The crow's harsh caw was swallowed by the academy's skeletal winter branches, King Ryo's stolen ring a malevolent glint clutched in its beak as it soared over courtyards desecrated by rain smeared posters. "REWARD FOR ACADEMY INTRUDERS," the cheap ink wept onto the cobblestones, the crude sketches beneath, a hooded phantom, a question mark adorned with a defiant silver streak grinning like hollow constellations mocking their flight. Shiro watched it vanish towards the brooding Star Spire, the fig Kuro had thrown moments before turning to cold, tasteless ash on his tongue. Akuma's guttural roars still vibrated in the stones beneath their boots, echoing from the Repository they'd left in artistic ruin.
"Quit sculpting your martyrdom, Ghost," Kuro rasped, flicking a fig pit with unnerving accuracy at the headless statue of King Theron the Obscure. It struck the chipped marble shoulder with a sharp tink. "Worried they'll engrave 'vandal' and 'fig pilferer' onto your already illustrious tombstone? 'Shiro of Higaru: Slum Rat, Star Slasher, Purloiner of Pastries'? Has a certain ring to it." He forced a smirk, but his storm grey eyes scanned the snow dusted quadrangle, alert for the glint of obsidian armour.
Shiro opened his mouth, a retort about princely hypocrisy poised on his lips…
when a cry, sharp with surprise rather than pain, shattered the brittle dawn air.
It came from the shadowed lee of the Celestial Navigation hall's arched entrance. Mira, the scholarship student ostensibly from the southern textile districts, known for her unnerving quiet and eyes that seemed to absorb more than they reflected, stumbled backwards out of the shadows, colliding solidly with Shiro as he and Kuro rounded the corner. Her worn satchel flew open, its contents scattering across the frost rimed flagstones with a clatter of scroll tubes and the whisper of unfurling parchment.
Not Academy charts.
Shiro instinctively steadied her, his gaze snagging on the spilled bounty. One large vellum sheet landed face up: a meticulously rendered map of the desolate Northern Reaches, far beyond the kingdom's charted borders. Strange, angular sigils marked strategic points, a stylized, double bladed axe beside a constellation Shiro didn't recognize, seven sharp points arranged like a broken crown. Another chart showed intricate coastal soundings annotated in a tight, unfamiliar cipher. And half hidden beneath a fallen astronomy text was a fragment depicting jagged, ice fanged mountain ranges labelled in bold, clear script: NYXARION PEAKS.
"Clumsy slum mouse!" Koji's sneer cut through the momentary silence. He emerged from the hall, flanked by his usual sycophants, jade cufflinks catching the weak light as he deliberately planted his polished boot on the Northern Reaches map, grinding the parchment into the damp stone. "Watch where you scuttle, gutter filth. Or do your kind navigate solely by stench?" His cronies sniggered.
Mira flinched, but it was a controlled movement, more reflex than fear. Her usual mask of diffident scholarship slipped, revealing a flash of cold, calculating anger in her dark eyes before it vanished. She dropped to her knees, gathering her scattered charts with swift, efficient motions that spoke of practice, not panic. "Apologies, Lord Koji," she murmured, her voice low, steady, devoid of tremor. She subtly slid the Nyxarion fragment deeper into her bag, covering it with the sanctioned astronomy text. "The morning frost… it makes the stones deceptive." Her eyes, when they flicked up to meet Shiro's for a fraction of a second, held not the expected plea for help, but a swift, unnerving assessment, weighing, measuring. Calculating.
Professor Vayne's cane tapped a staccato rhythm of profound irritation on the hall's threshold. "Enough theatrical dallying. Remove the distraction, girl. The Temple's illuminating light tolerates only disciplined minds and sanctioned cartography." His obsidian gaze swept over the scene, lingering on the unfamiliar maps, then settling on Shiro and Kuro with open, icy suspicion. "Lord Kuro. Shiro. An eventful dawn. Again."
Mira dipped her head, a picture of contrite humility. "Of course, Professor Vayne. My carelessness." As she straightened, tugging her satchel strap over her shoulder, her worn woollen sleeve rode up slightly. On the delicate skin of her inner wrist, revealed for only a heartbeat before the fabric fell back, Shiro caught a glimpse of intricate, swirling markings in deep brown ink, stylized feathers, layered like a crow's wing, or perhaps the sigil of a hidden guild. Her gaze met Shiro's again, brief and unreadable, before she melted into the stream of entering students with the silent grace of smoke.
