Counting down turned out to be a fantasy. Alden spent the night wide awake instead, staring at four lines of golden light that refused to blink first.
Name: Alden BlackwoodStatus: UnawakenedSoul Fragments: 0Objective: Survive the Rift Trials
He reached toward it once, half expecting his fingers to meet something solid. They passed straight through the light without resistance, and that — the fact that it was real enough to see but not real enough to touch — did more to keep him awake than the vision itself had.
"So it wasn't a dream," he said, to the empty room.
Every orphan at Blackthorn grew up on stories like this one: forgotten relics that chose their wielders, blessings left behind by the First Wardens, treasures buried under a thousand collapsed rifts. Nobody believed them past the age of ten. Alden had stopped believing around the same time he'd stopped believing anyone was coming back for him.
And yet here it was, glowing four inches from his face, patient as a held breath.
He made himself sit up and think instead of feel. Excitement was a luxury he could afford once he understood what he was looking at.
"Status," he tried.
Nothing.
"Open."
Still nothing.
"Ledger," he said, and the light rippled and widened into a fuller display, most of its fields still blank. Near the bottom sat a single line framed in red.
Authority: Locked.Requirements Unmet. Complete Initial Objective: Survive the Rift Trials.
So Inactive had a longer sentence hiding behind it. Whatever this thing wanted from him, it had built one door and handed him the only key that mattered. Alden lay back against his pillow and let a feeling he didn't fully trust settle into his chest — not confidence, not yet, but the outline of it. For the first time in three years, something in the world had looked at him and decided he was worth the investment.
Whether he could live up to it was a different question. He fell asleep somewhere around the fourth time he tried to answer it.
Morning arrived as an argument between his body and the idea of standing up. He lost slowly, washed the mud out of his hair, and crossed a campus already buzzing with pre-trial energy — students hauling swords and half-buckled armor down the stone paths, all of them rehearsing the next three weeks out loud whether anyone was listening or not.
Marcus found him before he'd made it halfway across the courtyard.
"Still planning on walking into the trials?" He fell into step beside Alden without waiting for permission, trailed by his usual crowd, uniform spotless despite the mud everyone else had tracked in. "Heard the instructors are finalizing teams by next week. Figured I'd save you the disappointment — nobody's putting their name next to the academy's weakest student. Not this close to the trials."
"Move, Marcus."
"Just don't get anyone killed." He peeled off toward the sparring rings, satisfied, and Alden kept walking, filing the comment away with the hundred others just like it.
If the Rift Trials were the door the Ledger had built for him, he meant to walk through it standing up straight.
The morning drills ran their usual course — forms, endurance laps, paired sparring — until his fifth match, when something in him shifted without warning. His opponent lunged. Alden's body moved before his mind caught up, sliding aside with a cleanness that had no business belonging to the exhausted limbs he'd woken up with. His counterstrike landed on the boy's chest before either of them had registered the opening.
"Didn't know you had that in you," the boy said, more startled than annoyed, rubbing his sternum as he backed off.
Neither had Alden. He flexed his fingers, turning it over in his head. Three years of drills had never once produced a reaction that fast. Either something in him had genuinely changed overnight, or the thing sitting behind his ribs had already started changing it for him.
He spent the rest of the day quietly testing that theory and collecting more questions than answers, which was how he ended up in the library once training let out — a habit most of Blackthorn had abandoned the moment they realized swords settled more arguments than books did. Alden had never had that luxury. Information was the one weapon nobody could bruise out of his hands.
An hour of searching turned up a cracked spine he didn't recognize: Artifacts of the First Age. He carried it to an empty table, and three chapters in, found a passage that raised the hair on his arms.
"The greatest relics are known as Soulbound Artifacts. Such treasures merge directly with their chosen host and cannot be separated by conventional means. Legends claim these artifacts possess wills of their own, and often guide their owners toward a destiny already decided."
Already decided. He didn't like the shape of that sentence. His whole life had been an argument against the idea that his future belonged to anyone but him.
The Ledger stirred in the corner of his vision, as though the book in his hands had reminded it he was there.
Welcome, Future Void Warden.
Not possible. Not potential. Future — as if the outcome were already settled and all that remained was for him to catch up to it. He closed Artifacts of the First Age harder than he needed to.
Still. It had given him something real. A door where there hadn't been one yesterday. He'd take the door and worry about who'd built it later.
The sun sat low and orange over the academy roofs by the time he left, the grounds quieting, instructors finishing their evening rounds. Everything about the moment felt ordinary — which was probably why the scream that split it open a heartbeat later landed so hard.
It came from beyond the western wall. A second scream followed, cut off too fast, and then the bell in the central tower began to ring — once, twice, three times, the same alarm Alden had heard exactly once before, the night a rift-spawned creature breached the outer fence during his first year.
The academy tore itself into motion. Instructors shouted for their stations. Students scattered toward the dormitories. And in the middle of it, the golden screen bloomed back into view, sharper than it had been all day.
Emergency Event Detected.Optional Objective Generated.
Investigate the Western Forest.Reward: Unknown.Failure: None.
Alden stood perfectly still while the courtyard emptied around him, staring at four lines of light asking him to walk toward the one place every instinct he owned was screaming at him to avoid.
His first real opportunity had finally arrived.
Naturally, it was standing on the wrong side of the wall.