Chapter 62: Aptitude Test (13)
The chandelier above glittered like a dying constellation, thousands of tiny enchanted crystals floating in shifting floral patterns overhead.
The scent of perfumed incense clung to the silk-draped walls, too sweet to be natural, too thick to be ignored.
The Hall of Petal Silk was not made for comfort. It was made for posture.
And Vaelira hated it.
The room was filled with the recommended, those few chosen not by exam, but by name, by bloodline, by family clout or political value.
Every one of them was beautiful in the bland, interchangeable way expensive things often were.
Bright eyes, good skin, elegant bones. Porcelain faces hiding sharpened pride.
Vaelira sat among them, upright, stiff-backed, in a pale lavender training dress with a bodice laced so tightly she couldn’t draw a full breath without feeling like her ribs might shatter.
Her shoulders were pinned back, her chin lifted exactly seventeen degrees, just as instructed.
Lady-worthy posture, they called it.
She called it a slow death in ten poses.
A matron in silk robes moved through the aisle between students like a prowling cat.
Her voice was calm, clipped, and cuttingly pleasant.
“Lady Violetta,” the instructor said, pausing at the next girl.
“Perfect smile. Delightful footwork. Be sure to repeat your curtsy at precisely the same depth next time. Consistency is elegance.”
Violetta, a girl with honey curls and a family crest sewn into her collar, gave a glittering giggle and nodded demurely.
The matron turned.
Vaelira felt it before she saw it, the shift in the air, the way everyone else’s eyes subtly flicked toward her like predators smelling blood.
“Lady Vaelira.”
Her name rolled off the instructor’s tongue like something sour.
Vaelira smiled.
The matron stopped in front of her, eyes scanning her like a hawk sizing up prey.
“Again,” she said.
Vaelira rose.
She stepped forward, curtsied. Not too low. Not too stiff.
A delicate hand at the waist.
Perfectly timed breath.
“Smile,” the instructor said.
Vaelira smiled again.
“Wider.”
She complied.
“You smile with your lips,” the woman said after a beat, voice heavy with disappointment. “But not with your eyes. Nobility do not wear masks. Your joy must be real, even if manufactured.”
Vaelira’s eye twitched.
The instructor’s gaze dipped lower.
“Raise your pinky when you curtsy. The hand must be fluid, not drooping. And your step between the first and second turn was off by half a beat. Listen to the rhythm. Try not to look like a merchant's daughter playing at courtly games.”
A soft chuckle rose from the group.
Vaelira didn’t blink.
Her smile never faltered.
But inside?
Inside, she was burying the urge to break the woman’s jaw with her heel.
“Now. Greeting rituals.”
Another instructor, this one a tall, skeletal man in a robe that smelled faintly of rosewater and old arrogance, stepped forward.
“You will be expected to know the names, titles, and affiliations of every attending guest at the upcoming Twilight Crown Welcoming Ball. Nobles, scholars, alumni, ambassadors. There will be tests. Failure to recognize a key figure will be taken as a slight to their station.”
He waved a hand.
Dozens of illusionary portraits appeared, hovering midair in formation.
Each showed a different person in formal wear, names and titles scrolling below them in golden script.
“You must address them correctly. For example: Lord Ellion Asterveld, Second of His Name, Warden of the Winter Borderlands. You bow deeper to someone in his station. Not as deep, of course, as for Duke Halgren, whose bloodline traces back to the Founding Twelve.”
A girl to Vaelira’s left recited a name correctly.
Another bowed at the perfect angle.
Then it was her turn.
The man tapped the air.
A face appeared.
Vaelira stared.
Who the hell was that?
They all looked the same, tight smiles, narrow eyes, powdered faces and flawless hair.
She tried.
She got the name slightly wrong.
She said “Warden” instead of “Lord Magistrate.”
“Incorrect,” the man said, as if she’d spat on his shoe.
“Lady Vaelira, are you illiterate? Or merely indifferent to protocol?”
Laughter again.
She bowed.
Smiled.
Plotted.
“Repeat this face’s title ten times. Out loud. So you do not forget.”
Vaelira did.
In perfect cadence.
The man moved on.
And she sat back down, smile frozen on her lips, nails digging into her palm under the table.
Then came the dancing.
A line of pale, trembling girls and preening boys arranged themselves in mirror pairs along a marble dance floor.
A magically projected harp played a slow, intricate waltz overhead, with each beat marked by a faint chime and glowing dot on the floor where feet should land.
Vaelira stepped into the pattern.
She turned.
