(Third-Person Limited - Lysera, Age 7)
I. Morning: A Seat Meant for Someone Else
The Maiden's Academy stirred awake in pieces, like a great white shell warmed from within. Footsteps brushed against polished stone. Servants whispered their morning routines with the precision of trained automatons.
A thin line of sunlight stretched across the atrium tiles and stopped just short of Lysera's feet, as if uncertain whether to touch her. The light, too, seemed to hesitate.
When she entered, the girls were gathering near the entry hall-arranging veils, adjusting ribbons, murmuring about breakfast and lessons and who had been reassigned to which triad. The air was thick with the scent of beeswax and the faint metallic tang of anxiety.
Lysera walked toward the familiar bench from yesterday. It was gone.
In its place stood a narrower slab of marble, carved directly into the eastern wall. Smoother. Sharper at the edges. Too cold. Too permanent. Too clean to be something that had existed before today.
Mistress Veyra stood beside it, the sleeves of her robe falling like silent wings. "This will be your seat," she said quietly. She did not explain why. She did not need to. The silence was the explanation.
The other girls absorbed the information the way grass absorbs dew-without protest, without understanding, and without the freedom to question.
Lysera sat. The marble did not accept her warmth. If anything, it drew it out of her, leaving a faint inner chill.
Serin and Mirelle paused several steps away. Serin fidgeted with the tassel of her sleeve, her small hand tracing an invisible pattern. Mirelle looked ready to wave, then froze, the gesture half-born and quickly smothered.
They wanted to speak. The world around them told them not to.
Lysera folded her hands in her lap. The seat felt like something carved not for her, but for an idea of her that didn't quite fit-a measurement device the school had installed specifically for its anomaly.
II. Ritual Mathematics - Where Numbers Exhale Wrong
The Theory Hall held the sharp smell of ink and warmed copper. Desks formed perfect concentric rings, and the copper lines etched into the center glowed faintly as the lesson slate activated.
Today's topic pulsed across the board:
RITUAL MATRICES OF DOMESTIC MANAGEMENT - Allocation, Loss, and Harmonic Stability -
Mistress Veyra tapped diagrams into existence faster than most students could breathe. "A household," she lectured, "is a series of promises. When one promise falters, the others must bend to hold it." Girls nodded in unison. The lesson was familiar, comforting in its predictability.
Lysera copied the opening diagram, then adjusted it. Not to defy instruction. Simply because the numbers begged for a different shape.
She moved wick-consumption from a 3-unit cycle to a 2-2-3 rotation. Redirected heat-loss tolerance by narrowing the channel margin. Shifted storage flow into a triangular distribution rather than a linear one. It reduced ritual waste by nearly eleven percent. Elegant. Symmetrical. Quiet.
Mistress Veyra stopped mid-sentence. Her gaze drifted downward, toward Lysera's desk. For a moment-just a breath-her expression flickered. Not anger. Not fear. A flicker of cold, bureaucratic recognition.
Veyra wrote something on her slate in tiny, needle-thin strokes:
"Pattern output irregular - exceeds expected cognition band."
The classroom shifted as though someone had drawn a curtain. Not a single girl dared whisper, but the air around Lysera thinned all the same. Averra, her triad-mate, stiffened. Serin's fingers curled around her quill as if bracing for something unseen. Serin was the only one who didn't look away from the numbers.
Lysera continued writing. Chalk dust clung to her fingertips like frost. Her mind felt like a machine that was too well-tuned for the house she was meant to manage.
III. Terrace Garden - A Glimpse That Should Not Exist
Between lessons, the upper terrace garden stretched open and bright. Girls spilled into it like scattered flower petals-laughing, gossiping, rehearsing sigils with the tips of their fingers.
Lysera walked toward the balustrade, drawn by the wind's cool breath. It was peaceful here, separated from the pressure of the corridors. A place that pretended to be free, even if freedom was an illusion carved into stone.
Then she saw him. A figure at the far end of the terrace- cloaked in grey that did not match any uniform she knew. The color was the deep, neutral grey of ancient mountain stone. Weathered. Uninvited.
Lysera recognized the quiet stillness of his posture. It was the same Artisan she had seen in the city, the Grey Wanderer who had spoken of tangled threads.
He stood with his back partially turned, face shadowed by the hood. He paused- subtle, measured- as though tasting the air. The air felt thinner, anticipating something.
Serin tugged at Mirelle's sleeve. "Do you... see that man over there?" "I don't think he's supposed to be here," Mirelle whispered, her voice tight with inherited caution.
Before either could speak again, the figure stepped behind a pillar and vanished. No guards ran. No alarms sounded.
Only Lysera felt the shift- a faint tightening in the air, a momentary void of thermal energy. Like the world exhaling a memory it shouldn't have held.
IV. Corridor Shadows - Words Not Meant for Children
The corridor leading to liturgy theory was dimmer than usual. A door on the right stood partly open. It was the door to the Junior Clerical Annex, a place rarely used by students.
Lysera would have walked past it- she wasn't in the habit of listening where she shouldn't- but voices, measured and low, threaded through the opening.
"...Tier II confirms the anomaly," one Sister murmured.
