Thorne's fork hovered over his plate. "That's an awfully blunt question for lunch conversation," he said lightly, his voice just loud enough for the surrounding Caledris students to hear.

"It's a fair one," Rowenna replied, her tone cool but edged. "The Empire doesn't court people without reason. If they want you, they'll take you. The only choice you have is whether you go willingly… or not at all."

Murmurs rippled down the table. The floating light-orbs above their heads bobbed and swayed like they could sense the tension, their glow sharpening to a pale silver.

Thorne set his fork down, folding his hands on the table. "And if I said I hadn't decided yet?"

"That's not the kind of thing you don't decide," she said, leaning in slightly. Her grey eyes were bright and unblinking, like a predator ready to pounce. "Every kingdom will take your answer as a statement of allegiance. Including Caledris."

From further down, Vivienne made a noise halfway between a laugh and a scoff. "Assuming Caledris even cares if he leaves."

Thorne arched an eyebrow. "Not sure if you noticed, but it's a big decision."

Her lips pressed into a thin line. "No, it's not. Not if you care about where you came from."

That drew a few curious glances down the table. The floating light-orbs above flickered faintly, their soft gold shifting to an almost judgmental white.

Thorne leaned back in his seat. "I see. And this is the part where you tell me how I owe my loyalty to Caledris?"

"I shouldn't have to tell you," Rowenna shot back. "You were born under its banner. Trained under its crest. Everything you've become, every skill you've honed, you owe that to your kingdom. And the second you take the Empire's hand, you throw all of it away."

Her words carried, and Thorne noticed more than one Caledris student pretending not to listen.

"I don't recall Caledris being this concerned about me before," Thorne said dryly.

"That's not the point," she snapped. "It's about what you represent. If you join them, it's a betrayal. You'll be standing with the people every other kingdom fears. Including ours."

Thorne's smile was sharp but without humor. "Betrayal's a strong word."

"Not strong enough." She leaned in slightly, her voice lowering but no less sharp. "Maybe you don't care what people here think of you. But when you wear their colors, you're telling the world that Caledris wasn't worth your loyalty. And that's something you can't take back."

The enchanted table under Thorne's hands gave a faint hum, like the magic itself had picked up on the tension.

He held her gaze, unflinching. "Then I'll make sure I'm worth more to the Empire than I ever was to Caledris."

Rowenna's eyes narrowed, a flicker of something colder than anger in them now. "And when Caledris stops claiming you, don't act surprised."

Lucien, sensing the edge in her tone, hastily muttered something about dessert. The floating orbs above them bobbed, their glow warming again as conversations cautiously resumed. But the silence between Thorne and Rowenna was thick as stone, and when she finally looked away, the judgment in her expression lingered like a brand.

Rowenna's hands curled into fists on the table. "You think this is just about you? It's not. Every move you make reflects on Caledris. On us. You're willing to sell yourself to the Empire for… what? Power? Comfort? Do you have any idea what that says about your character?"

The words landed like strikes, deliberate and aimed.

Thorne's jaw tightened. His pulse quickened, but not from shame, anger was starting to coil in his gut, slow and hot.

"You're awfully free with your judgments," he said, voice low, even. "Must be nice to see the world in black and white."

Her eyes flared. "Don't twist this. Loyalty isn't complicated."

A humorless smile touched his lips, sharp as broken glass. "Isn't it?"

"How can you even hesitate?" she pressed, voice rising now, drawing a few more curious glances down the table. "Caledris gave you everything..."

The temperature in Thorne's voice dropped several degrees. "Careful, Rowenna."

She blinked at the sudden shift, but her glare didn't waver. "I'm just telling you the truth. You owe Caledris. Turning your back now would be..."

"Don't," he said softly, but the warning in it was unmistakable. "Don't tell me who I owe. Or what I owe."

There was no heat in the words, only the kind of quiet, cold weight that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

Rowenna didn't back down. "If you had any sense of duty, you wouldn't even be considering them."

Duty. The word rang in his head like a gong. He didn't speak the truth, the king's standing order to kill his kind, the blood on the hands of the man who'd stood at the king's right, but the knowledge burned in his throat.

Instead, he let the coldness deepen. "Careful, Rowenna. You're assuming you know me. You don't. You never have."