Kuro watched her disappear, his earlier forced smirk replaced by a deep, thoughtful frown. He nudged a fallen scrap of parchment near Shiro's boot with his toe. It showed a fragment of coastline, annotated in the same tight cipher, beside a tiny, exquisitely detailed drawing of a crow in mid flight, its eye rendered with unsettling lifelike intensity. "Textile district scholarship," he murmured, his voice pitched low for Shiro alone, "yet her parchment smells of saltpeter, glacier dust… and crow feathers. Odd curriculum for a cloth merchant's daughter. Very odd indeed."
Shiro picked up the scrap. The crow's eye seemed to follow him. "She watches," he muttered, a chill unrelated to the morning air tracing his spine. He glanced upwards instinctively. The crow that had shadowed them since the Repository, or one strikingly similar, was perched on a nearby rainspout gargoyle, its head cocked at an unnatural angle, watching the spot where Mira had vanished with peculiar, focused intensity. "Like they do."
"Everyone watches in this gilded cage," Kuro countered, but his storm grey eyes held a new, sharp wariness. He scanned the emptying quadrangle. "Some just have better vantage points. And sharper eyes." He gestured subtly towards the crow. "Let's move. Akuma won't be admiring the architecture forever."
Later, beneath the academy's eastern wing…
The storage cellar beneath the disused alchemy kitchens was a tomb of forgotten supplies and pervasive decay. The air hung thick and frigid, reeking of mouldering fish barrels, damp earth, and the acidic tang of long evaporated preservatives. Dust motes danced sluggishly in the single guttering lantern's light. Kuro worked at warped floorboards near the back wall, the rhythmic scrape thud of his knife prying them up the only sound besides their breathing and the frantic skittering of unseen things in the walls.
"Lantern closer," Kuro grunted, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cold. "And keep an ear tuned for… flapping."
Shiro obliged, holding the lantern high. Its flickering light revealed dark stains on the stones below the floorboards, old, rust brown, the colour of dried blood or perhaps something worse. "You think Mira's…"
"I don't think I know, her movements are too calculated for a student," Kuro interrupted, heaving a thick, rough cut oak plank from the hidden space beneath, "she collects maps of places the Temple insists are myth or demon haunted wastelands. I think she flinches like someone trained to dodge blades, not clumsy footmen. I think her 'carelessness' was as staged as Father's piety." He ran a hand along the plank's grain. Stolen from Ryo's prized new warship's hull. "And I think…" He paused, knife held still.
A sound. Not skittering. Not dripping. A faint, rhythmic tapping against the grimy, high window set near the ceiling, tap tap pause tap tap. Deliberate. Patterned. Like a signal.
Kuro's gaze snapped to the window, then locked onto Shiro's. In the lantern's swaying light, his eyes were chips of glacial flint. "…she has allies in inconvenient places. Or high ones." He jerked his chin towards the unseen sky beyond the window, towards the crows. "House Isamu always did have an affinity for the overlooked and the sharp beaked."
As Shiro unrolled the expensive vellum stolen from the Repository's ruins onto a relatively clean fish barrel, a brittle, yellowed page detached itself, fluttering down like a dying moth. Kuro snatched it mid air before it touched the filthy floor. He held it close to the lantern, squinting at the faded, spidery script.
"The smudged rises… when false stars… choke the true sky over Astralon…" He traced the smudge with a dye stained fingertip. "'Queen'? 'Storm'? 'Shadow'? Damnable inkblot." Frustration edged his voice. He held the fragile page closer to the flame. "Nyxarion. That's the name on Mira's hidden map. The 'Sovereign's Blight' Aki muttered about after the frostbite incident last winter." The memory of the girl's blue black veins, the brown decay at the edges, flashed in Shiro's mind.
"Gin calls it corruption," Shiro said, etching the first deep groove for Cassiopeia's spine into the fresh oak. The knife felt solid, purposeful. "A demon's touch. Proof of Nyxara's evil." He recalled Vayne's lectures, dripping with venom about the "Tyrant Queen of the Frozen Wastes," Nyxara the Star Eater, who sacrificed children to glaciers and sought to extinguish Polaris itself.
