The flask was cold by the time he set it down. Across from him, the teller sighed and laced her fingers, rings clinking like coins.
"Mr. Sevrin…"
"Alaric," he corrected, tiredly.
"Alaric," she said, almost sympathetically, "you've had… how many attempts?"
"This year?"
"Total."
"Including street tellers and sanctioned ones?"
"Yes."
"One hundred and two."
She stared at him.
"There's nothing in you," she said, gently but without hesitation. "No Affinity. No imprint. No sequence resonance. You're…"
"I know what I'm not," he said, standing up. His hands were trembling, not from the cold. From shame.
"You're not just 'not something,'" she continued. "You're a Nothing. That's a title. It's recorded. You're a statistical anomaly. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't even have survived this long without a claim."
She didn't mean it cruelly. She was telling the truth. That's what made it worse.
"You can go now," she added softly. "You're wasting coin."
Alaric walked out into the street of Lex Empire, the bottle taste of Soltsilver[1]still burning the back of his tongue. The others stared. The boy who kept testing. The Nothing. The failed son of a failed name.
He was thirteen. His father, once a drifting Caeli minor, had taken to old rituals, cliff jumping after chugging "windwine," hoping the gods would catch him in midair like they did in stories. They didn't.
His mother followed. Not with wings, just with silence. She drank a sleeping draft made of bad Nightroot[2], laid on the cot, and never woke up. They left nothing behind.Just a name. And a boy no one wanted to adopt, because no one inherits from a void.
By fourteen, Alaric learned to keep his head down. By fifteen, he learned to fake a smile. He worked odd jobs: unloading carts, cleaning ritual halls, scraping glyph ink off stone. He watched noble heirs pass through Rheon's Spine[3], children no older than him, but cloaked in power, the air itself bending to their voices.
They weren't smarter. They weren't stronger. They were Affinitied[4], born with magic braided into their bones. And the Empire worshipped them for it.
Alaric didn't cry about it anymore. He studied them. Watched how they moved, the Caeli glide, the Umbra stillness, the Ignis posture that screamed dominance. He mimicked it. Trained his body until his feet struck the ground like a dancer's, light and precise. He couldn't summon wind. But he could look like he remembered it.
He broke into a retired scribe's home and stole ten scrolls: Sequence theory, bloodline markers, forging guides, and an outdated Academy admissions list.
It was in that list that he saw the name: Alaric Cassian – House Volair. Died at sea, presumed Affinity: dormant Caeli.
No living parents. No siblings. No public legacy record. Just a forgotten noble with the same first name. He could've cried then. He didn't. He copied the name onto a clean sheet of vellum[5].
"If I can't be born into something…" He paused, staring out the cracked window where wind rattled the shutters like a ghost trying to get in. "...then I'll steal something they wasted. And do it better."
It wasn't bitterness. It wasn't revenge. It was survival. Because in the Lex Empire, people with Affinity were protected. The rest were dust. And he was done breathing in their footsteps.
The next few months passed in blur and blood:
He memorized House Volair's rituals, their gestures and gait. He hunted down the right sealmaker, paid with a broken tooth and a promise. He trained daily, performing Caeli movement drills until he could pass under half-light and full suspicion. And finally, he forged the entry documents into Academia Arcanum, slipping them into the registrar's archive during a scholarship intake festival.
It should've failed. But the Empire doesn't investigate confidence. It rewards performance.
Now, at seventeen, Alaric stood beneath the arched gates of Academia Arcanum, dressed in a uniform stitched with stolen sigils, a Caeli flask at his side, and a performance carved into his very posture. He didn't come here to learn magic. He came here to fake it well enough to steal power from the ones who squandered with it.
The atrium bell rang. First-year Drinkers gathered in clusters, elixirs prepared for the Vein Assembly, the ceremonial trial where Affinities awakened publicly. One by one, students would drink. Their magic would reveal itself. And Alaric? He'd drink, too.
Just not the same thing. He felt the modified elixir at his side — a volatile blend designed to mimic Caeli reaction on a surface level. Just enough to make them believe.
If they looked too closely, he was dead. But if they looked just enough? He'd become something more dangerous than an Heir. He'd become a myth that wasn't supposed to exist.
And then, across the atrium, he saw her. Sky Nightingale. She stood alone. Motionless. A shadow behind her that didn't match the sun's angle. Her presence was off. Not wrong, just… heavier than air.
Their eyes met. Just for a second. Neither of them blinked. Neither of them smiled. That was the day she awakened Umbra. And he lied so hard the sky almost believed him.
[1] Soltsilver is a silvery, alchemical solution used by official tellers and Affinity examiners throughout the Lex Empire. It reacts to the latent magical imprint, or veinmark, encoded in a person’s bloodline. When consumed, it temporarily reveals the nature of one’s magical inheritance.
[2] Nightroot is a rare, pitch-black plant that only grows in low-light, magically scarred environments, abandoned battlefields, ruins saturated in Umbra energy, or beneath cities where shadow Veins run deep.
It is known for its sedative, hallucinogenic, and spiritually unstable properties. While highly illegal in most of the Lex Empire, it still finds its way into both street elixirs and rituals of mourning.
[3] Rheon’s Spine is a crumbling industrial city built along the skeletal ridge of an ancient World Vein, long since dried up. Once a minor hub of Caeli and Terra activity, it lost most of its magical infrastructure decades ago, turning it into a forgotten province of laborers, discarded bloodlines, and Affinity rejects. Rheon's Spine is one of Lex Empire's more neglected regions.
[4] A term used to describe someone with a magical affinity.
The 5 Affinities' are: Caeli, Terra, Aqua, Ignis, and Umbra
[5] Vellum is a fine-quality parchment made from specially prepared animal skins (usually calf or lamb), traditionally used in the Lex Empire for official documents, scrolls, and magical inscriptions.