For a long breath, neither Aurelia nor Lucien spoke. The air between them was still charged, friction without flame, pride without outlet.
Silk and glass were arranged into arcs and garlands around them. Needles threaded through the hall like distant commands.
Lucien broke the silence first, brushing a gloved hand through his hair with practiced nonchalance. "Disciplinary Work," he said with a quiet laugh. "Haven't had one of those since I was twelve." His eyes slid to her, sharp and assessing. "You should feel honored. Few people drag me that low."
Aurelia didn't rise to it. She dusted her uniform sleeve, movements calm and deliberate. "You provoked it."
He tilted his head. "You accepted it."
Her gaze met his, steady, silver, unreadable. "Because you asked for truth," she said. "And I don't hide from mine."
Something flickered across his face, amusement or irritation pretending to be interest. "Truth," he echoed. "You'll learn that's not what survives here, Aurelia. Control does."
She shook the notion off like an unwanted spark. "You're wrong," she said simply. "Strength and resolve survive. Not small mercies disguised as governance."
They worked in silence for a few moments, hands busy.
Aether lifted chandeliers from their carts and set them mid-air in slow, patient circles, ribbons braided themselves into honeycombs of light.
The punishment was practical, if not a touch ironic. As the duo in charge of the Academy's masquerade decorations, they were to be kept conspicuously close until the event. The irony of the situation wasn't lost on anyone.
When the next spool of silk floated toward them, Aurelia caught it between two fingers and threaded a ribbon through the rings.
Lucien watched the motion as if cataloguing its rhythm.
"What are you going to do after graduation?" he asked, casual as a coin flicked into a fountain.
Aurelia blinked, the question unexpected and clumsy. "We don't need small talk," she said, voice flat. "Don't make things awkward. We should finish."
Lucien scoffed, amused. "After that display yesterday, so much fire, now you are all neat edges and restraint. It's a pity. You had a good roar."
She let out a short, controlled exhale. He wasn't going to let it be. "I plan to do the work that matters," she replied. "Perhaps the royal mages. Practical service. There's enough pomp in the world already."
He smiled then, a slow, even thing that didn't reach his eyes. "Let time pass, Miss Caelistra, and you'll be part of the family one way or another. The court has a way of arranging its future."
Aurelia's fingers tightened on the ribbon. "I will never be your bride," she said, cold and clear.
Lucien's mouth twitched as if at a private joke. He leaned forward. "Never say never. It's a dangerous vow to make," he murmured. "And dangerous vows are the most entertaining."
Something in the room shifted, whether a smirk or a warning, Aurelia couldn't tell. She met his gaze without flinching.
The hall around them hummed with hands and Aether, but for a second their argument became a small, sharp thing suspended between them.
A silk lantern, strung a moment before, began to dip, an offbeat pulse in its levitation.
Without thinking, both of them reached. Their fingers brushed over the lantern's rim, for a heartbeat, their motions synchronized.
Lucien's thread of golden Aether steadied the lantern's wobble while Aurelia threaded a silver spool to hold it true.
The contact was brief, businesslike. They straightened and stepped apart, each reclaiming his or her dignity.
Lucien inclined his head, not a bow but a concession. "You're better at this than you look," he said, almost approving.
Aurelia lifted an eyebrow. "Flattery will not loosen my tongue."
He laughed softly. "We'll see how long that conviction stands, after the masquerade, perhaps."
She turned back to the work, fastening the last knot on the lantern. Pride and a plan braided together in her chest.
The punishment had been meant to humiliate, instead, it had handed her proximity and a reminder.
Patience and practice were the quiet crafts of power.
How am I supposed to push into Stage Three when most of my days are spent preparing for the party?
Maybe I shouldn't have goaded Lucien…
Stage Three, Echocraft lived at the edge of rumor and syllabus.
In her head, she recited the dry lines she'd memorized: In Stage Three, referred to as Echocraft, actions leave behind repeatable signatures that the Aether will echo.
By learning to ride that echo, a caster can fold past energies into future spells, amplifying resonance and precision.
How to make the world keep a copy of your motion and then read it back at will.
The Professors might teach the technique later, if the curriculum held to its rhythm. Still, for now, Malrec's focus stayed on the second stage of the Elemental Edict, and Seris on stage two of the Manipulation Edict.
Lucien's voice cut across the murmur of the hall like a blade through silk. "Do your work, Miss Caelistra. Daydreaming won't stitch these lanterns."
Aurelia blinked, the web of thought folding shut. She smoothed the ribbon between her fingers and let the memory of Echocraft, of echoes and signatures, recede to the back of her mind for now.
