The Archivum Nocturnis did not sleep. Neither did Caelus. He had forgotten to meet Dren at midnight, though the thought slithered through his mind like a half-remembered dream, sticky and unwelcome. It should have mattered more. Dren had been his only friend in this place, the one who flinched at shadows and chewed his nails to the quick, who whispered jokes in the dark when the silence grew too heavy between the ancient stones of Blackspire Academy. But something had changed in him these past two days, a transformation as unsettling as watching a reflection blink first. The nervous boy who once trembled at the sound of slamming doors now moved through the dormitory halls with a slow, deliberate grace, his fingers trailing along the walls as if reading secrets in the stone, his footsteps leaving no echo.
Yet the doubt lingered, a splinter beneath his skin, as Caelus moved through the library's labyrinth of shelves, the air thick with the scent of vellum and something older, something metallic, like dried blood ground into parchment. The weekend stretched before him like a corpse hollowed of time, the moonlight filtering through the enchanted glass to paint the stone floors in veins of silver. He walked as a shadow might if it had learned to step free of its body, his breath shallow, his eyes raw and red-rimmed from nights without sleep, from staring too long into the dark spaces between words. His hands had shaken when he opened the first tome, the leather binding cool and strangely yielding under his fingers, but that passed. Then they did not stop moving for days, turning pages with a feverish hunger, tracing symbols that pulsed faintly under his touch before fading back into the yellowed paper. Dust whispered beneath his fingers as he turned the ancient pages, and the silence of the Archivum was not true silence; it was a held breath, a thing that watched, that waited, that knew the shape of his skull better than he did. Every book he opened felt like a door unlatched by another's hand, and he could never shake the sensation that someone stood just behind him, reading over his shoulder, their breath stirring the hair at his nape.
The first was bound in dark leather that pulsed faintly against his palms, stitched with thread too fine to be cotton, too firm to be silk, the material shifting under his touch like living skin. It unfolded not a map of land, but of soul, the ink swirling into shapes that made his eyes water if he stared too long. The cultivation paths were never spoken of openly, only hinted at in veiled lectures by instructors who feared awakening ambition too soon, who knew the dangers of knowledge given to those not yet broken enough to wield it. Here, they were laid bare, the words crawling into his mind like insects under the skin. The elements were not the simple four of children's tales; fire, water, earth and air but deeper, older things: blood, void, soul, ruin, decay, echo. Each demanded its own sacrifice, its own unraveling. Fire was conquest, advancement earned through battle, Emberkind rising only by burning stronger foes alive and inhaling their last breath of flame, the heat searing their lungs black. Water asked for dissolution, the slow erosion of self, each tier washing away another piece of identity until only clarity remained, until the cultivator could no longer remember their mother's face or the sound of their own laughter. Blood was the rarest and cruelest, a path that fed on lineage but required the cultivator to carve their own essence into something new, refining themselves through torment and the consumption of cores; crystallized life-force ripped from those who had suffered, who had bled and screamed and begged before the light left their eyes. The book trembled when he touched that page, the parchment growing warm under his fingertips, as if recognizing him, as if welcoming him home.
The hierarchy of power was a terrible, elegant thing, a ladder built from bone and memory. Five tiers, known as Veins, each with three sub-levels, each a new way to break and remake the self. The First Vein was the Initiate Path; Flesh, Bone, Pulse. To awaken, the body had to be broken, the flesh made pliant, the mind made hollow. Some drank poison and let it scald their veins to kindle the spark, their screams muffled by the thick stone walls of Blackspire's initiation chambers. Others carved sigils into their skin with blades dipped in mercury, the metal singing as it bit into muscle, or endured nights buried alive in the academy's catacombs, the weight of the earth pressing down until their ribs cracked and their lungs burned. Flesh was only the beginning, the first step on a path that led away from humanity. Bone came next, the skeleton becoming a lattice for magic, the marrow humming with unstable power, the body rejecting the transformation in fits and starts. Some lost fingers to the change, the bones dissolving into ash beneath the skin. Others coughed up teeth, their gums weeping black blood as new ones grew in, sharper, harder, wrong. Pulse was the final threshold, the heart learning to beat in sync with the chosen element, the rhythm of it changing, slowing, until it no longer matched the steady thump of mortal blood. Blood cultivators heard whispers in their veins, voices that spoke in languages dead for centuries. Fire-bearers tasted smoke in every breath, their spit thick with the scent of burning flesh, even when no flame was near.
