The candle had burned down to a stub.

  Aldric sat cross-legged on his bed, the letter fragment spread before him on a cloth he'd laid out to catch any pieces that might crumble away. He'd been staring at it for hours—since before midnight, through the changing of the guards, through the deep silence that settled over the Order when even the insomniacs finally surrendered to sleep.

  His ribs ached from sitting too long in one position. His eyes burned from the candlelight. But he couldn't look away.

  The Hollowed Rite.

  The words were clear enough, written in Felix's uneven hand. Felix had never been good at writing—too restless, always wanting to be somewhere else, doing something else. His letters slanted sharply to the right, as if trying to escape the page.

  They know about—

  And there it stopped. A ragged edge where the rest should have been. As if someone had torn the letter in haste, or as if Felix himself had stopped mid-sentence, suddenly aware that writing more would be dangerous.

  Aldric had read those words a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. They'd become a mantra, a prayer, a curse. But tonight, something was different.

  Tonight, he was looking for what he'd missed.

  ---

  The fragment was small—barely the size of his palm. The paper was cheap, the kind commoners used for receipts and inventories. Not letter paper. Not something you'd choose for an important message.

  Which meant Felix hadn't chosen it.

  He'd used what was available. Written in haste. In hiding, maybe. Or while running.

  Aldric picked up the fragment carefully, holding it to the candlelight. The edges were uneven—not a clean tear, but a desperate one. Someone had ripped this letter apart quickly, without care for precision.

  Or someone had found it. And taken what they wanted.

  The thought sent a chill through him.

  He turned the fragment over. The back was blank except for a smudge near the corner—ink that had transferred from another page, perhaps, or a fingerprint pressed into cheap paper while the ink was still wet.

  Aldric brought it closer to his eyes. The smudge wasn't random. It had shape. Pressure points. The ghost of a pattern.

  He traced it with his fingertip, following the faint lines. An arc. A line crossing it. Something that might have been a curve, or might have been nothing at all.

  His breath caught.

  The symbol in the clearing.

  The blood-rite symbol he'd found carved into the boulder. Circle bisected by wavy line. Three smaller circles in a triangle.

  This wasn't that. But it was close enough to make his skin crawl.

  ---

  He needed better light.

  The Order's library would have been ideal—a reading room with enchanted lamps that never flickered, never dimmed. But the library was restricted after dark, and spellblade disciples didn't have the authority to request access.

  There was another option.

  Aldric folded the fragment carefully, tucking it into the hidden pocket inside his tunic. Then he stood, wrapped his ribs tighter—they'd stiffened during the long hours of sitting—and reached for his boots.

  The corridor was empty. The Order slept.

  He moved quietly, stepping on the parts of the stone floor that didn't creak, keeping to the shadows near the walls. The quartermaster's storage room was two buildings away, and he'd learned its schedules months ago: restocked on the fifth and twentieth of each month, checked weekly, otherwise left alone.

  The lock was simple. Standard. The kind that kept honest people honest but didn't slow down anyone with patience and a thin piece of metal.

  Aldric had both.

  ---

  The storage room smelled of dust and old paper.

  Shelves lined the walls, filled with supplies that were slowly being claimed by the audit—equipment marked for review, materials flagged for reallocation. In the back corner, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, was what he'd come for.

  A magnification crystal. Low-grade, barely functional, used for examining fine details in enchanting work. The mages had better ones—superior tools for superior practitioners—but this one had been deemed inadequate and left to gather dust.

  Aldric pulled it from its case and held it to the candle he'd brought. The crystal was cloudy, flawed, but it would do.

  He took out the letter fragment and held it beneath the lens.

  The smudge magnified into something more. Not a clear image—the ink had blurred too much for that—but enough to see that it wasn't random. The arc was definite. The crossing line was deliberate. And there, in the corner, pressed almost too faint to see even with magnification: three dots.

  A triangle.

  The same symbol.

