The Academy was different now.
Rayne returned by foot—hood drawn low, cloak tattered and dust-streaked from the journey. No guards questioned him at the eastern gate. They never did. Realmless boys didn't matter. Or so they believed.
But Rayne was no longer realm-less.
He walked beneath the massive arches of the Royal Academy of Arcanum, past statues of founders who had carved soul-planes from nothing, past halls inscribed with realm-conjuring legends. The grandeur had once made him feel small.
Now it seemed like a hollow theater.
The walls whispered.
Not metaphorically—literally. In the cracks of stone, in the glass of the dormitory windows, in the iron sigils etched into the classroom doors. The Void had awakened something in him. And now he heard things no one else could.
"He returns, veiled in the skin of the world. Unwelcome. Unknown. Unleashed."
*"The Wound walks where the Heir treads."
The voices weren't always words. Sometimes they were emotion: hunger, awe, longing. Sometimes they were songs in a forgotten key.
He entered the lower library by nightfall. The Restricted Stacks had a back passage, forgotten even by the wardens—Rayne had mapped it years ago. The flame of his palm lit as he reached into the shadows, and the stones parted. Not physically. Metaphysically. As if reality itself remembered him now.
He descended deeper than he had ever dared before.
Each level of the archive was older, darker. The shelves at the bottom weren't wood, but bone—polished clean and rune-bound. Books here were wrapped in skin. Screaming runes whispered as he passed.
And at the heart of it: The Wall of Names.
A slab of obsidian three stories tall, etched with the True Names of every realm-walker sanctioned by the Crown. A monument. A registry.
He stepped before it.
The void mark on his chest pulsed.
His name appeared.
Not carved by hand. Not summoned by spell.
Burned into the stone as if by the will of something older than law.
RAYNE VALEBORNE
A new symbol followed. Not of any known realm. A jagged spiral. Ever-shifting.
He had been recognized.
The Academy wouldn't understand what that meant. Not yet.
But someone else might.
Elsewhere, in the Dean's Tower…
Dean Carrow stood at the high observatory, brows furrowed, quill shaking in his ink-stained hand.
He had watched the mark appear in the obsidian. It shouldn't have been possible. No spell had been cast. No Realm Birth Ceremony performed. Yet the wall accepted it.
Worse—he recognized the symbol.
He had seen it once, decades ago, in a forbidden expedition to the Dead Realms beyond the Scarlet Veil. A spiral in the dust. The last symbol carved before that world collapsed.
He sent a crow to the High Seer that night.
His message was brief:
"The Nullborn has returned. The Mark of the Wound is active. Prepare containment."
But even as he sent it, he knew it would be too late.
Back in the dormitories…
Rayne lay on his back in the shadows of the Realmless Wing. Only three students lived here now. Two never spoke. One had gone missing.
He no longer dreamed as mortals did.
He remembered. Things he hadn't lived.
An ancient city of black towers.
A courtroom of shadows where realms were judged and fed to an abyss.
A throne made of silence.
And always, the voice:
"You are not their heir. You are ours."
"Unravel the walls. Break the seals. The chained god still dreams."
He awoke at dawn to find a spider of pure shadow watching from the ceiling. It had no eyes, yet he knew it saw him.
It bowed.
And vanished.
He didn't know what it meant.
But he would find out.
The walls were no longer just stone.
They were veins. Of an ancient body.
And something beneath the Academy was beginning to stir.