Kuro's lips thinned into a hard line. "Father's favourite bedtime horror. Used to justify the gold bleeding into his Northern Marches fortifications. The 'Ice Wall' they're building isn't defence, Ghost. It's a monument to paranoia… and a very expensive land grab." He flicked the ancient page into the lantern's open flame. It caught instantly, curling, blackening. For a split second, before the fire consumed it, a fragment of text glowed: "…fair harvests turned to ash by fear, the smudge peace shattered…" "Convenient," Kuro murmured, watching the ash fall, "how her alleged 'tyranny' always aligns with Father's need for more taxes and less scrutiny. Fear is the cheapest coin, and Gin mints it by the sermon load."
Tap tap tap. The tapping at the window intensified, sharper, more insistent.
Kuro ignored it, dipping his knife into the pot of thick violet berry dye. He began carving Polaris, not as Ryo's crushing fist, but as a cluster of sharp, defiant points aimed unerringly north. "Nyxarion's just another continent, Ghost. Frozen hellscape, probably. Stranger customs, certainly. But 'demon queen'?" He snorted, a harsh sound in the confined space. "Sounds like propaganda tailored to scare peasants and pry open their purse strings. Maybe Nyxara's crime is sitting on resources Father covets. Or refusing his 'benevolent' rule."
Shiro paused, considering. The idea felt audacious, dangerous. "You think he's lying? About everything?"
"I think," Kuro said, smearing dye into the fresh grooves of Polaris, the violet darkening to a bruise like black in the lantern light, "truth is the first casualty when crowns feel threatened. And Father's crown has rattled on his head since the Polaris defections." He glanced meaningfully at Shiro. "House Isamu… they were patrons of the northern observatories. Funded Polaris expeditions. Had ties to the Starborn before Gin declared them heretics. Before someone took star breaker and half the northern garrison into the Nyxion passes and vanished." He didn't elaborate on the legend, but the name Star Breaker hung in the air, a Polaris icon, a ghost who shattered Temple patrols with brutal efficiency, a symbol of resistance whispered in Higaru alleys. "If Mira is Isamu's eyes within these walls… why reveal her hand? Why drop that map practically into our laps?"
"Maybe it was an accident or a small gesture for an alliance who knows," Shiro offered, though he didn't believe it. He resumed carving, the knife biting deep into the oak. Cassiopeia's throne would tilt west, defiant.
"Or maybe," Kuro's eyes glinted with a mix of cynicism and burgeoning curiosity, "she wants us looking north. Past Ryo's fortifications and Gin's blighted sermons. Past the lies painted thick as Temple gold on every wall." He gestured vaguely upwards with his dye smeared knife. "Maybe the 'Tyrant Queen' isn't the monster lurking under our bed. Maybe she's just… inconveniently independent."
A sudden, distinct sound froze them both, not a tap, not a skitter. A faint creak from the floorboards directly overhead. Too heavy for rats. Too deliberate for settling stone.
Kuro moved with viper speed, snuffing the lantern flame between thumb and forefinger. Absolute, suffocating darkness slammed down, thick with the smell of fish and damp earth and sudden, palpable danger. Shiro's hand found the worn hilt of his knife, his other instinctively closing over the splintered remnant of Aki's plank in his pocket.
Silence. Thick. Oppressive. The only sound was the frantic hammering of Shiro's own heart and Kuro's near silent breath beside him.
Then, the softest rustle of feathers. Close. Near the high window. A faint scrape, like a claw on stone.
Silence again.
Then, a whisper of air, a minute disturbance in the stale cellar atmosphere. Something small and light drifted down, landing with an almost imperceptible tick on the stones near Shiro's boot. He didn't dare move.
Long moments stretched. No further sound came from above. No light seeped under the cellar door.
Kuro's whisper was the barest exhalation against Shiro's ear: "Clear. Lantern."
Shiro fumbled for the tinderbox, hands trembling slightly. The flint sparked, once, twice, catching the charred wick. Light flared, pushing back the darkness, revealing…
A single, sleek crow feather lay on the stones. But it wasn't plain black. Along its leading edge, rendered in the same deep brown ink as Mira's wrist marking, was an intricate pattern, swirling lines mimicking wind currents, interspersed with tiny, sharp runes that looked like stylized stars or perhaps mountain peaks. It was a signature. A message. I know where you are.
