge of earth on her cheek and an apron tied over her work dress. The smell of lemon balm and yeast clung to her.
"I heard the bells," she said. She always heard the bells, even when she swore she didn't. "Stand still for me, Kael."
I stood. She straightened my collar, then the line of my sleeves, then cupped my chin with a hand that smelled like mint and good dirt. She had bound Lark at sixteen in another city's summoning hall, and in the twenty years since, she'd tended herbs that cured fevers and coaxed orchards through bad winters. Lark could evolve into a steward of farms, a disciple of the Life God, or a flower too beautiful for mortals to look at for long. Infinite paths, she liked to say. Not infinite time.
"You remember your runes?" she asked.
I nodded. "First rune sets the element. If I change the first rune later, the whole formula falls to ash and rewrites from the ground up. The rest—range, cost, type, efficiency, strength—stack forward."
"And when you write into the familiar, you're drawing into a living lattice." She said it like prayer. "It grows while you draw. Never force a channel that hasn't thickened. Never push range if the cost rune screams."
"Or it'll blow up," I said.
"Or it will return to you through your seal," she corrected gently, "and you will try again. That's not failure. That's the work."
On Aethra, everything can be a spirit. Not just beasts. Boats, lanterns, teapots—the idea of a thing can answer the call. In first year, they marched us past galleries of bound spirits: a quill that wrote in three languages when fed copper filings, a kettle that brewed perfectly at sunrise, a chunk of ore that sang when the weather turned. Growth depends on two strengths: the familiar's channelwork—the little riverways the world uses to push power through a spirit's body—and the master's strength. The stronger the master, the more a familiar can be, breaking limits the way trees crack stone.
"Your father would be proud," my mother said, soft as if that could keep the ache from both of us. She kissed my cheek, and Lark's leaves tilted in patient blessing. "Go. Answer when the world calls your name."
Crownspire Academy rose out of Althryn like a crown had grown out of the hill and decided to stay. The summoning amphitheater lay in its heart: a broad oval cut into the ground, ringed by tiered stone benches and open to the sky. The platform in the center was chalk-white and smooth, rimmed by ten pillars etched and inlaid with rune-circles braided so tight they looked like lace.
Neutral ground, the Academies. Nations guard them. Courts send their brightest and their strivers. Contracts, rivalries, and old blood feuds wait outside the warded gates because every city knows—break the neutrality, and you starve your own future.
An hour before bells, Cohort Blue C streamed into the amphitheater in nervous pairs and tough-talking clumps. A few braver first-years fluttered at the top steps, eager to see the day they'd earn next spring. The sky was a clear, hard blue. I found a seat at the edge of our group and kept my breathing steady.
"Riven," drawled a voice that smelled like lacquer and money. Brann Calder slid into the row in front of me with the kind of casual ease born from knowing you could buy your way out of most mistakes. Brann's family owned half the ferries on the south river. His dark hair was oiled sharp, his vest hung with pewter charms he'd probably bought in a bundle. "Try not to call a broom, yeah? The sweepers' guild gets twitchy."
"My incantation doesn't rhyme," I said. "Sorry to disappoint."
Brann smirked and turned to the girl sliding onto the bench beside him. Aureline Belisar, third daughter of a Marseth House and niece to the Queen of Ansar. Her hair had been twisted into two drills that would have looked ridiculous if she weren't so composed. She didn't look at Brann; she looked at the platform like it had promised her something.
Professor Maelis Quill arrived with a sheaf of roster boards and a handkerchief already damp. He was a soft, round man with the bearing of a kettle left a bit too long on the stove: always just shy of a whistle. Today he tried to look like iron.
"As you know," he said, voice carrying by long practice, "second-year summons are public and recorded. What you call will be your partner for life—unless you break your oath and rebinding is permitted by the Trium Council, which requires crimes so severe you would not be here to petition. The Academy provides the circle, the restraint, and the first drink of mana. You provide the words and the will." He held each of our faces with his gaze like he was setting us into memory. "Crownspire's pillars will keep you safe. They will not save you from impatience."