The Second Vein; Marked, Echoed and Shattered was where the self began to unravel, where the cultivator stepped further from the world of men and closer to something else, something hungry. Marked cultivators found their skin rewriting itself, runes and scars blooming like ink in water, the patterns shifting when no one was looking. Blood mages often wept crimson in this stage, their tears staining their cheeks like war paint, their reflection in the mirror sometimes smiling back with too many teeth. Echoed was worse, a slow peeling away of the boundary between body and soul. Reflections moved first. Shadows stepped out of line. The cultivator's own voice echoed back at them in reverse, a garbled thing that spoke in languages they'd never learned, that whispered secrets they didn't yet know they carried. Shattered was the breaking point, the moment when the self could no longer hold its shape. Not of the body, but of the mind. Memories frayed, slipping through the fingers like sand. Emotions were excised like rotten tissue, the cultivator sitting numb as a surgeon carved away their fear, their love, their regret, until only the hunger remained. Few survived this stage intact, and those who did were never the same, their eyes too bright, their smiles too sharp, their hands always twitching toward the knives at their belts.
The Third Vein; Ascended, Hollowed and Bound was where the cultivator ceased to be entirely human, where the magic had eaten away enough of them to make room for something else. Ascended souls warped space around them, the air thickening when they passed, the light bending to avoid their shadow. Their blood ignited spells with a whisper, each drop a spark waiting to catch. Hollowed ones paid a steeper price. Some lost their voices, their tongues turning to ash in their mouths. Others lost their faces, the features smoothing over like melted wax, leaving only a blank mask behind. They could no longer eat ordinary food, only essence, only power, their teeth grinding against the bones of the dead in search of marrow, their throats burning with the need for something richer than wine. Bound was the final surrender, the soul tethered to a single, irrevocable law, the price of power made manifest. A fire-bearer might never lie again, their tongue blistering at the attempt. A blood-mage might never refuse a challenge, their limbs moving without their consent when the words were spoken. The Fourth Vein; Transfigured, Aethered and Exalted had not been seen in a century, the last of its kind buried beneath the academy's foundations, their name scratched from the records, their bones singing in the dark. The Fifth Vein was myth, a thing spoken of only in one place: the Codex of Ascension, a book that was not cataloged, that was not meant to be found.
That book found him.
He had been tracing the lineage of the first bloodcult wars when the air shifted, the temperature dropping so suddenly his breath fogged before his face. The lights dimmed, the candles guttering as if in a wind he could not feel. A single tome fell from the shelf without sound, without dust, without echo, as if the world had paused just long enough to let it drop. It landed at his feet, bound in scales that shimmered like oil on water, sealed with wax the color of dried blood, the mark on it smoking faintly. His hands trembled as he reached for it, his fingers brushing the cover and jerking back as a jolt of something; not pain, not quite shot up his arm. The moment he opened it, the words slid into his mind like blades, the ink twisting under his gaze, rearranging itself into shapes that hurt to look at. The Codex did not explain. It remembered. The author, unnamed, wrote not in instruction but in confession, the letters bleeding at the edges as if the page itself was wounded. I shed my name when I carved my heart from my chest and burned it over the bones of my brother. My blood did not boil. It sang. That was the First Shard. Caelus read until the ink blurred, until the words swam before his eyes, the letters peeling themselves from the page to press against his skin like brands. The Bloodglass Path was a branch of blood magic so ancient it had been outlawed before the fall of the Last Warden Empire, its practitioners hunted down and drowned in their own vitae. It demanded emotion refined into essence; rage, sorrow, love and regret each crystallized through ritual scars that bled not just blood, but memory, the wounds opening like mouths to whisper secrets as they healed. The deeper the feeling, the purer the shard, the more it burned when pressed into the flesh. Nine shards made a Sigil. Three Sigils built a Core. A Core was the key to rising through the Veins, to stepping beyond the limits of mortal flesh. But cores were not made alone. Most practitioners stole shards from others, tearing them from still-warm bodies, the memories of the dying clinging to their fingers like cobwebs. Which meant taking their lives. Their memories. Their last, gasping breaths.
