I lay on my iron bed, eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling, but my thoughts were meters underground, a fragment of darkness, trapped. A man from my past, bound to it. Fravikveidimadr, the organization that held me here, was playing a far greater game than I had imagined. They were dissecting the source of my power. This discovery upended all my calculations. This academy was no longer just a place to hide and learn. The Raven's Nest wasn't merely a containment facility. They were both pieces on the same chessboard—and I had only just realized I didn't even know the rules, let alone the players.
The man in the cellz the one I mentally referred to as Silas, was an unexpected variable. His connection to me, or more precisely, to this body, was a vulnerability. But vulnerabilities could become weapons, if played right.
I needed information. Not the kind from censored books or Grisa's sterile reports. I needed raw, unfiltered data straight from the source: the academy's population. Gossip, rumors, secrets whispered in the dark, these were the real currency in a place like this.
That night, after Roshtov, my cynical roommate, fell into deep, steady sleep, I began my search. I closed my eyes, sank into my aperture, and drew out a thread of Void Essence, thin, nearly invisible. I pushed it from my body, a psychic antenna that slipped silently out of our room.
Exploring the male dormitory came first. I guided the thread of my awareness through dim hallways, past closed doors, catching echoes of dreams and murmurs of slumber. Most were useless. Dreams of duels, anxieties over military exams, hatred for cruel instructors. I was like a scavenger picking through emotional refuse, searching for fragments of precious metal.
From one room on the second floor, I caught pieces of conversation, four senior cadets from noble families playing cards, their voices hushed.
"…another medal for the Chimera Project. My father says the funding tripled this year."
"What are they even working on down there? Everyone knows there's a facility under the West Wing, but no one dares to ask."
"I heard they're trying to stabilize the Flux. Something about primordial energy before the Broken Moon Cataclysm."
"Nonsense. Just myths to scare kids. They're probably making a new kind of steam weapon."
Chimera Project. Flux. Primordial energy. Keywords, stashed away. They didn't know details, but they knew something. The smoke was visible, even if the fire stayed hidden.
I moved on, steering my Essence thread across the open courtyard toward the female dormitory. It was harder, like trying to fly silk thread through a gust of wind. But I made it.
The atmosphere changed. Fewer dreams of battle, more of social maneuvering and political intrigue. I heard names of influential houses whispered, arranged marriages discussed, competition over attention from high-ranking patrons in the capital. Another side of war, fought with smiles and whispers instead of swords.
In one room, a girl cried in her sleep. The dream felt like a memory, she stood before her father, a stern general, who berated her for failing an Essence control test. "You've shamed the name Valerius!" he roared in her nightmare.
Valerius. Roshtov's family. So my roommate had a sister here, and their family pressure was just as heavy. Useful.
As my thread drifted through the upper hallway, I felt something else. A presence. Not human. I thinned my awareness and hid behind the shadow of a pillar.
From under the door of an old storage room, a small creature crept out, its shape unstable, like dust and shadow held together by malevolent intent. Knee-high, it hobbled, leaving trails of ash. It mumbled in a tongue not meant for humans, a rasping voice like sandpaper.
"…fracture… moon weeps… dust devours light… hungry…"
It was drawn toward the Valerius girl's room, likely attracted by the emotional residue of her nightmare. I watched, analyzing. A low-grade Aberration, a spontaneous manifestation of tainted Essence.
I had no intention of interacting. I only wanted to observe. But as the creature slithered near my suspended Essence thread, something happened.
Instinct.
The Bizarre Dao of the Outers within me reacted on its own. The passive thread suddenly tensed and shot forward like a serpent. It coiled around the dust-creature. The thing didn't even scream. It was instantly absorbed into the thread, which pulled the energy back into my aperture.
A surge of filthy, cold energy flowed into me, along with fragments of the creature's consciousness, images of a cracked moon in the sky and an endless, gnawing hunger.
I jolted back into myself. My heart pounded. That had been beyond my control. My power was inherently predatory. It saw that Aberration not as a threat, but as food. A dangerous complication. If I couldn't restrain its base instincts, I might attack something, or someone, I shouldn't.
...
Roshtov Valerius waited a full hour after his strange roommate's breathing settled. He didn't trust that boy. Welt Rothes. No records, no verifiable background, yet he could explain mathematical concepts that even the finest scholars at the Royal Institute still debated. And there was something empty in his eyes, too old for a child's face.
