The glow vanished, leaving nothing but the faint hum of silence.
For a long moment, Jayden just sat there — hand outstretched, watching the air where the runes had been. The blue trails were gone, but his skin still tingled, as if the memory of light refused to fade.
He flexed his fingers again.
Nothing.
The rune didn't reappear, but the feeling remained — a soft pulse, low and rhythmic, somewhere between his ribs and his mind.
He leaned back against the wall, listening.
The Academy never truly slept. Even at night, faint vibrations coursed through its stone — not essence, but machinery. The walls were laced with conduits, pipelines, and essence stabilizers, all humming in subtle harmony. It was the heartbeat of the world's most advanced structure — a fusion of technology and the remnants of ancient elemental design.
He'd heard stories about the Academy before arriving: that it was built on the ruins of an old fortress from the Era of Shattering, when humans first learned to capture raw essence and give it form. He didn't believe it at first. But standing here, feeling the hum beneath his bare feet… he wasn't sure anymore.
Kael was snoring softly, one arm hanging off the bed like a dead branch. Reno had somehow rolled himself into a blanket cocoon. Theo's pad glowed faintly from his desk, lines of equations flickering across the screen as he muttered in his sleep.
Jayden glanced at them — three strangers thrown into his orbit by chance — and wondered how long that would last.
In the real world, bonds broke faster than promises.
Here, maybe it'd be different. Or maybe not.
He sighed and turned his attention to the window.
Outside, the night was alive with quiet motion. From this height, he could see the rings of the Academy — concentric platforms floating above the sea, connected by transparent bridges that shimmered like liquid glass. Tiny boats moved between them, their lamps glowing blue and gold. The outermost rings held the dorms. The inner sanctum, where the instructors and archives were kept, floated at the center like a sleeping heart.
Far beyond that, the horizon was swallowed by mist.
Jayden had always hated mist. It hid things too easily.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass and whispered to no one in particular,
"…why me?"
The question wasn't new.
It had haunted him since the day of the Water Trial — since the day the Eye of Creation appeared.
He didn't earn it. At least, not in the way others would understand. He wasn't the top of his class. He wasn't from a powerful family. He didn't even know what the Eye truly was. All he knew was that it had appeared when he was on the verge of drowning — that it saw something in him worth saving.
Or maybe it just wanted to survive through him.
He closed his eyes.
For a brief, silent moment, he remembered the weight of the water pressing down on him, the burn in his lungs, the panic that gave way to clarity. He remembered the feeling of seeing — not with his eyes, but with something else — the way the current moved, the way the light bent, the way life pulsed through everything.
It wasn't magic. It wasn't divine.
It was understanding.
And it scared him more than death ever did.
A sharp chime snapped him out of it — the wall display flickering softly, projecting a pale message across the dorm:
[Lights-out protocol in effect. All students are to remain within dorm parameters.]
He sighed again and turned from the window.
The moment passed.
The quiet remained.
When he finally lay down, the ceiling above him seemed impossibly far away. The amber lights dimmed to a cold silver, casting faint reflections on the metal lining of his bunk.
His last thought before sleep wasn't about the Eye, or the Trial, or even the future.
It was about home — the faint scent of rain-soaked iron, the echo of his mother's voice calling him for dinner, the quiet hum of life before all of this began.
And then the hum of the Academy folded into the rhythm of his dreams.