Dawn dragged its blade along the rooftops of Solmaris and left the stones bleeding pink.
Hikaru laced his borrowed boots with the same care he'd use to defuse a bomb. The dormitory groaned awake around him—armor buckles clinking, nervous jokes, someone humming to keep their hands from shaking.
He'd slept a handful of minutes. His thoughts had paced all night like a caged thing.
The training yard spread below the cathedral—packed earth, sweat, and old splinters. Knights in white cloaks paced like chess pieces. Instructors shouted names. Bows thrummed. Wooden swords cracked together with happy, vicious noises.
"Heroes, form your lines," barked a captain with a slice of scar across his nose. "Light, Fire, and Lightning to the left. Water and Healing with the chaplains. Wind and Illusion with the rangers. Unawakened—" he barely swallowed the distaste "—with me."
Hikaru joined the smallest line.
Four of them.
A girl chewing her lip raw. A boy trying to be invisible behind his hair. A farm-broad kid whose hands shook. Hikaru made himself stand in a relaxed way that didn't feel like waiting to be judged.
The captain tossed them padded jerkins and staves. "You'll be trained for support," he said. "Lanterns, mapping, ropework, first aid, supply carry. Do your part and don't die. If the gods favor you, your talents may reveal themselves in time."
A few paces away, Leonidas exploded through a sword drill, movements clean and bright as the morning. Every turn pulled cheers. A priest annotated a slate with a satisfied mouth.
Miho, robed in pale blue, checked bandages at a long table. When she saw Hikaru, she lifted a hand. He lifted his back, something in his chest unknotting, then, remembering himself, looked down at his staff like it required intricate attention.
"Names," the captain snapped at Hikaru's line. "Then a short test. Appraisal slate first, then the course."
A squire carried over a board the size of a book cover, its inlaid crystal fizzing with faint light. One by one, the unawakened pressed their hands to it. Runes rose like pale bruises, offering numbers, tags, little verdicts.
"Basic Constitution: 10. Laborer Aptitude."
"Dexterity: 8. Kitchen Aptitude."
"Spirit: 11. Acolyte Prospect."
The board came to Hikaru.
He wiped his palm on his jerkin and pressed down. Cold bled into his skin.
For a breath, the world bent—subtle as a floor settling, obvious as a cliff—down and in and around. Something heavy but delighted tugged at him, like a planet saying yes, there you are.
A skein of violet-black sparks slithered up.
The runes struggled. The board hummed, then coughed.
[Read Error]
— Celestial Signature Detected
— Permission: Restricted
Public Output:
STR 6 AGI 7 VIT 7 INT 9 WIS 8 LCK 3
Class: —
Affinities: —
Notes: UNAWAKENED
Only Hikaru saw the first two lines.
They flashed in the corner of his vision, not on the board. Not on anything. Like a message on the inside of his skull.
He flinched so hard the board squeaked under his hand.
The squire lifted an eyebrow. The captain didn't notice—already bored.
"Six, seven, seven, nine," the captain droned. "You'll keep up if you try. Next."
Hikaru stepped away on legs that didn't quite belong to him, a taste like pennies in his mouth.
That wasn't the Church.
Whatever had whispered in his vision hadn't flowed from the board. It had cut across it. It had told the board to lie. It felt like the difference between a painted window and open sky.
He swallowed.
"Eyes forward!" the captain shouted. "You four—obstacle course. Rope climb, balance beam, weight carry. Move."
The course smelled of old fear and oiled wood.
Hikaru ran.
The rope demolished his palms. He climbed anyway. The balance beam wobbled under his soles; the world kept trying to tilt—a wrongness at the edge of sensation, like gravity had hiccuped. He bit the inside of his cheek and crossed.
At the weight carry, he bent under a sand-filled crate stamped with a sunburst.
Something in the earth said closer.
The weight eased a hair, like friends finding purchase under it, like invisible hands. Hikaru's knees straightened.
No one was near him.
He took three quick steps, startled, then the weight settled back in as if embarrassed to have helped.
Hikaru looked around sharply.
