The corridor to the Grandmaster's office felt like a hush given shape—vaulted stone ribs arcing overhead, sconces caged in brass washing amber light across banners that hung unmoving despite the autumn draft. The floor was a mosaic of onyx and bone-white tile, each tessera etched with curling sigils that glimmered faintly when Kaizer's gem brushed past his chest. He led without his usual bounce, steps measured, jacket unbuttoned but posture—today—military straight.
Outside the great door of oak and iron, four figures waited. Liora balanced on the balls of her feet, breath fogging in the cooler air of the North Wing, heterochromia irises bright with curiosity. Ashborne stood like a statue, twin blades crossed along his spine, white hair a stark flare against black uniform. Keiya's red waves were pinned back, a single strand escaping to cut a diagonal across her cheek; her chin was high, eyes calm, a noble flame banked but ready. Klyden noticed them first. He lit up, arm windmilling. "Heeey! Over here!" he stage-whispered, which defeated the point of whispering.
Beside them, a fifth student Wads didn't recognize: hair split cleanly down the middle—one half ink-black, the other winter-white—skin so pale he looked almost lit from within. His eyes were an unsettling petal-pink, irises transparent as if color had forgotten him halfway. He said nothing. Kaizer peeled off to him with a subtle nod and the two exchanged a low conversation that never quite became sound.
Wads drifted to Klyden's side. "What's going on?"
"I don't know?" Klyden said cheerfully, as if "unknown mission" were synonymous with "festival day." "They said our presence was needed." He didn't bother to wipe the grin off his face. If anything, it grew.
Six of us, Wads thought, counting—seven if you included the stranger with the divided hair. All top ranking first-years, pulled from class with no preamble. His mind spun possibilities. It rarely did otherwise.
Kaizer returned, laid a hand to the iron ring that hung from the door, and turned it. The hinges sighed like an old bellows. "You guys can head inside now," he announced, and led the way.
The office of the Grandmaster could have been a small museum. Shelves ran the length of the walls, books in every size stood shoulder to shoulder, their spines stitched in languages dead to ordinary tongues. Silver-lidded jars held ingredients like storms in miniature—bottled lightning, a feather that cast no shadow, a glass ampoule where a single snowflake never melted. The far left corner was given to alchemy: a brass-boned brewing stand where a thin blue flame licked an alembic, the air there sweet with basil and bitter with wild rue. A rack of clean stoppered vials gleamed like teeth. Opposite, a case of weapons: a spear whose haft was petrified ivy, a dagger that had drank so much sunlight its blade was iridescent.
Above, from cornice to cornice, sprawled a hand-painted map of the known world, the pigment so saturated it looked wet: the glacier-bright sweep of Zhero Ryth; the hexagonal glitter of Xekara Dome; the jag-toothed scar of Jestew Rift; the sea-soft pastels of Angeloco Kingdom; the heat-hazed ochres of Hustaw Desert; the cool prisms of Vertex Dome; and the cloud-lashed spires of Gersgie Peak. Rivers were gilt threads; trade routes, points of iron dust trapped beneath varnish. Wads' eyes drank it, cataloguing ports and passes, the way dominions kissed at borders like old enemies pretending at peace.
The smell of the room was a scholar's heartbeat: paper warmed by sun, old leather, ink, a sessile under-note of potion vapor that tingled the sinuses. At the window, a high gothic arch netted in leaded glass, an old man stood with his back to them, city and mountain laid out below as if the world had slid closer to hear him breathe.
Kaizer stopped three paces in and, without theatrics, brought his right hand to his left chest, thumb folded: the Zheno salute. Reiyell mirrored him with fluid ease. Liora, Ashborne, and Keiya followed suit; their motions had the crispness of repetition. Wads, a step behind, copied—clean lines, eyes forward.
Klyden, of course, threw his elbow out like a rooster mid-crow. Keiya's palm found the back of his head with well-practiced accuracy. "Posture," she murmured, not unkindly. He pouted, adjusted, and stood properly.
"Oh-ho." The Grandmaster's voice was smoke and honey as he turned. His beard fell to his sternum in a white torrent, caught with a bronze ring; his eyes—ancient sea, storm-trimmed—missed very little. He lifted one hand, two fingers together, and lowered it; the signal to ease.
Kaizer's tone had shed its carnival gloss. "I did as you ordered, Grandmaster." He bowed a fraction. The jest was gone from his mouth; fire had a formal face too, it seemed.
The Grandmaster put both hands behind his back and walked the line with his gaze, the way a general could inspect an army and see not uniforms but muscle and math. Wads felt the pressure like altitude. Some reptile-old reflex made a smile want to twitch up at the corner of his mouth—the same twitch he had to smother whenever he stood near something enormous and dangerous and good. He strangled it out of respect. Not the time.