Twirled.
Glided.
Her partner was clumsy, slow, too worried about messing up to actually lead.
She adjusted herself accordingly.
But she missed one step.
Just one.
“You turned late,” said the matron from earlier.
“Again.”
She did.
This time, she got it.
But her wrist was apparently “too stiff,” and the tilt of her head “not soft enough to inspire grace.”
By the fourth round, the instructor added a new note:
“You walk like a wolf in high heels. Powerful, but uncivilized.”
Vaelira wanted to scream.
She smiled instead.
When they finally gave them a break, she staggered to a corner, eyes scanning the other girls.
All of them were whispering and preening, sharing perfumed gossip and fake laughter.
Their smiles weren’t real either, but nobody called them out on it.
They didn’t get singled out.
They didn’t get told their body type was too angular, that their posture was masculine, that their face didn’t soften enough when smiling.
She’d even heard the instructor murmur to another:
“Such a sharp look. Intimidating. Not what a lady should be.”
It echoed in her skull.
Inside her mind, the façade finally cracked.
‘Sharp? I’ll show you sharp, you powdered swamp lizard.’
‘Do you want a ‘softer smile’? I’ll carve one into your skull with my nails. Make it permanent.’
‘Elegant enough for you now? Am I floating yet? No? Then let me float you out the damn window.’
‘I will end you. All of you. With grace.’
***
The battlefield was eerily quiet.
Not silent, no, silence would have been kinder.
But the kind of quiet that followed devastation, where the world itself seemed to hold its breath in mourning.
Dust still hung in the air, fine as ash.
The smell of scorched stone and lingering magic clung to everything.
What remained of the winged lion statues was now nothing more than a graveyard of cracked marble and shattered mana-forged core stone.
And Lucien… was nowhere to be found.
Corin stood in the middle of it all, chest heaving, eyes bloodshot from scanning the debris-strewn courtyard until it felt like the color had drained from the world.
His axe was still gripped in his hand, forgotten.
His body bore the marks of battle, burns, scrapes, torn sleeves, but it was nothing compared to the turmoil gnawing in his gut.
Balt clung weakly to his back, arms draped around Corin’s shoulders.
His legs had gone numb again, the strain of maintaining complex barriers, the shock of the aftermath, and the emotional toll had hit him all at once.
His lips were pale, his eyes hollow with guilt.
“…What if…”
Balt started, voice barely above a whisper, “…what if he got disqualified?”
Corin didn’t look at him.
Didn’t blink.
Just stared out at the pulverized remnants of the twin lion statues.
His jaw clenched.
“Then I still wouldn’t be able to sleep at night,” he said hoarsely.
“Not if I didn’t check. Not if I didn’t turn over every single damn stone here and made sure he wasn’t- he’s not…”
His voice caught.
Balt exhaled slowly.
The guilt was still there, but it dulled behind Corin’s conviction.
He gave a small nod.
“…Yeah,” he muttered.
“You’re right. Even if it was-, even if he’s… I’d hate myself if I didn’t try.”
Corin reached up and patted his shoulder in a rough, unspoken thank you.
Then, slowly, he turned back to the others.
The remaining examinees, now gathered around the rubble, looked pale and restless.
There was no cheering.
No boasting of survival.
The once-victorious energy had curdled into something far more fragile.
A heavyset boy with earth magic tried to lift a chunk of the marble flank that had once been a lion’s foreleg.
It didn’t budge.
Another girl with flame-channeling gloves burned away the smaller debris, trying not to damage anything buried underneath.
A pair of twins used synchronized wind magic to clear dust clouds from around the larger pieces, forming a coordinated breeze that swept the battlefield clean in pulses.
No one spoke above a whisper.
Every lifted stone.
Every cleared patch of ground.
Every exposed sliver of ruined statue carried the same quiet question:
‘Was Lucien under this one?’
Balt raised a shaky hand and cast a search glyph into the air, soft white strands of magic curling through the rubble, searching for heat, breath, heartbeat, anything.
It fizzled out after a few seconds, unresponsive.
Corin kicked at a slab of scorched lion paw with raw frustration, sparks of red mana flaring at his heels.
He lifted a piece with his bare hands, arms trembling.
Beneath it, only stone and dust.
“Damn it…” he whispered.
A girl with healing magic approached, gently touching Balt’s shoulder.
“We’ll find him,” she said, though the words sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than anyone.
“He got caught in the crossfire,” one of the melee fighters muttered to another.
“I saw him. He was still on the lion when it turned. He rode it like some lunatic.”