The captain didn't see. The knights were shouting at a lightning-fast boy whose footwork dazzled the dust. The lantern-eyed priest from last night—starburst tattoo at his throat—leaned in the shade of a colonnade with a small, satisfied smile, eyes fixed on Hikaru.
Hikaru's stomach dropped through him like a stone in a well.
He forced himself to finish without cheating gravity again. The crate bit his shoulders deep. His breath shredded at the edges.
When they were released to wash and drink, Miho found him at the well.
She pressed a roll into his hand—still warm. "Eat."
"You're a saint."
"I'm literally apprenticing to one," she said, wry. "How'd it go?"
He considered lying. "I'm… support."
"Then I'll depend on you," she said simply, as if he were already a rope he could not let snap. "I hate it when the lanterns go out."
He snorted. "Me too."
"Seriously. People say 'light is a comfort,' but on a bad day it's also information. Support keeps information flowing. If you do it well, it's like cheating death."
He looked at her carefully. "Who taught you to pep talk?"
"My mother," she said, smiling crooked. "She sold fish in a market notorious for pickpockets and storms. She told me the trick to surviving is to carry the right thing at the right time and to see one step further than everyone else."
"That sounds like a kind of magic."
"It is," she said. "So don't apologize for your place."
He raised the roll in a salute. "Yes, medic."
"Chaplain-initiand," she corrected, wrinkling her nose. "But I'll answer to medic if you say it with snacks."
"Duly noted."
A trumpet cut across the yard, bright as spilt mercury.
The scar-nosed captain strode to a crate and unrolled a parchment. "Heroes! By decree of His Majesty and the Celestial Church, today's novice assignment is a controlled expedition to the Moonfall Dungeon—Tier I. Objective: harvest glowcaps and ironwort, map the first two chambers, return by fifth bell. Illusions and Lightning to the vanguard, Light and Healing central, Fire and Water rear guard. Porters and support, lanterns and gear. Choose your squads!"
Excitement fizzed like a dropped soda.
Leonidas was instantly surrounded—boys slapping his shoulders, girls quick with quips. He looked like a sun with orbiting bodies.
Hikaru stepped back to check the crates—rope, chalk, extra oil, a battered bronze compass that pouted like it worked when it felt like it.
"Hey," said Leonidas, suddenly in front of him, grin turned down to a human wattage. "You on my team?"
Hikaru blinked. "Me?"
"Yeah, man. You look like you can carry rope without complaining, and I can't read maps to save my life."
Two boys behind Leonidas exchanged looks that said why in a language older than rain.
Hikaru found himself smiling, small and real. "I'll carry your rope and make fun of your handwriting."
"Perfect," Leonidas said. He turned, throwing an arm around a lightning-girl with shaved sides. "Aisha, this is Sato. He's support. Sato, Aisha. Fastest feet in the west."
Aisha eyed Hikaru's palms. "You're bleeding."
"I like to pre-season my staves with iron," Hikaru said, straight-faced.
Aisha snorted. "Okay, he can stay."
Miho sidled up, expression innocent. "And you'll want a healer." She flicked her gaze at Hikaru, quick as a coin toss: You okay with this?
He nodded.
"All right," Leonidas said, satisfied. "We're five. That's a full novice squad, right, Sir Captain?"
"Six," the captain said without looking up. "Take a second support or a fire-starter."
Before Leonidas could scan the yard, a shadow lengthened at the edge of their group.
The lantern-eyed priest stepped into sunlight. Up close, his smile looked engraved rather than grown. "Permit me to commend an addition," he murmured, voice oiled. "Novice Kade Valian. A minor talent in fire. Keen. Devout."
A noble boy with hair like a black waterfall and eyes like polished obsidian detached himself from a knot of white-cloaked admirers. He bowed with just enough depth to be legal. "It will be an honor to watch the Dragonsbane work."
Leonidas' grin faltered at the title. His jaw did a small clench—he hadn't chosen it, but it would have him anyway. "Welcome, Kade," he said.
