“Milena!” The name grated raw against his teeth. Her limbs hung slack in his grip, icy against his skin despite the archive's trapped warmth. The obsidian brand on her wrist flickered with an oily luster, its rhythm steady against his collarbone. The stain smelled faintly of ozone and dead ash. 'The Spire bleeds'—the reminder from his former life scraped raw across his memory. He caught her behind the knees and hoisted her against his chest.
He kicked open the heavy oak doors, boots hammering stone flags. Scattered novices scattered from the corridor, parting before him in startled silence as they recognized the supposed dud carrying a limp body. He ignored them all.
The sick ward smelled of crushed wormwood and sulfur salts. He dropped Milena onto an empty cot near the tall windows. The duty healer, an elderly woman with silver hair pulled taut into a knot, swept forward without a word. She drew pale luminescence across the girl's sternum, palms hovering an inch above cloth, her mouth drawn thin as her palms drifted to the marked wrist.
“Core exhaustion,” the old physician said flatly, pulling her fingers back as if burned. “Severe, for a novice. And this blackening...” She traced the creeping tendrils on Milena’s wrist with a hesitant finger. “I have seen nothing matching its resonance. It rejects natural humors entirely. Restorative drops will steady her pulse, but I cannot mend this rot. Leave her under observation.”
“Alien?” Radovan repeated, his voice strained. He knew what ‘alien’ meant. It meant the Void. He looked at Milena’s still, pale face, the mark a stark brand of an encroaching doom. He nodded once and turned on his heel without asking further questions.
By afternoon, the hard-packed dirt of the outer training ring baked under a white sun. Clay training rings lay scuffed around him, iron daggers clattering against shields while novices drilled in pairs. Charred patches marked where flame practitioners had scorched the clay.
A shadow fell over him. “Kresnik.” The voice was a sneering rasp he knew all too well. Instructor Borislav. Radovan turned slowly, his face carefully blank. Borislav stood with his customary air of self-importance, his hands clasped behind his back, a cruel smile playing on his lips. Flanking him stood two upperclassmen, broad-shouldered and smirking, faint amber light hardening the knuckles of their heavy gloves.
“Word travels quickly from the infirmary,” Borislav drawled, tapping a hardwood cane against his thigh. “A fainting spell in the archives. Marrow-drain, they call it. Pity, though hardly unexpected from your bloodline. Weak stock constantly stretches beyond its limit, only to snap.” He paused, letting his words hang in the air, a barb meant to sting. “A direct result of your own useless presence, no doubt. Incompetence has a way of poisoning the household, wouldn't you say?”
Radovan kept his thumbs tucked into his belt. In another timeline, he had watched creatures the size of cathedrals strip Borislav's kind down to marrow in seconds. The man was merely noise.
Borislav stepped inside his guard, nostrils flaring at the lack of response. His palm slammed into Radovan’s sternum, force-hardened muscle shoving the young man three strides backward into the dust. The two retainers chuckled. Radovan dragged his right heel into the chalk boundary line and halted. The shockwave smelled of bruised pine and compressed air, fading immediately into the wind.
“Still spineless,” Borislav sneered, flicking dirt from his knuckles. “Hiding behind dull silence. Let us see if your skin is as thick as your skull. A field assessment.” He waved a gloved hand toward the two retainers, and whistled for a third youth across the yard—a whip-thin duelist whose brass rings sparked with blue lightning. “Take all three at once. A modest demonstration of standing.”
The sparring perimeter went quiet. Borislav wanted a public thrashing to salt the wound while Milena lay unconscious.
Radovan settled his stance, boots sinking an inch into the dry grit. Deep beneath the soil, the weight of the Spire's roots aligned with his pulse, ready to drop the local field like an iron portcullis. A thumb-width shimmer distorted the air around his right knuckles, visible for only an instant before settling flat. He looked straight into Borislav's smug grin.
“I accept.”