Chapter 44: Entrance Exam (6)
The day before Lucien’s departure began with a strange mix of quiet urgency and unsaid farewells.
There was no grand proclamation of his journey, no speech from atop the stairs or ceremonial packing.
Just a hum of activity in the background as the estate bustled with its usual rhythm, except everyone was watching Lucien a little longer than usual, offering fleeting glances filled with pride, concern, and something else they wouldn’t say aloud.
Lucien moved from room to room, checking on the estate’s affairs one last time.
Ledgers were reviewed, keys handed off, and instructions given with more gravity than usual.
When he entered the study to double-check the trade records, he found Sir Richardson already waiting, arms folded and brow furrowed.
“I’m going with you.”
Lucien didn’t look up from the ledger.
“You’re not.”
Richardson’s voice lowered.
“Lucien, the capital is-”
“Unfamiliar? Dangerous? Overwhelming?”
Lucien snapped the book shut and finally met his gaze.
“I know. But I also know what happens to the estate if you’re not here.”
Richardson’s jaw clenched.
“The Everwind deal-”
“Hangs over our heads like a guillotine, I know,” Lucien said, a tired smirk tugging at his lips.
“Which is why you have to stay. This estate needs its steward. I’ll manage somehow.”
Richardson didn’t respond at first.
Just stared at the boy before him- no, not a boy, not anymore.
He sighed.
“You have grown to be quite annoying, you know that?”
“I learned from the best.”
Just as Richardson was about to grumble something back, Vaelira sauntered in, arms crossed.
“If he’s not going, then I’ll come with you.”
Lucien blinked.
“Vaelira-”
“There is a very substantial chance you’ll get lost before you even find the exam center,” she argued.
“And then there’s the very real possibility of you mistaking a back alley for an inn or getting pickpocketed because you look like a walking coin purse-”
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re worse. You’re you.”
He sighed.
“You need to stay here. Overseeing the estate, smoothing over the Everwinds if they show up, managing the staff, and pretending to be me if another noble house sends a representative. You’re too important to risk gallivanting off with me.”
She looked like she wanted to argue more, her lips pressed into a hard, defiant line, but then Lucien added quietly, “The only reason I can go to the capital is because I know all of you will keep everything running while I’m gone.”
That silenced the room.
Terrin, walking past the doorway and munching on an apple, poked his head in just in time to chime in with a cheeky grin.
“Now that’s one way to admit you’re completely useless, Young Master.”
Lucien groaned.
“How you always manage to show up at the right time is beyond me.”
But Terrin only laughed, walking into the room and slapping a hand on Lucien’s shoulder.
“I’m messing with you. Relax. We’ll keep things in order here. You go do your fancy entrance exam and make all of us proud.”
Lucien gave a small smile, heart tightening with gratitude.
“Thanks.”
“No pressure, though,” Terrin added.
“Only our reputation, finances, and the future of the house rest on your shoulders. But hey, don’t feel burdened.”
“I will set your shovels on fire before I leave.”
“See? That’s the kind of magic that’ll get you in.”
***
The next morning came far too quickly.
The dawn was still stretching its golden fingers across the distant hills when the carriage rolled to a halt at the front of the estate.
Lucien stood in his room, tying his satchel shut.
His luggage was minimal, he couldn’t afford to weigh himself down.
A few books, some spare clothes, an emergency mana crystal, and a ridiculous number of notebooks filled with scribbled spells and half-formed runes.
A soft knock at the door.
He turned to see Vaelira step in, the morning light catching her lavender hair and casting her face in a pale, almost otherworldly glow.
She looked small, like a child who had lost something she didn’t want to name.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Hey.”
“I just wanted to wish you luck before you left.”
Her eyes dropped for a second.
“Since you’re too stubborn to let me go with you.”
Lucien chuckled, shouldering his satchel.
“You’ve wished me luck like five times now.”
“This one’s different.”
He turned away, about to lift his bag, but suddenly, arms wrapped around him from behind.
Vaelira hugged him.
Tightly.
Firmly.
Her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades, and her fingers clutched the fabric of his coat like it was the last solid thing in the world.
Lucien froze.
“I know you joke about getting blown up or turning yourself into a frog, but…”
Her voice cracked.
“Don’t die, okay?”
He couldn’t turn around.
His throat was too tight to speak at first.
“And don’t be stupid,” she added, a soft sniffle escaping.
“Just… be okay. Come back.”
He slowly reached up and laid his hand over hers.
“I’ll see you at the Academy.”
There was silence.
Then a choked breath, a small laugh, and her arms released him.
He turned to see her rubbing her eyes with her sleeve, her face trying, and failing, to pull itself into a smirk.
Lucien smiled at her.
“Tell the estate to behave.”
“Only if you behave in the capital.”
“No promises.”
Moments later, he stepped into the carriage, the creak of wood and clatter of hooves echoing louder than it should have.
Vaelira stood at the estate steps, arms crossed but her expression soft and unreadable.
Lucien looked out the carriage window at the estate that had become his home, the people who had become his family, and the girl who had become his anchor.
The wheels turned.
The estate slowly faded behind him.
And ahead, loomed the capital.
The battlefield of ambition.
The crucible of magic.
The ticket to the Twilight Crown Academy.
Lucien took a breath, clutching the satchel at his side like a lifeline.
