The Awakening Ceremony smelled like incense and blood.
Liriel knelt on the stone dais, her hands pressed flat before the Council of Elders, and felt nothing.
That was the problem.
Around her, five hundred disciples sat in perfect silence on the temple steps, waiting for the moment her core would bloom. The Awakening Ceremony was sacred—every year on the autumn equinox, young cultivators stepped into the Moonveil Sect's inner sanctum to make their first contact with spiritual power. It should have been beautiful. It should have been the beginning of everything.
Instead, Liriel felt the void.
Elder Kaito's voice carried across the stone courtyard, sonorous and slow. He was the Master of Initiates, an old man whose beard had gone white from two hundred years of cultivation. "Liriel Ashenbrand. Daughter of House Ashenbrand. You have studied the foundational texts for three years. You have meditated on the breath of the world. You have prepared your body as a vessel for Resonance." He paused. "Are you ready to meet your true self?"
"I am," Liriel whispered.
It was a lie. She wasn't ready. She had never been ready. But her mother sat in the front row, draped in the silver robes of an established House, and her father stood beside the Council platform, his hand on the pommel of his ornamental sword. They had traveled six days from their ancestral home for this moment. They had paid the Sect's examination fees. They had publicly declared that their daughter would join the ranks of cultivators and bring honor to the Ashenbrand name.
There was no turning back.
Elder Kaito placed his weathered palm on the crown of her head. His Resonance flowed into her—a sensation like cool water pouring through her skull, spreading through her body with deliberate precision. This was the Elder's role: to open the door between the material world and the spiritual planes, to guide the young cultivator's first breath of power.
It was supposed to feel like awakening.
Instead, it felt like drowning.
Liriel gasped. The world contracted. She saw herself from outside her body—a tiny figure kneeling on stone, robes white as a funeral shroud, hair falling like ink down her back. She saw the temple around her shimmer and reveal its true form: an ancient structure of spiraling energy, built by hands that had wielded power she couldn't comprehend.
And she saw the Void.
It was beneath her, below the temple, below the Sect and the mountain and the world itself. A darkness that wasn't darkness, a silence that wasn't silence. It was everything that had been consumed and wasn't. It was the absence of presence, the negation of self. It was infinite.
And it was screaming.
Liriel's eyes snapped open. She felt her core—the spiritual center of her being, the seat of cultivation—and there was a fracture running through it like a lightning bolt through stone.
"No," Elder Kaito whispered.
The fracture spread. It splintered. It shattered.
Pain exploded through Liriel's entire body. Not the pain of fire or blades, but something deeper—the sensation of her own existence breaking apart at the cellular level. She felt her blood boil. She felt her bones splinter from inside. She felt the Void shrieking inside her skull, and she understood, in that moment of crystalline horror, that she was wrong.
She opened her mouth to scream, but blood came out instead.
Her body convulsed on the dais. She heard Elder Kaito shouting for the healers. She heard gasps from the audience—five hundred disciples witnessing her destruction, watching the bright promise of the Ashenbrand legacy shatter like glass. She heard her mother's wail—a sound of such pure anguish that it cut through even the agony of her breaking core.
But louder than all of it was the Void, laughing with a voice that had no sound.
The world went black.
When Liriel woke, she was alone in the infirmary.
The room was white stone and shadow. Moonlight fell through the narrow windows, painting everything in shades of silver and gray. She lay on a medical bed, her body wrapped in bandages infused with healing talismans. She could feel the talismans working—tiny points of warmth against her skin, slowly knitting tissue back together.
But they weren't healing the fracture inside her.
She tried to sit up. Her muscles screamed. Every movement sent shards of pain through her torso. She made it as far as propping herself on her elbows before the room tilted and she had to lie back down.
"Don't move too much." The voice came from the chair in the corner. An older woman, probably sixty in human years but likely much older—one of the Sect's Master Healers. Her name was Physician Wei, and she had kind eyes. "Your body sustained significant trauma. Physically, you're healing. The talismans should restore your mobility within a few days."
Physically.
Liriel closed her eyes. She didn't ask the healer to say the rest. They both knew. There was nothing in the world that could heal a shattered core. A cultivator's power lived in that core. When it broke, it didn't regenerate. It didn't mend. It simply ceased to exist.
She was no longer a cultivator. She was a broken vessel with no purpose.
"Your family was here for two days," Physician Wei continued gently. "Your mother wouldn't leave your side. Your father met with the Council." The healer paused. "The Council has made a decision."
Liriel waited.
"You're being released from your student vows as a disciple of Moonveil Sect. However, the Sect is willing to offer you a position in the servants' wing. You would have room and board, and work befitting those without cultivation." Physician Wei folded her hands. "Your family declined to take you home."
The words landed like stones. Liriel had expected this—cultivation families didn't keep broken children. They were liabilities, stigmas, proof of inferior bloodline. But hearing it stated so clearly still hollowed something out inside her. Her mother's wail made more sense now. Not grief for her suffering, but grief for her uselessness.
"When do I start?" Liriel asked quietly.
"Tomorrow, if you're well enough to walk. The head of the servants' wing will find you work."
Liriel nodded, staring at the ceiling. In the white stone, she could see the faintest trace of something—a marking, maybe, or a shadow. It reminded her of the fracture in her core.
"There's one more thing," Physician Wei said. "You had visitors while you were unconscious. Several of your fellow students came to see you. They left gifts—flowers, tea, sweets. The Sect didn't allow them to stay, but they wanted you to know they were thinking of you."
This kindness, unexpectedly offered, made something crack in Liriel's chest. She turned her face to the wall and said nothing.
After Physician Wei left, Liriel lay in the silence and felt the absence in herself where power should have been. She tried to meditate, to reach inward the way she'd been taught. But there was nothing to reach. It was like trying to touch something on the other side of a wall that went down forever.
She wondered if this was what death felt like.