Chapter 1: The Memoryless Boy
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They came to Crownspire once a year — robed, gold-ringed, faces hidden behind masks carved from bone.
They called it the Rite of Remembrance.
Twelve children stood barefoot in a stone circle under the mountain's eye, wind howling as if whispering the names of the dead. Ash Veil was one of them. The last in line. The least expected. The least wanted.
Above them, on a floating dais of black marble, the Examiner's voice boomed:
> "Let memory awaken those who are worthy. Let the past reclaim its chosen."
One by one, the children stepped forward. One by one, they remembered.
A girl with silver eyes screamed as flames erupted from her palms — a fire caller in her past life.
A boy muttered a dead language as shadow beasts slithered around him — a Nightbinder reborn.
Another wept openly as he spoke the name "Valdis" — the Archmage of Frost, reawakened after three centuries.
Every name remembered was recorded. Every spell cast became proof of legacy.
Ash stood still.
He had watched this ceremony once before — from behind a fence, years ago, when his older brother had stepped into the circle and remembered being a warlord of storms. The family cheered that day. His mother smiled.
She hadn't smiled at Ash in years.
> "Veil. Ashriel."
His name echoed cold across the circle. His turn.
The stone beneath his feet pulsed as he stepped forward. A pale blue light circled his ankles.
Around him, students and nobles watched with veiled amusement. Some leaned forward with morbid curiosity. The youngest son of the disgraced House Veil — surely, he would fail.
Ash knelt.
The Examiner's voice shifted, softer now, as if reciting something sacred.
> "Empty your thoughts. Yield to the echo. Speak the name that returns to you."
Ash obeyed. He closed his eyes.
And waited.
Nothing came.
No vision. No name. No fire in his bones. No shadow in his blood. Just silence.
He dug deeper, willing something to stir. He thought of books. Of battles. Of names not his own.
Still nothing.
After a minute, the Examiner cleared his throat. A second passed. Then another.
The marble floor dimmed.
> "There is… no echo," the Examiner finally said. "He remembers nothing."
Gasps. A few stifled chuckles. One voice near the back muttered, "Empty."
The word stung worse than it should have.
Ash rose slowly, dizzy but composed. He didn't protest. That would be pathetic. That would be expected.
He turned to leave.
But then—
A flicker.
Not in his mind — but under his skin. Something twitched in his wrist.
He paused.
A symbol drifted behind his eyes, unbidden: three lines, one arc. It had no name. No history. No translation. But it felt… familiar.
He didn't know why, but his right hand moved, as if tracing something in the air.
The moment his finger curved, the stone beneath him cracked.
A black line, thin as a hair, split the marble floor. Not with fire. Not with lightning. With absence.
The light around the platform vanished. Not dimmed — vanished. Erased.
The students backed away.
The Examiner stepped forward, lips trembling. "Stop. What did you just cast?"
Ash blinked. "I… didn't."
The air distorted. Reality buzzed like a broken instrument. And for a breathless moment, the entire platform felt like it might collapse into itself.
Then — silence.
Ash's hand dropped. The black crack on the floor disappeared like it was never there.
And the light returned.
The crowd didn't cheer.
They didn't gasp.
They stared.
> "What… was that?" the Examiner asked, voice no longer echoing. "You performed no incantation. No glyph. No known hand sign. You cast… nothing."
Ash felt a chill down his spine. He wanted to speak — to explain that he hadn't done anything, truly — but he realized even he didn't know what had just happened.
He hadn't remembered anything.
And yet something deep within him had acted.
The Examiner stepped forward and grabbed his wrist.
His thumb pressed into Ash's pulse. His other hand hovered above his chest, glowing faintly with diagnostic magic. A second later, the light flickered and died.
> "No soul-binding residue. No spiritual imprint. No inherited magic pattern."
He turned to the nobles watching above.
"This boy is not a reincarnation."
The silence broke into whispers.
> "Not a reincarnation?"
"But he cast something…"
"How is that possible?"
"Is he a Nullborn?"
"Or… worse?"
The High Inquisitor on the marble dais stood. Her eyes burned behind her fox-bone mask.
> "Remove him from the Rite. He is to be registered as Empty."
Ash opened his mouth.
> "But I—"
The Examiner cut him off.
> "No name. No echo. No proof. No right."
He was pushed gently out of the circle, his place erased as if it had never been.
And in that moment — as the nobles turned away, as the wind swallowed his presence, as the title Empty was written in ink beside his name — something inside Ash cracked.
Not in grief. Not in shame.
But in clarity.
If he wasn't reborn…
If he hadn't remembered anything…
If no one else could explain what he had done…
Then maybe he wasn't like them.
Maybe…
> They had all remembered him.
And feared him enough to erase the memory.
The carriage ride down from Crownspire was made in silence.
Ash sat alone. No chaperone. No family. Just his name written on a scroll with the word Empty stamped in red beside it.
The same scroll would be sent to every academy in the Empire.
He'd be placed into the lowest caste: Level 0 Initiate. A formality. A joke. A charity seat granted only to fill quotas and entertain the upper class.
