Two nights of crows and candle stubs later, the fig stem Kuro had tossed in defiant dismissal lay buried beneath fresh snow in the academy courtyard. Its frozen arc, preserved by the unnatural cold gripping Astralon, might have made a fine, transient constellation itself, Shiro thought bitterly, if anyone still trusted the shapes of things. The memory of the crow's cryptic parchment scrap, the jagged charcoal line scoring through false stars, the single drop like a dying star, burned in his pocket alongside the splintered remnants of Aki's plank. Each pulse of residual warmth from the wood felt like an accusation, a reminder of the sky that needed rewriting, and the crushing weight of the lies surrounding them.
Kuro's treasonous request for silk cushions still haunted the guards posted outside the Black Vault grate, their gold brocade indented with the ghosts of their frustrated vigil. But the Royal Repository demanded sterner postures, colder truths. Shiro braced against the cold obsidian lectern deep within its vaulted, dusty silence, his stolen blade , a Higaru gutting knife honed sharp, hovering over King Ryo's newly commissioned, obscenely gilded star chart. Moonlight, fractured by the stained glass Cassiopeia high above had cracked during Akuma's rampage weeks earlier, bled onto the parchment below. The same jagged line from the crow's message now split the throne room's constellation beneath Shiro's knife, charcoal scoring gilt, a physical manifestation of defiance. Rewrite the sky. The command felt heavier here, amidst centuries of sanctioned lies bound in vellum, the air thick with the dust of forgotten truths and the cloying scent of Temple incense used to "preserve" the charts.
Footsteps, light and deliberate, disturbed the moonlit silence between towering shelves choked with censored histories and forbidden cosmologies. Kuro's voice slithered from the shadows, a phantom emerging beside a toppled case of shattered celestial orreries. He held a small, stolen jar of viscous violet berry dye, the same hue staining his fingertips from defiantly sketching fireflies in detention. "Still brooding over royal virtues, Ghost?" He surveyed Shiro's tense posture, the knife trembling slightly over Polaris, depicted not as a guide, but as Ryo's spiked fist dominating the northern sky. "Or contemplating the artistic merits of regicide?"
Shiro didn't turn. The weight of the repository pressed down, the lies embedded in the chart screaming silently. "Arrogance has a half life longer than this rotting dynasty." He pressed the knife tip into the falsified coordinates of Polaris. A bead of berry dye welled on the steel, clotting like blood on the pristine parchment. "This whole place reeks of three centuries' decay. Lies petrified into 'truth'." Rewrite the sky, his mother's final gasp echoed in the silence, mingling with the phantom scent of Aki's burning herbs.
A dry chuckle stirred the juniper scented dust motes dancing in the fractured moonlight. "Careful, princeling. Some truths melt snow faster than Koji's nose bled." Kuro drifted closer, his shadow merging with Shiro's over the desecrated chart. His gaze flickered past Shiro to the high, narrow window. Outside, the wind howled like a tormented spirit, unspooling Cassiopeia's thread across the distant, snow locked peaks of the Nyxion Spine, the formidable mountain range guarding the border with the forbidden continent of Nyxarion. Somewhere on the battlements, a guard's boots crunched on ice he'd sworn wasn't due until solstice. The unnatural cold bit deeper this year, carrying whispers of a blight Gin preached about, a creeping frost from the north.
The repository's air hung thick with the scent of betrayal, ancient vellum, dried juniper berries Aki used in poultices, and the sharp, acrid tang of the Temple ink Kuro had liberated from a smashed flask. Moonlight seeped through the cracked Cassiopeia, fracturing her throne into shards of cobalt and indigo that pooled around Shiro's worn boots like spilled night, staining the floorboards where generations of scholars had knelt to worship stars distorted by dogma. The chart before him, a sprawling tapestry of Ryo's gilded falsehoods, seemed to pulse faintly under his trembling knife. Polaris glared, a false beacon manipulated to point only to the Oji throne.
"Guillotine or crown?" Shiro whispered, the blade poised over the falsified stellar coordinates. Another drop of berry dye welled, threatening to fall. Rewrite the sky.