He called the first name.
Aureline Belisar rose with the stage-trained smile of someone raised to wave at balconies. She walked to the platform. The ten pillars woke from inside: lines of light climbed them like ivy turning into ladders, bridged themselves into a web of pale silver. The circle on the floor filled in as if a careful hand were tracing it stroke by stroke. Even the air inside the pillars breathed differently—thin, clear, high-mountain air.
Incantations are personal. You can steal someone else's words, but the spirit that answers hears the grain of your voice and the shape of your need.
Aureline lifted her wand—polished cherry, copper wire braided along the grip—and spoke like a herald:
"Blue sovereign of sky and flood, hear me. Walk the wind by my side; let our names be writ in the same breath."
The circle took the sound. Light blossomed. A creature stepped through—sleek and long, four-legged, scales the deep lake-blue of noon with a shimmer under the color, two big wings that spread with a sound like silk torn slow. It hissed and beat the air once. Gasps sipped around the amphitheater.
"Sky-Scaled Salamander," Professor Quill said, delighted despite himself. He clapped, and the class joined him like the clap had pulled their hands on strings. "Dragonblood, confirmed by the dorsal heat-veins. Congratulations, Miss Belisar."
Chains of light drifted down from the pillars to settle like ribbons around the salamander's trunk and limbs. The restraints are courtesy, not cages—time to write the first formula without worrying your new partner will decide to leave.
Aureline approached. "Soul to soul, oath for oath. My breath for yours, your strength for mine. Binding." She pressed her palm to the salamander's brow, breathed, and wrote the small, sure formula into its waiting lattice. The chainwork around the creature loosened the way a hand relaxes.
One by one, the rest of Blue C went down. Spirits came up. A river-otter with kelp-fringed whiskers. A cat that stood upright on its hind legs and flicked its cobalt tail at anyone who admired it. A cherub the size of a loaf of bread, wings like frosted sugar, floating with the indignation of royalty. Sera Tallow, who never bragged, whispered into her cupped hands and brought up a clay pot with three little feet, its glaze crackled with age. The pot spirit puffed steam and rolled a few inches, eager to be useful. Brann called an ant the size of a small hound, gleaming as if someone had polished each joint. It clicked its mandibles in a way that made the lower benches shift away.
A stone doesn't show you how far it rolls. A familiar doesn't show you what it will be. First year drilled that into us, but eyes judge before the mind remembers.
"Kael Riven," Professor Quill said.
My legs felt like someone else's, but they moved. I stepped into the silver of the pillars and felt the thinness of the air, the bright quiet I'd come to love when we practiced channel-trace at dawn. Under my boots, the circle lines hummed. Crownspire's preparations gathered like a hand holding breath.
I had rewritten my incantation a dozen times. I had torn up pages, tried for poetry, failed at thunder. In the end, I kept the only words that hadn't felt like a costume.
"I call not a shape," I said, "but a flame that stays. A fire that learns. Walk with me."
The pillars brightened. The circle warmed underfoot as if I were standing over a hearthstone. Light swelled from the center—then pinched inward, like a breath held too tight, then blossomed again, steadier.
It rose from the floor in a spill of embers gathering themselves into a form: a small, bright thing the height of my knee, the raw-orange of coals with a rind of ash along its edges, a head like a candle flame's cusp and a body that remembered arms and legs without insisting on them. No eyes—just two hotter hollows where attention went. At its heart, a denser ember pulsed—an ember-core like a bead of molten glass that refused to drip.
The amphitheater went quiet the way people go quiet when they aren't sure whether to laugh.
Professor Quill's head tilted. He didn't smile or scowl. He did that thing he did when he saw the shape of a question. "Elemental fire-spirit," he said, mostly to himself. "A cinderborn. Rare in student summons. Hm."
Chains of light drifted toward my emberling, and the little fire leaned into them like a cat into a hand. Relief punched me hard enough to be almost pain. I went to it, the heat kissing my skin without burning, and held out my palm. The spirit lifted a limb like a paw and pressed it to my hand. Warmth ran through me—up the hand, into the forearm, across the chest, as if someone had poured tea into the space behind my sternum. My seal—that small tattoo over my heart I'd earned this morning from the Academy's menders—warmed in sympathetic answer. The cinderborn's core pulsed to the rhythm of my breath.