Rowenna stared at him, her fury warring with something sharper, wariness, maybe, but she still pushed once more. "Then say it. Say you'd rather serve them than stand with your own kingdom."

He met her eyes, unblinking. "If my 'own kingdom' sees me as nothing more than something to use or discard… then maybe I never had one to begin with."

He didn't raise his voice, but the words carried, sinking deep enough that the surrounding Caledris students went still, their murmured conversations fading.

Rowenna's lips parted, but for once, she didn't have a retort.

Thorne turned back to his food without another word, though his appetite was gone.

A shadow fell across the table.

Marian stood there, hands clasped behind her back, eyes flicking between Rowenna, still rigid, shoulders rising and falling with sharp, angry breaths, and Thorne, who calmly speared another bite of food as though nothing had happened.

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"I don't know what this is," Marian said quietly, voice edged with steel, "but you will both control yourselves in the Astral Hall. This is not a marketplace brawl."

Rowenna's jaw worked, but she said nothing.

Thorne didn't look up from his plate. "Understood."

Marian's gaze lingered on him for a long moment, as if trying to read through the mask of casual indifference he wore. Inside, his thoughts churned, anger still hot in his chest, each bite of food feeling like it was being ground between his teeth.

Without another word, Rowenna stood up and turned on her heel and stalked away, her boots clicking sharply against the marble floor.

Marian's eyes followed her for a beat, then returned to Thorne before she finally moved back toward the professors' table.

The whispers started almost immediately. First from the Caledris students, then further down the tables, small ripples of speculation and rumor.

Thorne ignored them, chewing slowly, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the hall.

The Astral Hall's hum of conversation clung to him even as he left, the stares and whispers chasing him down the corridors like gnats. He could feel the weight of them, curiosity, envy, suspicion, all boring into his back.

He wasn't in the mood for an afternoon of being a spectacle.

Instead of turning toward his next class, he veered left, down the sweeping sandstone stairs that curved toward the Arcanum Ring.

The air changed as he approached, warmer and sharper, scented faintly with the ozone tang of discharged spells. Past the final archway, the sprawling complex came into view, coliseum-like domes and training halls scattered across the open yard, their wards shimmering in the sunlight like soap-film stretched over stone. Bursts of colored light flared from the arenas, followed by the distant, muffled roar of detonations.

He checked in at the central desk, coin pouch lighter by the time the attendant waved him toward the beginner's chambers. He didn't bother asking for anything fancy, just a private simulation room, nothing to distract him.

The escort mage was young and looked bored out of his mind, muttering instructions as they walked the ward-lined hall. Thorne barely listened. His mind was already moving ahead, toward the stillness he craved.

The veil of the chamber rippled around him as he stepped through. The simulation room was as he remembered, round, ten meters across, smooth black walls inscribed with faintly glowing runes, the floor cool beneath his boots. No windows. No sound but his own breath.

The world narrowed to this space, and the noise in his head, Empire, Varo, Rowenna, faded away.

He holstered Ashthorn and stretched his hands, feeling the familiar thrum of aether beneath his skin. Since his last session, he'd made progress. Several successful casts, even if they weren't perfect. And Argessa's lessons on regulating his flow had been a game-changer, how to breathe with the aether, to guide it inside his pathways instead of wrestling it.

He started with the sigils, tracing them in the air. First, the curved talon. Then the trident rune. The spiral. The coiled diamond. Each hung in the air, flickering like they were carved from firelight.

Then the flow.

Left side, slow and steady, looping around his back, down the right arm. Hold. Release in three clean pulses.

Argessa's voice was in his head: Don't choke the current, shape it. Let it run the path you've carved.

The incantation left his lips with practiced precision. "Sevarin Kal Tyreth."

This time, the needle formed. A thin, gleaming shard of condensed flame, sharp enough to make the air hiss around it. It shot forward, striking the far wall in a burst of sparks before dissipating.

Thorne exhaled slowly. Not perfect, he could feel the imbalance in the final pulse, but solid. Better than last week.

He reset. Again. And again. Each repetition smoothed the rough edges, the motions flowing cleaner, the power obeying more readily. The failures stung less now; every misfire was a data point, a problem to dissect.

This was the part he liked, the grind, the solitude, the slow mastery.

Time slipped.

