Thorne moved like a ghost stitched from moonlight and silence.

His footsteps made no sound. His shadow didn't follow the rules of the lantern light. Veil of Light and Shadow, his evolved stealth skill made him invisible, and tonight it draped over him like a living cloak.

He was unseen.

Mostly.

But even wrapped in its delicate weave, Thorne felt it, that faint, annoying inkling that he wasn't as invisible as he wanted to believe. Students? Sure. The few he passed on his way down the hall barely looked in his direction.

But someone stronger?

Someone trained?

They'd see right through it. Aetherhold wasn't short on those kinds of people.

Still, he moved undeterred.

The castle's great doors had long since sealed for the night, but he slipped through a maintenance corridor that smelled faintly of lemon balm and enchanted polish. His cloak whispered against the stone, his breathing even, calm.

Outside, the air bit softly at his cheeks. He welcomed it.

The courtyard was bathed in quiet aether-light, the shimmering rivers above threading across the sky like veins of molten crystal. The colors rippled across the stones, blue, gold, violet, the occasional flicker of crimson, painting the world in a shifting kaleidoscope.

No one followed.

No one stopped him.

The tower loomed ahead.

Marian's tower.

Now visible again, flickering faintly in and out of phase with reality. Her magic always had a rhythm, like tides, or breath. Tonight, it pulsed like it was waiting.

He reached the spiral staircase carved into the tower's base, crystalline steps that spiraled up its exterior like a shell's coil and began to climb. The wind tugged at his coat, the chill sharper the higher he ascended, but the view was worth it, all of Aetherhold stretched out behind him in silence, glimmering like a city made of stars.

He reached the landing.

Paused.

Then knocked three times, sharp and steady, on the narrow door inset with runes that shimmered at his touch.

The door opened without a sound.

Marian stood on the threshold, framed in silver light.

But something was wrong.

For a breath, Thorne couldn't place it. She looked the same, same dark robes, same composed posture, same polished pearl ring glinting faintly at her hand.

And yet...

Her face.

Thinner.

Hollows under her cheekbones that hadn't been there before. Her skin, pale and drawn. Her hair was still spiky, but not with its usual careful perfection, it looked like she'd pulled so hard that the strands were ready to tear off.

But it was her eyes that stopped him cold.

Bright green, yes, but too bright. Wide. Frantic. Alive with something he couldn't name.

Or didn't want to name.

He stared. "What happened to you?"

For a moment, she didn't answer. Just stood there, like she was trying to remember how words worked.

Then, with a practiced sort of ease, she smiled.

"Got too deep in an experiment," she said, voice just a touch too airy. "You know how it is. Lost track of time. Let it run away from me."

Her tone was light. Controlled.

Her eyes were not.

And Thorne, who'd spent his life reading liars and thieves and murderers, knew a lie when he heard one.

This one reeked.

He wanted to press, wanted to ask her what she'd really done, why the tower felt heavier now, why the air buzzed faintly around her like it was afraid of being still.

But before he could speak, Marian raised a finger to her lips.

"Later," she whispered. "We need to leave. Now."

Her hand lifted.

The pearl on her ring pulsed once, bright as moonlight on bone, and the sigils embedded in the crystal walls flickered awake. Lines of light threaded outward like veins, climbing the surfaces, wrapping the air.

And then...

Reality bent.

The room behind him folded inward. The walls groaned without sound. The stars outside the windows smeared into streaks of glassy brilliance, then snapped into darkness. The world turned sideways.

Thorne didn't move.

He just watched as the tower shifted around them, no longer part of Aetherhold, but something else.

Somewhere else.

He swallowed hard.

The moment reality snapped back into place, the world seared into being.

The crystal walls of the tower lit up, blinding, brilliant, as if every surface had swallowed sunlight and was now regurgitating it tenfold. Thorne winced, shielding his eyes. The air hit him next: thick, dry, oppressive.

Heat rolled over him like a wave.

He staggered a step back. "What?"

His voice cracked.

"What is this?" he stammered, blinking against the glare. "Where are we?"