"I hear a great deal," the old man said, "about how… overachieving… this year's first-years are. Especially the six of you." He glanced to the desk beside him, where a sheaf of parchment lay dog-eared. "Oh—there is still another, but she could not come." His eyes warmed. "Ysoria Eldridge. Talented child."
His attention slid back—to Reiyell—and softened further, sheep's-wool over steel. "And to think the little Rei I used to see underfoot is now all grown. Time does a trick of it." A small laugh creased the corners of his mouth.
Reiyell inclined her head with that singular, sovereign poise. "Your guidance made the footing surer, Grandmaster. The Academy is in your debt—and I am, most of all."
"Mm." He seemed pleased, then allowed it to pass like a cloud over sun.
He pivoted. "Tell me—does anyone know what particular trouble currently coils around our capital?"
Reiyell raised her hand. "The illegal smuggling of drugs, Grandmaster."
"Correct." His gaze tracked across their faces. "Then, Princess, do you know why I called the six of you here?"
"I apologize, but I do not." The honesty was unadorned. In another mouth it might have sounded like humility. In hers, it was simply the way truth fitted on the tongue.
"I shall change the question." He clasped his hands, moved a step nearer. "In what year do students of Zheno Academy deploy for missions?"
Klyden's arm shot up so fast his sleeve snapped. "Second year!" he chirped, voice bright as a parade. The Grandmaster's chuckle threaded the air. Even Ashborne's mouth ticked, which for Ashborne was comedy.
"Correct," the old man said. "But I shall make an exception for the six of you."
The words struck like a bell. Wads felt his brows draw down. Liora's lips parted; a quick inhale. Klyden's eyes went sparrow-round, full of questions and none of the cautions. Ashborne dipped his head slightly, white hair curtaining whatever passed in his gaze. Keiya's hands laced behind her back, shoulders settling an inch lower—acceptance or readiness, hard to say. Reiyell didn't move at all: a still center around which the room's breath seemed to circle.
An exception? Wads' mind began its spinning: assets, liabilities, optics. First-years had no field hours. Give untested blades an enemy and you got either bright legends or needless funerals.
"Has any of you heard of a drug called Tres?" the Grandmaster asked, lowering himself into the chair carved to fit him like an old habit.
No hands. The room hushed in the way rooms do before a wound is named.
The Grandmaster flicked a look to Kaizer. The fourth-year understood in the space it took to inhale.
"Tres," Kaizer said, voice level now, "is a relatively new compound. It's brewed in backroom labs and clever basements, distributed in city veins we're still tracing. It does two things, depending on what the user leans on most: it pushes physical capacity past natural limit, or it sharpens and swells a diety's arcana. Sounds convenient. It isn't." He let the quiet wait a heartbeat. "It corrupts. Not your morals—your source. What should be divinity—clean, exact, gifted by the Empress of the Unknown—gets… turned. Tainted. The energy goes feral. Fast gains; ugly ends. It's blasphemy in a bottle."
Even Klyden's grin thinned.
Kaizer continued, gaze traveling from student to student to be sure the blade of it pressed equally. "Based on what the Order found, Evelina Petrovna used it yesterday. The surge. The color shift. The way her control—didn't exist." He didn't soften the words. "It wasn't a second wind; it was rot with teeth."
Wads' throat tightened with the recollection of that sudden red in her shadows, the way strength had come like a scream rather than a breath. So that's the shape of it, he thought. Not an awakening—an intrusion.
"It did not happen once," Kaizer said, and now the room cooled, "but twice. At the first event—the flags—an individual from 1C with a lizard tattoo at the neck. We found him last night." His jaw set. "Dead in his dormitory. Overdose. Tres."
Silence. The kind that wasn't emptiness but gravity: a pressure that rolled over skin and sat behind the eyes. In that silence, embarrassment budded and died in Wads' chest. If the public got the scent that their Academy—this Academy—could not keep its veins clean of such poison… it would not be a bruise; it would be rot.
The Grandmaster cleared his throat softly, a cough no rougher than a page turned. "It was the consequence of my carelessness." He did not need to claim it. No one in the room blamed him. Still, he took it. "The responsibility is mine."
He leaned forward, elbows on desk, fingers steepled, eyes steady as plinths. "I ask each of you to accept deployment one week from today. Mission parameters: locate and eradicate the source of Tres, and all tributaries feeding it. The Order will arm you with intelligence and tools."
Wads' hand rose before his mind finished vetting the impulse. The question had to be voiced or it would scratch his skull all night. The Grandmaster's brow tipped: proceed.
"Why us?" Wads asked, no challenge in the tone, only clean inquiry. "We barely have any experience."
The Grandmaster smiled—not indulgent, not dismissive. The kind of smile knives might trade when they found they were honed at the same stone. He opened his palms to air, then closed them. Kaizer inhaled to speak—"The Order could—" —and the Grandmaster lifted a hand. He would answer this himself.