Kuro leaned against a shelf listing under the weight of suppressed histories, his silhouette sharp against the moonlit disarray of scrolls and broken astrolabes. "Guillotine," he declared, teeth flashing like shards of ice in the dark. "Let the priests choke on their own poisoned sermons. Let the sycophants drown in the ink of their complicity." His violet stained fingers danced across the chart, redrawing Orion's sword with bold, decisive strokes of stolen ink until its tip speared the Oji dynasty's crest. The ink hissed faintly where it touched the gold leaf, as if the parchment itself recoiled from the unveiled truth. "Father's face when he sees this…" Kuro's smirk widened, predatory, devoid of warmth. "Priceless. Almost makes freezing in the Vaults worthwhile." He recalled the cold stone, the dripping silence, the shared fig, and the crow's feather tucked into his coat, a reminder of defiance.
Shiro carved deeper into Cassiopeia's spine, the grooves he etched mirroring the splintered lines on Aki's plank. The wood pulsed faintly against his thigh, a phantom heartbeat echoing Aki's choked words: They'll never burn the sky. Now, her defiance lived in every stroke of his knife, every drop of Kuro's stolen dye, every silent scream against the Temple's suffocating light.
Kuro leaned in, his breath warm against Shiro's neck despite the pervasive chill. He sketched a tiny, furious firefly devouring the royal moon depicted beside the throne, a symbol of Ryo's claimed divine mandate. The berry dye smudged under his thumb, its violet hue darkening to a bruise black. "Perfect," he snorted. "Imagine the Temple's silk robes when they see this. Panic shits are terribly hard to launder out of celestial white." His gaze flickered again to the window, a subconscious gesture Shiro noted. Kuro was always aware of exits, of watchers.
A harsh caw shattered the heavy quiet, sharp as broken glass. A crow landed on the repository's broken stone ledge outside, its shadow blotting the fractured moon. Shiro tensed; the knife slipped. A jagged line tore through Lyra's harp, mirroring the accidental slash on Aki's plank weeks ago. "They'll hunt us for this," he muttered, eyeing the bird. Its prismatic gaze fixed on them, too knowing, too hungry. The same crow, or its kin, had swallowed Kuro's signet ring whole after the gate confrontation, a thief loyal to no crown, a silent accomplice whose intelligence felt unnerving. Like Mira's eyes, Shiro thought fleetingly, recalling the scholarship student's unsettlingly observant gaze in the corridors, the way she sometimes paused to watch the crows. He dismissed it; everyone was nervous now.
Kuro flicked a droplet of viscous ink at the chart, watching it bloom like a venomous flower over the Temple's Polaris sigil. "Let them. Hunting's all Akuma's good for. That and licking my fathers boots." He snatched a half charred candle stub from the floor, likely salvaged from their Black Vault vigil, its wax pooling over his fingers as he held it aloft. The flame guttered wildly, casting monstrous, leaping shadows that clawed at the walls, twisting the shelves into grasping giants. King Ryo's portrait, slashed and defaced by Shiro during Akuma's earlier rampage, seemed to snarl from its shadowed corner, a reminder of the cost of defiance. "Besides," Kuro added, the candlelight dancing like trapped spirits in his storm grey eyes, "you think this is the first chart we've ruined? The Black Vaults weren't punishment enough?" He recalled the ledger burning in the brazier after Koji destroyed Aki's chart, the scent of smoke mingling with berry dye and the crow's feather tucked defiantly into their shared plank before Akuma shattered it.
Shiro's lips twitched. "Detention's dull," he echoed Kuro's earlier sentiment, the shared memory a spark of dark camaraderie.
"Exactly." Kuro dragged the candle closer, illuminating a patch of parchment near the chart's eastern edge. The Temple's official Polaris sigil had been violently scratched raw, the vellum torn beneath, defaced weeks prior. "This," he said, jabbing his charcoal stub at the mutilated symbol, "is what happens when Father sends Akuma to 'inspect' my chambers after the gate incident. Found him burning my personal star charts. Charts that showed real alignments, not Temple approved fairy tales." His voice dripped venom, the memory raw. "Said they 'distracted' me from my royal duties." A muscle jumped in Kuro's jaw. "So I distracted him."
