"Every empire advertises its mercy in the same architecture: high walls to protect those inside, higher walls to keep out those they have decided do not deserve protecting."
Varenith announced itself a full hour before they reached it.
The smell came first: smoke and coal and the particular human density of a city that has grown faster than its sanitation practices. Then the sound — a low, composite noise that was no one thing but everything at once, the breathing of ten thousand lives compacted into a space meant for perhaps seven thousand, all of it conducted beneath the steady rhythm of hammers on metal that never fully stopped.
Then the walls.
They were forty feet of dressed stone, grey and grimly functional, mounted at regular intervals with braziers that burned with Aether-augmented flames — blue-white fires that cast no warmth, only illumination, lighting everything with the quality of cold judgment. Guards moved along the parapet in the unhurried way of people who know the gate is the only way in.
At the gate: the sigil of the Order of the Sunken Chain. Twin-headed serpent, swallowing itself.
The architectural vocabulary of people who want you to know they are in charge before you are close enough to disagree. Noted.
Seris had pulled her hood up before they came within sight of the walls, and walked with a particular deliberate ordinariness that was itself a skill — she moved like a person with nothing interesting about them, which was an accomplishment so complete it was almost impressive.
"The gates check for cultivation signature," she murmured beside him. "Detection stones. If I pass within ten feet of one without suppressing my signature—"
"They find the brand."
"They find the brand," she confirmed. "Can you suppress a signature you're not sure you have?"
Excellent question. Deeply unhelpful moment for it.
"I'll do my best," he said, "which has historically been more than it should be and less than I needed."
She gave him a look.
"Suppress your core presence as much as possible," she said. "Think of it as — making yourself smaller on the inside."
Making myself smaller on the inside. I have extensive practice.
"Understood."
✦
The gate guards were thorough in the bureaucratic way of people who are thorough because the paperwork says so rather than because they believe in what they're checking. They processed travelers efficiently — papers were reviewed, purposes stated, fees collected, and the detection stones mounted in the gate pillars radiated their invisible inquiry over each person who passed.
When Luceo passed beneath them, one of the stones flickered.
It was a brief thing. A pulse of light in the grey matrix of its surface, there and gone. The guard beside it glanced at the stone, then at Luceo, then back at the stone, which had returned to its baseline vacancy.
"Papers," the guard said.
Luceo produced the document he had prepared — with Seris's help, from materials she had in her pack, in a move he had found practically impressive and ethically flexible.
"Merchant's assistant," the guard read. "Traveling from Aldenmere."
"My employer is ahead," Luceo said, with the specific tired boredom of a man who has been employed for too long. "She doesn't wait."
The guard handed back the papers.
They were through.
Either the suppression worked, the stone is poorly calibrated, or something about what I am did not register as anything the stone knows to look for. Any of those options is interesting. One of them is very interesting.
✦
Varenith's interior was a study in organized inequality. The city was built in rings, each ring separated from the next by a lower, internal wall — the kind of urban architecture that claimed to be about zoning and was actually about the efficient administration of who deserved what. The outer ring was the merchant quarter: dense, loud, smelling of things freshly made and things turning, populated by the industrious lower class conducting their industriousness in the specific manner of people who have been told to be grateful for the opportunity.
They found a room at an inn called the Salted Lantern, which was a name that suggested someone had once tried to be poetic and lost their nerve halfway through. The innkeeper asked no questions that weren't answered by coin, which was, Luceo reflected, one of the more reliable virtues in any world.
Alone in the room — Seris had taken the bed, Luceo the floor, arranged with the sort of wordless negotiation that happens between people who are not yet comfortable enough to discuss comfort — he held the blade and thought.
What do I want? Start there. What do I actually want?
Survival, obviously. Immediate and sustained.
Information. He was catastrophically uninformed about a world that would, sooner or later, attempt to kill him with the specific efficiency of institutions defending themselves. He needed to understand the Pantheon. The cultivation system. The political anatomy of Aethermoor. The nature of what was in his chest, coiled around a fracture, waiting.
And under that — the thing he did not examine directly because direct examination was the fastest way to make something overwhelming — there was the question of why. Why here. Why this world. Why him.
Because someone or something sent you. Or because something collapsed and you happened to fall through the gap. Either way, you arrived. Arriving is enough to start with.
He put the blade down and stared at the ceiling of the Salted Lantern, which was water-stained in the vague shapes of bad decisions.
✦
Morning came with Seris knocking on the floor with her knuckle — a brisk, efficient communication that required no words. He was awake before the second knock. Old habit. Old wounds.
She had information, gathered while he slept from a network of contacts whose nature she declined to specify.
"There's a recruitment event," she said, setting a bowl of something hot on the floor beside him. "In three days. The Varenith Academy of Aetheric Arts — one of the regional feeding academies for Kael's Spire."
"Kael's Spire."
