Levi woke to an unfamiliar ceiling.
He lay still for a moment, cataloguing the room before moving—a habit four years of solitary forest living had made automatic. Four other beds. High ceilings. Stone walls dressed with banners he didn't recognize. Furniture that cost more than anything he had ever owned. The kind of room that didn't just suggest nobility but took it entirely for granted.
He sat up, rolled his shoulders, and looked at the bed beside his.
"Hey." He leaned over and shook Mika's shoulder. "Do you know where we are?"
Nothing. Mika absorbed the question the way deep water absorbs a stone—completely, without a ripple—and sank back into sleep as though Levi had never spoken at all.
Levi pinched him.
"What the hell did you do that for?" Mika's eyes opened with the sharpness of someone who had gone from asleep to furious without passing through anything in between. His voice woke the rest of the room whether it meant to or not. Across the beds, Soren stirred. Eda sat up without sound. Marcus opened one eye, decided against it, and closed it again.
'Grumpy sleeper,' Levi noted.
"Where are we?" Mika demanded, still glaring.
"I have no idea. That's why I asked you."
"Then why would you ask me"
"Because I thought you might know"
"Why would I know if you don't"
Soren looked at the two of them with the expression of a man recalibrating his expectations of the morning. "Where are we?" he asked.
Levi and Mika turned toward him simultaneously. "We don't know," they said, in the flat unison of people still arguing.
'Grumpy sleepers,' Soren thought. 'Both of them. Definitely.'
Eda had already risen and was standing near the window, looking out at whatever lay below with the focused unhurried attention she seemed to bring to most things. She hadn't engaged any of them. Levi got the impression she rarely engaged anyone before she decided it was worth her time.
Then the Commander appeared.
He didn't knock. He didn't announce himself. He was simply not present and then present, the way very strong things sometimes are. The effect on the room was immediate. Soren straightened. Levi felt his knees make a decision his mind hadn't finished processing yet. Even Marcus—who had faced the Aethravyn in an arena with his arms crossed and asked if they were fighting it—swung his legs off the bed and dropped to the floor with an expression suggesting he found this particular development more intimidating than that one. All five kneeled.
The Commander looked at them without ceremony.
"You are inside the royal platform," he said.
'There's a room like that,' Levi thought. 'I assumed it was just for announcements and festivals.'
"You have all been granted the opportunity to attend the Floating Academy of Shearer. The Emperor has willed it. Be ready to leave tomorrow morning." He paused—not searching for words but choosing them. "The academy is nothing like what you have seen. Countless people from different places and empires will be there alongside you—some far stronger than you are now, having begun their aether training long before today. Some will try to befriend you and betray you before you see it coming. Some encounters will be worse than that." He looked across all five of them. "But carry this with you: you are future Solborns of Caelum. You are the generation that will lead those who come after you. Understand the weight of that. Come back stronger. Do not bring shame to your continent." A beat. "Farewell."
"Thank you, Commander," they said—not planned, simply simultaneous.
He vanished. Instantly. The air where he had been standing held the faint impression of presence for a second and then that too was gone.
Mika turned to Levi. "What do you plan on doing for the rest of the day?"
"I'm not sure. I didn't expect the tournament to be cancelled or only five of us to pass. I was originally planning to take first position and ask for a reward."
"Greedy bastard," Marcus said, without heat.
Mika nodded in agreement.
"Who said only five of you passed?"
The voice came from the doorway. A tall broad-shouldered figure stood there, unhurried, the kind of build that didn't need to announce itself. Levi felt it immediately—the same quiet register his instincts used to classify things. 'Strong. Very strong. How do I keep ending up in rooms with people like this.'
"Five others were also chosen," the man said, stepping inside. "The original number was always ten. Clothing and learning materials will be provided at Shearer. Graduation takes anywhere from one year to seven depending on your progress." He paused. "Oh—and carry only what matters to you. Follow me when you're ready."
'Forgetful,' Levi noted. 'But I can feel it in my bones. He's strong.'
They followed him into a long high-ceilinged corridor lined with stone that had the quality of age—not worn down but settled, the way things look when they've been standing long enough to stop being new and become simply permanent.
"The five others," Eda said from the back of the group, her voice quiet and precise. "Will we be meeting them before we leave or at the academy?"
"All five have already left for their homes to prepare," the man said. "So the most likely scenario is that you shall meet them at the academy."
Eda nodded once and said nothing further. A question answered was a question closed.
Marcus was not done. "Who are they?"
"You'll find out when you get there."
"That's not an answer."
"No," the man agreed pleasantly. "It isn't." He kept walking. Soren spoke next. "What should we actually expect at Shearer? Not the official version."
The man was quiet long enough that Levi assumed he wasn't going to answer. Then:
"The official version is that it's an academy. Structured, supervised, built over centuries." He didn't slow down. "The unofficial version is that it's the most competitive environment on this side of the world, populated by the best young fighters from seven continents, many of whom arrived with things to prove that have nothing to do with learning. It will push you sideways. At angles you won't see coming. From directions that don't always look like danger."