Shiro raised a brow, remembering Akuma's limping fury days later, the twisted Polaris pommel missing from his dagger. "Redistributed his face into a wall?"
"Close. Redistributed his favourite dagger, the one with the twisted Polaris pommel he loved so much, into the palace privy mid flush." Kuro's grin faltered as the crow outside tapped its beak sharply, insistently, against the cracked glass. A single, obsidian feather drifted in, landing silently on a pile of discarded scrolls. Just like the feather Mira dropped, Shiro thought, the connection flaring unbidden. Brown ink? He couldn't tell in the gloom. "He'll be back," Kuro said, his voice losing its bravado. "They always come back. Especially when crows gossip." He eyed the fallen feather, a shadow passing over his face.
For a moment, the repository felt smaller, the weight of a thousand unspoken threats pressing in, Akuma's flaying promise, Gin's cold scrutiny, Koji's vengeance, and now the unnerving intelligence of the crows, perhaps linked to observant students like Mira. Shiro's knuckles whitened around the knife. Aki's blood. Mother's stolen charts. The ghosts of Higaru clung, sharp as the blade. He carved harder, forcing Cassiopeia's throne to tilt defiantly west, away from the Temple's mandated alignment, towards the unknown vastness beyond Astralon's borders, towards the Nyxion peaks Mira's hidden map would later reveal.
Kuro watched him, storm grey eyes narrowing. "You're thinking too loud. Plotting our glorious demise or just admiring my profile?"
"You're breathing too loud. Distracting the artist." Shiro kept carving, the rhythmic scrape a counterpoint to his racing thoughts.
"Potentially." Kuro tossed the guttering candle aside, plunging them into near darkness save for the fractured moonlight. It caught the silver streak in his hair, a comet's tail frozen mid fall. "But if you're waiting for regret, don't." He gestured towards the defaced chart, the defiant firefly, the guillotine poised over the Oji crest. "This? This vandalism? This is the first honest thing I've done since I was seven." The raw admission hung in the cold air, vulnerable and stark.
Shiro stilled. Seven. The age whispers said Kuro had been locked in the lightless observatory for a week for daring to correct his father's star lore during a royal lesson. The age Shiro had carved his first trembling star into Aki's shack wall, hands numb with winter hunger but burning with impossible hope ignited by stories of true constellations. "Honesty's overrated," he said finally, voice rough. "But it's cheaper than swallowing silence." Cheaper than living the lie.
Kuro barked a laugh, sharp and brittle, echoing off the high shelves. "Spoken like a true slum rat who's tasted Temple lies and found them bitter." He reached for the almost empty inkwell, his sleeve riding up as he stretched. The faint, pale outline of the royal seal was visible on his wrist. The skin around it was raw, freshly scratched, a habit, Shiro realized with a jolt, Kuro employed when the gilded lies chafed too tight, a physical echo of Shiro's own clenched fists when faced with hypocrisy. A prince scratching at his own birthright.
Outside, the wind shrieked, carrying a flurry of snow like frozen needles against the window. The crow's wings snapped open, a sudden ripple of darkness against the moon. Shiro's pulse hammered against his ribs. The crow's gaze felt heavy, knowing. Like Mira's when she assessed us. "We should go. Now. Before the crows sing."
"Not yet." Kuro dipped his finger into the dregs of the ink, thick and cloying. He traced a new constellation over the chart's eastern edge, beyond Astralon's mapped borders, a jagged crown, its points fractured like ice. "The Temple's 'Divine Mandate'," he sneered, his voice dripping contempt. "Father's favourite lullaby. Claims the stars ordained his reign, that Polaris points only to his throne, blessing his rule over all lands, even those he's never seen." His finger pressed harder, smearing the ink. "Especially those he fears."
"Stars don't ordain," Shiro countered, slashing a deep line through the inked crown with his blade, splitting it into a dozen falling sparks that bled berry dye like wounds. "They witness. Like Aki did. Like… like your mother must have." He recalled Kuro's rare, fleeting mentions, a woman who loved gardens, silenced peacefully.