"...and the other candidate? The one with strong resonance?" another asked.
"Still under evaluation. If lineage aligns, the contrast may become... useful."
The other candidate, Lysera realized, must be the child whose flame sang rather than recoiled.
Useful. The word chilled Lysera more than the marble seat.
Lysera slowed. A floorboard creaked beneath her weight, a soft sound-yet loud enough.
The conversation snapped shut. One Sister moved to the door and closed it with careful finality.
Lysera stared at the wood grain. Something in their tone had carried weight-a shape like the outline of a decision not yet made.
A word surfaced in her mind: Contrast. She did not understand it. But it understood her as an opposing force.
V. Brother in the Study - A Weight Without Name
When she returned home, Lysera found Dorian in the study, leaning over parchment with the posture of someone older than twelve. He looked less like the Asterion heir and more like a besieged general.
He had always looked mature for his age- but today, he looked tired. Too tired.
Ledger entries sprawled across the desk. Distribution charts. A half-finished letter their father had asked him to review-all the mundane machinery of the House that Dorian was already responsible for.
Dorian did not look up until Lysera stepped fully inside. "Did anything happen today?" he asked. The question was light. The weight behind it was not.
Lysera hesitated. So many things had happened. The seat. The numbers. The Observers. The man in grey. The word "useful."
But she shook her head. "No." A lie so small it felt like silence more than deception.
Dorian's eyes darkened, as if he could see the spaces where words should have been. He knew her silence.
A drop of ink slid down his quill and thickened- the temperature shift subtle, but noticeable. A faint, cold pulse had momentarily stilled the ink, leaving a tiny bead of condensation on the quill tip. He set the quill down before it could stain the page.
"Alright," he murmured. He didn't press her. That was how she knew he was worried. Worry was the currency of their communication.
VI. Evening - The Household That Forgot Its Rhythm
Maelinne brushed Lysera's hair in slow, hesitant strokes. The silence in the room was deeper than the manor's massive walls.
The ritual candle by the vanity flickered when Lysera leaned too close- not extinguishing, but narrowing into a thin, pale thread. A fragile string of light.
"Candles misbehave sometimes," Maelinne said, voice gentle but strained. It wasn't unkind. It wasn't convincing, either.
Downstairs, Elphira returned from her Annex choir practice, still flushed from singing. Her laughter carried light with it, and a small flame hovered near her shoulder in delighted resonance. Elphira was warmth personified.
Lysera stepped forward. "El-" The flame faltered. A ripple of distortion wavered through the air. The air was protesting Lysera's presence.
Elphira froze-not in fear, but in caution. She shifted sideways, choosing a path that did not pass too near Lysera's Nullbound radius.
It was a small adjustment. It carved something large in Lysera's chest-the acknowledgment that even Elphira's love had a calculated boundary.
She lowered her hand. Elphira kept walking. The warmth she carried did not linger.
VII. Auremis - The Notice He Could Not Swallow
Auremis Asterion sat alone in his study, the lamplight dim, his shoulders heavy with the governance of his House.
A black-sealed document lay open before him. The paper was thick, embossed with the deep crimson of Shrine administration. He read it once. Then again, slower.
Words that should have been clinical instead felt like verdicts:
OBSERVATION TIER II INITIATED.
DIVERGENCE IN FLAME RESPONSE CONFIRMED.
FURTHER REVIEW RECOMMENDED.
Auremis pressed his fingers to his brow. The lines beside his mouth deepened. The weight of the Throne was settling on his house.
The door creaked. Lysera walked past, small and quiet, the candlelight from the hall haloing her.
Auremis straightened instantly. "Lysera?" he called softly. She paused. Her face was unreadable- not detached, merely protected.
Auremis opened his mouth, as though a hundred reassurances and a thousand apologies fought to be spoken. He saw the storm in her silence, and the guilt was crippling.
But none left his throat. He only said, with a father's practiced gentleness: "Have a peaceful evening."
Lysera bowed her head and continued down the corridor. The moment she left, Auremis let the weight crush him again.
VIII. Night - The Question No Flame Would Answer
The balcony was quiet at night. Too quiet. Lysera stood alone beneath the pale sky, the silver-frost beauty of her face unmarred by tears or fear.
She opened the small notebook Dorian had given her months ago. Its pages were clean-
a silence she had carried without knowing why. Tonight, it felt heavy with unasked questions.
She dipped her quill and wrote her first: Why does silence choose me?
A simple sentence. A painful one.
The candle beside her trembled- not recoiling, not reaching.
Just watching. Waiting for her next instruction.
As if it, too, were trying to answer and failing.
Lysera closed the notebook. The night pressed in with the soft weight of truth unspoken.
Somewhere far from her balcony, in a shrine chamber she had never seen, ink dried on a ledger bearing her name. The TIER II documentation was now official.
And in another part of the world, another child-one whose flame sang rather than recoiled- slept peacefully beneath warm light. The other candidate remained safely unaware of the contrast she presented.
But Lysera did not know that yet. Tonight, she only knew this: The world had begun paying attention to her. And attention, in Thesalia, was never harmless.