"Because experience is not the same as suitability," the old man said. "The Order can break doors. It cannot slip through them unnoticed. This requires a hand that looks like a student's and strikes like a veteran's." He stood, slow, no theatrics, yet when he straightened, the map behind him seemed to anchor to his shoulders. "Because there is rot inside my house as well as without it. I will not risk informing half the city every time I move a piece. You six sit outside the Order's ordinary chain—clean, in that sense. The fewer who know, the fewer who can betray."
His gaze pinned each of them in sequence. "Because you have already stood in the storm of corruption and did not bow your heads. You saw it, felt it, were not swallowed. That matters." His attention lingered on Reiyell. "Because a Princess' presence is a signal to our allies… and a deterrent to those who think to make sport of children."
He turned then to Keiya and Klyden. "Because flame and sun have already learned to dance together without burning the room." To Liora and Ashborne. "Because speed and shadow have found a shared tempo." Back to Wads. "Because you, Waxzi, do not flinch from the edge of the unknowable. You ask the right questions before the wrong moment." A hint of humor there, like a coin flashed and palmed. "And finally: because steel is not tempered in a basin of rain. We temper it in a live flame. I do not send you to break. I send you to be made."
He let the words settle; then the pragmatics followed, crisp and clean. "You will not be abandoned. Kaizer will serve as your handler and visible liaison—his role is twofold: to keep you supplied and to be the reason any suspect eyes stop looking deeper. You will have a covert extraction failsafe. You will have an Order shadow you will not see." His gaze slid, almost imperceptibly, to the pale student with the split hair. The boy's pink eyes didn't blink. "If you are compromised, invoke the phrase 'third bell.' You will be lifted."
The line of Wads' shoulders loosened by a fraction—contingencies had a way of quieting the worst parts of his mind. The other parts were already building trees of outcomes, each branching toward different cities, streets, names he didn't know yet but would.
"Your Majesty," Reiyell said softly, "you honor us with your trust. We will not squander it."
Keiya inclined her head, voice low. "The West lends its fire."
Liora's mouth curved. "I've been bored," she said, which in Liora-lexicon was consent.
Ashborne didn't speak. His blades made the promise for him.
Klyden, finally remembering gravity, lifted his chin. "We bring them the dawn," he said—and somehow didn't grin when he said it.
"Good." The Grandmaster reached for a seal and pressed it into molten wax on a packet of documents. The stamp hissed, and for an instant the shape—a stylized raven with a crown of thorns—glowed cherry. He slid the packet to Kaizer. "Brief them in two days. Equipment issue in five. Departure in seven. Until then, you will speak of this to no one outside this room. Not roommates. Not lovers. Not mirrors."
Kaizer tucked the packet under his arm and found his smile again, the warmer, human version. "And I'll make sure you're not walking into the dark without a lantern." He looked at each of them, then—almost as an afterthought—at the pale boy by the door. "You'll meet your… consultant… at the briefing."
The student with the divided hair tilted his head a degree, as if a sound only he could hear had called his attention elsewhere. His pink eyes had the sheen of quartz. When the light struck them, it caught like dawn on frost.
Wads' gaze drifted up to the map once more. The painted borders had always looked stable. Now, with Tres in the stories and spiders inked at necks, those lines seemed… porous. As if something could seep through and no one would notice until the water tasted wrong.
The Grandmaster's voice brought his eyes back down. "You have one week," he said, "to become, together, something I can send where my Order cannot go. Rest. Train. Learn each other's silences as well as strengths. The hunt begins when the seventh bell tolls next week."
A brief pause, not quite a benediction, not quite a warning. Then: "You are dismissed."
They saluted as one. Even Klyden's elbow behaved. As they turned, Wads felt the weight settle on his shoulders—not the kind that bowed a person, but the kind that made the spine take honest measure of itself.
In the corridor again, the Academical hush felt different: more alive, as if the sigils underfoot had leaned closer to listen. Klyden blew out a breath and immediately ruined the moment. "Sooo," he said, voice bouncing off stone, "exceptional heroes on a secret mission? Anyone else hungry?"
Keiya smacked his arm without looking. Liora laughed outright. Ashborne walked on, unbothered. Reiyell's profile was pure composure, but Wads saw the faintest lift at the corner of her mouth—the smallest answer to a future that had just leaned its weight on them.
Behind them, the great door of oak and iron whispered shut. In the map-room, the Grandmaster's window caught a slant of late light; it painted the seven kingdoms in gold. Somewhere beneath that paint, in the forest dark and the city veins, a spider sigil glowed and a cruel chemistry waited.
One week, Wads thought. Enough time to sharpen. Not enough to make this simple.
He looked down the hall where Kaizer was already talking in low, intent tones to the pale, divided-haired boy.
The hunt had a date now.