Silently, Roshtov climbed out of bed. He donned a dark cloak and pulled the hood over his face. He didn't leave through the door. Instead, he lifted a loose panel beneath his bed, revealing a narrow, dusty ventilation tunnel, one of many hidden passages he'd mapped since his first year. This "prison" was full of holes, if you knew where to look.
He crawled through the circular ventilation system with practiced ease. His destination: the main library, not the public section, but the Forbidden Archives below it, known as the Scriptorium.
He arrived at a grate overlooking a dim stone chamber, the Scriptorium's entrance, guarded by two motionless Warden Golems. Roshtov didn't confront them. He waited. At precisely two in the morning, they would enter a three-minute recharging cycle where their perception systems went dark. He'd discovered the flaw by observing them relentlessly since his first term.
He moved carefully, dropping down without a sound, slipping past the heavy doors. Inside, the air was cold and smelled of ancient parchment and alchemical preservatives.
He lit no lamps. He knew the darkness. Knew where every shelf stood. He searched for a particular book, one unlisted in any catalog. Supposedly destroyed, but Roshtov didn't believe in things like that.
He found it tucked behind maritime history tomes. Its title, scrawled in archaic script: Testamentum Errvasa Ghrae, The Testament of the Broken Moon.
He took it to the darkest corner, lit a dimmed lantern, and began to read. The pages spoke of a pre-Cataclysm era, when Essence was raw and wild, Primordius Manas, or Primordial Energy. Practitioners had no "Paths" like modern Evolvers. They absorbed Manas directly, gaining incredible power at the risk of madness or grotesque mutation.
The book explained that modern Evolvers, with their structured Paths, merely used tamed, filtered versions of Essence. Like drinking wine fermented safely, compared to ancient practitioners who drank the toxic sap straight from the tree. Those who survived became demi-gods. Those who failed became Aberrations, monsters birthed from unstable Essence.
Roshtov flipped the pages, searching for what interested him most: "The Lands of Thousand-Sage", a kind of Manas considered the most dangerous, said to originate from Sages among the stars, from wounds left when the moon shattered. Those who tried to channel this energy did not go mad. Their souls became empty. Vessels.
He paused at a diagram, a complex circuit of energy within the human body, labeled the Graham Circuit, a system meant to house Primordius Manas.
Footsteps. Outside the Scriptorium.
A night patrol, early. Roshtov shut the book, doused his lantern, and returned it to its hiding spot. He slipped back into the ventilation tunnel seconds before the doors opened.
Back in his room, he found Welt still asleep, motionless. Roshtov stared at him in the dark. He began to consider the possibility that Welt was something of His. He was almost certain now—Welt was either a descendant of Him, or worse, a fragment.
Coincidence? Roshtov didn't believe in coincidences. He had to dig deeper.
...
I returned to my own awareness, the tainted energy of the dust-creature still coiling in my aperture. It took a moment to purify, separating it from the pure pulse of the Eternal Drum. The memory fragment of the "weeping moon" disturbed me, like a scar from a past tragedy linked to this boy. I connected it to a footnote I'd once read on the Broken Moon Cataclysm. The more I learned, the more I realized this world's history was riddled with black holes.
At dawn's edge, Roshtov returned. Silent, but I, pretending to sleep, caught the faint scent on his clothes, ancient parchment and a preservative oil used only in the oldest sections of the library.
So, my quiet roommate had a nightlife of his own. Interesting.
I said nothing. Just filed it away. The chessboard was growing crowded. Fravikveidimadr, with their underground Chimera Project. Wandering Aberrations in the halls. Silas, a pawn or player yet unknown. And now Roshtov, a young noble sneaking into forbidden archives to study ancient secrets.
And in the middle of it all, me. An "error," becoming a player on this board.
That morning, in "Military History" class, as the professor droned about obsolete siege tactics, I felt that pulse again from underground. This time stronger. More erratic. They were doing something, to the artifact, or to Silas.
I had to get in. Observation wasn't enough anymore. I needed to see it for myself. But how? That facility was a fortress within a fortress.
An idea began to form—a high-risk plan. Fravikveidimadr considered me an unstable Oneiromancer asset. Perhaps it was time to give them an "episode." One dramatic enough to warrant medical confinement—the kind of confinement located near that laboratory.
I had to stage an incident. Something dramatic enough to trigger intervention, but ambiguous enough not to expose my true power. Something that looked like a side effect of my dangerous "gift."
The stage was the academy. The actors—students and instructors. And I would be the director. My passive game was over.