Three weeks later, Liriel had memorized the guards' rotation.
The Moonveil Sect was vast, but it operated with precise routines. The guards changed shifts at midnight and noon. The outer patrol covered the perimeter for exactly two hours before rotating. The inner sanctum—the sacred temple where only senior cultivators were permitted to venture—was guarded most strictly during daylight hours.
But at night, between the midnight and dawn shifts, there was a window. A brief moment when the gate stood unattended.
Liriel had discovered this by accident, watching patterns from the kitchens' high window. She'd spent the first two weeks after meeting Kael in a state of paralyzed uncertainty. The third week, she had made a decision: if he truly believed she could cultivate again, she needed to find proof. She needed to understand what he meant about being "different."
So she had started researching.
The Sect's libraries were nominally open to all disciples, but servants rarely ventured there. The few times Liriel had entered, she'd felt the weight of disapproval from the senior students stationed at the archives. She had managed to filch a few books over the course of several visits—texts on cultivation theory, histories of the Sect, transcripts of Elder lectures.
Most of it was familiar. But one book had caught her attention: The Sealed Era: A Record of the Forbidden Arts. It was a thin volume, marked with a wax seal indicating restricted access. Only senior cultivators were supposed to read it. Liriel had carefully broken the seal, read the entire book in one night, and carefully restored it to the shelf.
The book was about the Void Resonance.
According to the text, three hundred years ago, there had been a sect—the Order of Eternal Night—that specialized in the cultivation of Void Resonance. The text described them as having achieved wonders: the ability to move through darkness as if through water, to see across vast distances through the void between stars, to extend their lives indefinitely by drawing power from the spaces between existence.
But it had ended in catastrophe. The more deeply they cultivated the Void, the more the power had consumed them. They lost sense of self. They lost their humanity. Eventually, they lost everything. The order had imploded into madness. The survivors had fled, abandoning their techniques, their arts, their very knowledge of what they had become.
The current Moonveil Sect had been founded by refugees from that time—people who'd managed to escape before the end. They had deliberately suppressed all knowledge of Void Resonance. Every text had been destroyed or hidden. Every attempt to cultivate that power had been forbidden.
And Liriel had felt it calling during her Awakening Ceremony. She had felt the Void screaming beneath the temple.
That discovery had kept her awake for nights. It had explained the specific way Elder Kaito's face had gone white when her core shattered. It had explained why the Council had moved so quickly to dismiss her from the student ranks, rather than trying to rehabilitate her.
They were afraid of her.
The question was: why?
That was why she was creeping through the temple gardens at two in the morning, slipping past the unguarded gate of the inner sanctum.
The garden was nothing like the cultivated spaces on the upper levels of the Sect. Those were precision-maintained, every tree and flower arranged to maximize harmonic beauty. This place was wild—overgrown with moss-covered stones, with ancient trees twisted into impossible shapes, with herbs and flowers that glowed faintly with residual spiritual energy.
And at the center, half-buried in centuries of earth and vegetation, was a temple.
Not the Moonveil Sect's temple—something older. The architecture was different, more elaborate, with carvings that depicted scenes Liriel didn't have names for. Cultivators wielding power that danced like shadows. Cities with towers that reached toward stars. And everywhere, everywhere, inscriptions in a language she didn't recognize.
Except... as she got closer, she found that she did recognize it.
It wasn't that she could read the language. It was that the symbols seemed to resonate with something inside her—the fractured place where her core used to be. The closer she got to the inscriptions, the more clearly she could feel them humming with a power that had been deliberately suppressed, carved over with newer markings in an attempt to erase them.
But you couldn't erase something that had been carved into reality itself.
Liriel approached the temple wall and placed her palm against one of the inscriptions. The moment her skin made contact, everything changed.
The void beneath the temple opened like an eye.
It wasn't painful this time. Instead, it was like coming home to a place you'd only ever visited in dreams. The power recognized her. The inscriptions on the temple walls blazed to life with light that was older than the Sect, older than the world as it currently existed. And Liriel felt, for the first time since her core shattered, that deep humming resonance in her chest.
She felt alive.
The power flooded through her hands. It spread up her arms like vines, like rivers of starlight, like the sensation of falling into an infinite distance. Her eyes went wide. She tried to pull her hand back, suddenly afraid of what was happening, but the power held her there—not violently, but with inexorable gentleness.
And then, in the darkness of her own mind, she felt the temple speak.
It didn't use words. It used images and sensations, transmitting information directly into her consciousness. She saw the Order of Eternal Night at the height of their power, cultivators who walked through shadow and drank from the spaces between stars. She saw them discovering something that shouldn't be discovered—a well of power that had no bottom, that consumed even as it fed. She saw them losing themselves, one by one, until the Sect collapsed inward.
And she felt, beneath all of it, the echo of a choice.
The Void had a voice. It had intentions. It was offering her something—power, yes, but also something more fundamental. A partnership. A merging. A way to become something transcendent, something that had never been allowed to exist since the Void took form.
