Chapter 64: The Heir’s Selection:The Dance Where Wolves Speak Softly

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• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 75: The Ember Decree

  The moment Professor Marwood’s footsteps vanished beyond the stone archway, it was as if the air thinned with his absence. The tension he left behind did not dissipate—it hovered, thick and immovable, like the remnants of smoke after something sacred has burned. I stood in the echo of it, wrists clasped too tightly behind me, the cold from the flagstone floor beginning to seep through the thin soles of my shoes and into the bones of my heels.Callum hadn’t spoken. Not yet. Not since the final pronouncement.His silence wasn’t cold, but it was restrained—tightly wound, as though he was holding something back with both hands and wasn’t sure whether it would come out as words… or fire.I turned to him, slowly. I didn’t try to mask the tremor in my voice.“Callum,” I said, and the sound of his name felt strange in the stillness—too soft, too human for what we were standing inside. “What is it? The Ember Marking?”He didn’t look at me right away. His eyes were still fixed on the archway wh

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 74: The Council’s Sentence

  The eastern practice court stretched ahead of us in silent judgment, every step echoing down its long, lightless corridor as though the walls themselves were holding their breath. I walked with my hands knotted tightly in front of me, fingers pressing into my palms to hide the tremor. The air felt colder here, as if the stone itself had learned how to punish by temperature alone. The court was quiet—too quiet. No voices. No distant footfalls. Just the faint sound of my own breath, and beside me, Callum’s steadier one.We turned the corner, and there he was.Professor Marwood stood alone at the end of the hall, a tall, still figure haloed by the fractured colors of the stained-glass window at his back. The red and gold light fell across his shoulders like blood and fire. His robes were dark, sharply pressed, with the faintest gleam of a silver trim that caught in the filtered sun like strands of frost. One hand rested lightly against his spine, the other gloved and loose by his side. H

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 73: The Pale Covenant

  LATER THAT NIGHTI knew the moment sleep claimed me that I would not rest.It did not come gently. It dragged me under like a tide thick with memory—like black water churning with the silt of things best left buried. One moment, my cheek pressed to the pillow, breath shallow from exhaustion, thoughts still curled around the words I hadn’t said to Callum. The next, I was falling—not through space, but through sensation, through a cold that was not merely the absence of warmth but the presence of something else. Something watching.It was not like the other dreams—the scattered kind, warped by stress or emotion or the body's strange way of unraveling the day. No, this was different. I knew it in my bones. Knew it in the way the silence wrapped around me like wet cloth, smothering, intimate. Knew it in the way the air took on that too-familiar stillness, like breath held too long. As if the Void itself had reached for me again—eager, patient, unrelenting.And I knew—I knew—before the vis

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 72: Tomorrow Belongs to the Council

  When I returned to my dormitory, the hallway felt too long—elongated somehow by the weight of my own silence, the way footsteps echo louder when they're carrying something you can't set down. Each stride along the familiar corridor pulled at something in me, some quiet thread unraveling with every step, until even the soles of my boots felt traitorous for pressing against the worn runner without hesitation, without pause. The sconces along the wall flickered gently with low-burning witchlight, casting long shadows that swayed across the narrow panels, and I found myself watching those shadows more than the path ahead, as if some part of me expected one of them to turn, to speak, to say yes, you were wronged—yes, someone saw—yes, this is unfair.But the corridor said nothing.The key trembled faintly in my hand before I even reached the door. I had not noticed picking it up—had not noticed retrieving it from my pocket, nor the way my fingers had clenched around it so tightly that the o

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 71: A Sovereign's Invitation, A Scapegoat's Sentence

  The chair beneath me was still warm from where I had curled into it moments before, its velvet worn soft with age and faintly scented of ink, parchment glue, and something more elusive—an old, almost bitter fragrance like winter bark stripped too early from the tree. I sat in stillness, the silence stretching between us like a second hearth, flickering and low, catching only on the edges of things.Professor Marwood had not spoken since his last observation, and I hadn’t dared to fill the quiet. Not with my voice. Not yet.But the question pressed against the back of my tongue like a stone I could not swallow, and I knew—knew with the strange certainty that came from instinct and not logic—that I would not leave this room without asking it. Not because I expected a full answer. Not because I believed he would offer it willingly. But because the words on that book’s spine had lodged somewhere in my mind, in the hollow behind my ribs, where dread went to bloom.I turned slightly toward

• THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH   Chapter 70: Scriptum Obscura

  The next thing I knew, I was already standing in Professor Marwood’s office, the heavy door clicking shut behind me with a soft finality that sent a thin ripple across the quiet. I hadn’t meant to walk here quite so absently, quite so entirely on instinct, but somehow the steps had carried themselves, and now I was here, blinking against the mild hush of a space steeped in polished wood and a faint, old scent of something dry and alchemical—like parchment steeped in moonroot, or incense left to die out in the middle of a spell.The professor wasn’t in his chair. In fact, the room felt strangely suspended without him in it, like a stage waiting for its solitary actor to resume the scene. His chair was tucked back, ever so slightly askew as if he’d stood just moments ago, perhaps in a hurry, though nothing in the room itself reflected any particular urgency. Everything was neat. Exact. Unmoving.Then I saw it.A folded square of parchment—small, square-edged, and almost unnoticeable—res