The pale glow of morning seeped through the tall, arched windows of Astraelia Hall, tracing long, wavering stripes across the stone floor like ghostly fingers. Each slant of light was a quiet testament to the passage of time, a mockery of sleep's absence. I had lain awake for hours, staring at the ceiling while the storm circle bled into the dark behind my eyes, its symbols looping endlessly in twisting spirals.
Professor Windstrider's assignment had not merely occupied my thoughts; it had consumed them, burrowing into the spaces between breath and heartbeat. Even now, beneath my closed eyelids, I saw it: the symbols still pulsed, still whispered with meanings just out of reach, a coiled question to which I had no answer. But a deeper intuition, a resonance from the blue flame that had reforged my very soul as a phoenix, hinted at something more.
