The seventh bell's chime echoed through the silent administrative wing like a sentence. My boots, freshly cleaned for the occasion, made no sound on the deep, azure runner that led to the oaken doors of the Headmaster's study. They were taller than seemed necessary, carved with bas-reliefs of the founding races in symbolic harmony—a harmony that felt like a polished lie.
My heart was a trapped bird, but my mind, trained by Machina and tempered by the void, was a block of ice. I had spent the hours since the summons running scenarios, preparing responses, refining my mental shields. The Passive Null-Filter was a constant, faint hum at the edge of my awareness, a hope of muting my own aberrant energy signature. My cracked core ached dully.
The doors swung inward before I could knock, moved by unseen magic.
Headmaster Arcturus Caelum's study was not what I expected. It was not a cavern of grim power or a museum of trophies. It was a sphere. A perfect, thirty-foot diameter sphere of white marble, lit by a sourceless, diffuse glow. The floor was a mosaic of the night sky, constellations picked out in chips of obsidian and diamond. There were no bookshelves, no desks. Only a single, low stone dais in the very center, and upon it, the Headmaster.
He was not an imposing figure physically. Of average height, slender, his hair a close-cropped silver, his face clean-shaven and unlined. He wore simple grey robes. He sat cross-legged on the dais, eyes closed, hands resting on his knees. He did not look like an A-rank mage who could level a city block. He looked like a scholar lost in meditation.
But my [Mana-Sense] screamed.
He was not a man. He was a nexus. A calm, placid lake whose surface hid impossible, crushing depths. The mana around him didn't swirl or crackle; it bent, space itself curving gently toward his presence. The air in the room was so saturated with refined power it was difficult to breathe. My Passive Null-Filter strained, a tiny life-raft in a tsunami.
"Kaelen Veridian," he said. His voice was quiet, yet it filled the spherical chamber perfectly, coming from everywhere and nowhere. He did not open his eyes. "The Non-Standard Blank. The student with the twitch. The one who convinces golems to strike his rivals."
He knew. Of course he knew. Every detail.
I said nothing. I stood just inside the doorway, waiting.
"Proctor Valus finds you an irritating paradox," Caelum continued, his tone conversational. "Instructor Lyra believes you have a latent, quirky utility skill. The library archivist thinks you are a quiet, diligent worker. Young Jax is convinced you are a cheating poltergeist." A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. "And young Alric, in a moment of post-fugue clarity, reported a strange 'coolness' that stopped him from immolating several priceless manuscripts. He could not explain it."
My blood froze. Alric. He'd felt my interference.
"Multiple, contradictory reports," the Headmaster mused. "All concerning a single, F-rank student with a mana core so faint it barely registers. It is statistically anomalous. And I dislike anomalies in my academy."
He opened his eyes.
They were not the eyes of a scholar. They were the colour of a winter sky at twilight, and they held a depth of perception that made my [Mana-Sense] feel like a child's toy. They looked at me, and I felt utterly transparent. My Null-Filter shuddered under that gaze, threatening to shatter.
"I have looked at you, Kaelen," he said softly. "I have looked through you. Your core is not merely weak. It is... damaged. A recent, hairline fracture of a most peculiar nature. It leaks, but what leaks is... refined. Sharper than it has any right to be. And around the fracture, there is a resonance. A cold, structured echo of something that should not be in a first-year student. Something that smells of deep places and older sins."
He knew about the crack. He sensed the void-datum. My carefully constructed facade was tissue paper before this man's perception.
"Why," he asked, the simple word hanging in the charged air, "does a broken, seemingly powerless boy, carry the echo of a sealed God's failure in his soul?"
There was no point in denial. No lie would hold. So I told a truth. Just not the whole truth.
"I found something," I said, my voice steady despite the pressure in the room. "In the deep storage. A piece of something... dark. Cold. I touched it. It broke something in me. And it left an echo." All technically true. The Geode Caverns were deep storage of a sort.
Headmaster Caelum's gaze didn't waver. "Malkor's folly," he stated, not a question. "The God-Touched fragment. You found his secondary site. And you were curious." He sighed, a sound of genuine, weary disappointment. "Curiosity is the engine of magic, and its most common funeral pyre. What did it teach you, this echo?"