Kade's look skimmed Leonidas with calculation, bounced off Aisha with interest, paused on Miho with proprietary politeness—and landed on Hikaru like a fly choosing to land on a cooling loaf.
"Support," Kade said. "Good. Someone to mind the lanterns."
He said it in the way someone says, good, a mop.
The priest's attention never left Hikaru. "A strange eclipse, hmm?" he murmured, as if they were the only two people in the yard. "An omen with teeth. The Moonfall Dungeon responds keenly to omens. Be diligent, boy."
Hikaru's tongue felt briefly too big for his mouth. "Yes, Father."
"Canon," he corrected gently. "Canon Veres."
The title sat in Hikaru's head like a burr.
Canon Veres blessed them with a small sun-gesture and floated away.
Leonidas exhaled. "That guy gives me the creeps."
Miho's fingers found the pendant at her throat as if to confirm it still existed. "He's important," she murmured. "But… yes."
"Gear up," the captain shouted. "Pairs for lantern duty. Rope team—who knots? No, not you, last time you tied a knot it looked like a nervous intestine—move, move!"
Hikaru snagged a pack, counted oil flasks and rations with a cashier's neat hands, and passed them out with names.
He slid a chalk slate into his belt. He looped rope over his shoulder. He set a lantern's weight in his palm and, for a heartbeat, the handle tugged not down but a degree sideways—like it felt another true north below the city.
He stopped breathing.
Then it was gone.
They marched through the city in a bright little column. People stopped what they were doing to watch—old men with turnip knives, girls carrying baskets, a dog that tried to escort them two streets before losing interest. Bells argued somewhere. The air tasted of iron filings and baking bread.
The Moonfall Dungeon opened like a crack in the world two districts from the palace, in a plaza rimmed in cheap shrines and stall-tables selling talismans. A stone arch ringed the black—carved with moons in every mood. Candles guttered in the shade. The temperature fell in a way that crawled through cloth.
"Remember your steps," an instructor called. "Absolute pathfinding. Two lefts, then the right that smells like old rain. If your lantern dies, sit. If you panic, breathe and sit. If you find a shiny object, congratulations, you've found bait."
The squads moved in, swallowed by soot-velvet.
Hikaru's skin rose in gooseflesh. The darkness here wasn't just absence. It had texture, like brushed suede. The first chamber breathed cool against his face, damp and stone-lipped.
He raised the lantern.
Light pushed, then bent. Shadows didn't behave right. The edges of things had a halo, like he was viewing everything through thick glass.
Aisha swore under her breath. "Feels like a storm decided to be a cave."
"Glowcaps," Miho said, voice grateful for an objective. She pointed to mushrooms like small moons clinging to the wall. "Cut above the gills. Don't bruise them."
Kade summoned a plum-sized flame that hung over his palm, showy as a detour. "We should clear faster," he said. "If we're swift we can nudge farther than the second chamber. Impress the evaluators."
"Or die to impress the evaluators," Aisha said. "Either works, noble."
Leonidas cut glowcaps two at a time, and still made it look heroic. "We stick to plan," he said lightly. "We're novices, not a song yet."
Hikaru moved steady, filing the plink of mushrooms into a sack that he knotted and hung at his belt. He chalked their path on the stone, small arrows and numbers. His lantern threw a ring around their ankles.
Something whispered against his senses like silk.
He paused.
The floor wanted him. Not to swallow—no drama. It wanted to include him. To be under him in a way more intimate than ordinary standing. He adjusted his foot and the wanting eased.
The lantern trembled. The oil wick guttered once as if startled—and the flame swept sideways, windless, toward a corridor that hadn't been there a breath ago.
"Uh," Hikaru said, very quietly. "Does the light usually… lean?"
Miho's hand found his elbow. "No."
Leonidas lifted his head. His grin dimmed. "Captain?" he called softly to the instructor shadowing them from the entry.
No answer.
Hikaru turned.
The arch behind them had blurred, like breath on glass. The instructor's silhouette fuzzed—and slid out of sight as if the corridor had shifted a shoulder.
"Okay," Aisha said. "That's not the normal, 'dungeons squirm when you're new' thing."