  Aldric's hands trembled. The candle flame danced, throwing wild shadows across the storage room walls.

  The Hollowed Rite. They know about—

  About the symbol? About the blood rites in the hills? About something else entirely?

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  And more importantly: how had Felix known?

  ---

  He sat on an overturned crate, the magnification crystal in one hand, the letter fragment in the other. The questions came faster than he could process them.

  Felix had been strange. Everyone knew that. He'd spoken in odd phrases, used words that didn't quite fit, laughed at things no one else found funny. Aldric had always assumed it was just Felix—his particular way of seeing the world.

  But what if it was something more?

  Maybe I am from somewhere else.

  The words from the East Cliff flashback echoed in his memory. Aldric had dismissed them at the time—Felix had always said strange things. It was part of his charm, part of what made him different from everyone else in the Order.

  But now, sitting in a dusty storage room with a fragment of torn paper and a symbol that connected his dead friend to blood-rite practitioners in the hills, Aldric wasn't so sure.

  He thought of his father's words. There are things I haven't told you. About the catastrophe. About Felix.

  Edmund had been afraid. Aldric had seen it in his eyes, in the way his hands had tightened on the edge of the desk. Fear that had nothing to do with the audit or the resource cuts or the slow strangulation of the spellblade disciples.

  Fear of something older. Deeper.

  What are you hiding, Father?

  ---

  The letter fragment was wearing thin.

  Aldric could see it now—the edges crumbling slightly where he'd handled it too much, the ink fading where the light had touched it too long. He needed to preserve it. To record what it said before the words disappeared entirely.

  He found a scrap of parchment and a stub of charcoal in the storage room's discards. Carefully, carefully, he copied the visible words:

  The Hollowed Rite

  They know about—

  Then, separately, he sketched the symbol from memory—the one from the clearing, the one that matched the smudge on the back of the fragment. Circle. Wavy line. Three circles in a triangle.

  When he was done, he folded the original fragment in clean cloth and tucked it deeper into his tunic, away from light and air and handling. The copy he slipped into his boot.

  Two copies. Two hiding places. If one was found, the other might survive.

  Information asymmetry.

  Felix's voice again. One of the strange concepts he'd tried to explain, back when they were both alive and the future seemed like something that happened to other people.

  Knowing what others don't is power, Aldric. It's the only real power most people ever have.

  Aldric had thought he understood. Now he was beginning to realize he'd barely scratched the surface.

  ---

  Dawn was approaching when he returned to his quarters.

  The sky outside his window had shifted from black to grey, the first hints of light creeping over the mountains. Soon the Order would wake. The audit would continue. The system would grind on.

  But something had changed.

  Aldric sat on his bed, the hidden letter fragment pressed against his chest, and let his mind work through what he'd learned.

  Felix had known about the symbol. Or at least about something connected to it.

  Someone had torn the letter. Either Felix himself, in haste or fear, or someone else who found it later.

  The symbol in the hills was recent. The blood stain was old. Someone had been using that clearing for days, maybe weeks. Possibly longer.

  And The Hollowed Rite—whatever they were—knew something. Something important enough to get Felix killed.

  His hands had stopped trembling. The fear was still there, but it had settled into something harder. More focused.

  Some wrongs refuse to be bought off.

  But some debts demanded answers first. Demanded truth.

  Felix had died for him. The least Aldric could do was find out why.

  ---

  He lay back on the bed, not bothering to undress. His ribs protested the position, but he was too tired to care. Sleep wouldn't come—his mind was still racing—but his body needed rest.

  Tomorrow, he would start asking questions. Quiet ones. Careful ones. The kind that didn't draw attention but gathered information like water through cracks in stone.

  He would watch the hills. Watch the patterns of movement, the comings and goings that Garrett never noticed. He would look for more symbols, more signs, more evidence of the people who had carved their mark into that boulder.

  And he would remember.

