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Three Years Later — The Withering Dean
The Academy of Flameheart no longer glowed.
It flickered.
Once a beacon of innovation and power, it now pulsed with uneasy quiet. Students walked faster. Professors spoke softer. The dean's tower — once open to the curious — now loomed like a prison of ideas left to rot.
Caelum Verris hadn't been seen in public for months.
Rumors whispered through Phoenix City:
He had gone mad. He was building something beneath the academy. He was talking to the dead.
None knew for certain.
But sometimes, at night, light flared from the observatory — green, black, crimson — colors magic wasn't meant to wear. And those closest to the dean described him only in fragments:
Eyes sunken like forgotten wells.
Voice soft, yet full of pressure — like air before a storm.
A smile that no longer curved — it cracked.
Hinata remained, though changed. Sharper. Haunted. She spoke on his behalf, answered questions he no longer tolerated, and denied requests to see him with a steel-willed kindness. But even she flinched when he whispered her name from across the hall.
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Return of the Brother: A Ghost of Sanity
His name was Solan Verris — elder sibling of Caelum, once thought dead in the Ember Rebellion.
He returned not with flair, but with thunder. One night, the sky split open — no spell, no omen, just raw fury. And from it came a man clad in grey iron and red scars, bearing no title, only purpose.
Solan walked into the academy like it still remembered him — and it did.
Doors opened. Wards stepped aside. The walls watched.
He found Caelum not in the dean's chamber, but deep in the catacombs, surrounded by floating runes and skeletons of unfinished spells.
Caelum looked up.
Smiled.
"...Brother. I thought you were gone."
"I was," Solan replied. "But you dragged something dark enough into the world to pull me back."
Caelum laughed — soft and eerie, like broken glass clinking.
"You always hated the way I studied the void."
"And now you're living in it."
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A Cracking Mind, A Coming Storm
Solan became an uneasy presence in the academy — half protector, half threat. He challenged Caelum's experiments, argued with Hinata, and warned the faculty: "He's not your dean anymore. He's a storm pretending to be a man."
But none dared oppose Caelum openly.
Not after what happened during the Winter Solstice Lecture — when thirty students entered the astral archive and only twenty-three came back. The rest were… "lost in metaphor," he said.
Solan remained. Watching. Waiting. Searching for the root of whatever hollow god his brother was trying to become.
Because something was coming.
Caelum had seen it — in stars, in blood, in dreams.
And he was building a weapon of thought and pain to greet it.
Or maybe to become it.
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