Kade's flame, not to be upstaged, grew. "We return."
"No," said another voice, and Canon Veres stepped from a vein of shadow like a coin appearing from a sleeve. His smile was knife-thin. "You proceed."
Every muscle in Hikaru's body re-learned the art of bristling.
Leonidas put himself slightly in front of the group without thinking about it. "Canon," he said carefully. "Our orders—"
"Have been amended," Veres murmured. "By me."
He lifted two fingers to his breastbone and made that not-quite Church sign. The darkness listened.
"An eclipse brought you," he said, eyes on Hikaru though his words flowed for all. "The Moonfall is most responsive at such times. We must know which of you answers when the moon calls. There is a door in the second chamber that only opens for who it wants."
"Only opens?" Aisha repeated. "As in, also only closes?"
"As in, only opens," Veres said, patient as a scalpel. "Step lively. If the door chooses you, glory will follow. If not, you will return with bags of fungus and an amusing anecdote."
Miho's fingers pinched her pendant hard enough to blanch the knuckles.
Hikaru's lantern hummed, faint and thrilled, and then—like a dog eager to bolt—leaned again, tugging his wrist toward a black seam in the rock no one had marked.
He swallowed.
If the door chooses you.
In the skin behind his eyes, letters broke like faint lightning.
[Notice]
— Proximity to Locus: MOONFALL
— Substrate Handshake… pending
— Access: 0%
— Advice: Survive.
He nearly dropped the lantern.
"Hikaru?" Miho's voice was small.
"I'm good," he lied, and had the sudden unhelpful thought that he'd be lying a lot before this was over.
They moved.
The second chamber opened like a throat. Pale fungi freckled the floor. Water dripped at a pace that could euthanize patience.
At the far wall, moonlight pretended to exist. Not light. A memory of it, soaking the rock as if a crescent had once pressed there and left residue.
A crack bisected that crescent.
Hikaru's lantern shivered. The flame surged horizontal, hungry to slide into that crack.
Leonidas' hand settled warm on Hikaru's shoulder. "You don't have to," he said, very softly, a sentence too big for its words.
Hikaru smiled with half his mouth. "If I don't, you will. And you're the one with the fancy title."
"Unwanted," Leonidas muttered.
Kade made an elegant show of impatience. "We have a canon's command."
Aisha rolled her neck, loose as a cat before a pounce. "And a brain."
Miho stood close enough that he could feel her steadiness the way you feel a wall on a bad day. "If anything feels wrong, step back."
It already felt wrong in nine different ways. It also felt like a key with his name on it trying to meet the lock.
Hikaru lifted the lantern.
The crescent crack pulled like tide.
He took one step.
The world tilted, not in a way anyone else could have balanced. Down and in and around grabbed him by the bones and said, mine.
[Notice]
— Substrate Handshake: 1% → 12% → 27%
— WARNING: Vessel integrity inadequate.
— Offer: Binding available. Cost: unknown.
"Hikaru?" Miho again, thread-thin.
He could have said no. He could have said later or never or I'm only a lantern.
Instead he breathed in, held the breath like a promise, and pressed the lantern's light into the crack.
The door opened like a pupil dilating.
Cold spilled out, rich as night, and the air that breathed over them tasted like silver and thunder and the space between a falling thing and the ground that wants it.
Behind Hikaru, Canon Veres' engraved smile widened into something that could bite.
"Excellent," Veres murmured. "The moon has chosen."
The floor moved.
Not like a trap. Like a decision.
The stone beneath Hikaru wasn't where it had been a moment before. He had the dizzy, untethered feeling of stepping off a curb you didn't know was there.
Leonidas lunged, hand catching Hikaru's forearm in a grip bright with intent. Aisha seized his pack straps. Miho's fingers snared his sleeve.
Kade hesitated a heartbeat—calculating—then grabbed the rope at Hikaru's shoulder.
For a terrifying instant, the world decided to forget what "up" meant.
The lantern went out.
And the dark welcomed them in.
—Chapter 2 End—-