Lucifer settled on Ancient Studies in the end, not because he knew exactly what it taught, but because the brief description on the registration board, history, artifacts, ancient races, and lost civilizations, felt like the most honest answer to something he’d wanted for a long time: to understand a world he’d only ever known secondhand, through other people’s stories.
His first class met in a circular room on the lower floor of the eastern tower, its walls lined with shelves of old scrolls and fragments of artifacts protected behind faintly glowing glass.
His teacher, a middle-aged man named Professor Halric, opened the lesson by unrolling a large map of the Elysara continent across the main wall, far more detailed than anything Lucifer had seen in the books Beelzebub had given him.
“History isn’t just a list of dates and kings’ names,” Halric said, his voice echoing softly through the quiet room.
“History is the reason the world looks the way it does today, and not some other way. If you want to understand why the Abyssal Hell has seven kings instead of one, why the Elves have never truly gotten along with the Dwarves despite both opposing Imperium Asteria, or why this academy stands on neutral ground that belongs to no one, you have to start here.”
Lucifer sat in the middle row, among roughly twenty other students of various races, listening with a far deeper attention than most of the students around him, many of whom seemed more interested in whispering to each other than in the map hanging in front of them.
He didn’t notice that two rows behind him, a pale blonde girl was staring at him for a long moment, an expression on her face even she couldn’t quite explain.
Helena Valeria had already been at the Grand Academy for a full year before Lucifer arrived, long enough to know almost every corner of the campus, long enough to build a reputation as a quiet but brilliant student in the Divine track, long enough to grow used to the looks people gave her once they learned she was the Crown Princess of Valeria and treated her accordingly, either with excessive deference or quiet suspicion.
She didn’t know why today felt different.
She was sitting in a Divine Arts class in an entirely different building from Ancient Studies, nowhere near the room Lucifer sat in at that moment, but something in her chest had felt restless since morning, a very familiar feeling she hadn’t felt this strongly in a long time, one that usually only surfaced right before one of her dreams arrived.
That dream had haunted her since she was young enough to remember dreaming at all.
A burning sky.
Kingdoms collapsing one after another, like sandcastles swept away by the tide.
Screams blending together into a single roar that no longer sounded human at all.
And at the center of it, always, without fail, a boy with pitch-black hair, standing perfectly still amid the destruction, his eyes fixed on a direction Helena could never quite determine, whether staring at the world collapsing around him, or staring directly at her, at Helena herself, though the distance in the dream always felt impossible to close.
She had never been able to see the boy’s face clearly.
Only his general shape.
Black hair.
A posture too calm for someone standing in the middle of the apocalypse.
That night, the dream came again, clearer than she had ever remembered it being.
Helena woke gasping, cold sweat soaking her forehead, her heart pounding so hard she could hear it in the silence of her dorm room.
This time was different.
This time, for the first time in her life, she managed to see the boy’s face clearly, only for a fraction of a second before the dream shattered and threw her back into the waking world, a calm face, too calm, dark eyes staring back with something she couldn’t fully call sadness or anger, but a more complicated mixture of both than anything she’d ever felt herself.
She sat on the edge of her bed for a long while, trying to steady her breathing, staring into the darkness of her room with her thoughts racing.
She had told her mother about this dream once, years ago, and received a response more frightening than the dream itself.
Her mother had gone very pale, held her tightly, and said, in a voice that rarely wavered, that a dream like that should never be told to anyone else, not even her father.
Since then, Helena had kept it to herself, writing it down in a private journal she always kept carefully locked, trying to convince herself it was only a recurring nightmare, no more meaningful than any other child’s dream about monsters under the bed.
But tonight felt different, and not only because the face had finally come into focus.
She felt something hard to explain, a faint awareness, as if something distant had moved closer, as if a thread that had hung slack somewhere inside her for years had suddenly been pulled taut without warning.
The next morning, Helena heard the whispers among the other students at breakfast, a story spreading quickly the way strange stories always did in a closed environment like the academy, about a new student who’d caused the Placement Exam to freeze entirely, something even Professor Yrsa herself had never seen before, a student who’d apparently been called directly into Archmagus Coren’s office on his very first day.
“They say he’s strange,” one student whispered at the next table over, loud enough for Helena to hear.
“Really quiet. Black hair, dark eyes. I heard he’s from some tiny village that isn’t even on the map.”
Helena set her spoon down slowly, her heart beating faster than mere breakfast gossip should have warranted.
Black hair.
She knew it was too much of a coincidence to ignore, and too thin to count as certainty.
There were plenty of black-haired students at this academy, from all sorts of races and kingdoms.
It didn’t mean every new black-haired boy who walked through the gates was the same figure who had haunted her dreams for years.
But for the first time since the dreams had begun, Helena felt an urge she couldn’t simply set aside, an urge to find out, to see with her own eyes, rather than wait for the dream to return and perhaps, this time, show her more than she was ready to face.
She spent the rest of breakfast in silence, her thoughts far from the conversation around her, forming a simple plan that felt bolder than anything she’d done in her entire year at this academy.
She would find out who that new student was.
Not because she was certain.
Precisely because she wasn’t certain at all, and that uncertainty, for the first time in her life, felt more frightening than the dream itself.