The pain arrived like a cold tide. It was small at first, a hollow ache beneath Erian's ribs where the bond had always kept its quiet vigil. Then it roared, a vacuum tugging at the edges of his mind and pulling at the memory of Aster until the prince's presence became a distant echo.
Erian clutched the blanket and forced himself to breathe. He did not dare cry out. The infirmary around him smelled of herbs and slow healing. Moonlight slanted through the latticed window and painted the floor in pale streaks. Professor Kael sat at the foot of the bed, parchment spread across his knees, eyes dark and thoughtful.
"You felt it," Kael said without looking up.
Erian swallowed. "They cut him away."
Kael's jaw tightened. He rolled a silver bead between his fingers, a charm of containment and study. "Not completely. The seal the Sun Order pressed around the prince's blood is crude and old magic. It will hold for now. But every seal weakens when two souls strain against it."
"Then help me break it," Erian said. The words trembled, but they were steady. "Tell me what to do."
Kael looked at him for a long time. The flicker of candlelight carved shadow across the lines of his face. "There is a ritual," he said finally. "Forbidden techniques recorded in a codex older than the Codex of Veiled Light. It calls itself the Ritual of the Unbound, a rite to sever a seal by knitting its reverse thread. But it demands a price."
Erian's hands tightened around the blanket. "Any price."
"You are rash," Kael warned. "The ritual feeds on memory and will. It requires you to walk back through the lives that bind you, to relive pain as if you were the instrument of that pain. You will remember more than you want, and you may wake with pieces of those memories lodged where they do not belong."
Erian thought of Aster kneeling beneath the broken crown, the memory of the dream that had been their first honest exchange. He thought of the way Aster had taken him in his arms, of Aster's vow. He thought of the emptiness when the seal had ripped them apart.
"I will pay it," he said.
Kael rose and closed the book. "Then we need time and shelter. They will come looking. The Order has eyes inside the academy. They will not be patient."
Outside, beyond the infirmary window, the stars seemed to tremble in sympathy. Erian placed his free hand over his chest where the sigil pulsed like a heartbeat. "Do we have allies?"
Kael's mouth curved in a tired, small smile. "A few. Lady Selene is not as simple as she appears. She knows how to hide things and people. And Seren Vale is unpredictable. He hunts for the Order, but he has a history of doing favors for debts no one else remembers. We will not be safe long."
Erian let the plan fill him with equal parts dread and hope. "When do we begin?"
Kael's eyes held the weight of a teacher who must ask his pupil to step beyond knowledge into sacrifice. "At midnight. The observatory mirrors are arranged. The ritual calls for reflected sky. It will give you a path into the seal."
The night came with the scrape of hidden wings. Moonlight slid across the academy roofs. Erian wrapped himself in a cloak and followed Kael through corridors lit by sleepy torches. They moved like conspirators, soundless as ink across a page.
When they reached the old observatory, a hush lay over the instruments. Kael's assistants had already arranged mirrors and crystal lenses, forming a dome of reflected heavens. Every surface caught a different shard of star, and the air smelled faintly of ozone and old rain.
"You need to set your intention," Kael said as they entered. "The ritual will take a memory as the vessel. Choose a memory that anchors you to him, and then let it burn inside you as you turn it outward."
Erian thought of Aster standing beneath the broken crown, pride transforming into quiet surrender, the prince's fingers brushing his wrist. He closed his eyes and held that moment like a flame.
Kael began to chant words that had not been spoken aloud inside the academy for centuries. The syllables moved like cold water, and at each cadence the mirrors hummed in answer. Light loosened from the vaulted dome, slinking along the mirrors until the whole room felt like a bowl of liquid stars.
Erian laid both hands upon the central stone. The mark on his chest flared in sympathy. For a time everything was sound and breath and the steady rhythm of Kael's voice.
Then the memory flared. Erian saw the battlefield of a forgotten age. He felt the weight of a blade in hands that were not his. He heard a cry that broke a world. He watched himself, or a version of himself, choose to wield light until it unmade a city. He tasted ash and salt and the iron tang of loss.
Pain ripped through him as the ritual demanded installment after installment. Each shard of recollection unstitched more of the seal around Aster's blood. The light in the mirrors shivered, then leaned toward Erian as if drawn to a beacon.
Kael supported him like the trunk of a tree holds a sapling in wind. "Do not bind yourself to guilt," Kael said in a flat voice. "The ritual asks for memory but not for self-condemnation. Remember and let it pass."
Erian forced himself to breathe through images that were not wholly his. He let the priest's whisper echo, the cries beneath a crown, the moment when someone he loved turned to ash in his hands. He threaded them through his will like beads on a wire, and at last the memories folded inward and burned like small coals.
A sound like a cracked bell rang out. The mirrors fractured one by one, their reflections knitting into a single column of silver light that surged toward the ceiling and then down again like a river. The seal around Aster's name, wherever it hung in distant palace dark, trembled.
Erian fell back onto the stone, lungs burning. His knees shook. Kael was beside him, hands steady on his shoulders. "It worked," Kael murmured.
For a moment a taste of triumph eased the ache of memory. But that relief was a thin thing in the night. A distant scream echoed, muffled and panicked. The observatory doors blew inward with a crash that scattered the dust and knocked over a tray of crystal lenses.
Men in golden insignia filled the doorway. The sun mark glowed on their breastplates, and at their head walked Ren Vale of the academy, his polite smile replaced by an expression of triumph. Behind him came two priests from the Order and a figure Aster's name would make Erian ache for. Seren Vale stood to the left, arms folded, watching as if perusing an interesting book.
"You really thought you could hide a star," Ren said smoothly. "The High Priest has eyes everywhere."
Kael's face hardened. He shoved Erian behind him in reflex. "You have no jurisdiction here," Kael said, voice a low, dangerous rumble.
Ren's smile hardened into something colder. "We have authority to remove dangerous relics and those who harbor them."
Erian pushed forward despite the shaking in his limbs. The ritual had left him further exposed, raw around the edges. "You cannot take him," he said. "You cannot take what belongs to both of us."
Ren's gaze flicked to the faint sigil now glowing along Erian's arm. "That mark is treacherous. You will understand once you are brought before the sanctum."
Seren stepped forward then. His voice was not amused. "You should have run when you had the chance." He drew a blade and left it resting on his palm as if tempting the air. "But if the Order wants a trophy, they will have to fight for it."
The hall contracted into readiness. Kael's assistants gathered crystals and protective charms. Ren's priests began to chant a sealing liturgy. The chance to broker for time was shrinking.
Erian's chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with magic. Far from the academy, he imagined Aster beneath a crown hall, touching the place where the sun's seal had closed and feeling a tug like a lost thread. He pictured the prince's face as if engraved upon his eyes.
"Then let them try," Erian said, voice small and impossible stubborn. "If they break the sanctum, what will be left for them to rule?"
Kael's hand tightened on his shoulder. "Be ready," Kael said. "You gave them both an answer and a challenge. The Order will not back away."
Outside, under a sky that had begun to fracture with new constellations, a messenger flew toward the palace, and somewhere beyond the gilded doors an emperor roused to the thunder of an approaching storm.
Erian breathed in. The ritual had opened a path. It had also marked their footsteps with a trail the world could now follow.
He closed his eyes and listened. For the first time since the seal, he could hear Aster's breath in the silence, a faint, steady rhythm across the distance like a promise.
He would not let them take that rhythm away.