“He didn’t jump off. He couldn’t.”
A silence followed that.
A boy in gray robes finally voiced what everyone was thinking:
“…Maybe there’s nothing left to find. We should get going…”
The words dropped like lead into water.
Corin turned on him.
“Shut up.”
The boy raised his hands.
“I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking-”
“Shut up!”
Corin’s voice cracked.
Corin’s fist clenched around his axe hilt.
His shoulders trembled, not with rage, but with something deeper.
With a fear he didn’t want to name.
With guilt he didn’t want to feel.
Another search team started lifting parts of the lion’s shattered wing.
A shimmering mana core rolled out from underneath, a small one, cracked, flickering with dying light.
Not Lucien.
A jagged belt fragment came next.
A crumpled length of silvery metal, part of one of the statues’ decorative harnesses.
Then, a piece of cloth.
Charred.
Blue.
Everyone froze.
Corin’s heart jumped into his throat as he stumbled forward, knocking over a pile of stone in his haste.
He scooped up the cloth with trembling hands.
It was a sleeve.
Frayed.
Familiar.
Lucien’s trousers.
Balt let out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a whimper.
“…No…”
Corin muttered.
“No, no, no- he can’t just be gone- he- he can’t-”
He dropped to his knees beside the broken wing, digging with his bare hands now, throwing aside chunks of debris like a madman.
He didn’t care about his wounds.
Didn’t care about the blood or the smoke still in his lungs.
All he cared about was that piece of cloth.
And the fact that Lucien wasn’t wearing it anymore.
Balt slid off Corin’s back slowly, wincing as he sat on the ground on his own.
He looked around at the gathered examinees.
At their haunted eyes.
At the cracked marble and broken bones of stone lions that had nearly killed them all.
At the battlefield that now felt more like a tomb than a trial.
“…Don’t just stand there,” he said.
“Keep digging. We don’t stop until we find him.”
The others moved again.
Slower now.
Not out of hope, but duty.
Corin stood up again, lifting another slab.
He didn’t speak.
His throat was too tight.
Balt lent what little magic he had left to shift the stone.
The two of them worked in silence.
Together.
A wind picked up across the battlefield.
Carrying the ash.
Carrying the scent of burning mana.
And carrying with it the single, dreadful thought that no one dared say aloud:
‘What if they were already too late?’
***
Somewhere Between the World and the End of It
There was dust.
And then, there was sky.
Endless sky, warm and golden, as if the sun had melted and poured itself across the clouds in slow, syrupy streams.
Everything below was distant and blurred, like a memory someone had whispered too many times until the details faded.
Lucien floated.
No pain.
No weight.
Just air and golden quiet.
He wasn’t sure what caused or led to this.
But he could see things now with a strange clarity.
The forest stretched out far below him like a broken mosaic, shattered wings and broken stone forming a mural of violence and aftermath.
The examinees looked like dolls from this height.
Small, frantic things with magic flaring at their fingertips, voices raised in desperate calls that didn’t quite reach his ears.
They were looking for someone.
No, not someone.
Him.
Lucien’s gaze drifted, unblinking, as he watched Corin toss aside debris with wild urgency, Balt sitting and watching through dust and ash.
He saw the girl with wind magic shouting something he couldn’t hear, the earth mage collapsing to his knees in exhaustion.
They were looking for him.
…But he wasn’t down there.
He was up here.
Why?
Lucien blinked, or at least, he thought he did.
His body wasn’t obeying the usual rules anymore.
Neither was his mind.
His thoughts drifted like pollen on a spring wind, flickering between images.
The lion’s breath.
The cold.
The threads of mana stitching him to unfeeling stone.
The explosion.
The last thing he remembered was being frozen to the belly of that goddamn lion and thinking, ‘This was a bad idea.’
Now he was floating in golden light and watching his own story unfold from above.
Was he dead?
Was this it?
Was this how it ended?
He didn’t feel dead.
But he didn’t feel alive either.
There was something in the air, too soft, too perfect.
Like the pause in a lullaby just before the singer starts again.
Lucien exhaled slowly, watching the breath curl away like mist in a dream.
“So this is it, huh…” he murmured to no one.
“Guess I really screwed up.”
And then.
"You are kind of stupid."
The voice didn’t echo.
It chuckled, low, amused, old and intimate like an inside joke he wasn’t in on.
Lucien’s eyes widened.
He wasn’t alone.
His head turned, slowly, the golden clouds parting just enough to reveal the faintest outline of a figure standing, or hovering?