"The primary cultivation academy of the Northern Reach. One of the five Great Academies of Aethermoor." She said it the way people say significant names — with appropriate weight, allowing the information to settle before continuing. "It's where the next generation of Aethermoor's ruling class comes from. Politicians, military commanders, the upper cultivation tiers. Entry is by invitation or open trials."
"And you're suggesting we attend the trials."
"I'm suggesting you attend the trials." She held his gaze. "I can't. Hollowed cultivators aren't permitted in sanctioned academies. The brand disqualifies me." Her voice carried no particular bitterness — a flat statement of a world that had been unjust for long enough that she had stopped expecting it to apologize. "But you can. You're unregistered. Unknown. If you test positive for any Aether affinity, they'll take you, no questions about origin."
"And once I'm in?"
"Resources," she said. "Access. A legitimate identity in this world. Allies, eventually, if you're careful." She paused. "And something to learn from. The academies teach cultivation in structured progression — if you're developing something the way I think you are, you need structure. Or it develops wrong."
She is planning something. This is obvious. The question is whether her plan and my plan are compatible, and the secondary question is whether I have a plan yet.
"Why?" he asked.
She blinked. "Why what?"
"Why help me? You found me in the woods. You don't know what I am. You're taking substantial risk by—"
"The brand reacted," she said simply. "It's a detection mark. It detects Aether signatures that the Pantheon considers threats." She met his eyes. "It didn't hurt when it reacted to you. It does that with Pantheon-allied cultivators — it burns. It's supposed to suppress my own power in their presence." She touched the mark briefly, a gesture that was almost involuntary. "With you it... resonated. Differently. Like finding a frequency that matches rather than one that cancels."
"You're saying you think I'm dangerous to the Pantheon."
"I'm saying I think you might become something they'd rather not exist," she said. "And since we share a category in that regard, I find the company useful."
He was quiet for a moment.
Honest. Calculating. Not warm, precisely, but genuine. The most trustworthy kind of ally: the one who tells you exactly what they want from you.
"All right," he said. "Tell me about the trials."
✦
The Academy Trials of Varenith were held in the city's central plaza — a wide, flagstoned space beneath the impossible blue-white of Aether flames, surrounded on three sides by balconies thick with observers. Citizens, merchants, lesser officials — anyone who wanted to watch the next generation sort itself into useful and useless, the capable and the forgettable.
Luceo stood in a line with forty other candidates and performed the private inventory he had come to think of as his first-morning habit. Around him: young men and women from various provinces, most of them nervous in the transparent way of people who have been promised this moment matters and are discovering that promised moments are terrifying. A few were older — late entrants, wildcards. He was one of them.
The trials themselves were elegant in their simplicity: each candidate placed both hands on a Resonance Pillar — an obelisk of smoothed jade about four feet high — which read the candidate's Aether signature and projected it for the assembled assessors. The assessors were three robed figures seated at an elevated table, their faces professionally neutral, their Aether signatures — even Luceo could feel them dimly now, after two days of Seris's careful instruction — radiating the settled solidity of deep cultivation.
One by one, the candidates placed their hands. The pillar glowed, colors varying: yellow for basic Aether affinity, orange for elemental alignment, green for formation talent, and occasionally, for a few, a deeper color that made the assessors lean forward.
He watched and filed. The system was readable. The assessors responded to unexpected colors with interest. To conventional colors with practiced efficiency. To the absence of color with a brief note and a politely terminal "next."
What will you show them. What are you. Do you know yet.
His turn came.
He placed both hands on the Resonance Pillar.
The jade surface was cool, and smooth, and for a moment nothing happened — a pause long enough that he heard someone in the line behind him shift their weight, a small sound of anticipated dismissal.
And then the pillar went black.
Not dark. Not unlit. Black — the specific, swallowing non-color of a thing that had absorbed light and decided not to return it. The blackness spread from his hands to encompass the full surface of the pillar, and within it, barely visible, were fractures of dim, deep crimson that pulsed slowly, like breath.
The plaza was silent.
The three assessors were no longer leaning. They were standing.
The middle one — oldest, with a face that had the rigidity of long authority — spoke in a voice that was very carefully not startled:
"Name."
"Luceo."
"Province of origin?"
He used the name Seris had suggested. "Farhold."
The assessors exchanged a glance of the particular speed that means an enormous amount is being communicated without words.
"Step aside," the middle assessor said. "You'll be processed separately."
Oh, wonderful. Separately. The loveliest word in the language of people who intend to investigate you.
He stepped aside.
The pillar slowly, reluctantly, returned to jade.
He caught a glimpse, across the crowd, of Seris watching from a second-floor balcony. Her face was composed and still.
But she had covered her collarbone with her hand, where the brand was.
It's resonating again. I have no idea what I am, but I appear to be loud about it.
He almost laughed.
In a different life, in a different world, in a version of himself that had not been broken so many times that the fractures had become structural, he might have been afraid.
Instead he watched the sky over Varenith — that wrong, too-saturated, beautiful, terrible sky — and felt something that was almost, almost, like the beginning of ambition.