She glanced at him, caught by the bluntness. "The party isn't until next week," she said, half-smiling. "No need to rush."
"I want to finish as soon as possible," he replied, tone clipped. "So I can get back to practice."
Out of curiosity, and spite, a slight private tug, she asked, "What stage are you working on, then?"
He looked at her with that casual, unbothered tilt and answered, "Weavecraft."
"Weavecraft." The word had the clean, metallic ring of something fashioned, deliberate. "The one Professor Seris is teaching of the Manipulation Edict?"
Lucien reached for a loose ribbon, pinched it between thumb and forefinger, and plucked the air with a single, efficient motion.
The ribbon shivered, then obeyed, coils bending into an intricate knot and locking in place like a key turned.
"It's…crafting the pull in things," he said, voice even. "You don't force the world so much as you give it direction. Stage One, basic shaping, allows you to move an object. Stage Two involves gaining the ability to maintain various effects in place while you gather your thoughts. This stage allows you to sustain a lantern or hold a latch against powerful gusts, showcasing a newfound capacity for control."
Aurelia watched the knot, the way the ribbon held the shape without taut effort as if it had been born that way.
"Polite sabotage," Lucien echoed, as though filing it under a favorite category. "Efficient."
Aurelia couldn't help the inward roll of her eyes, but she also felt a small, reluctant respect.
The prince made his work seem like an art, showy perhaps, but also cruelly effective.
He favored neatness, not brute force. That explained his preference for Weavecraft, his style had always been about the little rules that made people step where he wanted them to.
Aurelia thought of Echocraft again, how echoes could be ridden, how signatures left behind could do the next job for you.
If I could learn to leave a clean signature with my harmonized spells, then later coax those echoes into strengthening a follow-up weave.
The combination of Echocraft and Scriptcraft might be more than the sum of its parts.
Aurelia paused with a length of silk hovering between her palms and really looked at the room for the first time in a long while.
Ribbons twirled into place, lantern frames rotated and locked with a whisper of silver light, and small motes of Aether slid along the grain of the table like obedient insects.
Every motion felt uncannily like breathing: lift, nudge, settle.
Hands moved, but the work was done by the current they cupped rather than by calluses and elbow grease.
A thought that had been skittering at the edge of her mind caught and steadied.
Had we chosen this method because it was easier? Had the Academy, a place that taught the art of asking the world to move for you, trained us so thoroughly that their first impulse was to let Aether do the heavy lifting?
Or had we, each in our own way, simply found the method that suited us best.
Aurelia let her fingers wander, not with the sharp, ordered gestures of a practiced spell, but more like testing the surface of a quiet lake.
The Aether answered before she could finish thinking, a dozen thin currents uncoiling from the nearest rafters and pooling beneath her palms.
They were cool and precise, little crescents of silver light that hummed like strings tuned just shy of a chord.
The sensation was half-memory and half-measurement.
On one level, it felt intimate, the world leaning in to listen.
On another, it felt clinical, a grid of possibilities she could read, assess, and refine.
She had learned to make Aether do what she wanted, now the question was whether she could make it remember.
She let the feeling swell. Where Harmonic Flow had been about alignment, folding mood, and intent until the world's breath and her own matched.
Echocraft aimed at something slipperier, leaving a trace the Aether would echo back.
The idea was simple in theory and dangerous in practice.
Imagine striking a bell not once but in a pattern that imprinted a vibration into the air itself.
Later, when you hit the bell again, the echo would answer, strengthening or redirecting the new sound.
Echocraft was learning how to write those echoes into the world so that the next cast rode on what came before.
She tried for that imprint. First, a steady pulse, soft, inward, and then a shaped command.
Let the currents hold, then recall, then fold.
Let the self dissolve and return in resonance.
The words were not a spell so much as a metronome for the heart.
For a heartbeat, the ballroom filled with motion. Aether rose in a slow, synchronous bloom, sparks folded into bands and the bands into ribbons.
The ribbons pooled where she directed them and, to her startled delight, a faint memory of the pattern lingered after she released her focus.
A single place in the air kept a low, quivering echo, like a musical note that refused to die at the pianist's hand.
Then the echo faltered. The ribbons thinned and, as if meeting an invisible dam, snapped back into silence.
The hold had not deepened into persistence, the echo would not sustain itself beyond that one, small repetition.
She had coaxed the world to repeat once, and the world had declined to repeat again.
