Dawn at Astral Peak was usually a time of crisp air and hopeful energy. My dawn with Professor Dorian Vane was something else entirely.
His domain was not in the main academic complex, but in a detached, three-story tower of weathered black stone that seemed to lean away from the morning sun as if in distaste. The "Tower of Weeping Stone," the students called it, though never within earshot of its occupant. No path led to its door; one simply walked across a patch of dead, grey grass that crunched like ancient bones underfoot.
The door was unadorned iron, pitted with rust. It swung open before I could knock, revealing a gloom so profound the dawn light seemed to die at the threshold. The air that washed out was dry, cold, and smelled of old paper, preservative chemicals, and a faint, sweet undertone of decay.
"Enter. Close the door. Do not touch anything."
The voice was a dry rasp, like pages being turned in a tomb. I stepped inside, and the door shut with a solid, final clunk, plunging us into near-darkness. A moment later, a single, greenish everbright stone flickered to life on a distant desk, casting long, distorted shadows.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw the tower was not a study, but a vertical ossuary of knowledge. Every wall was floor-to-ceiling shelves, but they held no books. They held specimens. Jars of preserved, floating things in murky fluid. Skeletons of creatures both familiar and bizarre, wired together in poses of eternal stillness. Dried plants that looked more like mummified claws. And dust. An immense, all-pervading layer of fine, grey dust that coated every surface, muffling sound and scent.
At a large, stained worktable in the center of the room stood Professor Vane.
He was a tall, gaunt man, all sharp angles and stretched skin. His hair was the colour of ash, lank and long. He wore spectacles with lenses so thick they magnified his eyes into pale, watery orbs. He was currently dissecting what looked like the petrified heart of a large reptile with a scalpel that glowed with a sickly purple light.
"Kaelen Veridian," he said without looking up. "The cracked lens. The entropy boy. Caelum's little problem." He made a precise incision. "He thinks you're fascinating. I think you're a symptom. A late-stage symptom of a world whose metaphysical immune system is failing. But symptoms are data. Sit."
He gestured with the scalpel to a stool on the other side of the table, its surface cleared of everything but more dust. I sat.
For a full minute, the only sound was the minute scritch-scritch of his scalpel and the distant, erratic drip of condensation somewhere in the tower's heights.
Then he put the scalpel down and looked at me. His magnified eyes were unsettlingly perceptive, but in a different way from the Headmaster's. Caelum saw the forest. Vane saw the rot in each individual tree.
"Show me your hand," he rasped.
I held out my right hand, palm up. He didn't touch it. He leaned close, his lenses focusing. "Not the flesh. The echo. The one Caelum sensed. The God-rot. Push it to the surface. Just a flicker."
He knew. He wanted to see the void-datum. My mind raced. Could I control it? Could I show just enough?
I focused inward, on the cold, screaming silence of the archived pattern. I didn't try to use it. I simply remembered it, vividly, and let that memory resonate through the crack in my core, hoping to project a whisper of its nature.
A faint, almost imperceptible chill radiated from my palm. The dust on the table near my hand didn't stir, but it seemed to… grey further, becoming momentarily more inert. The green light from the everbright stone dimmed by a fraction around my fingers.
Professor Vane's breath hissed out between his teeth. A sound of professional appreciation. "Fascinating. Not just an echo. An… imprint. A fossil of negation. You didn't just find it, boy. You ate a piece of it. And your pathetic little core is trying to digest it." He leaned back, wiping his scalpel on a stained cloth. "It's killing you, slowly. You know that, yes? That crack is a fistula. It's leaking you out, and the void-stuff is seeping in. You have, by my estimate, a few years before you either dissolve into a quiet little puddle of nothing or the contradiction tears you into spontaneous cosmic confetti."
His clinical description of my impending, bizarre death was delivered with the same tone one might use to discuss the weather. It was horrifying, and yet, a strange relief. Here was someone who didn't deal in potential or pity, but in facts of decay.
"That is my diagnosis," he said. "My prescription is knowledge. If you are to be a host to this… parasite of absence, you must understand its nature. You must become an expert in endings, so that you might, perhaps, delay your own." He gestured around the dusty chamber. "Welcome to your new classroom. We will start with the fundamentals: The Five Stages of Magical Decomposition. Today, we discuss Atrophy."
And so began my tutelage under the Professor of Dust.
There were no inspiring lectures, no encouraging words. Vane's teaching was a relentless autopsy of failure. We studied crumbled enchantments, their runes faded to illegibility. We analyzed the mummified remains of magical beasts, determining which organ failed first when their internal mana balance collapsed. We reviewed historical accounts of fallen empires, not for their glory, but for the precise moment their societal mana-grids overloaded and fried.
