Chapter 1: The Page That Refused to Shine
The air in the Sanctum of Selection tasted like ozone and ambition.
Kaelen stood at the back of the line, his worn boots scuffing against the polished marble floor. He could feel the judgmental stares before they even landed—the too-thin frame, the patched academy robes, the faint, almost imperceptible mana signature that made older mages squint as if trying to see a ghost.
Before him, the golden children of the Astraean Empire glowed.
"Elara Vyseria! Step forward!"
A girl with hair like spun moonlight glided to the central dais. The air hummed as she placed her palms on the Obsidian Altar. Light erupted—a blinding, silver-white torrent that coalesced into a thick, ornate book bound in platinum, its cover etched with swirling frost patterns. The pages fluttered open, revealing intricate spell diagrams that glowed with inner light.
"PLATINUM-GRADE GRIMOIRE: ETERNAL WINTER!" boomed the Grand Archivist.
The nobility in the viewing galleries erupted in applause. Elara's smile was serene, destined. She was a masterpiece, and her grimoire was the frame.
Kaelen's stomach clenched.
One by one, his classmates received their destinies in book form.
"GOLD-GRADE: VERDANT LASH!" A boy from a merchant family, now set for life.
"SILVER-GRADE: STONE SHAPER!" A sturdy girl from the mining districts, her future secured in construction or the military.
"BRONZE-GRADE: KINDLING SPARK." A boy from the slums. The applause was polite, pitying. A bronze grimoire meant a life of utility—street lighting, low-grade crafting. Better than nothing.
Then came the failures.
"Joren. No grimoire. Dismissed."
The boy on the dais stared at his empty hands. The altar had remained dark. His shoulders slumped, and the Imperial Guards escorted him not back to the line, but out a side door—the "Exit of the Unbound." He was a ghost now. A mana-void. Society had no page for him.
Kaelen's palms were slick with sweat. His mana was barely a whisper, the lowest ever recorded at the academy. The healers had called it a "dwarf core"—a mana reservoir so small it was practically decorative. He'd spent his childhood being told to give up. But he'd trained. He'd pushed. He'd studied theory until his eyes burned, clinging to one law of magic: Grimoires amplify what is already there.
But what if there was almost nothing to amplify?
"Kaelen of the Lower Districts."
The silence that followed his name was heavier than the applause. He walked forward, the sound of his footsteps absurdly loud. He could see Grand Archivist Rel's barely concealed boredom.
"Place your hands on the altar. Focus your meager mana, boy. Let us be done with this."
Kaelen took a breath that did nothing to steady him and pressed his hands to the cold stone.
He pushed.
He dredged up every flicker of mana from his dwarf core, every ounce of will he'd forged in secret, predawn training sessions. He poured it into the altar.
For a moment, nothing.
A snicker from the gold-grimoire line.
Then, a sound. Not a lightshow, not a roar of power.
A rip.
A tear, as if reality itself were parchment being shredded.
From the altar's surface, not light, but shadow bled upward. It wasn't dark mana—it was an absence, a vacuum that drank the light from the immediate area. It coalesced into a book that fell into Kaelen's hands with a dull thud.
The silence was absolute.
The book was… wrong.
Its cover was no known metal or leather. It was the color of a deep bruise, of twilight swallowed by storm clouds. It had no embossed title, no elemental sigils. Its spine was bound by what looked like cracked, petrified bone. It felt cold, not with temperature, but with a hollow, hungry chill.
Grand Archivist Rel stumbled back, his face pale. "That… that is not a mana signature. That is an erasure."
He lunged forward, not to congratulate, but to snatch the book. The moment his fingers touched the cover, he hissed in pain and jerked back, staring at his fingertips which were now gray and lifeless, as if briefly petrified.
"The Altar rejects your touch, Archivist," a new voice cut through the tension. A tall, lean man in the grey robes of the Historical Anomalies Division stepped from the shadows. His eyes, sharp and analytical, were fixed on the grimoire. "Fascinating."
"The book is Unclassified," Rel spat, cradling his hand. "It should not exist. The records of such things were purged for a reason."
The grey-robed man ignored him, looking at Kaelen. "What is your name, young man?"
"Kaelen, sir."
"Kaelen. I am Inspector Vale of the Curator's Guild. Your grimoire… it does not follow mana-based law. It is an ontological anomaly." He said it with the fervor of a scholar presented with a forbidden text. "It is, by definition, Unclassified."
The word hung in the air, heavier than "failure."
Unclassified. Not a grade, but a verdict. Grimoires of unknown origin, unpredictable power, often tied to forgotten, forbidden magics or catastrophic events. Feared. Often, their bearers were "retired" for the safety of the empire.
"But it is a grimoire," Kaelen said, his voice stronger than he felt. He clutched the cold book to his chest. It felt like holding a sleeping beast. "The ritual granted it. It is bound to my soul."
"That is the problem," Rel whispered, loud enough for all to hear.
Inspector Vale studied Kaelen, then the hostile faces of the Archivist and the nobility. He made a decision. "The law is clear. An Unclassified grimoire bearer is to be placed under immediate observation and study, not summary judgment." He turned to Kaelen. "You will come with me. You have been selected—not for a high-tier Mage Squad—but for the Obsidian Guard."
A new wave of whispers.
The Obsidian Guard. The empire's dumpster for misfits, problem cases, and those too potentially useful to discard but too dangerous to leave free. A squad with a mortality rate that was the stuff of dark rumors.
Kaelen looked from the terrified, repulsed face of the Archivist to the intensely curious one of Inspector Vale. He looked down at the Unclassified grimoire in his hands. He tried to will it open, to see what spell, if any, lay on its first page.
The cover did not budge. It offered no light, no guidance, no power.
It was a lock without a visible key. A book of blank pages written in invisible ink.
He was not a platinum prodigy. He was not even a bronze utility. He was a question mark in a world that demanded exclamation points.
As the guards gestured for him to follow Vale out the same side door as the failures, past the triumphant, shining faces of his former peers, Kaelen's fingers tightened on the cold cover.
The last thing he heard was Elara Vyseria's clear, pitying voice. "What a waste of a Selection."
And deep within the hollow chill of the grimoire, something ancient and hungry finally sensed a spark of will worth feasting on—and stirred.