Elira's breath fogged in the chill morning air as she stood in the ruins of the warded room, her boots crunching on splintered stone and scorched ivy. The tower had been closed for decades—centuries, some murmured—and now, after the ritual under the tunnels of stone, its magic was broken like wet paper in a gale.
She could feel it: the gritty feel of magic—raw, primal, and churning—still echoing in the rifts. Magic shock had etched magical glyphs into rocks, and the once-intact door had been ripped apart like having supernatural claws tear at it.
He walked alongside her, strain in his gait, dark cape billows of shadow the morning took. He had been silent since they had come back from the Whispering Crypt. He had not needed to speak. She felt it now more than before—the silent storm in him.
A ring of robed, halowed mentors had circled the wreckage. One, Professor Ilthane, eyes blazing under her cloak of silver hair, stood before Kael with an unyielding expression.
"Whatever has occurred in the crypt," she stated gravely, "has unraveled centuries of protection preceding this school itself."
"We were summoned there by the wards themselves," Kael answered softly. "Perhaps you should ask the stone why it whispered.".
Elira's eyes flew open. She'd heard them too—those voices in the earth. But not ghostly. Calling.
Professor Ilthane's face scrunched into a frown. "The Council will have questions. In the meantime, you two are both to remain on Academy grounds. No excursions off. No solitary channeling."
Kael's jaw clenched. Elira struggled not to allow the ice in her veins to show. The whispering had never stopped after they had left the crypt—it had simply retreated into something softer. Something internal.
---
That afternoon, Elira pored over forbidden bloodlines in the west wing of the library. The books were covered in glittering veils of warding and hovered in front of her, their pages opening only when touched with purpose. She wasn't sure what she was searching for, only that her own last name—Thorne—kept repeating itself through her mind like an unspoken spell.
Kael appeared out of the silences between books, as quietly as possible. "You shouldn't be alone here."
She rounded on him, didn't shrug. "You followed me."
"You knew it would be so."
There was a hum of understanding resonating like a shared heartbeat. She had known. From the crypt onwards, something in them had tightened into a tense wire of tension pulled taut with things unspoken.
"I found this," she said, sliding a partially burnt book across the table towards him. The cover had been burned to nearly nothing, but three words were left:
Aetherion. Void. Balance.
Kael's eyes went black. "Aetherion. That manor was taken out of the records by High Council decree."
"And yet here it is. Concealed, not destroyed. As though someone wanted to make people forget—but not lose it."
She turned the page, her discovery a half-drawn crest that spread its edges somewhat as she reached it. A tree of light torn by a river of darkness. Her own symbol branded on her chest beneath her uniform.
"I think that this was my family," she whispered.
Kael's voice was tense. "If it's true, you're more than a light magician. You're one of the few who can reverse Void magic without annihilating the world."
Elira's eyes shifted to him. "Or annihilating it altogether, for that matter."
There was tension between them—sparking, unsure, charged.
Kael's expression altered. "The Council will want this kept quiet."
She nodded. "So we must know more before they summon us."
---
Rain lashed against the table windows that night as Elira sat hunched in her dorm suite, candles flickering low. She reproduced the crest from the book onto paper, following the lines which glowed softly under her fingers. Her thoughts spun.
The Aetherion lineage. A lineage of balance between Light and Void.
There was no reason for them to have been exterminated.
A knock at the door. She wrenched it open to find not Kael—but the Council's investigator: Lucien Marr, in red silk robes, storm glass eyes.
"You've been busy," he said, a mocking crescent on his lips. "Care to tell me what you discovered?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Lucien entered the room without invitation. "The crypt was sealed for a reason. What you released is dangerous."
"I didn't release anything. The bond did."
Lucien's smile faltered. "That bond is older than you know. And more expensive than you can possibly imagine."
Elira's spine straightened. "You're telling me this has happened before?"
Lucien rubbed his temple with a finger. "The last soul bond of yours toppled a kingdom. The Void hungers for attachment. And the Light. well, it consumes just as addictively."
He moved to turn away but halted in the doorway.
"Don't dig too deep, Elira Thorne. Some secrets don't wish to be forgotten."
---.
She met Kael by the edge of the cliffs that night, where the wards shimmered faintly like northern lights above the sea. She told him what Lucien said.
"We're not the first," she said. "But maybe we'll be the last."
Kael didn't answer at first. He looked out over the ocean.
"I was tempered in the Void," he panted. "Shaped by it. But even I can feel it stirring now that we're both present. Hungrier. Angrier."
Elira shuddered. "Then we'll master it. Both of us."
His eyes wrestled with hers, something wild in their depths. "Together may not be enough."
She moved closer, a hand on his chest. "It has to be."
His chest scar blazed. His chest scar seethed. Their hearts beat as one then—and the cliffs trembled beneath them.
A cut across the sky above the sea, a cut of starlight and darkness. Out of it came a voice they could not know—one of immense age, grave, and merciless:
"The Bound Ones stir. Initiate the Reckoning."
---
At the academy, Lucien Marr watched from a distance from the tower, his expression unmoving.
"She's not ready yet," he replied.
A second figure emerged from the shadows behind him. Hooded. Familiar.
"Then perhaps," the voice spoke, "we push the agenda.".