Kuro froze. The mention of his mother, a ghost scrubbed from the Academy's records, her name erased, her existence paved over like the garden stones she cherished, stilled the very dust in the air. The scratching at his wrist ceased. "She… carved stars too," he said, the words quiet, fragile, stripped of their usual armour "Hidden. In the rose quartz flagstones of the palace garden's hidden paths. Constellations they never taught here." He swallowed, the sentence crumbling like old mortar. "Father had them smashed. The stones… pulverized. After she…" He couldn't finish. The silence that consumed her memory was thicker than the repository's gloom.
The plank in Shiro's pocket pulsed warmer, a sudden, insistent heat against his leg. He pulled it out, the grooves of Cassiopeia's spine glowing faintly violet in the fractured moonlight. He pressed it into Kuro's ink stained hand. "Rewrite the sky," he said, the words his mother's, Aki's, now theirs. A plea, a command, a shared purpose forged in defiance. "For her. For all of them silenced." For Mira, if she's truly fighting the same lies, he thought, the connection solidifying.
Kuro's fingers closed convulsively around the familiar wood. For a single, unguarded heartbeat, the prince's brittle armour shattered. His eyes widened, vulnerable; his breath hitched. The raw grief, the buried love, the fury at the erasure, it all flashed across his face, illuminated by the moon's cold gaze. Then, just as swiftly, he shoved the plank back into Shiro's hands, the vulnerability replaced by a familiar, defensive sneer. "Sentimental," he scoffed, but the usual razor edge was blunted, replaced by a hoarse rasp. "Keep your splintered hopes, Ghost. I've got ink to spill." He turned away, but Shiro saw the tremor in his hand before he shoved it into his pocket.
A floorboard groaned, a sharp, protesting sound from the hall below.
Both froze, senses snapping taut, the moment of vulnerability shattered by imminent threat.
"Shit," Shiro hissed, snuffing the faint moonlight reflection on the chart with his sleeve. Utter, suffocating darkness swallowed them, thick as the lies they fought. Footsteps echoed on the stairs, slow, deliberate, heavy with the weight of armour and malice. Akuma's voice, thick with Temple venom and barely contained fury, slithered up: "Tear it apart! Search every shelf! His Majesty's… displeasure will be measured in your failure!"
Kuro's hand clamped around Shiro's wrist, yanking him behind a massive, crumbling pillar supporting a teetering shelf of celestial atlases precariously balanced. Their breaths mingled, harsh and too loud in the sudden, charged silence. "Three," Kuro mouthed against Shiro's ear, his lips barely moving, his breath warm. He peered through a crack in the rotted wood. "Akuma's leading. Two Temple guards." The obsidian armour would be near invisible in the dark, but the menace was palpable.
Shiro's mind raced. The defaced chart lay exposed on the lectern, Cassiopeia's throne gleaming wet with fresh berry dye under the vanished moonlight. One flick of Akuma's torch, and their rebellion would end in the very flames Gin craved. Panic warred with resolve. Mira wouldn't panic, he thought irrelevantly, remembering her calm retrieval of spilled maps.
Kuro's lips brushed Shiro's ear again, a phantom touch carrying a desperate plan. "Distract them."
"What??"
But Kuro was already moving, a shadow dissolving into deeper shadow, heading towards a display of ancient, priceless star globes near the Repository's main entrance. With a grin visible only as a flash of teeth in the profound gloom, he hooked his foot under the pedestal of the largest globe, a gilded monstrosity stamped prominently with the Oji crest, and shoved with all his might.
It fell with the sound of the sky breaking.
CRASHH SHATTER THUDDD! The impact shook the floor, sending echoes like gunshots through the cavernous space. Globes rolled, shattered, their delicate brass frameworks screaming.
"INTRUDERS! HERETICS IN THE REPOSITORY!" Akuma's roar shook dust from the rafters, fury overriding caution.