"Your words," Professor Quill said gently.
"Soul to soul," I said, my voice not quite steady. "My breath for yours, your fire for mine. Oath for oath. Binding." I wrote the small net of the Bind into the spirit's waiting lattice. I've seen the inside of latticework on diagrams—a lace of channels, some hair-thin, some like braids, running through what passes for a body. In a fire-spirit, the lattice was light and heat more than flesh, and that made it both simpler and more treacherous. The Bind settled. The chains of light loosened and fell away like scraps of silk.
The emberling—my emberling—tilted its not-quite-head. A little of its ash rind broke and floated down like gray snow. I realized I was grinning and couldn't seem to stop.
"Don't worry," Brann called from the benches. "It'll make an excellent candle."
Laughter rippled where he wanted it to. Aureline did not laugh. She watched with an expression I couldn't read.
Professor Quill's voice cut neat through the noise. "Enough. A reminder: the world is full of spirits smaller than your pride and greater than your plans. Riven, stay with me a moment."
I stepped back, the emberling padding beside me, leaving no marks on the stone but warmth. Quill flicked a brass lens from his pocket and peered, not at the spirit's flame, but at the faint lines that spidered through it—the lattice channels.
"Interesting," he murmured. "Channel density is high for a juvenile. Most fire-spirits we see at summoning have two or three viable conduits for formal spellwork. I count…seven? No, eight, though that eighth is hair-thin. You'll need to thicken it with practice before you feed it cost-heavy runes." He glanced at me. "It will burn itself out if you push it to range or power too soon."
"I won't," I said, too fast. "I— I'll be careful."
"Care is good," he said, "but growth is better. Remember our first principles: a familiar's growth is a braid. One strand is their channels. The other is yours." He tapped my sternum lightly with the edge of the lens. "Breathe more. Eat more. Sleep more. Lift something heavy. Write runes only into what can hold them."
He turned to the class. "Blue C, gather. We'll do a brief demonstration before we break for afternoon training."
A groan rippled across the benches. Quill ignored it. He touched one of the pillar grooves with his palm, and a wooden practice figure slid up from a hidden slot at the edge of the platform. It wore a painted grin and held a wooden sword because someone in Maintenance had a sense of humor.
"Two volunteers," Quill said, already pointing. "Belisar. Riven."
Of course.
Aureline stepped to one end of the stage with the easy confidence of someone who had practiced being watched since she could lift a spoon. I moved to the other with my emberling. When Quill gestured, Aureline closed her eyes for a breath to feel the lattice inside her salamander. She found the innate, simple formula near its throat—every spirit comes with a few—and fed it mana.
"Fire Spit," Quill said for the first-years hovering high above to hear.
The salamander hissed and shot a globe of blue-orange fire. It hit the wooden figure; it smoked, back blackening a bit. The doll wobbled, unimpressed.
"Controlled. Efficient. Innate." Quill nodded. "Now, Riven. Different approach. Fire-spirits don't always arrive with a full set of 'ready-to-fire' innates. Many of you will be learning and writing formulas yourselves as second-years and beyond. Riven, show us a starter. A minor bolt. Keep your cost low, your type fixed, your range within ten paces."
I knelt and put my palm near—never on—the emberling's core. It leaned into my heat. I traced runes into the air right above its flame, not on stone, not on paper. Runes live best where they intend to root. First rune: element. I set it for Fire. Second: type. I set a line for bolt rather than blossom or shroud. Third: cost. Low. Fourth: range. Ten paces. Fifth: efficiency. Higher than my fear wanted. Sixth: strength. Modest. I felt the little channels tug and tremble, wanting and wary. I breathed and wrote the binding lines that turned six ideas into a single seed.
"Cinder Bolt," I said softly, more to the spirit than to the class.
It tried.
