The letter was short, which with Aldric meant it contained exactly what needed to be said and nothing further.
Begin investigation on the Thaddeus family immediately. The Academy is their primary base of social operation. Identify the heir currently enrolled. Observe. Report. Do not engage unless necessary. From Aldric Nox Nocturne.
Clyde read it twice, folded it carefully, and tucked it into his inner coat pocket.
New mission, he thought, with the particular resignation of someone who has accepted that new missions arrive regardless of whether the previous situation has been fully processed. First day. First class. Still in Latin pronunciation. New mission.
He turned to the class register he had been given during orientation and scanned the student names.
There, near the bottom of the list.
Caelan Thaddeus.
He said the name quietly in his head a few times, fixing it. Caelan Thaddeus. He closed the register and tucked it away, filed the name where he kept things he needed to access quickly, and returned his attention to the front of the room where the teacher was now demonstrating vowel sounds with impressive commitment.
The rest of the class passed without incident. When the bell rang and students began dispersing into the corridors, Clyde moved with the flow until he reached the library, which he had seen signposted near the central plaza during orientation.
The Academy library was similar to the one beneath the Lunar Sentinels in structure and completely different in atmosphere.
The Sentinel archive smelled of old paper and damp stone and the accumulated years of a space that had been sealed too often and ventilated too rarely. This library smelled of something faintly warm and clean, a hint of cedar from the shelving and something else, botanical and faint, coming from the small arrangements of dried flowers placed at intervals between the stacks. The books were organized with the thoroughness of an institution that had money to spend on organization, their spines aligned, their sections clearly labeled, the whole space carrying the particular quality of a place that had been designed to be used comfortably and had succeeded.
Clyde went to the counter and produced his student card.
The librarian was a quiet older woman with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough to move through the space without thinking about it.
"Books on ascension," Clyde said. "Ichor ascension specifically."
"This way."
She led him through two sections and stopped at a shelf that held twelve volumes on the subject, their spines ranging from academic texts to what appeared to be practical guides. She gestured along the row and returned to the counter.
Clyde pulled the first one that looked comprehensive, opened it to the index, and found what he needed.
The ascension chapter described the holy spring method with the same information he already had. Locate the spring corresponding to your ichor's frequency, submerge until your body resonates with it, stabilize the wave during the submersion, break the barrier. The theoretical framework was sound and completely unhelpful for his specific problem, which was locating a Hollow Star holy spring in a world where he had no map of spring locations and a scholarship that required exceptional grades before he could even ask the Academy for access to one.
He closed the book and reached for the next one.
This one was different. Older, its cover plain, its title pressed into the leather simply, The Ichor Dimension, A Practical Study. He opened it with mild curiosity and became considerably more interested within the first three pages.
The relevant section was in the middle of the book, under a heading that read Orbs of the High-Phase Howling.
When a Howling of sufficient phase development was killed, the text explained, the destruction of their primary Astral Card produced a secondary phenomenon in the brain. The concentrated ichor that had been cycling through the Howling's system over years of consumption crystallized around the pineal gland into dense spherical formations, each one carrying the compressed energy of a significant ichor event. These orbs, when harvested correctly and introduced to an Ichorborn's constellation system through directed resonance, could activate a single unlit star in any of the bearer's ability constellations.
One orb, one star, Clyde thought, turning the page carefully.
The implications assembled themselves with the quiet efficiency of someone doing arithmetic they were good at.
Fifteen empty constellation slots across three abilities. Fifteen orbs from high-phase Howlings would fill them completely and push all three abilities to the ceiling of the first phase. From there, Stellar Resonance became accessible for each ability independently. New abilities, unique to his frequency, generated from the breakthrough.
I could strengthen my current phase to its absolute limit and generate three Stellar Resonance abilities, he thought, without ascending at all. And then ascend from a significantly more developed position.
He closed the book and stood up.
He would sign both volumes out. He reached for the register on the librarian's counter, picked up the pen, and scanned the previous entries out of professional habit, the same way he had always scanned historical records for patterns.
He found one immediately.
Two lines above the space for his name, written in a precise, slightly angular hand.
Caelan Thaddeus.
He looked at the call number beside the name. The book Caelan had signed out was not on ascension. It was in a section Clyde had not visited, something in the restricted reference materials toward the back.
He asked the librarian quietly, keeping his voice even and his expression curious rather than urgent.
"The student who signed out before me, I think I recognize his name from orientation. Is he still in the library?"
The librarian glanced at the register and then pointed toward the back right of the space, toward the quieter reading alcoves where the shelving was denser and the lighting slightly dimmer.
"That corner," she said.
Clyde signed his name, tucked both books under his arm, and walked in that direction.
He found him in the furthest alcove.
Short brown hair, an oval face with a chin that came slightly forward to a soft point, wearing his Academy blazer with the particular ease of someone who considered formal clothing a default rather than an effort. His teeth showed slightly when his mouth was at rest, the canines marginally longer than standard, enough to notice without being something you could point to directly.
Clyde activated his Hollow Eyes at their lowest output and looked at the frequency around him.
What is that?
The ichor signature was wrong in a way he could not immediately categorize. Malicious was the word that formed, though malicious was an interpretation rather than a frequency descriptor. The signature carried a quality of deliberate distortion, something in the wave that had been bent away from its natural pattern and held in that bent state long enough to have settled into it. Corrupted, maybe. Or altered.