This was the dangerous part. I had to give him something real, to sell the lie of my limitation.
"It taught me... what 'nothing' feels like," I said, choosing my words with the care of a bomb defuser. "And by knowing nothing, I can... see the edges of things better. The flaws. It doesn't give me power. It just lets me see where power isn't."
It was a description of my enhanced perception, stripped of the archive function, stripped of Machina. A plausible explanation for my odd awareness.
The Headmaster was silent for a long moment, his winter-sky eyes seeing realms beyond the stone sphere. "A perceptual mutation," he finally said. "Born of trauma and contamination. You are not a Blank. You are a... Lens. A cracked lens, focusing on absence." He leaned forward slightly. "This 'twitch' of yours. Demonstrate it."
A command. Not a request.
I focused. The room's immense mana pressure made using my own power like trying to light a match in a hurricane. I picked a point one meter to my left, visualized the fold, and activated [Flicker Step].
The effect was worse than ever. The spatial distortion of the room itself interacted violently with my feeble skill. I didn't just twitch. I wrenched, appearing off-balance, a spike of nausea and core-pain lancing through me. It was pathetic. A flinch, not a feat.
Caelum watched, his expression unreadable. "A spatial hiccup. One meter. Unstable, mana-inefficient, clearly painful. Born of observing a Spectral Mantis, I presume? Your file shows a Menagerie access irregularity."
He knew about that too. He knew everything.
"But," he continued, "you used it to orchestrate a scenario in the Coliseum. You used perception of absence to find a weak point in a golem's runic array. You used it to place a stabilizing flaw in a student's runaway core." He steepled his fingers. "You do not wield power, Kaelen. You conduct entropy. You are a catalyst for systemic failure."
It was the most accurate assessment anyone had ever made of me.
"That is not a skill the academy is equipped to train," he said, his voice final. "It is the antithesis of what we teach. We build. We create. We impose order. You... perceive decay and give it a nudge."
Here it came. The expulsion. The end.
"Therefore," Headmaster Caelum said, rising from the dais in a single, fluid motion, "I am assigning you a specialized tutor."
I blinked. That was not what I expected.
"Professor Dorian Vane," he announced. "He is our resident expert in... degenerative magics, curse theory, and metaphysical decay. A gloomy man, but unparalleled in his field. He has long argued that understanding how things fall apart is key to building things that last. You will be his personal project for the next term."
A tutor. In decay. It was a masterpiece of bureaucratic maneuvering. He was containing me. Putting the anomalous, dangerous lens under the supervision of the one man who might understand it, and who could certainly monitor it. I was being placed in a gilded cage of specialized study.
"It will be arduous," Caelum said, his gaze pinning me again. "You will work harder than any student in this academy. You will learn the theory behind the entropy you instinctively court. And you will report any further... echoes or anomalies directly to Professor Vane, and thus, to me. Your status as a student is contingent on this. Do you understand?"
It was an ultimatum wrapped in an opportunity. I would be watched, always. But I would also be given access to knowledge, to a mentor who might actually comprehend fragments of my path. And I would remain inside the walls, close to the Vault, close to the resources.
"I understand, Headmaster," I said, bowing my head slightly.
"Good," he said, and the pressure in the room lessened by a degree. "You are dismissed. Your first session with Professor Vane is tomorrow at dawn. Do not be late. He abhors tardiness almost as much as he abhors... well, most things."
I turned and left, the great doors sealing behind me. I walked back through the silent halls, the Headmaster's winter-sky eyes burning in my mind.
I had passed the audit. Not by hiding my secrets, but by revealing a compelling, contained version of them. I had been classified, catalogued, and placed on a shelf labeled "Vane's Problem."
It was not freedom. But for a thief, a locked room with a knowledgeable curator was still a room full of things to learn. The gaze of the Headmaster was now upon me, a sun I must orbit carefully. But in his shadow, in the study of decay, I might just learn how to make stronger, stranger, and more subtle flaws. The path of the god-thief had just acquired a syllabus, and a warden.