The morning air was fresh, untainted by Kuro's duality.
Without his masks, his barbs, his cruel theatre, the Academy felt lighter, almost human. Shiro breathed it in with relief, though the weight in his chest never truly lifted.
He met with the new friends he had made the day before. They spoke of the upcoming exam, only days away. Shiro went pale, knowing he barely understood the basics. His silence betrayed him until Reo leaned in, his tone deceptively casual.
"I'll tutor you," Reo offered. "But in exchange... you'll tell me secrets about Kuro. You're cousins, after all surely you know something."
The group laughed, thinking it a joke. But Shiro saw the sharpness in Reo's eyes. He was deadly serious. This was a test. Shiro forced himself to laugh along, masking his fear perfectly, and accepted with a reluctant nod.
After that they walked to Professor Kaels lesson, the walk felt like freedom without Kuros barbed cruelty and his exhausting duality.
Kael's lecture begun, the chalk scratching across the board as he unveiled the new star charts mandated by Ryo Oji. Shiro stared at them, bile rising in his throat. They were wrong. He knew they were wrong. Proof of Ryo's tyranny, his desecration of the one constant in the world. The stars bent to his nihilistic rule, rewritten to serve his crown.
The classroom felt empty without Kuro's presence. The silence was not relief but absence, a hollow space where cruelty usually lived.
Shiro leaned toward Reo. "How long will he be gone?"
Reo's eyes narrowed, suspicion flickering. "I don't know. No longer than two weeks." His tone was attentive, but Shiro felt the weight of calculation behind it.
The new chart was an open act of violence against the sky. Kael stood before it, his posture rigid, his starched collar standing unnaturally high against his jawline. He pointed to the redrawn lines with a reverent tone, but it was forced, hollow, like he’d rehearsed these exact lines endlessly. A faint, breathy whistle escaped him as he spoke.
"Observe the perfected alignment," he declared, the words precise and sharp. "Cassiopeia’s throne is now correctly oriented to the east, symbolizing a reign facing the dawn of a new era." He paused, and the silence was punctuated by that soft, wheezing exhale. "This is not a mere update; it is a celestial ratification of our current order, as decreed by the Crown."
Murmurs of approval hummed through the room. Nods, thoughtful and unanimous. Shiro’s stomach turned. He had verified the west tilt himself, just last night.
The truth was being erased in front of everyone, and they were applauding the erasure.
"The implications for navigation are, of course, corrected in all new astrolabes and almanacs," Kael continued, his delivery clipped, almost regimented. "The old archives are being systematically recalibrated to serve the new truth." He turned from the board, his movement stiff, like a soldier on parade. "Consistency between earth and heaven is the foundation of a stable realm."
"Professor," Reo's voice cut through, not with challenge, but with seamless alignment. "Will the revised navigational tables be available before the mid term? It would be a disadvantage to revise with outdated calculations." His question wasn't about the lie; it was about functioning efficiently within it.
"A prudent concern, Lord Veyne." Kael’s reply was clipped, the name spoken with a tightness that bordered on disdain before being smoothed into sterile neutrality.
A faint, breathy whistle escaped him as he turned his head slightly, a motion that drew attention to the severe, high cut collar of his robes, which seemed to swallow his throat entirely.
His posture was rigid, shoulders set as if bearing an unseen weight. "They are being distributed this afternoon.
Shiro couldn't stay silent.
The words pushed out, low and strained. "But if we change what's documented to match the decree... how do we trust any observation? Doesn't that make all science just... an echo of the throne?"
The room didn't just go quiet; it went cold. The approving hum died. All heads turned to him, not with curiosity, but with a unified, discomforting blankness. He wasn't asking a philosophical question; he was poking a beehive of accepted reality.
Kael's face softened but quickly hardened. "Science, Malkor, is the servant of truth. The Crown defines truth. Your role is to learn, not to question the architect of the very reality you study."
The rebuke was absolute.