“Let’s do this.”
***
The carriage rattled along the uneven dirt road, wheels bumping and jostling with every stone and rut it crossed.
Lucien, for the hundredth time that hour, regretted ever trying to read a thick, leather-bound history tome while in transit.
His head throbbed faintly, his stomach protested violently, and his eyes felt like they were trying to spin in their sockets from motion sickness, but he stubbornly refused to stop.
“Gods, I would sell half my future soul for an audiobook,” he groaned under his breath, pressing a hand to his temple.
The book in question, “A Revised History of the Third Epoch: The Ley Line Crisis and Its Aftermath,” sat precariously on his lap, its pages fluttering slightly with every jolt.
The elegant script, clearly typeset for a library or academy rather than a bumpy field trip, glared up at him with the judgmental precision only history textbooks could manage.
Lucien winced as the wheels slammed over another pothole, nearly biting his tongue as he tried to keep his eyes focused on the text.
He blinked away the nausea and forced himself to keep reading.
[Desperation makes monsters of men. In the final decade of the War of the Nine Banners, with their resources dwindling and their armies pushed to the brink, the Arcanist Dominion, led by human warlords, resorted to an act now remembered with equal parts shame and horror. It was not brilliance that birthed the weapon, it was theft. The schematics were stolen from the archives of the Sildrani Enclave, where elven scholars had theorized dimensional siphoning as a purely hypothetical construct, a forbidden thought experiment left to molder in obscurity.]
Lucien paused.
[Elves hadn’t built the weapon. They hadn’t dared. But the humans, driven by defeat, loss, fear, had taken the bones of that theory and breathed ruthless life into it.]
The book’s next paragraph was unforgiving in its description.
[The weapon that was never given a name was fired only once. That was enough. The sky cracked open above Silver Fold Valley. Survivors spoke of a light not of this world, silver, shimmering, and screaming. Thousands vanished in an instant, not disintegrated, not burnt, but simply erased. What remained was worse. Time staggered. Gravity wept. Animals were born dead. The soil turned glassy and hummed with residual vibrations. The Mirror Beyond had bled into the realm of mortals, and the wound refused to close.]
Lucien’s fingers clenched the book’s leather cover tighter.
His stomach churned, not from motion sickness this time.
The book continued without mercy.
[The ley lines, the invisible rivers of mana that sustained the continent’s magic, nature, and civilization, could not withstand the foreign energy. They swelled and split, bloated with mana that did not belong to this world. The continent entered a state of magical collapse. Forests burned without fire. Tides reversed. Snow fell in deserts. Arcanic storms consumed cities. Scholars and clerics alike died by the dozens simply trying to contain the chaos.]
Lucien swallowed hard, throat dry.
He could practically hear the sirens of a disaster movie, see the ash-coated air and weeping parents, the kind of imagery usually reserved for dystopian fiction.
But this wasn’t fiction here.
This was history.
Real people had lived through this.
He leaned his head against the cool wooden wall of the carriage, eyes scanning the next passage as the road beneath them pitched violently once again.
[And yet, in that ruin, something unthinkable happened, peace. Not out of diplomacy, but necessity. Warring nations, bitter enemies, broken empires, they had no choice but to join hands. Mages and engineers, clerics and kings, even former enemies stood shoulder to shoulder to mend what they could. The Fivefold Accord was born not out of hope, but horror.]
Lucien’s vision blurred, whether from the jolting ride or the haunting gravity of what he was reading, he wasn’t sure.
[And from that grim unity, the Fivefold Accord endured. No longer merely a ceasefire, it became the spine of a new world, part tribunal, part treaty, part chain. It did not govern with warmth or ideology, but with the cold clarity of survivors who had once glimpsed the end.]
[The Accord drafted the Lex Arcanum, a binding charter that regulated all magical practice. Spellcraft was no longer the domain of eccentric prodigies or clandestine warlocks; it became a discipline bound by oaths, licenses, and international oversight. Forbidden spells were etched into the Black Ledger, names not spoken, magics not mourned, sealed beneath wards older than most nations.]
[Violations were not punished. They were erased.]
[And yet, for all its rigidity, the Accord was not heartless. It created paths for collaboration, for ethical research, for the reconstruction of what had been lost. A mage in Veldran could send findings to a scholar in Othis without fear of espionage. A kingdom could request arcane aid during drought or plague without inviting conquest.]
[Peace had birthed law. Law had birthed order. But none dared forget that it had all been built atop a graveyard.]
“Gods…”
He muttered to himself, closing the book gently, almost reverently.
“This isn’t history. It’s a warning. A bloody cautionary tale dressed in dates and names.”
It reminded him, strangely, chillingly, of the world he had come from.
Of scientific brilliance turned into something grotesque by fear and pride.
That kind of desperation… he could almost understand it.
And that made it worse.
He leaned back, pressing the book against his chest, eyes shut as the carriage rattled onward.
For the first time in hours, he didn’t feel like reading anymore.
“Definitely not helping my nausea,” he muttered with a grim chuckle.
“Let’s just… study something a little less horrifying later. Like maybe… the tax reforms of the Second Epoch.”
The book rested quietly in his lap, heavy with tragedy.
And Lucien, staring out the small, jostling window at the horizon ahead, let the silence stretch, sobered by a history that felt just a little too real.
***
