Aether pushed himself up, his chest aching where the kick had landed.
His knees were scraped, and his hands trembled as he gathered his keys and clutched his ID card.
He felt small—smaller than he had ever felt in the vast, dark woods of his home.
As he stood, wiping the dust from his tunic, he noticed a change in the atmosphere.
The younger students continued to snicker, but the Older Species—the ones who had lived long enough to remember the world before the Great Downfall—stayed silent.
A group of High Elves with silver hair that reached their waists stood near a crystalline archway.
Beside them, an Elder Dragonite, his skin like burnished copper and eyes filled with ancient fire, looked down at Aether: There was no hatred in their gaze—only a heavy, crushing pity.
It was the look one gave to a beautiful creature destined for the slaughterhouse.
The Elder Dragonite slowly raised a clawed hand, pointing toward the horizon of the city.
There, looming over everything else, was the Nexus Academy; It was a titan of architecture, a spiraling tower of white stone and floating rings of mana that seemed to pierce the very clouds.
It was where the Spectrums were measured, where the future was decided, and where Aether was supposed to go.
Aether took a shaky breath.
He looked back at the Golden Gates, now closed and distant, then looked toward the Academy.
He was a speck of dust in a city of diamonds, but he remembered his mother's warmth and his father's fierce grip.
"I am a man," he whispered to himself, the words barely audible over the hum of the city.
He began to walk.
Every step toward the Academy felt like a step into the mouth of a beast.
He passed through the central plaza, past statues of Kraton and Aetheros that seemed to track his movement with stone eyes.
The air surrounding the Nexus Academy was not merely oxygen; it was a pressurized medium of pure, unadulterated power.
To Aether, it felt like treading through invisible, honey-thick currents of mana that hummed with a low-frequency vibration, a literal song of the gods that vibrated in his very marrow.
The architecture of the High City defied every law of physics Aether's young mind understood.
Buildings didn't just stand; they existed in a state of architectural grace, with buttresses made of solidified light and balconies that drifted lazily in the air like lily pads on a pond.
Gravity here seemed more like a suggestion than a rule. Waterfalls flowed upward from marble basins, the droplets glowing like tiny pearls of liquid starlight before dissolving into mist that smelled of ozone and ancient parchment.
The livelihood around him was a chaotic, beautiful symphony of the superior.
"Look at the way the mana-currents are swirling around the Spire today," a High Elf noble remarked to his companion, his voice like the ringing of a silver bell.
He gestured with a hand that had elongated, elegant fingers. "The Magical Spectrum is at its peak. My daughter should have no trouble hitting the Fifth Tier during the placement."
"Indeed," replied a Dragonite, his voice a deep, gravelly rumble that seemed to shake the pavement.
His scales, a shimmering obsidian, caught the light of the artificial suns hovering above. "Though I fear my son's Physical Spectrum is far too aggressive. He cracked a training dummy of reinforced steel this morning. Kraton's blood runs hot in him."
As these titans of the new world conversed, their children—the future lords of Sylvaris—formed a gauntlet of mockery.
"Is that... a human?" a young Daemon girl whispered, her tail twitching in rhythmic disgust as she adjusted her silk robes.
She fanned herself with a wing, her eyes—black pits with crimson pupils—tracking Aether's every stumble. "I thought they were extinct. Or at least kept in the pens. It smells of... dirt and sweat."
"It's a charity case," a Centaur boy snorted, his hooves clattering sharply against the iridescent cobblestones. "The Council thinks it's neccessary to educate them."
The Centaur would glare at Aether. "As if you can teach a dog to recite poetry."
Aether heard it all.
Every word was a needle pricking his skin. He felt the weight of his own nothingness.
In this world of glowing skin, soaring wings, and eyes that held the secrets of the stars, he was a smudge of brown and grey.
His boots, caked with the mud of a three-day trek, left dull marks on the pristine, self-cleaning marble.
"I want to go home," he thought, and the thought was a silent scream behind his ribs.
"I want the smell of the damp earth and the smoke from the hearth. I want the way the wind sounds when it moves through the pine needles, not this... this singing light."
He clutched his ID card until his knuckles turned white.
"Mama would be holding my hand right now. She'd be telling me to ignore them. Papa would be standing behind me like a mountain, and no one—not even that big Dragonite—would dare to sneer."
"I can still feel the ghost of Papa's hand on my shoulder. It's the only thing keeping me from falling over."
"Everything here is so bright... it's so bright it hurts. Why is everything so sharp? Why do the walls look like they want to cut me?"
Soon, the concrete seemed to change as Aether walked long enough.
He looked up at the Academy's entrance. It was a maw of white and gold, an entrance so grand it made him feel like an ant approaching a palace.
The sheer scale of the statues—the Two Gods, Kraton and Aetheros, towering hundreds of feet into the air—made his vision swim.
Kraton held a hammer that seemed to be forged from a dying star, his muscles rendered in stone so realistic they looked ready to flex.
Aetheros held a staff of pure crystal, his face an expression of cold, divine indifference.
Neither god looked down at the human boy at their feet.
They don't see me, Aether realized with a sudden, chilling clarity. Nobody here sees me. I'm just a ghost that hasn't realized it's dead yet.
"Hey! Human!"
The shout broke through his internal monologue: A group of young Goblins, dressed in fine velvet that looked ridiculous on their green, warty frames, were pointing at him and laughing.
One of them threw a small, glowing fruit.
It burst against Aether's shoulder, staining his tunic with a sticky, neon-blue juice.
"Make a trick, human!" the Goblin jeered. "Show us that legendary 'nothing' Spectrum!"
The laughter that followed was a chorus of different voices—the trill of Faeries, the bark of Beastmen, the haughty chuckles of Elves.
Aether didn't look up. He just kept walking, one heavy, mud-caked boot after the other, toward the great stairs of the Nexus.
At the top of the Great Stairs stood the High Dean, an Elf whose presence was so powerful it created a literal aura of shimmering gold around him.
He was holding a Spectrum Staff.