Reo leaned over, his whisper no longer pseudo friendly, but firm and final. "Stop. You are questioning the Crown's order in a room full of its beneficiaries. We are not here to debate the sky. We are here to map it as we are told. Do you want to be marked as a dissenter before you've even learned the basics?" His gaze was unwavering, a wall of complacent certainty. In that moment, Shiro didn't see a potential friend or a rival. He saw a perfect product of the system, intelligent, capable, and utterly subservient to the lie. He was surrounded not by fellow seekers, but by polished, willing pawns. And he was the only one who could still see the board.
Shiro was quiet for the rest of the lesson but Kael never took his eyes off him, as if he silently agreed with him but couldn’t say it outright.
After, at lunch Shiro sat with his new cluster of friends. They pressed him on Malkor traditions, eager for stories. Shiro's stomach knotted. He knew nothing. He spun something convincing on the spot, a tale stitched from scraps of overheard noble chatter.
The questions were a gauntlet of assumed knowledge. "The Malkor vineyards in the Sumire Hills," Elara began, "do they still use the old stone presses, or have they modernized?"
Shiro's mind, already reeling from the classroom, scrabbled for purchase. Stone presses sound old. "A blend," he said, aiming for diplomatic vagueness. "The old presses for the ceremonial vintages, new for the exports. Tradition and progress." He offered a shrug he hoped looked wistful rather than ignorant.
"And the Yurei Buto," pressed Baronet Lin's son. "Does your family still open the Founders Ball with it? Ours switched to the Sovereign's March a decade ago."
Sovereign's March. Another term he didn't know. "The Yurei is... reserved for private gatherings now," Shiro fabricated, taking a slow drink. "Less spectacle, more meaning." He was building a ghost of a heritage, brick by hollow brick.
Lady Mara leaned in, her eyes bright. "I heard a rumour your house still has a stock of pre Shattering Cynosures Bloom elixir. Is it true? My grandmother swore it was the only thing that cured the plagues fever."
Shiro froze.
Cynosures Bloom.
The name meant nothing, but the context screamed valuable, rare, legacy. Denying it might seem like poverty; confirming it could lead to questions he couldn't answer. "The stores are... closely guarded," he said, layering his voice with false solemnity. "A relic of a brighter past. We don't speak of it often." He turned the focus. "Is it true the Veyne Phoenix feathers still fluoresce?" he asked Reo, a desperate redirect.
Reo fielded the question smoothly, detailing the family myth. But as the conversation moved on, Shiro felt the heat of his silent observation. Reo hadn't asked a single question. He was a spectator, and Shiro was the exhibit. Every hesitant syllable, every crafted dodge, every moment where Shiro's eyes flickered with panic at a name like 'Cynosures Bloom' was being noted. The others saw a slightly odd but amusing cousin. Reo saw a performer who hadn't fully memorized his lines, slowly realizing the script itself might be a forgery. But he masked it perfectly, smiling with the rest, but inside he was cataloguing every inconsistency. His suspicion grew at an unprecedented rate. Shiro was not like them. Not of the same ilk. Reo knew it, even if no one else could see.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Shiro waved off his friends and went to the library alone. Relief washed over him as the door closed behind him. Here, at least, he could breathe. He searched for forbidden books on Nyxarion. The texts he found were bleak, describing it as a desolate, dead place. Nothing like Aki's stories. But one name appeared again and again: Queen Nyxara, the Demon Queen, conqueror bent on destroying Astralon. The narrative was clear, Nyxarion was painted as a threat, Ryo as the saviour. Propaganda. Lies.
The sanctioned texts were tombs for a living world. They didn't just describe Nyxarion; they entombed it. 'The Bleak Realms: A Survey of the Northern Desolation.' 'On the Savage Rites of the Starborn.' The pages smelled of dust and deliberate forgetting. Every account followed the same sacred script: Nyxarion was a blight. A land cursed by the Shattering, its people reduced to superstitious, light maddened husks clinging to ruins. Their queen was the heart of the rot. Nyxara, the Demon Queen. Illustrations showed a spectral tyrant with galaxies for eyes, seated on a throne of bones, commanding legions of twisted, marked fanatics. The texts whispered of sacrificed children to fuel her magic, of forests she burned for spite, of a hunger that would consume Astralon's sun if not stopped.