> "You'll be forgotten," the Examiner had said as they dismissed him.
"You should be grateful."
Ash looked down at his hand.
It didn't glow. It didn't tremble with power. There was no magical mark. But the moment replayed over and over in his mind — the black crack, the silent snap in space, the way light had ceased to exist around him.
That wasn't memory. That was something older.
Something that lived in his bones — not his thoughts.
---
💠
Back at the Veil estate, no one greeted him. Not even the steward.
The house was quiet, cavernous. Decaying under the weight of history. Once, House Veil had advised kings. Now, they were a footnote.
His brother's voice echoed from the training yard. Lightning cracked the sky. Laughter followed. Clearly, no one had told them Ash had returned — or they simply didn't care.
He made his way up to the west tower — the abandoned observatory where no servants entered. It had once belonged to their grandfather, a star-reader and failed alchemist. Now, it belonged to dust and silence.
Perfect.
Ash placed the scroll on the desk and stared at the word again: Empty.
Three letters, like a curse.
> "But I cast something. I know I did."
He opened a drawer and took out a pencil and a crumpled notebook. Not a spellbook — just blank pages. He flipped to a clean sheet and drew the symbol that had come to him.
Three lines. One arc.
It looked like nothing. It resembled no sigil from the Six Known Schools. No glyph from the Elemental Order. No rune used in religious sanctums.
But his hand had moved with certainty. That was what haunted him.
Not the rejection.
Not the shame.
But the certainty of his motion.
His hand hadn't copied a spell.
> It had remembered how to create one.
---
💠
That night, Ash sat by the cracked window as rain tapped glass like clockwork.
He hadn't eaten. He couldn't sleep.
Instead, he wrote down everything he had ever noticed about magic. Not from lessons — he had never been allowed to attend the core classes. But from observation.
Fire spells require three-layer runes. But why three?
Lightning spells bend faster in wet air. But why do they bend at all?
Shields fracture along circular paths, not linear. That defies basic structure.
He scribbled, diagrammed, questioned.
And then, without thinking, he drew a second shape beside the first. Not from memory. Not from copying.
From instinct.
When he stared at it, his pulse jumped. The two shapes… they fit. Not visually. But conceptually. The first erased. The second replaced.
He grabbed the notebook with trembling fingers.
> "This isn't magic I'm remembering," he whispered.
"This is magic… I'm rewriting."
---
💠
The next morning, a letter arrived.
Burned at the edges, sealed with a red wax stamp in the shape of an open eye.
Crownshade Academy – Class Placement Confirmed
Student: Ashriel Veil
Caste Level: 0
Dormitory: Black Wing – Lower Barracks
Mentor: Unassigned
Restrictions: Limited access to spell halls. No staff permit. No channel stones. No dueling privileges.
Status: EMPTY
At the bottom, written in thick ink by hand:
> "We look forward to watching you fail. Entertain us well."
— Professor Allaxor Mire, Dean of Classical Memory Studies
---
Ash folded the letter with care and placed it next to his diagram.
They all wanted him to be harmless. Pathetic. A background shadow to be mocked.
> Good.
Let them believe it.
Let them throw him into the pit with the rejects, the unranked, the memoryless. Let them stare down at him from their towers of remembered glory.
Because he had no past to chain him.
No name to live up to.
No rules to obey.
> He was Empty.
And empty things can be filled.
Crownshade Academy didn't look like a school.
It looked like a fortress that had forgotten what war was.
Carved into the side of Mount Velron, its towers jutted like claws into the cloudline. Black banners waved across the sky-bridges, each marked with gold — one symbol per tower, each a legacy. The Tower of Thorns. The Tower of Echoes. The Tower of Chains. All built for the remembered.
And then there was the Black Wing.
No tower. No gates. No sigil.
Just a half-sunken hall carved underground, its stone scorched and forgotten.
That was where Ash was sent.
---
The guards didn't even escort him inside. They threw his scroll at the threshold and left him at the rusted gate alone.
Ash pushed open the iron door. It groaned like something waking from a long sleep.
The hallway inside smelled of metal and mildew. Flickering sconces lit a narrow stone corridor that sloped downward into shadow. A sign was etched on the wall in faded chalk:
> "Here lie the memoryless. May they dream in silence."
Ash didn't stop walking.
At the base of the stairs, the corridor opened into a common room. Five other students glanced up — all wearing brown sashes, the mark of Level 0 initiates.
The girl closest to the door narrowed her eyes. "Another corpse?"
Ash raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"You look like one," she said. "That blank face. That 'I was just kicked out of the Rite' look. You've got it worse than most, though. Bet you didn't remember a thing."
"I remembered something," he replied.
"Yeah?" She leaned forward. "What's your past life's name, then?"
Ash hesitated. "...I don't know."
The girl grinned. "Thought so. Welcome to the pit."
---
That night, Ash unpacked what little he brought — a notebook, two pens, and a single silver shard he kept hidden in his collar. Not magical. Just a keepsake from his mother before she stopped calling him her son.
He didn't cry.
He didn't speak.