All she had to do was say yes.
Liriel screamed and tore her hand away from the wall.
The connection snapped. The light from the inscriptions went dark. The humming in her chest faded back to that distant, phantom sensation. She collapsed onto the ground, breathing hard, her entire body shaking.
She understood now why the Order had fallen. The power didn't care about survival or continuity or safety. It wanted only to grow, to consume, to merge itself with everything it touched. It was antithetical to the careful balance that cultivation required. It was chaos wearing the mask of transcendence.
But she also understood something else: it had chosen her. During the Awakening Ceremony, it had recognized her—recognized something in her blood or her spirit or her very essence—and called to her across the sealed boundaries of the Sect.
She was not broken because her core shattered. She was broken because the Void lived in her, and the shattering was its way of saying hello.
"I wondered when you'd find this place."
Liriel spun around, her heart in her throat.
Kael stood at the edge of the temple, backlit by the moonlight, his expression impossible to read.
"How long have you been watching?" she demanded.
"Long enough to see what happened." He stepped closer, and now she could see that his eyes were wide, shocked, terrified. "That power... I've never felt anything like it. It was like the entire temple was alive, and—"
"You felt that?" Liriel interrupted.
"Everyone with a core felt it. Half the Sect probably woke up in cold sweat just now." Kael grabbed her shoulders. "Liriel, the Council is going to investigate. We need to get you out of here."
"Where?" Liriel asked, looking down at her hands. They were glowing faintly, residual Void Resonance still flickering beneath the skin. "Kael, what did you see? What just happened to me?"
"I saw you touch that wall and suddenly there was power everywhere," Kael said urgently. "Power that I've only read about in forbidden texts. Power that the entire Sect was founded specifically to prevent." He paused, studying her face. "I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"
Liriel looked at this young man who had appeared in her life without explanation, who had offered kindness when she had nothing, who had known more about her situation than he should have. Something in his steady gaze told her that he was telling the truth about this, at least.
"I trust you," she said quietly.
"Then we need to run. Now."
But there was nowhere to run to, not really. The Sect was entirely sealed during the night hours. The only way out was through the main gate, and it wouldn't open until dawn.
Kael did the next best thing: he took her deeper into the Sect itself. He used his status as an advanced student to move through corridors that would have challenged a servant. He brought her to his private chambers in the senior dormitory and gave her his spare robes—indigo with gold trim, marking her as something other than a servant.
"If anyone sees you, you're my study partner," Kael said. "No one will question it."
They spent the rest of the night in his room, and Liriel told him everything. About the symbols on the temple walls. About the voice of the Void beneath the Sect. About how, during her Awakening Ceremony, she had felt something calling to her from impossibly deep.
Kael listened to all of it with an expression that grew more grim with each revelation.
"This is bigger than I thought," he said finally. "I knew something was strange about the way the Council handled your dismissal. I knew there was something they weren't saying. But this..." He stood, pacing his small room. "The Void Resonance isn't just forbidden. It's sealed. There are wards throughout the Sect specifically designed to suppress it. And somehow, despite all of that, you awakened it anyway."
"Why is that important?" Liriel asked.
"Because wards like that would only be necessary if there was something dangerous to seal," Kael said quietly. "The Council isn't protecting the Sect from the Void. They're protecting the Void from being found."
Liriel felt a chill run through her. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that the Order of Eternal Night didn't just disappear." Kael stopped pacing and looked directly at her. "According to certain texts that I definitely shouldn't have been able to read, the founders of our Sect made a bargain with what remained of the Void Resonance. They sealed it beneath the temple, and in exchange, the Void promised not to consume them. But the seal has always been fragile. It requires constant reinforcement."
"And I just cracked it open," Liriel whispered.
"You did more than that," Kael said. "You touched it, and it recognized you. That shouldn't be possible. The Void hasn't responded to a human presence in three centuries." He was quiet for a long moment. "Unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless you carry its mark in your blood. Unless one of your ancestors made a covenant with it, the way the founders did. Unless you were meant to find this place."
The words hung in the air between them like a sentence of doom.
"What happens now?" Liriel asked.
Kael looked out his window toward the slowly lightening eastern sky. "Now, the Council investigates. They realize that something has awakened in the temple. And they find you, still marked by its power, glowing like a beacon to anyone who knows how to look."
"I'll run," Liriel said. "I'll leave the Sect, leave everything—"
"And go where?" Kael interrupted. "The Council has reach beyond these walls. And more importantly..." He turned to face her. "The Void won't let you leave. It's found you. It's called you home. It won't accept your rejection."
Liriel felt despair rise in her chest like floodwater. This was the curse she'd been given. This was the reason her core had shattered—not a flaw in her, but a mark on her, a beacon calling to a power that should have stayed sealed forever.
"Then what do I do?" she asked, and heard the break in her own voice.
Kael was quiet for a long time. Then: "You let me teach you. You learn to control it. And you become the thing the Sect is most afraid of."
He said it with such certainty that, for a moment, Liriel almost believed it was possible.