The moment the notification appeared, Alden shut his door, locked it, and checked the lock a second time out of pure habit. Experience had taught him the Ledger liked to drop important revelations at the worst possible moments, and Marcus interrupting a genuine breakthrough would be unfortunate. Marcus interrupting a breakthrough and then loudly misunderstanding every word of it — that was practically guaranteed.
He summoned the Ledger. Gold pages unfolded.
Authority Fragments: Throughout history, powerful Authorities occasionally leave echoes behind. These fragments may influence locations, objects, bloodlines, or individuals. Extended exposure increases resonance.
He sat forward. Authority — the same word, tangled up with everything strange that had happened since Vale walked into his life. For once, the Ledger kept going instead of stopping there.
Observation: Authority resonance is not inherently beneficial. Improper synchronization may result in corruption, instability, or death.
Historical Note: Many sought Authority. Most did not survive obtaining it.
"Wonderful," he muttered, leaning back. "Exactly what I wanted to read before bed." The Ledger, predictably, offered no comfort. Still — for all its grim implications, the information was genuinely useful. Authority had finally stopped being an abstract mystery word and started feeling like a real, documented phenomenon. A dangerous one. But real, which counted for something.
The next morning began before sunrise, the entire third-year combat track dragged out for conditioning. Marcus took it as a personal betrayal.
"I was asleep."
"It's dawn."
"Exactly."
Gareth pointed toward an obstacle course stretched across most of the training grounds — walls, ropes, balance beams, hazards that shifted mid-run. It looked less like an exercise and more like something built with a personal grudge.
Team Seven did better than expected, not through individual dominance but coordination. Somewhere past the halfway mark, Marcus fell in beside Alden during a breather, breathing hard, watching the Rift's faint outline against the morning sky.
"You ever wonder why I push this hard?" he asked, quieter than usual.
Alden glanced over. "Family?"
Marcus huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "My brother was called a prodigy before he turned fifteen. My sister commands an elite Warden unit. Nobody in my house gets to be average, Alden. Second place is failure." He picked his sword back up before Alden could answer. "Anyway. Don't tell Lena I said something honest. She'll write it down."
Alden let it go, filing the moment away with something that felt, unexpectedly, like understanding.
That afternoon brought an emergency lecture on Rift history, taught personally by Headmaster Orion — an announcement alone enough to guarantee silence the moment he walked in.
"You've all heard stories about Rifts," he said, surveying the hall. "Most of them are incomplete." Behind him, images shifted through old battles, ruined cities, Wardens long dead and mostly forgotten. "The world you live in exists because previous generations survived them."
The lesson carried a weight ordinary classes never quite managed. Alden noticed something else, though, buried in what the Headmaster didn't say. Not once, across the entire lecture, did Orion mention Authorities. He covered Rifts, monsters, history, the shifting borders of old kingdoms — every adjacent topic except that one specific word, and the absence felt deliberate rather than incidental. Alden wrote it down without hesitation. Missing patterns mattered as much as visible ones, sometimes more.
That evening, a new line appeared in gold.
Investigate Blackthorn Academy's Founding History.
He smiled. Finally, a mission built for exactly what he was good at.
Three days into the investigation, Alden had settled on a working theory. Blackthorn wasn't hiding something in the sense of active conspiracy. It had buried something so long ago that most people currently walking its halls had no idea it existed at all — history, not intrigue, which in his experience tended to be the more dangerous of the two.
Breakfast that morning ran its usual rhythm. Marcus pointed a fork at him. "You look suspicious."
"That's an unusual way to say good morning."
"You didn't deny it."
Lena caught it immediately. "You found something."
"I received a research lead," he said carefully.
"You make that sound thrilling."
"It is thrilling."
"No. Winning tournaments is thrilling."
"You're both wrong," Elara said, calmly sipping her tea without looking up. "Sleep is thrilling."
A beat of total silence. Then Lena burst out laughing, Marcus nearly choked on his food, and even Alden cracked a smile. Elara stayed completely expressionless through all of it, which somehow made the whole thing land harder.
That afternoon, the library welcomed him back like an old friend. He spread his usual collection of maps, construction records, and old journals across a table. Blackthorn had stood for nearly four centuries as an academy, built atop a fortress that predated it by another hundred years, founded by celebrated Wardens. Impressive. Also, on paper, entirely ordinary.
Then he caught it — a small discrepancy, easy to miss, but real once he looked twice. The earliest architectural records didn't line up cleanly with later maps of the same grounds. One section of the academy appeared, described, and measured differently across different eras. Missing in some records. Present, but reshaped, in others.
He pulled more documents, cross-referenced dates, compared layouts side by side. The inconsistency held.
The Ledger flickered. Observation Recorded. Probability of Concealed Structure: 78%.
His pulse ticked up. Something had been hidden here, deliberately or otherwise, and either possibility mattered.
"You look pleased with yourself."
He looked up. Elara stood nearby with a stack of books under one arm, and eventually sat across from him without waiting for an invitation. For a while neither of them said anything — a silence that settled surprisingly comfortably between them. Eventually her eyes drifted to the documents spread across the table. "Research?"
"Always."
"You're avoiding training."
"No."
"You are."
She exhaled. "...Maybe."
That caught his attention — Elara rarely admitted to anything close to uncertainty out loud. He closed one of the books. "What happened?"
A brief, deliberate silence. "The Rift." She looked toward the window, toward the faint purple scar still visible against the clouds. "For the first time, I actually understood how large the world is. How much of it I don't control."
The honesty caught him off guard, mostly because he understood it exactly. Everyone arrived at Blackthorn convinced strength solved everything eventually. Reality had a habit of correcting that assumption sooner or later.
He shrugged after a moment. "I figured that out years ago."
"How?"
"History books." The answer left him before he could dress it up into something more thoughtful.
Elara stared at him for a second. Then she laughed — a real one, unguarded — and Alden felt an odd, small sense of victory over it.
A final notification caught him on his way out of the library that evening.
Research Objective Progress Updated. Blackthorn Founding History: 21% Complete.
Twenty-one percent. That implied this particular thread ran a great deal deeper than he'd assumed. The realization should have discouraged him. Instead, it just made him more curious — which was, unfortunately, exactly the problem. Curiosity had a well-documented habit of leading him straight into trouble.