The Hall of Records did not sleep.
Long after the Trials had ended, its stone tables still echoed with the scratch of quills and the murmurs of tallymen. Candidates filed through, faces pale, wrists glowing faintly where the marks still burned.
Some were led out in silence. Marked.
Some were carried out on stretchers. Broken.
Some were not led out at all. Fallen.
The categories did not change, but the weight of them hung over the hall like a stormcloud.
Kael sat with his group in the waiting chamber, the word Anomaly etched beside his name in a ledger he would never see. Yet elsewhere, other names were recorded with equal gravity.
⸻
Two desks down, a scribe's quill paused.
A boy stood there, tall for his age, posture perfect as if carved from marble. His hair, pale gold, was cut with military precision, and his eyes — cold, violet-grey — carried none of the haunted exhaustion of others.
The scribe frowned. "Name?"
"Axel Veyron," the boy said. His voice was steady, unbent. He held out his wrist without hesitation.
The mark on his forearm glowed with intricate symmetry: runes aligned in perfect lines, shifting as though alive. The shard he carried at his hip pulsed faintly — not broken, not jagged like Kael's, but a smooth crystal blade hilt, as if the Trial itself had forged him a weapon.
The scribe muttered, "Deviation… resonance stable, but above threshold." His quill scratched. "Classification: Anomaly."
The silver-robed watcher, still lingering in the shadows of the hall, glanced up at this pronouncement. His gaze lingered on Veyron the way it had lingered on Kael. His lips pressed into a thin line.
Two anomalies. In one cohort.
Unprecedented.
⸻
Elsewhere, the fates unfolded:
• A girl was carried in screaming, clutching at her eyes as though she still saw horrors no one else could. Broken.
• A boy staggered forward, bleeding from his mouth, no mark at all on his wrist. His record read Fallen, even though he still breathed.
• A group of four — one member missing — stood in tight formation, faces pale but proud. Their marks were standard, clean. Marked.
But it was the anomalies that drew whispers.
Axel Veyron walked past Kael's group as they sat waiting. His stride was steady, proud, as though the trials had been nothing more than a test he had already studied for. His violet-grey eyes flicked toward Kael just once — and stopped.
Two gazes met.
Something wordless passed between them: recognition, rivalry, inevitability.
Veyron's lip curled in the faintest smile — not of kindness, but of promise. He turned away without a word, robes snapping behind him as an attendant guided him toward the higher halls.
Darius muttered under his breath, "Who the hell was that?"
Kael didn't answer. His mark pulsed against his skin, the shard humming faintly in his pocket. For the first time since leaving the Gate, he felt something colder than fear: the knowledge that he was not alone in being different.
The academy was not a place that celebrated uniqueness. It recorded it, studied it, and set it on a collision course.
And somewhere deep inside, Kael understood.
The trials had not ended.
They had only set the stage.