Marian stood calm, unfazed, her silhouette cutting a sharp figure against the pulsing crystal light.

"The Red Waste," she said.

Thorne frowned. "That's not a place."

"It is," she replied softly. "Just not one many survive long enough to map."

The words didn't help.

Everything felt wrong. The air buzzed with unstable aether, the walls radiated a kind of pressure that made his skin prickle. The sky, if there even was a sky, was a warped smear of reds and golds through the tower's glassy dome, as if the horizon had been drenched in fire and then left to rot.

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Marian stepped closer. "I brought you here to help you, Thorne. To train you. To teach you how to command the aether before it commands you."

Thorne narrowed his eyes. "By dragging me into a wasteland?"

Her expression didn't shift.

"I need to see what you're working with," she said. "What you're truly capable of. I can't teach you until I know the shape of the storm I'm taming."

That sounded familiar. Too familiar.

Like something a Lost Ones instructor would whisper right before unleashing something inhuman just to see how you'd bleed.

He took a step back, instinct prickling. "You want to test my limits."

"I want to protect you," Marian corrected, her voice soft. "I'll be one step behind you the whole time. If anything happens, I'll stop it. I swear it."

She said it with such conviction, such quiet honesty, that for a moment… Thorne actually believed her.

But then...

"Before we exit the tower," she said, her tone changing, sharpening, "there's something I need you to do."

She turned to him fully now, gaze direct. "Take off your pendant."

Thorne froze.

Everything in him locked down.

The silver chain at his throat suddenly felt like a noose.

"No," he said reflexively, quietly.

Marian didn't move.

"I need to see," she said. "Without interference. Just once."

He shook his head.

"I can't."

"You can."

"I won't."

The air between them went still. The heat didn't matter now. The light didn't matter. Only the silence and the question hanging inside it.

She didn't reach for him. Didn't force it.

But her eyes held his.

And waited.

Thorne didn't move.

His hand hovered near the pendant, but his fingers never touched it.

He stared at Marian, eyes sharp, breath tight in his chest.

"I said no."

Marian's lips parted, but Thorne cut her off with a glance, flat and quiet and final.

"You don't understand," he said. "You can't understand. I've never shown anyone. Not even myself… not really."

The pendant rested against his chest, cool and familiar, a constant anchor in a world that kept trying to tear him apart. He didn't even remember when he'd started wearing it, only that it had always been there. A boundary. A barrier. A piece of armor forged not of steel or spell, but of fear.

To take it off wasn't just to reveal.

It was to bare.

"I've only seen it a few times," he said quietly, not even realizing he was speaking aloud. "And every time… it scared me."

He looked away. "Even if you're Elderborn too, Marian… I won't. It's not just a choice anymore. It's who I am. The hiding. It's in me. Sewn into my bones."

She took a step forward, careful. Gentle.

"I understand," she said.

But he could hear the edge in her voice, the need, the frustration buried under the patience.

"No," he said again. "You don't."

A beat.

Then Marian sighed.

Her shoulders dropped, not in defeat but in decision.

"Fine," she murmured. "Then I'll go first."

One of the rings on her hand, the opal one, not the pearl, flared with inner light, a pulsing green that flickered like a flame trapped beneath glass.

Then it went dark.

Inert.

And Marian… changed.

Thorne took a half-step back.

It was immediate. Frightening in its stillness.

Her frame shrank, not dramatically, but enough to notice. Her already slight form seemed lighter now, more compact, more precise. Her robes fluttered as if they no longer belonged to her.

And her skin...

Gods.

Her skin turned white first.

Not pale. White.

Then translucent.

Hard.

Impossibly smooth, like polished quartz. Light refracted across her cheekbones, catching the jagged gleam of inner lattices just beneath the surface. Her arms were no longer flesh; they were crystal. Seamless, sculpted, glowing faintly from within.

The transformation was quiet. There was no sound. No flare. Just… truth.

Her hair shifted next, ribbons of brilliant green blooming like ancient trees, almost weightless, as though made from the same living crystal that built the tower around them.