Lucien's laugh in the doorway broke the hush. He was not cruel now, his mouth was a brief, incredulous smile. "You're excessive," he said, but awe undercut the teasing. "A monster, really. To make dust dance like that and then expect the world to applaud."
Aurelia let herself smile anyway, not at the praise, but at the proof. It wasn't Echocraft, not yet.
The currents had answered her once, they had not learned to respond consistently.
That sliver of response, however small, was a map more useful than any boast.
It told her where the seams in her control lay: timing was too blunt, imprinting was too shallow, and the emotional stain was not held constant long enough to bind the echo.
What was needed was a genuine emotional anchor that roots the imprint, precise phasing so the signature breathes with the world's tempo, and a narrow, repeated gesture small enough to be learned by the Aether rather than dismissed as a single moment.
The order mattered. Anchor first to give the echo a tone, phase next so the imprint dovetailed with the world, then repetition to turn a motion into motif.
Miss any one, and the echo collapses into silence or, worse, feedback that chews at the caster.
Aurelia had hit the first syllable of that triad and missed the rest.
She breathed in, tasting the cool residue of the attempt. Progress, not perfection.
The Aether's reluctance felt less like failure and more like a threshold she could practice toward.
A rhythm to train, an inner state to learn, a patience to cultivate.
Lucien's eyes were still on the drifting motes, his amusement softened into something like respect. "Show off," he said, but the words were gentle. "And stop daydreaming in the middle of work."
Aurelia smirked. "I at least found a hint toward Stage Three while 'daydreaming,'" she teased, the emphasis light and wicked.
Lucien's amusement softened into something almost conspiratorial.
He let out a long breath, glanced at Aurelia once as if testing whether she would scold him for theatrics, then, very deliberately, flopped back onto the polished floor and folded his hands across his chest as if preparing for a child's prayer.
Aurelia blinked. "You're kidding."
He gave her a careless, practiced smile. "If you can daydream in the middle of work, I can try a thing too."
Then, quieter, with a cadence that felt practiced rather than plucked from impulse, he spoke, "Weavecraft… Thread, hold, become." The words were not a mirror of her chant but a cousin, short, sharp, sculpted for purpose rather than mood.
Where Aurelia's Aether had bloomed in soft crescents and left a tremor, Lucien's answered as taut, golden filaments.
They unfurled from his fingertips in neat, obedient lines and ran across the ceiling like lacquered threads.
He guided them with the precision of a tailor, a braid here, a knot there, each motion measured, economical.
The filaments wrapped themselves around a row of floating lanterns and bound them into a tidy chain.
The chain hung unblinking, as if nailed to an invisible beam.
Aurelia found herself watching the difference in silence.
His Weavecraft wanted shape and repetition, the ability to set a pattern and trust it to hold.
Where Echocraft sought a living echo, something that learned and answered, Lucien's strand-work insisted on stability: make the thing, teach it to endure. She could see the appeal.
The weave held longer than her echo's, and the line did not falter at first.
But when Lucien shifted his intention and tried to coax the same braid to repeat a subtle, secondary motion without drawing more from himself, the filament creaked and thinned, the knot seeming suddenly unfamiliar.
With a soft pop, the extra motion failed. The chain stayed stubborn and steady, but it refused the new instruction.
He opened his eyes and sat up, his composure slipping into something near pleased surprise.
"Not bad," he conceded, tossing a look that was half-tease, half-challenge. "Different aim. Yours wants memory, mine wants trust. Both useful. Neither perfect yet."
Aurelia let a slight, genuine smile tug at her lips. "Perhaps," she said, "we're practicing translations of the same language."
Lucien's brief nod carried the weight of a truce and a dare both, "So what does this make us then? Geniuses? Or is advancing through stages really as easy as lying on the floor and thinking hard enough?"
Aurelia crossed her arms, still gazing at the faint shimmer lingering above them. "Don't get too arrogant. What we achieved was only a glimpse, just a hint toward progress. Nothing more."
He hummed in mild disagreement. "You make it sound trivial. Most students don't get a shimmer like that by accident."
"Most students," Aurelia countered evenly, "reach Stage Four by the time they graduate. That's the average."
Lucien sat up, brushing the dust from his coat. "We're not the average, though."
Aurelia's lips curled faintly at that, neither denying nor agreeing. "If that's true," she said, her tone light but her eyes sharp, "then we'll earn the title of geniuses only when we touch the threshold of the Ten Stages."
Lucien tilted his head. "Stage Five…" He smiled. "Then I suppose that's true."
The ballroom, for a moment, felt less like a test and more like a proving ground, one that would demand both echo and weave before either of them could claim mastery.