The path after the monolith led downward.
Not taphorically. Literally. The cracked earth gave way to a spiraling staircase of bone and obsidian, slick with condensation and writhing with runes that squird if I looked directly at them.
With every step, the air grew thicker. It pressed against my lungs like I was breathing through wet cloth. My heartbeat sounded distant. Like it was coming from outside my body.
Six left.
But there was no ti here. No direction. No logic.
Only the Wager.
Only the weight of the blade on my back, and the hunger in my blood.
I don’t know how long I walked before I saw the next one.
She was sitting on a throne of broken mories.
That’s the only way I can describe it.
Old parchnt, shattered lenses from my runic goggles, lted pieces of a tea kettle I’d once repaired for Felix—all fused together into a jagged seat that pulsed with forgotten warmth.
And she...
She wore my face. But hers was younger. Too young.
She looked barely eighteen. Before the academy. Before the na "Professor Lucian Drelmont" ant anything.
Before I started lying to survive.
She smiled. "You rember ."
I didn’t draw my blade.
I didn’t need to.
The air told she wasn’t here to fight.
Not physically, at least.
"Are you another contender?" I asked.
She shook her head. "No. I’m what you left behind. The last ti you were honest."
She gestured to the space around us.
Suddenly, I was standing in my childhood bedroom.
Books stacked everywhere. Stars drawn on the ceiling with chalk. A broken wand snapped in two beside my pillow.
My hand twitched.
I hadn’t seen this room in decades. Not since...
"You died here," I said quietly. "That version of . He died in this room."
She didn’t argue.
She only whispered, "So why are you still dragging his corpse around?"
The room collapsed.
Not all at once.
But in pieces. Like a jigsaw puzzle unraveling in reverse. The stars fell from the ceiling. The floorboards peeled back to reveal void. My old wand shattered into dust.
And still, she sat.
"Is this guilt?" I asked.
She tilted her head. "No. You’re past guilt. This is anchor. The version of you that rembers why you started learning the runes in the first place. Why you never gave up, even when you should’ve."
I turned away from her.
Because I couldn’t look her in the eye anymore.
Because I knew she was right.
She stood.
Walked toward .
And for a mont, we were the sa height again.
Sa voice. Sa body.
Just years apart.
She reached out and touched my forehead.
"You still know love. You still know fear. That ans you haven’t lost everything."
I blinked—
And she was gone.
In her place, a rune pulsed.
Different from the others. Brighter. More... human.
I felt it etch itself into my skin.
Not on my back. Not on my sword.
But over my heart.
A rune that ant: Rember.
I don’t know how long I stood there.
But eventually the path opened again.
This ti, not down—but sideways.
A long bridge of shattered hourglasses stretched into the distance, suspended over a sky full of falling stars.
The Wager wasn’t just a tournant.
It was a crucible.
And it wasn’t just testing my power.
It was testing if Lucian Drelmont still deserved to exist.
anwhile, at Noctis Ardentis...
"Is this what you wanted?" Roderick hissed, throwing the smoking scroll across the chamber. "You pushed him, Vaughn. Pushed until he cracked."
Mira knelt beside the broken circle where Lucian had vanished. "He didn’t crack," she murmured. "He made a choice."
"Then why can’t we follow?" Julien snapped. "Why can’t we reach him?"
Wallace was the one who answered—quiet, almost afraid.
"Because I think... he’s sowhere that only monsters or gods can go."
Cassandra, staring at the sky through a broken pane of glass, whispered:
"Or those who have been both."
The stars were screaming.
I know how that sounds. But it’s true.
Each one that fell from the void above the hourglass bridge left behind a whisper—a voice. So cried, so laughed, others chanted riddles that crawled under my skin like insects.
I kept walking.
There was no other choice.
The bridge crunched underfoot, fragile and brittle. Ti itself felt... wrong here. Sotis my footsteps echoed a second before I took them. Sotis shadows of walked ahead, disappearing just as I reached them.
Then I saw it.
A banquet table stretched across the bridge, impossibly long, lined with empty chairs.
At its head sat a figure.
He wore red robes lined with gold script. Runic tattoos bled across his arms like living scars. His face was familiar. Too familiar.
It was .
But gaunt. Hollow-eyed. With a smile stretched too wide to be sane.
"Lucian Drelmont," he greeted, gesturing to the empty seat across from him. "Take your place."
I didn’t move. "Let guess. You’re another version of ?"
He laughed. "Not quite. I’m who you pretend not to be."
His hands tapped against the table. Plates began to fill. Not with food.
But with monts.
The day I lied to Mira and told her she didn’t have what it takes. The ti I let Wallace take the fall for an experint that I pushed too far. Every betrayal. Every calculated cruelty. Every ti I played the villain because it was easier.
He raised a glass. "To survival."
I didn’t sit.
He didn’t seem to mind.