He closed the book and could not breathe, the air thick in his lungs, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. A whisper curled up from the Archivum's sealed lower levels, where only Headmasters and Ancients were permitted, where the oldest, hungriest things slept fitfully in the dark. It spoke his name not to his ears, but to his marrow, the vibration of it setting his teeth on edge. He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling the pulse there, the steady thump of blood through veins, and wondered how many memories lived beneath his skin, waiting to be carved free, how many shards he could pry from his own flesh before there was nothing left.
Time lost meaning. Sleep was a forgotten language, the concept of it slipping through his fingers like smoke. He ate only when his stomach knotted in protest, the bread stale in his mouth, the water tasting of copper. He drank only when his lips cracked and bled, the blood smearing across his teeth like war paint. The hunger for knowledge was sharper, a blade between his ribs, twisting deeper with every page he turned. He learned of the secret societies that moved like ghosts through Blackspire's halls, their members marked by the way the shadows clung to them too long, by the way their reflections sometimes moved a second too slow. The Pale Covenant, who believed enlightenment required the death of the gods, who carved their prayers into their own skin and let the wounds fester. The Ashen Choir, who burned their own vocal cords to harmonize with elemental aether, their songs audible only to the dying. The Circle of Silent Bells, who left messages in books that only the dead could read, their ink made from ground bone and midnight dew. And the Bloodwing Club, oldest and most feared, founded by those who had survived the first bloodplague and sealed it beneath the school, their hands still stained from the work. They believed in purity, in the elimination of fractured bloodlines, in the slow pruning of the unworthy. Their leader, Malrec, was said to be on the cusp of the Fourth Vein, his skin already translucent in places, his bones visible beneath like shadows under ice. He lacked only one core, the whispers said. Only one.
Caelus did not yet understand what that meant for him. But he felt it; a pressure, a presence, like a hand hovering above the nape of his neck, the fingers twitching as if eager to close.
In a forgotten corner of the Archivum, tucked behind a shelf of crumbling grimoires, he found a diagram half-scorched into the back of an alchemical ledger, the edges blackened as if someone had tried to burn it and failed. A web of interconnected circles, nine lines leading to a sigil; a heart pierced by three daggers, the blades buried to the hilt. Beneath it, in dried blood, the words: To ascend, you must become the altar. He did not know what it meant. But the ache in his ribs deepened, the bones there humming as if in recognition.
The deeper he dug, the heavier the truth grew, the weight of it pressing down on his shoulders until his spine creaked. Blackspire had been a battlefield before it was a school, the stones of its foundations still scarred from ancient spells, the mortar between them mixed with ash and bone. The towers were built atop mass graves, the bodies buried there restless even now, their fingers scraping against the underside of the flagstones on moonless nights. The halls echoed with old war songs, the melodies woven into the very stone, audible only when the wind blew from the east. The Archivum itself had once been a tomb, the shelves carved from the same black marble as the sarcophagi that lined the lower levels, the books bound in leather that was not always animal. He read the journals of the first Headmistress, her handwriting growing increasingly erratic as the pages turned, the ink splattered like blood in places. She had buried her own son beneath the east wing when he began to bleed shadow from his eyes, when his voice became something not entirely his own. The magic is waking, she had written, the letters clawed into the paper. We pretend to teach it. But it teaches us.
His path clarified slowly, the shape of it emerging from the dark like a face pressed against glass. He was not fire, not water, not void. He was blood; but not as the Bloodwing Club understood it, not the clean, sharp cut they revered. His affinity twisted toward Echo, a rare subclass that connected memories between souls, that thrummed with the resonance of pain not his own. It required him to touch another's essence through shared suffering, to mirror their emotions until the boundary between them blurred, and then to extract a shard of memory; not to steal, but to understand, to carry the weight of it until it became his own. It was slower. More intimate. More dangerous. But it meant he could grow without killing. Not forever. The books were clear on that. The hunger would come, sooner or later. But for now, he had a choice.
On the final night, as the moon hung fat and heavy in the sky, the Codex opened to a page that had not existed before, the parchment pristine where the rest of the book was yellowed with age. His name curled in the margins, the ink fresh enough to smell, the letters written in a hand that matched his own. Below it, words etched in silver flame, the edges of them burning faintly against the page: Those who do not consume are consumed. Choose. The Archivum held its breath, the very air gone still, the shadows stretching long across the floor. Caelus closed the book, his fingers leaving smudges on the cover, the scales there warm under his touch. And this time, he did not put it back.