Chaos erupted below. Shouts, the clatter of drawn swords, boots pounding up the stairs, momentarily diverted by the cacophony near the entrance. Kuro became a phantom of chaos, darting between islands of shelving, deliberately overturning inkpots filled with expensive Temple black, scattering precious, irreplaceable scrolls like autumn leaves before a storm. Shiro lunged for the chart, rolling it hastily, the wet ink smearing cold against his ribs like a brand as he shoved it inside his coat. The firefly felt like an ember against his skin.
"THERE! BY THE LECTERN!" A Temple guard's voice bellowed, spotting Shiro's movement. He charged, sword glinting in the weak light now spilling from the stairwell.
Shiro ducked, instinct honed in Higaru alley brawls kicking in. The blade slammed into the pillar where his head had been, embedding deep with a sickening thunk of steel on stone. He didn't wait, didn't look back, sprinting towards the only escape, the window with the cracked Cassiopeia, high above the frozen courtyard. Kuro was already there, perched impossibly on the narrow stone ledge like a carrion bird ready for flight, the twenty foot drop onto flagstones below looking like a death sentence. "Jump!" Kuro ordered, tossing down a rope braided from torn vellum and sturdy leather bindings anchored to a heavy, bolted down reading desk. His eyes were wild, alive with adrenaline and defiance.
"Are you insane?" Shiro hissed, the icy wind clawing at his face, Akuma's bellowing growing closer.
"Possibly" Kuro shot back, a reckless grin splitting his face. "Trust the rope… or trust Akuma's mercy!" The choice was stark.
Shiro grabbed the makeshift rope, the rough vellum tearing at his gloves. He took a breath, filled with the scent of dust, berry dye, fear, and the fading warmth of the plank in his pocket, and leapt into the void. The rope burned, fibres snapping, but held long enough. He hit the frozen ground hard, rolling with the impact, the wind knocked out of him. Kuro landed beside him a second later, the impact jarring, but he was up instantly. Laughter, wild and defiant, almost unhinged, trailed behind him like a battle standard as they scrambled up and ran, vanishing into the academy's labyrinthine, snow dusted shadows, guided only by the fading, mocking echo of the crow's final caw.
Akuma's fury shook the repository windows, promising retribution: "FIND THEM! BURN THEIR DEN! FIND THE HERETICS!"
In the lee of an ice encrusted hedgerow near the sundial they'd toppled years before in a simpler act of rebellion, Shiro doubled over, chest heaving, the stolen chart a lead weight against his ribs. The cold air burned his lungs. Akuma's threat echoed: Find the Heretics. The cold dread was sharper than the winter air. "Your distractions," he gasped, clutching a stitch in his side, "need subtlety. Or at least… less property damage."
Kuro leaned against the headless statue of some forgotten Oji ancestor, his smirk illuminated by the rising moon glinting off the snow. He was breathing hard, but his eyes sparkled with exhilaration. "Says the rat who nearly redecorated Akuma's blade with his internal organs. Grace under pressure isn't your strongest suit."
"That was once…" Shiro protested, straightening.
A dried fig, miraculously preserved by the cold, smacked Shiro square in the cheek.
Kuro tossed another, his teeth a white gleam in the gloom. "Eat. Whining's unbecoming before a regicide." He nodded towards the distant, illuminated windows of the throne room, glowing like a malevolent jewel in the pre dawn gloom. "We've got a crown to finish toppling… and a continent of lies to unravel." His gaze drifted northwards, towards the Nyxion peaks barely visible as dark teeth against the horizon. Nyxarion.
Above them, unseen in the growing light, the crow circled, King Ryo's stolen ring glinting like a fallen, captive star in its beak. Somewhere in the dark repository, a star chart dried, its inked guillotine poised over a dynasty's throat. The frozen fig stem Kuro had thrown lay forgotten, buried deeper under the relentless snow, a relic of a simpler conflict. The game had escalated beyond defacing royal property. The sky over Astralon wasn't just false; it was a cage. And the key, perhaps, lay north, in the frozen realm of a queen painted as a monster, watched over by crows and spies with crow feather tattoos. The path ahead was darker, colder, and far more dangerous. The next move wouldn't be made with charcoal, but with blood and desperate trust. The crow's final cry wasn't just mockery; it was a summons to a larger war.