"You’re wondering what this is," he said, lifting a fork and stabbing into a mory of Julien collapsing in training, coughing blood, while I watched and said "keep going."
"This is the Feast of Justifications. Every monster feeds on it."
He ate.
I didn’t flinch.
"You think I’m ashad?" I said quietly. "I’ve done worse than lie. Worse than manipulate. And if I could go back—"
He interrupted. "—you’d do it again. Because deep down, you believe the ends justify everything."
The bridge shuddered.
The stars wept harder.
He leaned forward. "So here’s your choice."
He pointed at the chair.
"Sit. Admit it. Embrace . And ascend as the monster you were always ant to be."
Then he pointed over the edge of the bridge.
"Or jump. Let this broken path end. Let Lucian Drelmont die."
I stared at both options.
Then I did neither.
I picked up a plate. Held it.
Looked him in the eye.
"You’re wrong," I said. "You’re not who I pretend not to be."
I crushed the plate in my hand.
"You’re who I outgrew."
He bared his teeth. "Then why do I still exist?!"
I stepped closer. Face to face.
"Because a monster rembers. But he learns."
And with that—I burned him.
Rune after rune tore free from my skin, lighting the table, the bridge, the stars themselves with searing white light.
The false howled as he dissolved into cinders.
And when he was gone...
The chair remained.
But this ti, it was empty.
A seat not of guilt—but choice.
I walked past it.
And the bridge didn’t break.
Elsewhere...
Cassandra stood alone in the Academy’s observatory.
The glass do above her shimred, reflecting no stars—only ink. The sky had turned black.
She whispered to herself, voice tinged with sothing not her own.
"He’s reached the Feast."
Behind her, a ghost flickered into shape.
A boy with horns. A silver bell around his neck. And eyes older than ti.
"He’ll need help soon," the ghost said.
"I know," Cassandra replied. "I’ll be ready."
She looked toward the sealed vault beneath the Academy.
Where the last rune—one that even Lucian had forgotten—waited.
The Rune of Regret.
The observatory was colder than usual.
Not the chill of winter or the creeping dusk. This cold ca from deeper places—between monts, behind nas. The kind of cold that whispers.
The kind that rembers you.
I stood in the center of the ritual circle, barefoot, the hem of my uniform already soaked with ink and crushed flower ash. Moonlight filtered through the cracked do above, but it wasn’t moonlight from this sky. It was sothing borrowed. Sothing owed.
The ghost boy sat cross-legged at the edge of the chalk lines, bell around his neck tinkling in ti with my heartbeat.
"You’re too early," he said.
"I’m already late," I answered.
My hands trembled as I traced the last symbol. The old tongue hurt to write. It resisted . It wanted to forget itself.
I bit the inside of my cheek. Blood spilled across the rune, and it accepted .
One step closer.
"Why do you care what happens to him?" the boy asked, flicking a bit of ghost-light between his fingers. "Lucian wouldn’t bleed for you."
I didn’t answer.
He tilted his head. "Ah. So it’s not about him. It’s about the one before."
The air thickened.
"Be quiet."
The bell chid again. "He died screaming, didn’t he?"
My hand shook.
I pushed the mory down.
Now wasn’t the ti.
Lucian Drelmont had reached the Feast. That ant the Wager was nearing its end. And when it ended—so did he. Unless soone intervened. Unless soone broke the pattern.
So I offered a part of myself.
The ritual demanded more than mana. It needed mory. Truth. Nas I had buried so deeply they rotted beneath my skin.
The ghost watched as I removed the final seal.
My true na spilled from my mouth in a whisper. Seven syllables. None of them human.
The glass above cracked.
The stars blinked.
And the Vault beneath the Academy stirred.
When the door opened, I expected darkness.
I found her instead.
She was older than I rembered. A skeleton draped in violet threads and ti, her eyes hollow and gold. The First Arcanist. The one who gave the Academy its foundation.
"You shouldn’t have co here, child," she said. Her voice was two voices, layered. "You were ant to observe, not act."
I bowed my head. "I’m breaking that law."
"You’ll be erased."
"Then erase ."
She studied , silent for a long ti.
And then, slowly, she extended her hand. In it—a fragnt. A sliver of light shaped like a snowflake, trembling with regret.
The Rune of Forgotten Futures.
It pulsed against my palm like a fading heartbeat.
"This can only be used once," the Arcanist warned. "And only for soone who has already been condemned."
"I know."
I took it.
The observatory groaned.
The do cracked wide open.
And the sky scread.
Elsewhere — Lucian
I gasped, stumbling on the next bridge.
Sothing had shifted.
A ripple in the world’s breath.
A whisper that soone had reached for .
I looked up.
And for the first ti since stepping into this nightmare trial...
I saw a light not born of fire or pain.
A sliver of sothing that shouldn’t exist here.
Hope.
No.
Cassandra.
You absolute little enigma.
What did you do?
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