The chamber was a cathedral of silence.
Cold light pulsed through the walls like veins beneath translucent skin, rising and falling in rhythm with the breath of Khthonia's ley-lines. The boy sat upon the dais, bare, pale, unblinking, surrounded by instruments of polished crystal and humming sigils.
Kaelith Veyrahl stood at the observation platform, one hand resting on the rail. His expression was fixed in its usual geometry of control.
"Begin the resonance calibration," he said.
The seers obeyed without a word.
Lattices of runes unfolded in the air around the child, rotating with mechanical grace. Threads of blue fire converged upon his chest, drawing in the aether of the room until the walls began to tremble. The instruments screamed, and then, impossibly, went still.
The sigils turned black.
The light bent around him.
For a moment, Kaelith saw nothing but a silhouette seated in the center of absence, a gravitational quiet where all sound and motion were consumed.
Then came the pulse.
It struck like the heartbeat of a god, rippling through the chamber, through the manor, through the very ley beneath their feet. The seers fell to their knees, bleeding from the nose. One whispered, terrified, "It's… void resonance. He's drawing from the silent strata."
Kaelith's eyes narrowed.
He descended the stairs, each step echoing in the vacuum of awe. The boy raised his gaze. There was no fear, no pride, no confusion, only observation.
"What do you see?" Kaelith asked.
The child tilted his head slightly, as though listening to something distant.
"…I see the gaps between things," he said. His voice was soft, clinical. "The empty breath before a thought. The pause that shapes the word."
Kaelith considered this. Then, quietly: "You hear the silence itself."
The boy nodded once.
It was the only moment Kaelith allowed himself to feel something close to awe.
---
When the test concluded, the seers refused to approach him. The crystals had cracked, the runes had dulled, and the entire testing hall smelled faintly of ozone and iron.
Kaelith dismissed them all.
He approached the boy, who now sat upon the floor with perfect composure, studying the patterns of dust where the resonance had scarred the stone.
"You have no name," Kaelith said. "You were born unnamed until your purpose revealed itself."
The boy's gaze rose to meet his. There was a strange steadiness there — something self-contained, self-defining.
"I have a name," the boy said quietly.
Kaelith paused. "Oh?"
The child's eyes reflected the dim glow of the dead sigils. "Iblis," he said.
The word seemed to reshape the air around them, smooth, decisive, final.
Kaelith studied him for a long moment, then allowed a faint smile that never reached his eyes. "You chose a peculiar name."
"I didn't choose," Iblis said. "It was waiting."
Kaelith exhaled slowly, almost amused. "Then may the world learn to pronounce it with reverence or fear."
Iblis looked down again, tracing the cracks on the floor with his finger. "They'll do both."
---
[Years Later: The Departure]
The morning sky of Khthonia was a lattice of stormlight and sunfire. Rain had passed, leaving the land glazed in mirrors.
The carriage waited by the manor's lower gates, its dark frame glistening with condensation, the sigil of House Veyrahl carved into its doors.
Iblis stepped inside without looking back.
The coachman, a wiry man named Orren, saluted nervously and flicked the reins. The carriage shuddered, rose from the ground, and began to glide along the magnetic lines of the ley-road, leaving the Veyrahl estate fading into the mist.
For a long while, neither spoke. The air outside rippled with motion, landscapes blooming and folding like painted scrolls: crystalline spires, waterfalls that flowed upward, rivers that carried light instead of water.
Khthonia unfolded in impossible beauty.
Iblis sat with his hands folded neatly in his lap, eyes half-closed.
Orren cleared his throat. "First time heading to the Academy, my lord?"
"Yes."
"I hear it's somethin' else," Orren continued, eager for conversation. "Floating towers, whole libraries made of glass that sings when you open the books. They say if you stare too long at the stars above it, you start hearing the gods hum."
Iblis opened one eye. "That seems inefficient for study."
Orren chuckled nervously. "Ah—sure, sure. Just stories, my lord."
They passed through a valley where the ley veins were visible beneath the surface — pale rivers of aether pulsing through rock and soil. The sky shimmered with auroral reflections.
Orren leaned forward, awestruck. "Ain't she somethin'? Khthonia's heart. Never thought I'd live to see it."
Iblis watched him for a moment — the simplicity of the man's wonder, his awe at patterns that to Iblis looked only like systems and function.
"Curious," Iblis murmured.
"Beg pardon, my lord?"
"You seem… unafraid."
Orren blinked. "Should I be?"
"Most who know my family's name tend to react with trembling or prayers."
Orren grinned, sheepish. "Well, fear's for folk with somethin' to lose. Me? I just drive. Besides—" he gestured at Iblis, "—you don't seem half as monstrous as they say."
That earned a faint, almost imperceptible smile from Iblis. "Appearances deceive. Sometimes intentionally."
Orren laughed. "Well, then, here's to appearances, eh?"
"Indeed," Iblis said.
For a moment, the silence between them felt almost human.
---
Hours passed. The landscape shifted from the deep provinces into the radiant expanse of Khthonia's capital reach.
Aetherion rose before them like a dream of geometry, towers suspended upon invisible currents, arcs of light joining spires, entire libraries orbiting slow as moons. The air hummed with contained divinity.
Even Iblis, who had long since ceased to marvel at beauty, felt a flicker of recognition in his chest.
Orren whistled low. "By the ley, it's bigger than I imagined. Look at that, each spire's got its own storm halo!"
Iblis leaned slightly forward. The academy's architecture was a convergence of art and science, every curve designed to harness and redistribute ambient aether. The entire citadel breathed, alive in its own symmetry.
"Efficient," he said quietly.
"What's that?" Orren asked.
"It's… efficient."
The coachman grinned. "Never met anyone who looked at the grandest sight in the world and called it efficient."
"Then you've not met enough people worth remembering."
Orren barked a laugh. "Ha! You've got a strange way with words, Lord Iblis."
"So I've been told."
The carriage began its slow descent toward the central platform. Below, thousands of students in ceremonial attire crossed the walkways between towers, a kaleidoscope of colors, sigils, and noble crests.
Iblis's gaze moved across them, cataloguing, dissecting, observing.
Solar, Umbral, Crimson, Storm. Four major currents of Aether. He could sense each one resonating faintly from the crowd, harmonic and discordant all at once.
It would be his task, his pleasure, to surpass them all.
He could already hear his father's voice in memory: Perfection is not a state, Iblis. It is the distance between yourself and others.
He smiled faintly, cold and beautiful.
> Then I shall become the distance itself.