It was brutal, depressing, and utterly illuminating.
He taught me to see decay not as a single event, but as a process. Atrophy (loss of power), Contamination (introduction of corruptive elements), Cascading Failure (the breakdown of interdependent systems), Metastasis (the spread of failure to healthy systems), and finally, Inertia (the state of stable, non-magical ruin).
My own condition, he declared, was a rare case of "Simultaneous Atrophy and Contamination with a dash of Cascading Failure." Cheerful.
But within this grim curriculum, I found gold. His explanations of Contamination dove-tailed perfectly with my understanding of the void-datum. His theories on Cascading Failure gave me a framework for my "precision interference"—I wasn't just poking things; I was introducing a micro-contaminant at a stress point to trigger a cascade.
One afternoon, while we were painstakingly reassembling the fractured mana-crystal of a broken "Everflame" orb, he spoke without looking up.
"Your little spatial twitch," he said. "It's not a skill. It's a spasm. The spatial fold is there, but your body lacks the cohesion to execute it cleanly. You are a cracked bell trying to chime; you produce a rattle." He held up a shard of the dead crystal to the light. "Tell me, what is the primary cause of failure in this crystal?"
I examined it with my [Mana-Sense]. "The internal lattice has a hairline fracture. Not from external impact, but from a microscopic impurity in its formation. Under sustained energy flow, stress concentrated at the impurity until…"
"Until Cascading Failure," he finished. "The flaw was always there. The power simply revealed it." He looked at me, his magnified eyes unblinking. "Your body is the crystal. Your core is the flaw. The void-echo is the impurity. Every time you use your 'spasm,' you are pouring power through the fracture. You are hastening your own decomposition. A most elegant suicide."
It was a stark warning. But it was also an insight. The problem wasn't the [Flicker Step] principle. It was my vessel.
"Can it be stabilized?" I asked, the question slipping out before I could stop it.
Vane snorted. "Stabilized? No. You cannot un-crack a bell. But you can… buttress the crack. Reinforce the area around the flaw so it does not propagate. It would require a material of immense stability, capable of integrating with your living tissue and mana system. Something like…" He trailed off, his gaze drifting to a specimen jar on a high shelf containing a lump of strange, iridescent metal. "...Admantium, perhaps. Or a sliver of a Stasis-Beetle's carapace. Rare. Prohibitively expensive. The academy would never allocate such resources to a dying F-rank."
He said it not to be cruel, but as a simple statement of budgetary and logistical fact. A dead end.
But to a thief, "rare" and "prohibitively expensive" were not barriers. They were addresses.
Later that night, in my barracks, I reviewed the encounter with Machina.
[PROFESSOR VANE'S ANALYSIS IS CLINICALLY ACCURATE. YOUR CORE INTEGRITY IS DECLINING AT A RATE OF 0.8% PER LUNAR CYCLE. THE [FLICKER STEP] ACCELERATES THIS BY APPROXIMATELY 3% PER USE. LONG-TERM VIABILITY WITHOUT INTERVENTION: 22 MONTHS.]
Twenty-two months. Not years.
"The reinforcement," I sub-vocalized. "The Stasis-Beetle. Is there one in the Menagerie?"
[SCANNING PUBLIC MENAGERIE RECORDS… NEGATIVE. STASIS-BEETLES ARE XENO-ARTHROPODS NATIVE TO TEMPORALLY-UNSTABLE PLANAR FRAGMENTS. THEY ARE NOT KEPT IN CAPTIVITY. HOWEVER… CROSS-REFERENCING WITH MALKOR'S LEDGER AND VAULT INVENTORY LEAKAGES FROM THE VENATI BREACH…]
A schematic appeared. A list of artifacts logged in the Vault of Echoes, compiled from the scattered, inferred data of my distant sensing and the Venati's movements. One entry glowed:
*Item #447: Carapace Fragment, Stasis-Beetle (Mature). Status: Inert. Use: Alchemical Stabilization/High-End Warding Component.*
It was in the Vault. The one place with security that had briefly been bypassed by masters of stealth. The place now under the direct, paranoid scrutiny of the Headmaster after the Venati's visit.
A sliver of a beetle's shell. A potential patch for my crumbling soul. Locked in the most secure location in the academy, watched by a man who could see the void-echo in my palm.
The Professor of Dust had given me a diagnosis, a timeline, and a cure. He had also, inadvertently, given me my next, most impossible heist. The thief needed to steal the bandage for his own wound, from a vault that was now a fortress, under the gaze of a man who was practically a demigod. The study of decay had just become intensely personal.