[Celestial Academy — Day 12 — 11:30 PM]

Valeria had given the notice that afternoon.

A folded paper slipped under Alex’s door. No signature. Just three words: *Magnus is out.*

The team moved at eleven.

---

The fifteen‑minute window in the north corridor — the one Kira had mapped on the first day — took them from the lodging wing to the old building’s outer courtyard without crossing any active guards.

The main door had a lock.

Raven opened it in forty seconds using the same technique Soren had shown her in Veltharr.

They entered.

---

The inside smelled different from the rest of the Academy.

Not of decay — the opposite.

Of preservation.

The kind of smell a space has where maintenance enchantments have been active for decades without anyone renewing them because they don’t need renewal.

Time hadn’t fully passed within these walls.

The upper‑level classrooms still had writing on the blackboards — lessons from fifty years ago, written in the specific handwriting of instructors who had been dead for decades.

The chairs in class position.

The dust absent where it should have been.

"Preserved," Maya said quietly.

"Too preserved," said Raven.

The boy looked at the blackboards with the attention of someone still processing that written texts were accessible to him.

"Can we read this later?"

"Later," said Alex.

---

Maya found the archive on the second floor.

A windowless room.

Floor‑to‑ceiling shelves with documents in folders using a classification system the modern Academy didn’t use — an older system, more specific.

Maya took the first folder.

She read the index.

"Record of Fragment bearers. First two hundred years of the Academy."

She looked up.

"The Temple said these records were destroyed a hundred years ago."

"Destroyed or moved here?" said Raven.

"Moved." Maya was already opening the second folder.

"The Temple decided it was more convenient for them not to exist than to physically destroy them." She turned pages.

"The selection pattern of bearers is fully documented. It’s not random — there are specific criteria the Fragments follow." She kept reading.

"No one documented it as a pattern because no one had access to enough cases simultaneously to see it."

"How much time do you need?" asked Alex.

"To read everything — weeks." Maya took three folders. "To copy the essentials — tonight."

"You have until two."

Maya was already writing.

---

The lower level.

A corridor narrower than the ones above.

The walls with the original Harvester’s symbol carved at regular intervals — different from the Temple’s symbol everywhere else on campus. Older. More direct.

At the end — a door.

Alex recognized it before he reached it.

Not the door itself. What was behind it.

The summoning room.

He opened the door.

---

The same as he remembered.

The circle on the floor — not erased, not restored.

Exactly as it had been that night.

The platform at the back.

The marks on the floor where generations of students had tried to summon companions, the accumulated energy of those attempts impressed into the stone.

And his.

The circle in the east corner that everyone had ignored because ignored circles summon nothing.

The mark where Fragment 1 had waited for decades until it found the lowest‑level student in the ceremony and decided that was enough.

Alex looked at the circle.

He remembered that night with the specific precision of memories the body keeps before the mind processes them — the anticipation, his trembling hands holding the summoning crystal, the certainty that this was the moment.

That after three years of being the student no one looked at, Ms. Walsh would see from wherever she was that it had been worth it.

That he would have something to prove.

And then the scandal. The laughter. The expulsion.

Everything he had hoped to build in that moment was taken from him in minutes.

He kept looking at the circle.

What had started there was not what he had planned.

It was more.

---

The altar at the back of the room.

A book.

Ancient — the kind of binding that wasn’t paper or leather but something the modern magical system didn’t produce because it didn’t know how.

With the Harvester’s symbol on the cover, carved into the material with a precision that suggested it had been there since before the Academy existed.

Fragment 1 responded as soon as Alex saw it.

Not an offer. Not pressure.

Recognition — two pieces of the same being detecting each other.

Alex approached.

The book pulsed.

"One of the gods placed it here in book form," said Alex.

Not to anyone specific.

Just articulating what Grim had told him and that now, in front of the book, became concrete. "The Academy always collected books. One more book among thousands." A pause.

"No one looked for it because no one knew what to look for."

Raven watching the book from behind.

"Who is its bearer?"

Fragment 1 pulsed stronger as Alex took another step.

Fragment 4 also responded — the perception of the plane between life and death that Fragment 4 had given him without asking, now showing him something that Fragment 1 alone could not have shown him.

Fragment 5’s energy as a signature — specific, different from the other Fragments he knew.

"It hasn’t chosen yet." Alex.

"But it’s close to choosing." He looked at the book.

"I can feel it in the energy."

"Close as in this room?"

"Close as in this Academy."

*And I wonder what would happen if I took it before it chooses someone else.* 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

The thought arrived on its own. Not from Fragment 1 or Fragment 4 — his own.

*Three Fragments. It would be faster. More complete.*

He let it go.

He knew exactly why he couldn’t.

---

Kira from the doorway of the room.

"There are four thousand students in the Academy." Her amber eyes — [Predator’s Sense] active even though her ears were invisible — looking at the book. "We don’t know if the bearer it chooses might be unstable. Or a threat."

Alex didn’t answer immediately.

"And if you take it now," Kira continued, "those who hid it will come to you for it. You still can’t fully control the weight of two Fragments. A third—" She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

Raven processed that in silence.

"She’s right. But if we leave it and Fragment 5 chooses someone we don’t know—"

"We could convince the bearer to join," said Alex.

Raven looked at him.

"Do we have a cause to join?"

Alex looked at the book.

"I don’t think so." A pause. "But we have the option to have one. Maybe that’s enough to start."

The book on the altar. Still. Waiting with the patience of something that had waited for decades and could wait a little longer.

Alex stepped back.

"We leave it. We know where it is. That’s enough for now."

No one objected.

Kira looked at the book with the attention of someone cataloging something to process later.

Maya from above in a low voice — they had left the door open to listen: "I’ve finished the essentials."

"We’re coming down."

---

Exit.

The lower‑level corridor. The stairs. The upper level with the preserved classrooms. The main door.

The outer courtyard.

Kira went first — [Predator’s Sense] at maximum as soon as she stepped outside.

She stopped.

The team behind her stopped too.

Her eyes swept the courtyard in the specific pattern she had when locating something that shouldn’t be there.

"Someone saw us go in," she said quietly.

"Who?" said Alex.

Kira evaluated the energy signature. The direction. The weight of the presence.

"Not a student." Her invisible ears but her posture completely unmistakable. "Not Valeria."

A pause.

"It’s one of Agustín’s escort."