The emberling flashed bright enough to sting my eyes. Its ash rind blew outward in a ring. Heat ballooned in a pulse that pushed dust across the stage. For a heartbeat, a dart of fire hung formed and perfect between us—and then the whole little body went white at the edges, then red, then redder, and in a single soft whoomph it collapsed into a pile of ash the size of a small blanket. The ember-core popped up like a cherry bead tossed by a child and zipped—light as thought—straight to the seal over my heart.
The amphitheater coughed as one organism. Quill wafted his hand; the pillar-wards pulled ash toward the far vents. Across the benches, heads turned away, toward, away, the awkward dance people do when they don't know how sorry to be.
"What you witnessed," Quill said, patient even through the smoke, "is not failure. It's a lesson in lattice. Many of you, especially those with spirits of raw element, metal, or air, will exhaust a familiar's channels before you learn to listen to them. They return to your seal. You gather breath. They gather shape. You adjust the runes and try again." He glanced up at the rows. "You who are smirking—remind me to make your objects sing before sunset. Pots can scream when overfed."
A few of the smirks tried to hide.
Quill's tone sharpened. "The world is full of growth paths. Some spirits grow by eating—meat, fruit, grains. Some by metals—copper filings, iron sand, silver dust. Some by water. Some by heat alone, stoked and stoked until their channels glaze into something that can hold more. What your spirit needs depends on what it is. Today at noon, you'll be assigned to training groups by family—winged, humanoid, reptilian, aquatic, aerial, object, plant, elemental. Riven, you'll join Elemental Cohort. Belisar, scaled aerial." He slipped the lens back into his pocket. "We're done for now. File out, breathe, and for the love of all nine Towers, drink water. You're not statues."
We broke like waves over rocks—sudden, eager, chattering, uneven. Brann brushed past me with his polished ant keeping pace like a little soldier. "Try coal next time," he said lightly. "Or a bucket."
"Try humility," I said, and startled myself with the fact that it didn't shake.
Outside, the amphitheater poured us into Crownspire's central green where the afternoon sun warmed the stone to bread-oven comfort. The ember-core over my heart pulsed in time with my breathing—fast, then steadying. I found a patch of shade under a juniper and sat with my back to the living bark. I focused inward on the seal. The core was there like a held candle-flame. I fed it a trickle, then a ribbon, of mana. My seal warmed. I pictured a bowl. I pictured pouring.
The ash under my collarbone thickened into an ember-lump, then shaped itself—a head like a cusp, a body remembering limbs. The emberling re-formed not on the stage but on my knee, light as a cupped match, its heat polite. It looked up at me—or I decided it was looking, because the hollows deepened where eyes might be.
"Hey," I said, because something felt required. "You came back quick."
A shiver ran through it that I decided was agreement.
"Kael!"
I looked up. Sera Tallow's clay pot trundled ahead of her, steam puffing in pleased bursts, while she balanced three books, a canteen, and a bag of dried dates on one hip. Sera did not smirk. She rarely smiled, but when she did it was an honest, crooked thing that felt like summer. She dropped cross-legged beside me without asking because we'd shared a table all last year, and she knew I didn't mind.
"Your spirit is pretty," she said, and when I laughed, she sounded offended on my behalf. "It is. Don't let Brann in your head. My gran brewed for a tavern with a kettle-spirit for thirty years. That kettle saved three lives in a winter plague and fed forty in a spring flood. People slept a little warmer because of it."
"My mother's is a plant," I said. "She says Lark will evolve into whatever we work it toward. Spirit of gardening. Spirit of fields. Or just…more itself."
"More itself is enough," Sera said, as if reciting something she'd chosen as a vow.
Her pot spirit rocked its little feet and exhaled a thread of fragrant steam. The emberling leaned toward it, curious. Heat and warmth touched, like two notes overlapping. For a moment, if I reached with the sense the first year had found in me, I could taste a possibility: a formula that turned heat into simmer without scorch. A rune for steadiness, not just strength.
I drew a small breath and traced a stabilizing rune with one finger just above my emberling's core, asking instead of pressing. A little loop to keep cost from spiking when it tried to throw. The rune took. The spirit brightened, then settled into a steadier glow.