The chamber's runes shifted in brightness with each cycle of simulated "hours," but Thorne barely noticed. All that existed was the pattern, the sigils, the breath, the pulse. Over and over until his body obeyed without conscious thought.

His biggest obstacle was still the same, the damn aether flow.

Even with Argessa's guidance, even with weeks of practice, the current resisted perfect control. Sometimes it surged too fast, forcing the needle to warp mid-formation. Other times it lagged, breaking apart before the final shaping rune locked it in place. Each failure was a spark of frustration, but he didn't stop. Couldn't.

With each cast, something subtle began to change. It was like carving a channel through stone, one pass left little more than a scratch, but the next deepened it, and the next, until the path began to hold.

He could feel it now. That groove inside his body's aether pathways, forming with every repetition. A route the power wanted to follow.

The needles began appearing more frequently, clean and sharp, each one lasting an instant longer before dissipating. Not enough to call mastery, but enough to make his pulse quicken.

His aether points plummeted with each attempt, yet his eclipsed core drank greedily from the ambient currents in the chamber, siphoning energy back into him before depletion could become a real problem. Still, it wasn't infinite. The flow in and the flow out had to be balanced, and until the spell was second nature, every cast carried the risk of overreach.

And until he could master it, really master it, the Flame Needle would always be unpredictable. The shape might hold, or it might twist mid-flight. It might pierce cleanly or flare and sputter like a dying ember.

That uncertainty was unacceptable.

And then there was Isadora.

Her voice, her casual confession from last night, echoed in his mind. I mastered my second spell. The fact she'd done it, quietly, without fanfare, while he was still wrangling his first, lit a spark under him. No, not a spark. A blaze.

His jaw tightened as he launched another cast, the flame needle snapping into existence with a hiss and burying itself dead-center in the target dummy's chest. It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough to smell the singed wood and feel the heat kiss his face.

Again.

And again.

Until the dummy smoked and the chamber's air grew hot with the smell of scorched wards, Thorne kept going, each cast a promise, to himself, to her, to anyone watching in the future, that he would not be left behind.

He knew.

The moment he began the cast, he felt it.

Not the grinding effort of shaping a spell against stubborn resistance, not the cautious push-and-pull of testing a fragile construct, but clarity. The kind that cut straight through the static in his head. The kind that felt inevitable.

The fog of uncertainty that had haunted every attempt simply… lifted.

The aether inside him surged to life, no longer a wild current that needed wrangling, but a river flowing exactly where it needed to go. He guided it, yes, but it felt as though the path had already been carved for him, smooth, unbroken, familiar.

The ambient aether, which he had been holding at bay with an iron will so it wouldn't contaminate the casting, brushed against his senses. Just a nudge, so faint it could have been imagined. But in that fraction of a second, it suggested a correction to the sigil he was tracing in the air.

He listened.

His wrist shifted ever so slightly, adjusting the final curve of the sigil. The lines locked into place with a precision that sent a shiver down his spine. The sigil thrummed, resonating with his own core like the final click of a key in a long-forgotten lock.

He spoke the incantation. His voice was low, but it carried something, heat, resolve, the embers of his determination glowing beneath each syllable.

And then he felt it.

The branding. That unmistakable, searing-yet-exhilarating sensation of a spell etching itself into his core, claiming a permanent place in his arsenal. A tiny wave of aether rippled outward from him, as though announcing his success to the world. The chamber's wards hummed in acknowledgment.

Before his ashthorn wand, a Flame Needle bloomed into existence.

Perfect.

No warping, no shudder in its form, no last-second collapse. A thin, lethal dart of molten fire, gleaming at its tip, steady as a spear in the hands of a master.

For a heartbeat, Thorne just stared at it. He wanted to laugh, to shout, to let the giddy rush tear loose from his chest. He wanted to collapse to the floor and just breathe in the victory.

Instead, he swallowed it all down, bottling the celebration, feeding it into the same quiet fire that had gotten him here.

With a flick of his wrist, the Flame Needle shot forward, slicing the air in a perfect line before burying itself dead-center in the practice dummy. The impact left a precise, scorched hole through the target, smoke curling from the edges.

"Yay," he whispered, voice rasped with exhaustion.

It wasn't loud. But in his chest, it burned like a battle cry.

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