Or that is simply what his ichor looks like, Clyde thought. Some people carry dark frequencies without being dangerous.
He was still deciding when Caelan moved.
He went to the far corner of the alcove without glancing at Clyde, produced a card from his coat, and held it flat on his palm. The card was circular, plain black, with Latin characters around its edge that Clyde's developing Latin could not read at this distance. He threw it.
Whoosh.
The card spun like a vortex in midair, rotating flat, and a shape emerged from it. A body. A person, or something wearing the shape of one, stepping through the spinning card the way someone steps through a door. And in the thing's chest, visible through Clyde's Hollow Eyes, a Howling heart, still pulsing with the corrupted arrhythmic beat of something that had been consuming Astral Cards for a long time.
Then Caelan's hand moved.
Thin threads of Lunar Ichor extended from his fingers, barely visible even through the Hollow Eyes, surrounding his hand like a blade without a handle. He drove it into the emerging figure's chest, extracted the Howling heart with the clean efficiency of someone who had done this before, and held it while invisible threads began stitching the opened wound shut again.
Clyde's grip on the books tightened.
He is transplanting a Howling heart into a living person. That person stepped through the card. He came from somewhere else. He is a prisoner.
Caelan turned his head.
His eyes found Clyde immediately, with the specific quality of eyes that had known someone was there before turning to confirm it.
"You saw that?!" he said, the words carrying more curiosity than alarm, which was somehow worse than if he had been alarmed.
Clyde dropped the books and reached into his coat for the Clockwork card. His butterfly knife was already in his other hand, resonance building through the blade, the purple of his ichor visible along the edge.
Caelan's hand moved, the thread-blade extending, and Clyde moved to dodge it, his reaction fast enough to take the cut across his side rather than his torso. Slice. The edge of it burned with the specific quality of a cut made by Lunar Ichor rather than metal.
He gritted his teeth and brought the butterfly knife up. Clang!
The butterfly knife's resonated edge met the thread-blade and the sound of it was metallic and loud, the dense Lunar Ichor in Caelan's threads registering against Clyde's resonance like striking something far heavier than thread had any business being.
His Lunar Ichor reserve is huge, Clyde thought.
Threads wrapped his ankles. Snap. He felt them tighten immediately, the kind of grip that would stop forward movement completely within a second.
He had approximately that long.
He began chanting in his mind, the Latin moving through his memory faster than speech, the Clockwork card already warm in his palm from the blood he had pressed against it, the resonance building toward the activation point. He let the threads pull tight, let himself stagger, let Caelan read vulnerability into the movement.
The artificial sun above the Academy pulsed its warm light through the library windows.
Then the yellow light came from the card.
Ring.
Tempus auge.
The room slowed.
Everything in it, the dust in the air, the faint motion of Caelan shifting his weight forward, the threads tightening around Clyde's ankles, all of it dropped to a fraction of its normal rate while Clyde moved at full speed through the compressed time.
He cut the threads. Snick.
Then the yellow light was gone, neutralized by something in Caelan's card that Clyde had not anticipated, the Clockwork's window closing faster than expected, and everything snapped back to full speed.
Slice.
Caelan's thread-blade caught him across the arm in the return to normal time, a clean cut that burned immediately.
"You know the Thaddeus secret now," Caelan said, with the calm of someone reciting a conclusion rather than making a threat. He produced the black card again, holding it ready, the Latin around its edge catching the light. "That makes the next part unfortunate."
The dark energy around the card intensified.
Then a gust of wind hit Caelan from the left with enough force to stagger him sideways into the shelving.
CRASH.
Aurelian stepped into the alcove, his coat moving with the residual Gale Ichor discharge, his posture carrying the relaxed readiness of someone who had already committed to a direction and was simply continuing it. He moved with a fluidity that Clyde could only describe as dancing, weight shifting continuously, never fully committed to any single position, the Gale Ichor in his legs making every movement a potential launch point for the next one.
Caelan recovered faster than expected and sent threads forward.
Aurelian was already somewhere else, the threads closing on empty air while Aurelian's fist connected with a compressed gust of Gale Ichor. Whump. Caelan absorbed it, which was more than most people would have managed.
They moved through three exchanges at a speed that Clyde, bleeding from two cuts, tracked with his Hollow Eyes while pressing his sleeve against his arm.
Then Aurelian stopped moving.
He curled his middle finger against his thumb, the specific gesture of something loaded and aimed, and looked at Caelan with the expression of someone who has found the correct tool for the current problem.
Flick.
CRACK.
The compressed air round left his finger at a velocity that the eye could not follow, visible only through Clyde's Hollow Eyes as a dense sphere of Gale Ichor traveling the distance between Aurelian's hand and Caelan's chest in approximately the time it took for Caelan to register that the flick had happened.
The impact launched Caelan backward into the shelving.
SLAM.
Books scattered. The shelving unit tilted and caught itself against the wall. Caelan slid down it and sat on the floor, the black card still in his hand but the concentration required to use it clearly disrupted.
Aurelian stood with his weight distributed evenly between both feet and looked at Clyde.
"You are bleeding from two places," he said.
"I am aware," Clyde said.
"We should leave before a teacher arrives."
Clyde looked at Caelan, who was already recovering with an unsettling speed, and agreed completely.