And Ryo Oji, the Butcher King, was recast in every paragraph as the realm's stern saviour. His war was a righteous purge. His borders were a shield. The bleakness of Nyxarion was framed not as his father's legacy of conflict, but as the natural, deserved state of a land ruled by a monster.
But the truth bled through in the footnotes of forgotten ledgers. Shiro found a water stained trade manifest, its script a cramped, dying hand. Listed among confiscated goods.
'Polarisia: 3 crates.
Healing Agent for deep burns and scars.
Harvest must coincide with Sirius's zenith; cycle is twice per decade.
NOTES:
No Astralon substitute exists.
Source: Nyxarion supply chain via the treaty between Shojiki and Eltanar, now ceased by King Ryo's command.'
A 'bleak realm' didn't produce a substance so precise it required a celestial schedule. This was the product of deep, specific knowledge, the opposite of savagery.
Beneath it, another entry made his blood run cold:
'Cynosures Bloom (dried): 1 lb. For Minister Arata's wife. Plague.
Last known remedy.
SOURCE CUT OFF by royal decree after the treaty was abolished.
Alternative: none.
Spectral fever. The very sickness the nobles feared. The cure had existed. It had been cut off. Not lost. Severed. By Ryo's decree. The horror dawned, cold and absolute. The books weren't just lying. They were inverting reality. The tyrant was the saviour. The provider of rare, miraculous cures was the demon. The man who severed those cures was the hero. Nyxarion wasn't a desolation. It was a rival kingdom being strangled, and its portrait as a monster was the rope.
Shiro closed the ledger. The war wasn't just on the border. It was here, in this library, in every line that painted salvation as sin and butchery as duty. The Butcher King wasn't just fighting a queen; he was murdering the truth and mounting its head on a pike for all to salute.
The silence of the library became a physical pressure. Shiro didn't move. He sat at the scarred wooden table, the damning ledger open before him, his fingers resting on the entry for Cynosures Bloom. The dust motes danced in a single slant of grey light from a high window, indifferent to the quiet unravelling happening below.
It's all a story.
The thought wasn't intellectual. It was visceral, a sickening lurch in his gut. The Academy, the uniforms, the respectful murmurs for Professor Kael, the very charts on the walls, they weren't just teaching lies. They were built on them. The foundation of Astralon's pride was a bed of corpses and burned books. Nyxara the Demon. Ryo the Saviour. It was a children's fable, but written in blood and enforced with the edge of a knife.
He thought of Aki's feverish tales, not as the ramblings of a sick girl, but as leaked truth. Her voice, rasping about light that moved and thrones that hummed, wasn't describing a myth. It was describing the enemy. The real one. And the Butcher King hadn't just conquered territory; he'd conquered memory. He'd taken a living, complex world and flattened it into a two dimensional monster for his people to hate.
Polarisia. Cynosures Bloom. These weren't just resources. They were evidence of a civilization sophisticated enough to understand stars as calendars and blooms as medicine. The very things Astralon lacked. And Kuro... Kuro's bitter anger about "edited ledgers" and "corrected" stars now had a terrifying, panoramic context. His father wasn't just a cruel man. He was an architect of reality, a man who would rather let his own people die of spectral fever than admit the cure came from his enemy. The cage wasn't just gilded walls and expectations. It was this, being forced to live inside your father's grotesque, self aggrandizing fairy tale and punish anyone who points out the plot holes.
Shiro finally pushed the ledger away, its weight suddenly intolerable. The urge to run, to find Kuro and shake him, to scream the evidence into his storm grey eyes, was overwhelming. But he saw the empty classroom, the nodding nobles, Reo's firm, complicit correction. You are questioning the Crown's order. This truth wasn't a weapon; it was a disease. And he was patient zero. To speak it was to be quarantined, erased just like the names in Nyxarion's ledgers.