He wrote.
He drew the two sigils again. This time, he added a third. It had come to him in a dream, half-formed, burning like starlight across his eyes. The moment he inked it onto the page, the candlelight flickered.
Not from wind.
From fear.
It recoiled.
Ash paused.
> This was no ordinary magic.
These were command spells — words not to remember, but to author.
Suddenly, the door to his dorm creaked open.
A tall boy stepped inside, flanked by two students in violet sashes. Unlike Ash, their robes shimmered faintly with enchanted thread. Wealth. Prestige. Memory.
The lead boy stared at Ash like he'd found a roach in his wine.
> "You're the Empty."
Ash didn't respond.
The boy stepped forward. His eyes were pale silver, cold as glass. He didn't introduce himself, but Ash recognized him from the Rite. He'd been among the remembered — the boy who conjured frost just by whispering a name.
> "I'm Caelion Argent. Heir of the Argent Line, voice of Valdis the Frost Warden. And I don't like flukes."
Ash closed his notebook.
"I'm not a fluke."
"You performed a spell without echo. Without sigil. That means either you cheated…" Caelion's voice dropped, low and dangerous, "...or you're something worse. A liar."
Ash met his gaze. "Afraid of someone with no past?"
One of the violet-sashed students growled and stepped forward, but Caelion held up a hand.
> "I'm going to duel you."
Ash blinked. "What?"
"Tomorrow. First light. Old Arena."
"You know I'm not allowed to duel."
"That's the point."
Caelion turned on his heel and left, robes trailing behind him like a curtain of snow.
---
💠
At midnight, Ash returned to the corridor outside the Black Wing.
He stood before the stone wall and whispered words he had never read, but somehow understood.
> "Open to the unbound."
The wall shimmered.
A sliver of the stone surface peeled back like paper, revealing an old passage lit by violet crystals. A whisper ran through the air — not a voice, but a memory not his own.
> "Codex fragment detected. Initiator unknown. Access: denied."
Ash stepped back.
> The Codex.
The true Codex of All Magic.
It wasn't a myth. It was real.
And it recognized something in him.
He reached into his notebook and traced the third sigil agai
n. When he pressed his palm to the wall this time, the voice returned:
> "Initiator… recognized. Original Source."
The door swung open.The Duel That Never Was
---
Ash barely slept.
His hand burned from drawing sigils that didn't exist in any book. His notebook now held six unrecorded shapes. He didn't know where they came from. They felt like thoughts stolen from the edge of creation.
Still, he arrived early to the arena.
It was carved into the bones of the mountain — a sunken ring of blackstone surrounded by broken seats. This was where failed duels were erased from the record. Where nobles could bleed out the shame of the lower castes in private.
Ash was already waiting when Caelion Argent arrived, flanked again by his violet-robed entourage.
Ash wore nothing but his threadbare school tunic.
Caelion wore silverweave robes laced with runes. A frostwand at his belt. Two core rings on his hand — both glimmering with ancestral power.
He looked at Ash like a priest about to perform a mercy killing.
> "Do you even know how to cast?" he said.
Ash didn't answer.
A formal start was impossible. There would be no staff, no referee, no crowd. Just two students, one spellbook, and one Empty.
Caelion raised a hand. "I'll make it quick."
Ash didn't move.
Caelion whispered a name — "Valdis." The air cracked.
Suddenly, a wall of blue-white frost tore from the earth, racing toward Ash like the teeth of winter. The ground hissed and froze in spirals.
Ash still didn't move.
He traced a single arc in the air.
No light. No spark. No chant.
The ice touched the line — and vanished.
Not shattered.
Not blocked.
Unmade.
Caelion staggered back.
"What was that—?!"
Ash stepped forward. Quietly. Almost gently.
He drew a second symbol. Two lines intersecting — a cut in the script of the world.
Caelion tried again — casting four spells in rapid succession. Ice, shield, frostbind, echo-strike.
None reached Ash.
Each disappeared the moment they crossed the invisible threshold around him.
No magic touched him.
Not because he was strong…
But because magic refused to exist in his presence.
Caelion fell to his knees.
"Who… what are you?"
Ash looked at him. Not angry. Not triumphant.
Just calm.
"I don't remember."
He raised his hand one last time.
This time, instead of a sigil, he spoke:
> "I do not borrow power.
I do not inherit names.
I do not remember.
I erase."
The sky above the arena dimmed for a single second.
Then — silence.
Caelion collapsed, unconscious but unharmed.
Ash walked away.
---
💠
By evening, word had spread.
"A Zero defeated a Level Three."
"Without casting. Without mana."
"Without remembering."
The professors panicked. The higher-bloods whispered. The Codex alarms triggered once in the Tower of Echoes — then died before a trace could be recorded.
And in the deepest part of the academy, past the sealed halls and forgotten runes, a voice that had not spoken in a thousand years stirred.
> "He has returned."
But no one could agree on who "he" was.
Because Ashriel Veil didn't exist in any scroll.
No records.
No sigil.
No name.
He was not reborn.
He was the original.
And the world had tried to forget him.
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