But her eyes...

They didn't change.

Still green. Still wild. Still her.

"This is me," she said.

Her voice was altered, clearer, ringing like a bell struck from a far-off mountainside. Beautiful and eerie all at once.

"The true me."

Thorne's breath caught.

Because this?

This wasn't just an elder race.

This was something older.

Something elemental.

And Marian… she had just offered it. Without hesitation. Without shame.

He stared.

Didn't move.

Couldn't speak.

Because now it was his turn.

And he wasn't sure if he could do it.

Not even for her.

Thorne's fingers hovered at the clasp of his pendant.

He hesitated.

His heart beat once, hard, and then…

He trusted.

Not the tower. Not the safety of the space or the logic of Marian's offer.

Her.

The last link he had to his mother. To family. To anything that had ever felt like truth.

His thumb flicked the clasp open.

The chain slid off his neck like a whisper, the silver cool against his palm as he lowered it.

He didn't feel different.

No great surge of power. No crackling transformation. Just… silence.

But Marian's breath caught.

Her crystalline fingers flexed at her sides, and for the briefest second, so quick he almost missed it, she looked like she wanted to step back.

Thorne said nothing.

He didn't have to.

Because behind her, in the perfect, impossibly smooth surface of the crystal wall, his true reflection stared back at him.

And it was terrifying.

Not because of blood or battle scars or savage magic but because it didn't look human.

It barely looked mortal.

It wasn't a version of Thorne. It wasn't Thorne. It was the origin of him. The raw, unfiltered core. What the world had shaped into shadow, this form had once cast in light.

His skin was pale, not white, not grey, but a luminous ivory laced with veins of silver aether that pulsed in slow rhythms beneath the surface. Not soft light. Not gentle. This was the light of a moon right before it devoured the sun.

Every inch of him glowed faintly, as if his body was carved from starlight layered over bone.

But it was his face that turned his stomach.

It wasn't cruel. It wasn't monstrous.

It was perfect and that was worse.

His cheekbones flared like sculpted obsidian. His jaw was sharp, chiseled, like a blade waiting to be drawn. The lines of his features were too symmetrical. Too clean. The kind of geometry that felt wrong in its flawlessness.

The kind of beauty that came before annihilation.

Like a statue built to honor a forgotten god of judgment. A being meant to hunt, not protect. Something born to be obeyed or feared.

And his eyes...

Not human.

Not even remotely.

Silver-blue, yes, but the color was alive. Aether spun in them like smoke caught in a frozen storm. Rings of bright, eerie luminescence burned in layers, sigils within his irises, like celestial maps etched into ice. And they didn't blink. Didn't flinch.

They watched.

As if judging the world and finding it wanting.

His lips parted, and his breath hitched.

Fangs.

Not grotesque. Not beastly.

Elegant. Refined. Predatory.

They gleamed faintly in the ambient light. His upper canines were long, curved slightly inward, not just for tearing, but for holding.

His hair had turned snow-white. Silken. Longer than he remembered, falling loose around his face, carried by currents of unseen aether like it was weightless. Threads of it shimmered faintly in colors that weren't entirely real, silver, violet, aether-blue. Not dyed. Not enchanted. Inherited.

His ears had lengthened, subtly, but not like an elf's. Sharper. Carved for wind and sound. For listening across silence.

His shoulders were broad, his limbs long, but there was no softness, no roundness to his frame. He was lean, like something starved but honed. A blade after centuries of use. A predator with nothing left to prove.

His veins glowed.

His bones, beneath the skin, shimmered faintly.

He wasn't wearing aether.

He was aether.

A creature not bound to flesh and blood, but to light and force and shadow. Something that remembered what it was like to be feared by the elements themselves.

And gods help anyone who thought they could tame him.

He stared at the reflection.

And for a moment, a terrible thought crossed his mind.

No wonder I hid myself.

No wonder he'd worn that pendant like armor.

He wasn't the noble hero rising from the ashes.

He was the thing you prayed didn't walk out of the fire.

Thorne stared at himself.

And for once...

He didn't look away.

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