  Every word Felix had ever said. Every strange phrase, every odd concept, every moment that hadn't quite fit. Somewhere in those memories was a key—a pattern that would unlock the mystery of who Felix had really been, and why he'd died.

  Aldric closed his eyes. The candle had guttered out, leaving the room in grey pre-dawn dimness.

  The Hollowed Rite. They know about—

  About what?

  About him?

  About his family?

  About the scar above his brow that no one could explain?

  He didn't know. Not yet.

  But he would find out.

  ---

  A knock at the door jolted him from half-sleep.

  "Voss." Therin's voice, muffled through the wood. "Training starts in an hour. You coming?"

  Aldric pushed himself up, wincing as his ribs reminded him of their existence. The letter fragment was still tucked against his chest, safe and hidden.

  "Yeah," he called back. "I'll be there."

  He stood, stretched carefully, and began preparing for the day. The copy of the fragment in his boot. The original in his tunic. Two pieces of information, two hiding places, one question burning in his mind.

  What trail were you following, Fel? And would one complete sentence really have killed you?

  And who killed you for it?

  ---

  The training grounds were cold.

  Frost still clung to the grass, white crystals that crunched underfoot as Aldric made his way to the spellblade section. The audit had reduced their numbers further—today he counted only six disciples where there should have been twelve. The others were on support duty, or had simply stopped coming.

  Kira was already there, working through forms with mechanical intensity. Dace sat on his usual bench, staring at nothing. Therin stood near the equipment rack, his expression worried.

  "You look like you didn't sleep," Therin said as Aldric approached.

  "Didn't. Much."

  "The audit?"

  "Something like that."

  Therin's eyes lingered on Aldric's face, reading more than the words. He was perceptive that way—one of the few people in the Order who actually paid attention to things that weren't spelled out in official documents.

  "Something else happened," Therin said quietly. "Didn't it?"

  Aldric thought about lying. Thought about deflecting, changing the subject, retreating into the careful silence that had kept him alive through three years of systematic oppression.

  But Therin was one of them. One of the spellblade disciples who had been ground down and dismissed and told they were worthless. If anyone could be trusted—even partially, even cautiously—it was someone who shared the same burden.

  "I found something," Aldric said. "In the hills. Yesterday."

  Therin's expression sharpened. "What kind of something?"

  "I don't know yet." Aldric kept his voice low, barely above a murmur. "But I think it's connected to... something bigger. Something that goes beyond the audit."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  "Probably."

  Therin was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, a small, tight movement.

  "If you need help," he said, "I'm here."

  Aldric let the sting in his ribs anchor him. Breathed in. Breathed out.

  "I know," he said. "And I'll remember that."

  ---

  Training passed in a blur of repetition.

  Aldric went through his forms, his mind elsewhere. The mana in his right hand flowed smoothly—Common-grade, consistent, the product of weeks of careful refinement—but his attention was fixed on the questions that had kept him awake all night.

  The symbol. The blood. The letter fragment.

  The Hollowed Rite.

  Somewhere in the distance, Caelen Wyndthorpe was conducting another interview. Somewhere in the hills, someone was using that clearing for blood rites. Somewhere in the past, Felix had learned something that got him killed.

  And Aldric was standing in the middle of it all, holding a torn piece of paper and a list of questions that grew longer with every passing day.

  He finished his forms. Bowed to the instructor. Made his way back toward the disciple quarters.

  But instead of entering, he kept walking. Past the supply hall. Past the training grounds. Toward the path that led up into the hills.

  There was more to find. He could feel it.

  And he wasn't going to let fear stop him from finding it.

  ---

  In a dusty storage room, a symbol reveals itself. In a hidden pocket, a dead friend's words wait to be understood. And in the hills above the Order, shadows gather around secrets that have waited years to be discovered.

  The letter fragment is only the beginning. What comes next will change everything.

  But first, Aldric has to survive long enough to find the truth.