The road climbed until the city fell away and the stone turned black. Ember Academy sat on a ledge of old lava, its towers cut from rock that remembered heat. Banners the color of banked coals hung from the parapets, breathing in a wind that smelled faintly of ash and rain.
Yuj arrived with dust on his boots and no one to say goodbye to. The ribbon in his pocket felt heavier than a blade.
The gate posted a single guard who looked at the letter, at the boy, and then at the thin glow moving beneath the skin of Yuj's wrist.
"Public recommendation from Yuvale," the guard said, surprised and trying not to be. "You're early."
"I'm late," Yuj said. "But I'll catch up."
The guard blinked like someone who had heard cleverness where he expected grief. He waved Yuj through with a grunt.
The amphitheater was a bowl carved from volcanic glass, tiered seats rising like dark waves. Students filled them in rustling clusters: robes stitched with ember sigils, hair braided for luck, nervous laughter that broke too loud and too often. At the center of the ring lay a wide firepit, dead and clean, its stone etched with old runes that looked like teeth.
A man waited there as if he had been waiting forever.
He had ash-silver stubble and hair the color of fresh flame. His coat was black with a thread of crimson along the collar, and his grin had the easy tilt of someone who enjoyed small disasters when they taught quickly.
"Good morning, unlit candles," he said.
The voice carried—warm, amused, and edged like a file. Yuj knew without being told: this was Master Alaric.
"House rules," Alaric continued, spinning an iron poker in one hand. "No melting school property without permission. No setting each other on fire without intent to learn. And if you explode, explode interestingly. I bore easily."
Laughter, half-relief and half terror.
Alaric planted the poker in the pit. "Lesson one: Why fire? No, seriously. It's loud, it's hungry, it ruins friendships and cookware. So why did the first fools decide it was a good pet?"
He pointed into the tiers, rapid as sparks. "Name, village, and fuel."
A girl in front—braided hair, steady chin—stood. "Lysa, Rivergate. Fuel: pride."
"Excellent. Burns quick. Try not to run out before lunch." He flicked the poker. "You."
"Garron, Quarryfold. Fuel's fear. I burn so nothing can hurt me first."
"Honest. Fear's a good starter. Upgrade to purpose when possible. You." He aimed the poker like a question mark.
Yuj rose. The seats turned toward him as one, gravity changing.
"Yuj," he said. "Yuvale."
A brief hush rolled the word around itself—someone had heard of a valley that burned.
"Fuel?" Alaric asked lightly.
Yuj's mouth was dry. He thought of a hill lit with red, of a ribbon that had not burned all the way. "Regret," he said.
Something in Alaric's gaze sharpened, then relaxed again like a fist remembering it was a hand. "Strong stuff. Pairs well with stubbornness. Next."
A boy stood without being asked, which was its own answer. He had white hair that looked like frost in moonlight and eyes the color of water under ice. His posture said I have paid for the right to be calm and I will keep paying.
"Kaen," he said. "From Graymarch. Fuel: order."
Alaric's grin returned like a coin flicked back to the palm. "A librarian in a volcano. Delightful."
Glyphs flared along the amphitheater rim, waking with a sound like a throat clearing. Alaric levered the poker and the sigils crawled across the firepit in thin lines of light.
"Pit's dead," he said. "Let's see what you can feed it."
They came down one by one—timid candles, sputter-and-pray torches, a boy who produced a gout of flame so proud of itself it collapsed in a wheeze. Alaric praised where praise taught faster than shame and mocked where mocking would turn the lesson hard enough to hold.
When Yuj stepped into the ring, the stone under his soles hummed very softly, as if clearing its throat again for him. He exhaled slow. Heat answered like a dog that had learned—recently—to sit.
He raised his hand and drew a small circle. Fire gathered to the line as if remembering an old game and spun on his fingertip the size of a coin. He split it into three, then braided the threads together, not because he should but because his hands knew how to do that when he was not thinking of anything else. The braid folded into a flower without asking permission.
For a heartbeat the amphitheater was very quiet.
Yuj felt the door inside him creak—the one the heat knocked at when it wanted to become everything. He shut it gently. The flower became a thread became a ring became a breath that went home. He did not look at anyone. He looked at his palm until it was only a palm again.
Alaric pursed his mouth in a way that did not quite hide approval. "Control is arrogance with better manners," he said. "Keep the manners."
"Kaen," he added. "Show us your library."
Kaen did not flourish. He walked to the pit with a soldier's economy and exhaled a narrow flame so pale it read as cold, a ghost-blue that licked the coal and made it crack along old seams. The core brightened without noise, blue-white and steady, as if someone had put a star in a jar and told it to behave.
Heat pressed around Yuj and then away again. His own palm answered—warmer, redder—uninvited. Kaen's flame leaned a fraction. Yuj's leaned back. At the seam where they met, the air went peculiar: a faint skin of frost formed between two kinds of hot.
Alaric's poker snapped into that seam with a cheerful clank. "Homework," he said. "Do not explode my amphitheater."
Order returned. Laughter too, the kind that releases a held breath.