He stood, his legs unsteady. The knowledge settled in him not as power, but as a burden, heavier than any water bucket. He carried a secret that could get him killed, and the only people he could possibly share it with were the ones most damaged by it: a dying sister, a caged prince, and a guardian who was leagues away and whose return was a mystery. The loneliness of it was absolute. He was awake in a world of sleepwalkers, and the sleepwalkers had all the weapons.
He decided to switch his attention to the exam but...revision was impossible. Studying the mandated charts felt like consenting to the mutilation of the sky. Instead, he took out parchment.
Dear Aki, he began, and then his hand began to write the opposite of everything in his heart.
All is well.
The academy is challenging but fair.
I've made friends.
Reo of House Veyne is helping me catch up, he's very kind.
And Kuro he helps me with everything.
It's just like it was in the shack, but with more books and better light haha.
It's fun.
Truly.
I enjoy it, its way better than the slums, I have food, warmth a bed and most importantly friends and a brother.
Each sentence was a burial. He interred the Black Prince, the complicit classmates, the crushing loneliness of being the only one who saw the lies. He painted a picture of the integrated, happy life she desperately wanted for him. The wax seal he pressed felt like he was entombing his own honesty to preserve her hope. He was the anchor now; he had to be stone, even if it meant sinking himself.
The folded letter was a guilty weight in his hand. He left the silent library, navigating the Academy's evening corridors. They were less crowded now, the echoes of polished boots replaced by the whisper of servant's feet and the distant clatter of the kitchens. The lamplight guttered in iron sconces, casting long, leaping shadows that made the stone gargoyles seem to twitch. He walked quickly, head down, the parchment feeling less like paper and more like a shard of his own conscience, sharp against his palm. Each step towards the faculty office felt like a step deeper into the lie, moving further from the boy who'd carved stars in a shack and closer to the stranger who had to wear the name Malkor like a borrowed, ill fitting skin.
He finally reached the antechamber, its air smelling of ink and sealing wax, and extended his hand to the waiting clerk. The faculty member took the letter with a perfunctory nod, dropping it into a brass bound mail slot with a final clunk. The sound felt like a door closing. The lie was committed. It was out of his hands, speeding toward Aki on a current of official parchment and royal seals, a piece of false light in the dark.
He walked the corridors back to the dormitory wing, his footsteps echoing in the cavernous silence of the post curfew hour. The grand portraits of past headmasters and star gazing kings watched him pass with painted, indifferent eyes. For once, their stares didn't feel accusatory; they felt empty. They were part of the set dressing, just like the false charts and the demon queen in the books. He moved through a museum of someone else's truth, a ghost in its halls.
Reaching his door, he fumbled with the key, the metal cold and clumsy in his tired fingers. Inside, the room was exactly as he'd left it: the narrow bed, the desk with its untouched exam notes from Kael, the scarlet uniform draped over a chair like a shed skin. The silence here was different, it was his own. He didn't light the candle. He let the moonlight, weak and filtered through thick glass, paint the room in shades of grey and blue.
He lay down on the bed, the soft wool blanket a balm against his cheek. The day's tensions, Reo's probing, Kael's rebuke, the ledger's damning footnotes, unspooled in his mind, a tangled knot of fear and revelation. But instead of pulling at the threads, he let them be. He focused on the solid points, the fixed stars in his own shifting sky: Aki was safe. Valeria was her keeper. And Valeria would return. That was the anchor he dropped into the roiling dark. Not the politics, not the lies, not the Black Prince's dual nature. Just the simple, stubborn fact of a mother's promise. His mother would come back, and she would make sense of this. She would look at Kuro and see the boy, not just the prince. She would look at the false charts and know them for what they were. She would know what to do.
As Shiro drifted into uneasy sleep, clutching the last fragments of hope he had left.
However another dawn rose far from the Academy, a harsher sun, one that cast no warmth.
Two boys, bound by a thread neither fully understood, faced two different mornings.
One sought truth in the stars.
The other was being dragged back into the gravity of a throne that devoured them.
Your Thoughts On Kael?
