The warning settled in the air between them — quiet, precise, and impossible to ignore.
Zayden didn’t need time to decide.
His instinct had already answered before Manher finished speaking.
But instinct alone wasn’t enough.
He needed to understand the exact shape of what he was walking into.
“Is there a serious reason behind that?” he asked.
Voice even.
Expression neutral.
Manher’s gaze shifted — not alarmed, but carrying the particular kind of carefulness that Zayden had come to recognize as pay close attention now.
“The higher-ups have very strict eyes on this matter.” The officer kept his voice low, measured, as if the corridor itself might listen.
“More than usual. And if I’m being honest with you…” He paused, scanning the empty hallway behind them.
“It looks to me like a trap.”
A trap.
The words landed with clean, deliberate weight.
“But sir,” Zayden said slowly, “Professor Richard trusts me. He asked me specifically. He believes I can answer his question.”
Manher studied him for a long moment with those thoughtful, purple-dark eyes.
Something in his expression shifted — not dismissal, but the careful calibration of a man who understood risk better than most.
“Speaking to him alone — privately — that’s one thing.” The officer exhaled through his nose.
“Many high-ranking people are confused about what happened in that garden. Even among church officials. Telling the professor quietly, in private, is reasonable.” His tone held steady.
“But standing up in front of others? Placing yourself at the center of something the higher-ups are already circling?” He shook his head once.
“That’s an entirely different problem.”
Zayden said nothing.
He turned the logic over in his mind.
Examined every edge of it.
He’s right.
I know he’s right.
But the real problem isn’t the higher-ups.
It’s that I’m not entirely certain what my answer would be.
Manher had a talent for filling silence without crowding it.
The conversation eased naturally forward.
“Do you know what happened last night?” Zayden asked.
“Night patrol filed reports.” Manher’s voice stayed measured.
“Abnormalities in the moon. Patterns that weren’t expected for that particular night.”
Something stirred quietly in Zayden’s chest.
He kept his expression still.
“I don’t know the details myself. But since my awakening, I’ve been seeing the moon differently. Things I never noticed before.”
Manher nodded — the kind that already contained its own answer.
“That’s because you’re an Aethriel now. The moon shows certain things to badge-carriers that ordinary people simply cannot perceive.”
He glanced briefly toward the narrow window at the end of the corridor — a strip of pale evening sky catching between stone walls.
“There are four distinct patterns,” he continued.
“Red. Blue. The one that glitches. And the green — the rarest of them all.” His tone settled into something like a teacher reciting lessons long committed to memory.
“Three of them appear regularly, cycling through the weeks. But the green one…” He paused.
“Months can pass without it. Sometimes an entire year. Then it arrives.”
“When it does,” Zayden said carefully, “does something change? In the environment?”
Manher was quiet for a moment.
“Old myths,” he said at last.
“Stories passed down through the churches for generations.” Another pause, as though weighing how much to offer.
“Some say that when the green moon appears, the life force of the world stirs — that it surges, in the very regions that fall beneath its light.”
Zayden held that thought perfectly still inside his mind.
The garden.
The roots tearing upward through the stone floor.
The vines climbing walls that had stood bare the day before.
The muted horror on every face around him.
He didn’t say any of it out loud.
“The patrol report,” he said instead.
“What exactly did they document?”
Manher’s expression shifted — polite, but absolute.
A door closing without apology.
“I can’t share that. Higher-up orders.” A small, genuine half-smile.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine, sir.” Zayden meant it.
He hadn’t expected to receive it in the first place.
“But the mutation,” he added.
“You mentioned you could show me a live example rather than just explain it.”
The half-smile became something more deliberate.
More knowing.
“I did say that.” Manher straightened, nodding toward the exit.
“Then let’s not waste the evening.”
They moved toward the exit, and Zayden’s gaze caught the board near the office entrance.
He slowed without meaning to.
Newspaper pages had been pinned to it in overlapping rows — the day’s editions, their ink still dark and sharp against pale paper.
Reports of Missing Persons — Amber City District.
Researcher Uncovers Anomalous Formation in Bright Mountains.
More headlines lined the board below those, smaller, less prominent.
His eyes moved across them quickly — the automatic efficiency of someone who had spent a previous life cataloguing fragments into patterns.
Missing people.
Something discovered in the mountains.
The overgrowth beneath the academy.
Three threads.
Or one thread stretched across three separate points.
He couldn’t be certain yet which it was.
He stepped away from the board without comment and followed Manher into the street.
Amber City in the evening had its own particular texture.