They broke for water and questions. Questions multiplied the way rabbits do in places with grass and no foxes. Yuj drifted to the edge of the ring and let the stone cool beneath his feet. Kaen drifted to the opposite edge and pretended the opposite edge had always been the plan. Alaric appeared between them without crossing the distance, as masters did.
"Regret," he said to Yuj conversationally, as if continuing a chat they'd been having for years. "Vintage fuel. Burns hot. Leaves aftertaste."
"I'm working on it," Yuj said.
"Good." Alaric turned to Kaen. "Order. The favorite lie of men who want to survive. Also good. Keeps the hands steady when the heart should not be."
Kaen's expression did not move. "Sir."
Alaric leaned his elbows on the pit's rim. "Listen, both of you. Fire isn't a personality. It's an appetite with ethics. Feed it fear, and it will guard your bed until it eats the house. Feed it pride, and it will light your banquets until there's nothing left to eat. Feed it love—" He shrugged. "Dangerous. Beautiful. Unreliable."
"What do you feed yours?" Yuj asked before the careful part of his mind could veto it.
"My students," Alaric said promptly. "They're terribly flammable."
The grin cut and then softened. He tapped the rim. Around the amphitheater, runes woke again, weaving a map in lines of light along the inner wall: spiraling tunnels, a chamber marked with a sigil Yuj did not recognize, a second mark beneath it that translated—if you squinted as a language does—into ask again later.
"Trial teams post at dusk," Alaric said. "You will descend into the Ember Ruins. You will return. Ideally you will learn a thing we cannot teach: who you are when the room burns wrong."
His gaze touched Yuj only for a breath. It felt like being named. It felt like being forgiven and being warned in the same unhelpful instant.
Dismissal came with a bell and the relieved roar of a hundred voices. Students spilled out, fresh rumors already forming flocks. A few looked at Yuj and then practiced not looking again. Talent rearranged gravity. So did disaster. He kept his eyes on the path and his hands in his sleeves.
A shadow fell across him. Kaen had not meant to stand there; he simply did. Up close, his hair looked less like frost and more like a thing that had elected to be white in a world that preferred gray.
"In the pit," Yuj said before he could talk himself out of it. "When the air went strange. Did you feel it?"
"I catalogued it," Kaen said.
"Same thing?"
"Not for most people." The corner of Kaen's mouth considered having a sense of humor and allowed itself a millimeter. "Your flames talk too much."
"Yours whisper like they're judging me," Yuj said. "Which is rude."
"Rudeness is efficient," Kaen said. He hesitated, then added, "Don't bleed in there."
Yuj blinked. "Planning to stab me?"
"Planning to avoid accidents," Kaen said flatly. "When some people bleed, the room gets warmer. When I bleed, it does not."
He left the space where he had been standing before Yuj could assemble a proper answer. The warning lodged in the back of Yuj's head like a nail waiting for a hammer.
Afternoon sloped toward dusk. The academy shifted to that different kind of quiet schools get just before something happens. Yuj walked the outer corridor and let his fingers skate along the black stone. It felt like cooled bread crust. It felt like a drumhead waiting for a hand.
A prickle rose under the skin of his palm. He looked. A thin green line lifted there, faint as the idea of a leaf. It pulsed once and then went still.
"Not now," he told it softly. "Please."
He closed his fist. For a heartbeat—he could swear it—a voice like wind in grass spoke from the fist's dark: Don't burn alone.
He opened his hand. It was only a hand again. He breathed in, on the count of five, and out on the beat of regret, the way the midwife had taught him when the world was smaller and kinder.
The trial list went up as the sun found the edge of the western wall. Names in clean ink, groups of four. Yuj scanned for his and found it paired with three others he did not know and one he already did.
Kaen Vale.
Of course.
A ripple of comment passed behind him—Oh, the Yuvale boy—Is that the one—Do you think— He let the noise go by like weather. Alaric's shadow lengthened across the page.
"Try not to be on the same team," Alaric had said earlier, which in teacher meant absolutely be on the same team so you learn something you don't want to. Yuj glanced over his shoulder.
Alaric raised two fingers in a casual salute and then pretended he had not.
Down in the amphitheater bowl, torches kindled one by one without hands. The runes along the wall brightened, the map lines thickening as if inked by an invisible pen. Somewhere under the academy, stone shifted in a way that made the soles of his feet know it.
"Fuel," Alaric's voice carried, amused and merciless. "Bring enough."
Yuj slid the ribbon from his pocket and tied it around his wrist. The knot sat against the small green memory under his skin. He looked toward the stair where Kaen already stood, winter looking down at a volcano and taking notes.
"Ready?" Yuj called.
Kaen did not turn. "Cataloguing variables."
"Add one more," Yuj said, stepping into the torchlight and finding that he could still smile without breaking. "I don't plan on exploding."
"Then plan on improvising," Kaen said, and started down the steps into the red-lit dark.
Yuj followed, the pit's old heat rising to meet him, the map lines leading them toward a door that had not been a door until sundown. The stone breathed like an animal that sleeps light.
He thought of Alaric's lesson, of appetites and ethics. He thought of flowers that looked like fire and a voice that had forgiven when it had no good reason to. He thought of what he would feed the flame tonight.
Not fear. Not pride.
Something that lasted longer.
The door opened its black mouth. The Ruins exhaled.
They went in.