Chapter 25
For the next three days, Astern was no longer a shadow drifting through corridors.
He was a name.
Students turned to stare as he passed, nobles lowered their voices when he entered a room, and even some instructors gave him a second glance now. The duel with Cassian had shifted the winds. He wasn't just a commoner who got lucky. He was the boy who brought down a Valemar with nothing but his aura.
Kaela noticed it immediately.
"Feels different now, doesn't it?" she said, leaning back on the balcony rail outside their dorm. "The air's thicker. The praise is louder. And the envy… sharper."
Lunaria didn't smile. "They think he's a threat. That makes him a target."
Astern said nothing. He was used to being watched. But this was different. This was exposure.
And exposure, he knew, always came with consequences.
---
That evening, the trio was summoned to the Headmaster's observatory tower. The night sky stretched open above, the stars unusually bright.
Seraphon stood waiting, arms behind his back, flanked by three figures Astern didn't recognize—archivists, by the look of their robes, bearing the golden trims of the High Vault.
"Come," Seraphon said simply. "You've stirred the attention of more than just the academy."
Kaela muttered under her breath. "Great. First the nobles, now the bookworms."
The head archivist, a tall woman with runes engraved across her eyes, stepped forward. "We've come to request a formal reading."
Lunaria blinked. "Of what?"
The woman turned to Astern.
"Of him."
---
Within the central sanctum of the High Vault, a sacred pool was unveiled. It shimmered with pure Astral Ink—liquid knowledge said to read not just memory, but potential.
Astern stood at its edge, flanked by Seraphon and the archivists.
"Place your hand within," the woman said. "And do not resist."
He hesitated. But something in the pool called to him.
His fingers met the surface.
Light exploded.
Images flashed—not memories, but fragments of futures: a battlefield soaked in starlight, wings made of ash, a figure kneeling in chains, and beyond it all… a throne of obsidian and feathers.
The pool rippled, then stilled.
The runes faded from the woman's eyes. Her voice was shaking now.
"This one… bears a mark unseen in any archives."
"Is he dangerous?" Seraphon asked.
She looked at Astern—not with fear, but reverence.
"He is unknowable."
---
Later, walking back to the dorm in silence, Kaela finally spoke.
"Unknowable? Sounds dramatic. I mean, you've got secrets, sure, but unknowable?"
"I think they saw something they didn't expect," Lunaria said. "Something not even their books could prepare them for."
Astern didn't respond.
Because buried in that vision, in the moment between starfire and shadow, he had seen something no one else had noticed:
His own face.
Wearing the crown of the Ghoul King.
And smiling.