The bullying hadn't stopped.
It simply changed its skin.
When brute force lost its bite, Cedric's crowd shifted tactics. Rustling pages in the Grand Archives, just loud enough to fray concentration. Snickering shadows during meditation, perfectly timed coughs or knocks to break the stillness.
Always indirect. Always deniable.
Dawn said nothing. He sat through it. Meditated through it. Studied like nothing around him mattered—like their noise was part of the silence.
But it wasn't silence. It was pressure. Constant, sharpening pressure. And Dawn welcomed it.
---
Ingrid didn't. The strain had started to show.
She walked into their usual meeting spot near the colonnade with her shoulders drawn tight and her eyes rimmed red.
"They flipped my satchel in the stream behind the north hall," she said, voice brittle. "My ink, my notes... gone."
Gary clenched his fists. "Was it Cedric?"
"No proof," she muttered. "There never is."
Gary stood by the wall, arms folded tight, jaw locked. For once, he didn't try to talk it down or reframe it. His silence burned.
Dawn stood by the stone railing, unmoving. Watching the garden's evening breeze comb the grass.
Gary exhaled, low and hard. "I should've done more. If I hadn't dragged us together that day..."
"Don't," Ingrid said quickly. "Don't blame yourself."
"I'm untouchable because of my name," Gary snapped. "And you two get the fallout. That's not fair."
"Fair's got nothing to do with it," Ingrid said. "I knew what Elias was the moment he opened his mouth. And I'd still make the same choices."
Dawn turned, eyes calm. "So would I."
Gary blinked. "Even now?"
"Especially now," Dawn said.
Ingrid hesitated. "Then what do we do, Dawn? Keep eating dirt until it stops?"
Gary looked at him too, but this time... something in Dawn's quiet unnerved him.
His father once told him, Beware the one who suffers in silence. They're the ones who never forget the shape of it.
Dawn stepped forward, eyes on both of them.
"I've endured, I've reflected" he said softly. "And I grew stronger"
He placed his hand just above his chest. Not touching—hovering.
A faint shimmer passed through the air. Barely visible.
Three twinkling halos emerged, aligned over his heart, pulsing faintly. Each delicate, silent, luminous—one silver-white, one dusky gold, one a deep, ember-red.
Gary's eyes widened. Ingrid gasped.
"You—" she started.
"Three halos," Dawn said. "I reached them in silence. Let them think they're breaking me. Every bruise they thought they had inflicted on me, is just another refinement I have undergone. It only makes me a stronger person."
He let the light fade, the halos dissolving like breath on glass.
Only Gary and Ingrid had seen.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Gary asked quietly.
"Because I wasn't done," Dawn said. "And I'm still not."
"What does that mean?" Ingrid asked.
He looked at them both, gaze level.
"It means it's time," he said. "Time to move forward."
"To what?" Gary asked, even though part of him already knew.
Dawn looked up. Somewhere above them, the high spires of the Academy towered into the deepening sky.
"To ascend again," Dawn said. "To pursue the Luminous Frame."
Ingrid inhaled sharply. "Already? But you only just reached three halos."
Dawn nodded. "Three is the prerequisite. Tere's more thab that needed of course. But we will find them, just as how we did the previous time."
Gary stepped forward. "Is this just about getting stronger? To make them stop?"
Dawn's eyes didn't waver.
"No. This isn't about them. This is about what I saw at Verdant Echoes. About what I felt. I don't want to walk slowly."
He glanced down at his chest, where the halos had briefly shone.
"I'm meant to resonate louder than they can silence."
The words landed like stones in still water. No bravado. No rage. Just certainty.
Gary didn't respond right away. He looked at Ingrid, then back to Dawn.
"Then what do we do?" he asked.
"You accompany me," Dawn said. "That's all I'll need."
Ingrid nodded, slower than before, but her fear had dulled—replaced by something like awe.
Gary, after a pause, smiled grimly.
"Let's see them try to stop that."
---
Far above, in one of the sealed upper chambers, the Grand Instructor stood by an open scroll, his eyes distant.
"He moves faster than expected," he murmured to himself.
He tapped the air above a glyph—one linked to the old resonance wells hidden beneath the Academy.
"Three halos forged in hardship... If he survives the Frame, he may do more than ascend."
And that didn't scare the old timer anymore, if anything, it existed the stone for a heart he had!
---
End of Chapter Thirty-Five