"Eyes in the sky, Ghost," Kuro murmured, picking up the feather. It felt unnaturally cold. "And they're not just watching the academy anymore. They're watching us."
Dawn's Grey Hand…
They emerged from the cellar's stench into the marginally fresher, biting cold of the academy's lower cloisters. Posters screamed from every pillar and archway, fresher and more virulent: SEDITION IN STARLIGHT! TREASON IN TEMPLE DYE! The ink was thicker, blacker, the accusations bolder. The sketches remained crude, Shiro's Higaru roughness exaggerated, the hooded figure with the silver streak more menacingly ambiguous. Akuma stood near the main gates, directing squads of Royal Guards, his star pupiled eyes scanning the gathering students and servants like a hawk surveying a field. He spotted Shiro and Kuro, his gaze lingering on Shiro with predatory intensity, a cruel smile touching his lips. But his focus shifted quickly, barking orders towards the barracks. His hunt today seemed wider, less personal. He was looking for the source, not just the symptom.
Near the gates, partially obscured by a cluster of nervous first years, Mira stood seemingly engrossed in a large, Temple approved star chart displayed on a board. She looked the picture of diligent scholarship, her expression serene. As Shiro and Kuro passed, she didn't glance up, didn't acknowledge them. But her left hand rested casually against the cold stone wall beside the chart. Beside her fingertips, almost invisible unless one knew to look for such things, a small symbol had been freshly scratched into the mortar: a simple, stark outline of a double bladed axe.
Kuro's step hitched, almost imperceptibly. His breath caught for a fraction of a second. Star Breaker's sigil. The legend lived. Here. Now.
Mira's eyes flicked upwards, not towards them, but towards the slate grey sky. High above, circling like a sentinel, was a crow. Not the one from the cellar, perhaps, but kin. It let out a single, sharp, distinctive caw, different from its usual cries, more resonant, almost… conversational.
Mira gave the faintest, almost imperceptible nod. Then, without a backward glance, she rolled up her scroll, tucked it under her arm, and walked calmly away, disappearing into the morning throng heading towards the lecture halls.
"Friendly neighbourhood spy," Kuro murmured, a genuine flicker of something akin to respect warring with his ingrained cynicism in his storm grey eyes. "Running a courier service via crow. Efficient." He watched the crow bank sharply, winging its way northwards, towards the forbidding, snow capped peaks that marked the edge of the known world, the Nyxion Spine, gateway to Nyxarion. A single, tiny shard of something crystalline and impossibly cold fell from its talons, vanishing into the snowy courtyard below. Nyxarion ice?
"Reports to who?" Shiro asked, his gaze following the crow's flight until it was a speck against the ominous clouds gathering over the mountains. The name Star Breaker burned in his mind.
"To whoever needs to know," Kuro said, the ghost of his old, dangerous smirk returning, "that the 'shitty prince' and the 'slum rat' are still kicking holes in the Temple's pretty lies." He started walking again, purpose in his stride. "And maybe… just maybe… that we're starting to look north. Past the Ice Wall. Past the sermons." He glanced at Shiro, the unspoken question hanging between them: What lies there? Truth? Or a different kind of storm?
Above them, the crow with the inked feather signature circled once more, lower this time, its prismatic eyes seeming to hold Shiro's gaze for a heartbeat before it too banked northwards, following its companion. King Ryo's ring was no longer clutched in its beak; a thin band of darkened iron now encircled its leg, a stolen crown worn as a shackle. Somewhere beyond the mountains, in a palace carved from glacial ice and lit by captured auroras, Nyxara, Queen of Nyxarion, surveyed her realm, unaware of the monstrous portrait painted of her in Astralon, or the spies moving like shadows through the gilded cage of Ryo's academy. The game board had expanded overnight, vast and terrifying. New players had revealed themselves, new alliances were hinted at in crow calls and axe sigils, and the frozen fig stem from their first act of rebellion lay forgotten, buried deeper under the relentless snow, a relic of a simpler, smaller war. The chill in the air no longer felt merely like winter; it felt like the breath of a continent waiting. The path forward was no longer just about defacing charts; it pointed north, into the teeth of a storm built on lies, towards a truth that could shatter kingdoms. The next move demanded more than berry dye and stolen knives. It demanded a pact written in something far more permanent.