"Better," I told it.
A bell rang—one, a pause, then three in quick succession. Training call.
Afternoons at Crownspire belong to running and writing. We learn new runes in classroom ring-rooms that smell like chalk and brass; we break ourselves on the field until even the nobles sleep like farmhands. Today, the field filled with nine classes and the racket of three hundred sixty students trying to look stronger than they felt.
Marshal Osk Thorpe—our training master—strode out like a marching drum had grown legs. He was tall in the way doors are tall and built broad across the back, with a scar like claw marks angling down one cheek. He'd bound a living armor spirit in a century-old war; rumor said he'd beaten it into shape until it could take a dragon's hit. He had no patience for titles.
"LINES!" he bellowed. The sound hit the front row like a shove and echoed off the stone. "Drop the courtesies. I don't bow to your crests and I won't bow to your sulks. Today I see what I've got to hammer. Two meters between bodies. Summon your partners. Move."
We moved. Spirits burst, hummed, padded, rolled, hovered into being. Osk paced the front line and counted like he was pricing us by the pound.
"Sorts," he barked. "Humanoid—here. Winged reptile—left. Wingless reptile—right. Birds—left of wings. Winged snakes—beside birds. Wingless snakes—beside wingless lizards. Aquatics—over there, and if your fish dies, it's your fault. Aquatic humanoids—next to them. Winged humanoids—center. Objects and tools—by the gear racks. Plants—close to the shade. Elementals—front and center, where I can see you try to cheat by looking pretty."
We shuffled, sorted, swore. I took my emberling to the front and center and found myself with a handful of wind wists, a grit-sprite that shed pebbles when it laughed, a candleflame that had taken the shape of a fox's head, and a tiny whisk of cloud that dripped on everything like a leaky roof. Sera waved from the object cohort. Aureline stood tall with the winged reptiles, her salamander's wings folded neat.
Osk stopped in front of us, hands on hips, eyes narrowed. He stared at my emberling long enough that the ash at its edges flaked in anxiety. Then he grunted.
"Fire," he said to me. "You'll want to feed it heat and carbon to thicken channels. Charcoal to start. Iron sand when your cost rune stops squealing. If it dies, it dies. If it returns, it returns stronger. That's the forge. But—" He jabbed a finger at the emberling. "—you're not throwing bolts today. You're writing a Steady rune. You—" He pointed at the cloud wisp. "—are writing a Gather rune. Wind—Contain. Grit—Bind. We start with bones. No one eats a cow whole."
"Sir," said someone who could not help themselves, "what about—"
"Shut it," Osk said, without heat. "Runes first. Then laps. Then food. Overfeed a spirit, you waste coin. Underfeed, you waste time. Both are sins."
He clapped, and the field exploded into work. The emberling brightened under my palm as I sketched the Steady rune again, slower, this time fixing the loop with three anchor points—and felt the little channels inside it thicken as if a thread had been doubled.
The world is an engine, Professor Quill had said on the first day of first year. It runs on breath and bargains and names. Today it felt like a promise: if I breathed, if I wrote carefully, if I kept showing up when the ash settled, I could make this small flame into something that walked beside me through hard weather.
Across the field, Brann's ant tried to spit a fire-pipette and blew its own head off—a neat pop and a shower of sparks. The benches erupted in laughter. I caught Brann's eyes by accident. For a heartbeat, his mouth twitched toward a grin directed at me, as if inviting me to join the joke. I didn't. He looked away first.
The emberling's heat climbed from warm to steady-hot, a hearth rather than a match. It pressed its hot-not-hot forehead against my knuckles the way Lark pressed leaves against my mother's wrist.
"Walk with me," I said again, softer this time. "We'll learn to burn without breaking."
The spirit pulsed once, twice. When I opened my hand, a clean, thumb-length spark formed and held—no flare, no whoomph, no collapse. It drifted across my palm like a held star and evaporated on a breath, leaving the faintest wreath of smoke that smelled like pine.