Ari sat beneath a whispering glyph-tree in the northeast corner of Sanctum's oldest courtyard—a place where students rarely ventured. The bark hummed with low-level incantations, and the leaves shimmered in ethereal patterns like a heartbeat coded in light.
He was reviewing Eluin's notes again.
Dreamscript syntax chains. Memory echoes. Glyph dissonance thresholds.
His mana refused to behave like anyone else's. It no longer pulsed in threads but spiraled in a kind of recursive bloom—foreign to the structured world around him.
"You're shaping mana like it's alive. That's not supposed to happen."Eluin's warning echoed in his head.
That's when he noticed the presence.
Not a student. Not a professor.
Just… a man, seated quietly on the low wall across from him.
The Stranger
He looked like he'd been built out of war and silence. His cloak was ragged, his boots dusty, and a blade made of sigilglass lay across his back—cracked in the middle like it had split a spell in half.
His eyes were what stopped Ari. They were Threadless.
No glow. No flicker. Just stillness.
"You're drawing attention," the man said.
Ari's mouth tightened. "You're not from here."
"Not anymore. Name's Cael Ardyn. Used to be someone important. Now I'm just a risk."
Ari blinked. "Wait. You're that Cael Ardyn? The Royal War-Threadmaster?"
Cael gave a wry grin. "Guilty. And exiled. Or dead, depending on which textbook you read."
Cael Ardyn had once been a legend—High Spell-Marshal of Vastelune, master of eleven elemental cores, and wielder of a now-lost hybrid thread that nearly destabilized the First Blood Accord.
He disappeared after allegations of forbidden Dreamscript experimentation. No trial. No remains. Just erased.
"They said you tried to rewrite the structure of causality," Ari said slowly.
"No, boy. I succeeded. That's why they buried me."
"I came when I felt it. That... pulse. You cast something the system didn't authorize."
Ari nodded slowly.
"I didn't mean to."
"That's why you need me."
Cael rose. The air around him hummed like a sword unsheathing itself from reality.
"No one in this kingdom will train you to wield what you are. They're terrified of you. Of what you represent."
He stepped forward, unwrapping a scroll from a metal case.
"This is a segment of Primordial Logic—precursor syntax to even Dreamscript. It doesn't cast. It rewrites."
"You want to train me?"
"No. I want to stop you from accidentally unmaking reality while trying to light a candle."
He stared at the scroll. Its glyphs hurt to look at—like staring at a thought you weren't allowed to think.
"Why help me?"
Cael shrugged.
"Because I made the same mistake you did. I thought the System could be obeyed. Turns out, some of us were born to talk back to it."