The Grand Archives held a thousand secrets in every corridor, but Dawn had always been a seeker, a questioner of patterns. While the Academy lay emptied of its students, its halls echoing with the silence of parting footsteps, Dawn found himself walking those paths with clarity in his eyes. His destination today was not the rows of bookshelves or the scroll-lined sanctums—it was Instructor Lysandra.
Dawn had questions. After all, something had changed. He had returned from the Wilderness not with six halos, but twelve. An impossible leap in an impossibly short time.
He had asked her once, long ago, in passing curiosity: "Are halos like the phases of Solara? Destined to fade?" To which she had replied cryptically, "Even light folds back into itself."
He found her today not within the cold stone of the archive walls, but seated beside a crystalline fountain in the garden just beyond it. Her legs dipped into the clear water, robes folded to her knees. The sunlight kissed her hair like old parchment kissed by fire—quiet, ancient, but unburned.
Lysandra—the Keeper of Lores. She wasn't a historian chronicling the whisperings of gods or the madness of monarchs. No, she kept what mattered. Lores: the deep truths that shaped reality, and the rules written beneath reality's skin.
"You're here for answers that the Archives cannot give you I presume?" she said without looking, ripples forming where her toes idly stirred the water.
"I reached twelve halos," Dawn said simply. "Unintentionally. And I remembered your words. About collapsing them."
Lysandra sighed and finally turned to meet his gaze. "I hoped you'd ignore that path. Collapsing twelve halos into one isn't a common act—it's an aberration."
"Why?"
She stood, water dripping off her legs as she stepped out and drew a small cloth from her sleeve to dry them. "Because it grants nothing but a wider radius. It hinders what comes next. The second step in the Way of Prime is the forging of a Celestial Mark—shaping one's light from Solara or Lunara. The mark becomes a function, a tool. It channels. Enhances. Evolves. Halos, collapsed, become one. Leaving you with a single Celestial Mark. Twelve Halos mean Twelve Celestial Mark! Do you understand?"
Dawn frowned. "But I read otherwise."
That gave her pause. She narrowed her eyes. "What did you read?"
Dawn reached into his coat, pulling out a weathered, leather-bound codex. Its title was half-peeled from the spine: Codex of Ascended Forms. He opened to a dog-eared page where ink danced in the shape of strange diagrams.
Lysandra's face twisted in recognition and exasperation. "Of course. That book."
"You know the author?"
"I do. He was a demented and reckless guy who piked to live in his dreamland."
"A demented man who wrote with clarity."
"A genius," she corrected, "but mad nonetheless. His ascended forms were theories constructed on unstable foundations—visions, he claimed, glimpsed through dream-fire and starlight. But the codex was never banned. Because no one could ever follow it."
Dawn's eyes gleamed. "Then let me be the first. I jave already reached Infernal Mantle. I am already halfway towards my goal."
Silence. Lysandra studied him. Not just his determination, but the shape of his soul. His Radiance. The way the halos clung to his chest—not as orbits, but as branded will.
"You know," she said quietly, "that book... it isn't in our usual records. We never give it. How did you get it?"
Dawn blinked. "An assistant gave it to me. When I first came here, searching for anything about Resonant Layers. An old man, hunched, sharp eyes, but gentle voice."
Lysandra didn't speak. Her lips thinned into a flat line.
"I thought he was just a librarian," Dawn added.
"He wasn't. He is just a bored old man giving people what should not be given."
---
Far above, beyond the Archive tower, upon a perch of shadowed marble, sat the Grand Instructor. Neither Lysandra nor Dawn could see him. Neither could feel him. His presence was a phantom's hush, his gaze sharp like a falling star.
The Grand Instructor had watched every motion unfold. A smirk curved his ancient lips as he heard Dawn's words. So, he had found the boy again, just as planned.
---
Below, Lysandra continued, her tone now quiet, guarded. "Dawn, collapsing twelve halos is one of the conditions for forming the Transcendent Shell. There is more, harser ones tht you have no hope of completing. Do you understand what you're doing by choosing this path?"
Dawn closed the book. "I'm not choosing. I'm continuing."
She chuckled, shaking her head. "Then may your madness be the kind that shapes reality, not shatters it."
As Dawn turned to leave, the last light of the afternoon filtered through the trees, dancing over the Codex in his hands.
In the distance, instructors stood scattered like silent statues—close enough to observe, far enough not to intrude. They had watched quietly from the shadows, unseen by Dawn.
All but one.
He had no shadow.
The Grand Instructor, cloaked in solitude and thought, murmured to himself as Dawn disappeared around a bend in the path, "Let us see if the orphan of fire finds home in the storm... or becomes the storm."