The metallic scent from the locket’s hidden compartment still clung to Anja’s fingers when the sharp rap came. Three swift knocks, hard as granite. She closed the locket, tucking it under her tunic, and quickly covered the herbs with a stray piece of linen. Chirri dove into the folds of her sleeve, a trembling, feathered knot. The guard, a hulking man named Bogdan with eyes like chipped slate, filled the doorway.
“Apprentice Koskinen. The Morozov requires your presence in the Aethelgard Lyceum. Now.” His voice was a low growl.
The amphitheater was the Conservatory’s grand trial hall. Her throat went dry. She followed Bogdan through echoing galleries where drafty flagstones numbed the soles of her worn boots. The hall opened beneath an arched granite ceiling, vaulted ribs vanishing into soot-black rafters. Today, an amber spotlight fell upon the central circular dais, while the surrounding tiers sat shrouded in cold gray.
But they weren’t empty. Every seat was filled. Hundreds of students, instructors, and silver-robed Masters filled the stone benches, staring down in absolute stillness. The heat rose along Anja's neck. Three tiers up, Tatiana Markova watched with lowered eyelids and smooth, sorrowful composure.
Valerien stood at the perimeter of the dais, wrapped in charcoal wool, tall and uncompromising. His gray eyes pinned Anja without a trace of recognition, fixed in flat assessment. He pointed two fingers toward the marked center of the stone.
“Today, Apprentice Koskinen, we examine discipline,” Valerien’s voice cut across the vault, thrown sharp by the acoustic tiles. “And the catastrophe of its collapse.”
Silence locked down over the tiers. Valerien took one measured pace inward. “You insisted in your initial testimony that the severance of Lykov’s Oneira stemmed from a slip of focus. A lapse in restraint. An artisan does not slip, Anja. Not in the field, and never inside the marrow of a Morozov.”
He let the quiet fester between them. “Today, you will weather an unbridled surge of manic intent. A beast born of raw delusion. You will hold your mind steady, or crack under its weight.”
He pivoted toward a mahogany spool-frame anchored beside the dais. His long fingers struck its glowing warp cords with brutal precision. The surrounding draft curdled, humming like boiled brass. From the loom's phosphorescent ribs, a jagged quadraped took shape: a predatory specter with snapping talons and an unhinged jaw. Flakes of rancid green rot peeled from its flanks, while twin embers burned behind its brow. A nightmare construct, spun from distilled spite to shatter a weaver's composure.
“Stand,” Valerien commanded, clipped and hollow. “Demonstrate the weaver you pretend to be.”
The construct shrieked, an abrasive screech that vibrated through Anja’s teeth. It sprang. She threw her palms forward, snapping twin skeins of daylight memory into a lattice, just catching the beast's descending claws. The collision jolted the joints of her wrists. Valerien watched without blinking, his frame feeding pale ribbons into the chimera's spine, quickening its stride.
“Paltry,” Valerien mocked above the snarling. “Your bulwark is as brittle as your oaths. Is this what you offered my brother? A thin veil before the dark?”
The beast lunged again, a blur of talons and curdled light. Anja stumbled, her heels scraping the stone rim as she twined a denser perimeter of silver chords. Yet the chimera battered the web without pause, fracturing the outer weave and sending splintered pulses through her temples.
She fixed her eyes on Valerien. His knuckles showed white against the tuning levers, venting his bitter grief through the beast's sinews. He was channeling his own fevered bile directly across the warp.
Anja drew a sharp, silent count through her nostrils. She could not repel his malice with blunt resistance; she had to yield to redirect it. Sweeping her wrists inward, she loosened the taut strands into an open, spiral net—a sieve rather than a barricade. It sought to siphon the current driving the hound instead of meeting it head-on.
The beast struck the gossamer ring. Instead of crashing, its forelimbs tangled in the slack loops. The sickly green hue sputtered out, its throat constricting around an aborted howl as the momentum bled harmlessly into the floor tiles. The specter twisted, suspended in midair, shivering as its core began unraveling thread by thread.
A stillness smothered the hall. Valerien’s hands halted over his harp cords. His hard mouth parted, stunned disbelief flashing through his features before turning to vicious indignation.
“A parlor trick,” Valerien muttered, stepping forward as the cords rattled. “A parasite's trick, feeding off my grief. You think you can twist my own work against me, Anja?”
He slammed his fist against the frame's central bridge, tearing Anja's net into scorched vapor. The monster bellowed, reknitting its torso with blinding violence. It smashed through her remaining defenses like sun-bleached bone. An icy psychic shock hit Anja square in the sternum, buckling her knees. Granite met her cheek with an iron crack, the ceiling spinning into blackness while claws shredded the air above her and dissolved.
Valerien leaned over her prostrate figure, his respiration rough and ragged. “That, Apprentice Koskinen, is the ruin of your vanity.” He stepped past her motionless hands, his mouth set like iron. “You will never sit at a frame again. I will see to it.”
A junior instructor sprinted up the dais steps, clutching a cracked wax cylinder. He stammered into Valerien’s ear. Valerien’s cheeks went ash-pale. The fury fell from his mouth, replaced by wide, terrified shock. He thrust the parchment back at the runner, lunging toward the exit.
“Lykov!” he shouted, bolting across the arena flags and abandoning Anja on the blood-cold floor. “Lykov, what have you done?!”