The mountain air cooled as the sun descended behind the peaks — woodsmoke thickening, lanterns beginning to flicker to life in doorways and along shop fronts.
People moved through the cobblestoned streets with the unhurried certainty of a city that had always lived close to the sky.
Children called to one another near garden walls before being pulled indoors.
The warm smell of supper drifted from open windows.
Somewhere, a door shut.
Everything looked entirely ordinary.
That was the problem with ordinary.
It never announced when it was over.
Zayden walked at Manher’s side in comfortable silence, observing everything — the last amber light catching the edges of the church towers, the mild, untroubled eyes of passersby who registered nothing unusual about a young man walking alongside a CSF officer.
Good.
Let them keep seeing nothing unusual.
They reached the main gate of the Church of Ligitaris.
Its twin towers rose above them, pale and composed against the cooling evening sky, holy emblems carved into their stone surfaces catching the last of the amber light along their beveled edges.
Zayden had grown more accustomed to the church’s presence in the weeks since his registration.
But something about its scale still pressed lightly against his thoughts every time he stood beneath it.
Something ancient.
Something vast.
Something that had witnessed centuries without ever needing to move.
Manher didn’t lead him inside.
He turned along the side path that curved around the church’s eastern wall.
Zayden followed without a word.
The path opened into the Cemetery.
Not grim — not the kind of heavy, suffocating stillness some graveyards carried like a physical weight.
Simply quiet.
The particular stillness of a place that had held too many lives to be anything but patient.
Rows of headstones stretched across tended ground, the grass between them pale green and close-cut.
Some markers were simple flat tablets, modest and worn.
Others carried engravings: names and dates, small symbols of the Aethernal System’s nine elements, their edges softened by seasons of mountain wind.
At the far end stood three larger monuments — broad, elevated, set apart from the rest.
The graves of previous Priests.
Their scale said everything about what the Church believed worthy of enduring memory.
Zayden brought his right hand to his chest without thinking.
He pressed it there briefly.
A quiet gesture for the dead.
It felt correct in this space.
Manher watched him do it.
Said nothing.
Gave a small nod.
They had barely taken a dozen steps further in when Priest Kenny Root emerged from the side path — returning from somewhere deeper along the church’s boundary, unhurried as ever, his expression as composed and warmly steady as Zayden had come to expect from him.
“Officer Manher.” The greeting carried genuine welcome without ceremony.
The priest’s eyes moved to Zayden, measured and kind.
“And Zayden. Something brings you both this evening.”
“A teaching,” Manher said easily.
“I find your cemetery is the most honest classroom in the city.”
Priest Kenny’s mouth curved.
“It has always had a way of saying things plainly.” His gaze lingered on Zayden a moment longer.
“How are you finding the early days, child? The badge adjusts to its bearer over time. Don’t rush the process.”
“I’m learning something new every day,” Zayden said.
“That is all any of us can offer.” A pause, something quiet and approving behind his eyes.
“I have prayers waiting. Walk well, both of you.” He offered a brief blessing — steady, genuine, unhurried — and continued along the path.
Zayden watched him go for a moment.
Then turned back to Manher, who had already begun to move.
“This way,” the officer said.
The corner of the cemetery was older than the rest of it.
Zayden felt it before they reached it — the ground slightly uneven underfoot, the headstones more worn, their engravings worn so smooth by decades of mountain weather that they had become nearly unreadable.
The boundary wall rose here, thick grey stone older than anything else on this side of the city, broad patches of pale lichen spreading across its surface in slow, silent constellations.
And there, in the corner where the wall met its own shadow, stood a tree.
Zayden stopped walking.
His mind went completely still.
The tree was not large — not the towering kind that dominated deep forests and ancient riverbanks.
It stood roughly twice his height, the trunk no wider than the span of both his hands pressed together.
Its bark was dark.
Almost charcoal.
Almost black.
But threaded through that bark, running in unmistakable lines from root to branch, were veins of deep and vivid gold.
Not mineral.
Not surface-level.
Not anything that belonged to the natural world he knew.
The gold moved inside the bark — alive within it, branching the way blood moved through a body, the way rivers fractured across a valley floor.
The branches above extended at angles that felt less like growth and more like deliberate arrangement — each limb reaching at precise points that no ordinary tree would choose, as though something had placed them rather than grown them.
His voice came out quieter than he intended.
“What is that?” He still hadn’t looked away from it.
The gold seemed to pulse faintly — though whether the movement belonged to the tree or his own perception, he couldn’t tell.
“What is that thing?”
Some things have no name yet.
And standing in front of them — that silence is the most honest answer the world will give you.