The corridor opened onto a wide landing. Through a high arched window Levi caught his first proper view—Fraire spread out below, the artificial sun pouring gold across its rooftops, the city entirely normal and entirely indifferent to everything that had happened in the arena today.
'Tomorrow morning,' he thought. 'And then none of this.'
"One more question," Marcus said.
The man stopped. Turned. Looked at Marcus with the expression of someone who has decided to find this mildly entertaining.
"What's your name?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth—not quite a smile, the suggestion of one.
"Aldrek," he said. "And before you ask—yes, you've heard of me. No, this is not the time. Get some rest." He turned back toward the corridor. "Dawn comes early."
The name landed differently from anything that had come before it. Not declarative. Not formal. Just a word spoken plainly in a corridor—and it still stopped all five of them cold.
Soren's head turned toward Aldrek's retreating back with the expression of someone cross-referencing everything they thought they knew against what was standing in front of them and finding the numbers don't match. "Aldrek," he said. Not a question. Just the word, turned over carefully. "As in—"
"The First Dragon of Caelum," Mika said.
The title sat in the air.
Aldrek didn't stop walking.
Marcus had gone very still—which for Marcus was its own event. He stared at Aldrek's back with the expression of someone who has just discovered that the thing they most wanted to fight was standing right in front of them and is now doing aggressive mathematics about their odds.
"Twenty-five years old," Soren said quietly. "The youngest Caelastis in recorded history."
"He controls all fire," Mika said, his voice carrying the flat quality it got when he was processing quickly and keeping it internal. "Not a type of flame. Not a technique. All of it. Every form."
'And he was just standing in a doorway telling us to pack light,' Levi thought. 'Looking slightly forgetful.'
He looked at Aldrek—at the unhurried stride, the complete absence of anything performative in how he moved—and recalibrated. The Commander carried his strength like a declaration. The Emperor carried his bedrock. Aldrek carried his the way people carry things they've had so long they've stopped noticing the weight.
'That might be the most dangerous version,' Levi thought.
Even Eda had turned fully from the window—the first time anything had pulled her attention completely away—and was watching Aldrek with an expression Levi hadn't seen on her before. Not awe. Something more precise. The look of someone recategorizing.
"Most likely candidate for Commander," she said. Quiet, factual. "When the current one steps down."
"If," Mika said.
"When," Eda repeated, with the mild certainty of someone who has already done the calculation.
Aldrek stopped at the end of the corridor and looked back at all five of them, entirely unbothered by the fact that they had spent the last thirty seconds audibly reassessing him.
"I can hear you," he said.
Nobody answered. Nobody had a particularly good answer available. Something moved at the corner of his mouth—the same not-quite-smile, slightly more committed this time. Then he turned the corner and was gone, his footsteps fading into the stone until there was nothing left of him but a faint warmth in the air that Levi was almost certain hadn't been there before he arrived.
Silence.
Marcus exhaled—long, slow, the breath of a man setting something down at considerable effort. "Right," he said. "That's a problem."
"For you specifically," Mika said.
"For all of us eventually."
Levi said nothing. He was still looking at the corner where Aldrek had disappeared. 'Every ceiling I find,' he thought, 'turns out to be a floor.'
They emerged from the royal platform into the late afternoon, Fraire spread out around them in the gold light of the artificial sun—warm, unhurried, indifferent to the scale of what had happened inside its arena today.
The five of them stood outside for a moment. The fact that this was the last time they would stand here like this went unspoken but not unfelt.
Marcus rolled his neck. "Right then." He looked at each of them in turn, brief and direct. "See you lot at Shearer." He turned and walked and within seconds the crowd had absorbed him.
Soren was next. He looked at Levi—a look that lasted slightly longer than a farewell look usually does, carrying something neither of them had found the occasion to say out loud. Then he nodded once and left.
Eda said nothing. She turned and walked in the direction she'd chosen and was gone before anyone thought to say anything, which Levi suspected was entirely intentional.
That left Levi and Mika on the steps, the city moving around them the way it always did—loud and warm and entirely unconcerned.
Mika looked out at Fraire for a moment. At the streets, the rooftops, the distant Solborn residence catching the last of the afternoon light. Whatever he was thinking he kept behind his eyes, where he kept most things.
"Don't be late tomorrow," he said finally.
"I'm never late."
"You're always late."
"I'm always exactly as late as the situation requires."
Mika looked at him sidelong with the expression that meant he was trying not to find something funny and losing. Then he descended the steps and walked toward the palace without looking back.
Levi stood alone on the steps for a moment longer. The city moved. The artificial sun poured its gold over everything equally. He took a breath. Then he turned and walked toward the house on the wealthy district street that he had almost forgotten was his, to pack the only things that mattered.
Tomorrow, Shearer.