Chapter 12: Cassian Valemont

Through it all, Lucien had remained horizontal, wrapped in his blackberry-colored dressing gown and clutching a silver jar of strawberry glaze like an emotional-support object.

He was already mentally calculating how many leagues he could put between himself and the Imperial Academy once they arrived.

’My plan is foolproof,’ Lucien had mused to himself on the final night as the carriage rattled across the enormous stone aqueduct spanning the Sol-Aeterna valley.

’I am an unawakened invalid. I have a doctor’s note that explicitly recommends ’spiritual hibernation.’

When we reach the gates, I will simply bury my face into Caelan’s back. Elara will provide a defensive perimeter of sub-zero hostility. We will slip through the outer courtyard, bypass the main administrative plaza, and I will barricade myself in the Everhart private campus villa until the awakening ceremony. I will be invisible. I will be forgotten. I will be a background ghost.’

It was a brilliant plan.

It was elegant and completely logical.

It survived for precisely twelve seconds after the carriage crossed the threshold of the Great Sun Gate of Astraea.

The Academy of Astraea was not merely a school; it was an architectural monument to the concept of unchecked imperial hubris.

Suspended three thousand feet above the capital city of Sol-Aeterna upon a massive, levitating slab of ancient titan-granite, the institution resembled a floating mountain carved from white marble, mother-of-pearl, and polished brass.

Soaring spires pierced the sky like jagged icicles of light; crystalline walkways arched across yawning chasms between airborne lecture halls; and the great outer courtyard, capable of holding three full legions of cavalry, was paved with pristine, mirror-polished slabs of sunstone that drank in the morning light and cast a warm, golden radiance across everything.

Normally, the Sun Gate’s arrival plaza was a bustling hive of noble peacocking.

First-year prodigies showed off family crests, third-year knights polished their breastplates while loitering near decorative fountains to attract romantic interest, and pampered noble daughters complained about the humidity ruining their enchanted ringlets.

Today, however, the courtyard was dead silent.

It was not a peaceful silence.

It was the terrifying, suffocating silence that usually precedes an artillery bombardment or a public royal execution.

Hundreds of students clad in the academy’s high-collared uniforms of navy blue and gold braid were pressed against the perimeter colonnades, murmuring behind fluttering silk fans and broadsheet newspapers.

They were all staring at the center of the grand sunstone plaza.

More specifically, they were staring at the single human being standing dead center in front of the arrival lane.

"Why is the carriage slowing down?" Caelan grumbled, pressing his nose against the beveled glass window of the carriage. "The plaza isn’t even crowded. Did a merchant drop a crate of slime cores again? If I have to wait twenty minutes for the administrative clerks, I’m going to start setting things on fire."

"You will set nothing on fire," Elara said flatly, not looking up from her grimoire. "You will sit there, look stupidly handsome for the family prestige, and carry Lucien’s luggage like the oversized pack mule you were born to be."

"I am an A-Rank Vanguard, you pale witch—!"

"Wait," Lucien said, his voice suddenly squeaking.

He leaned forward, squinting through the carriage window.

His stomach, which had been peacefully digesting a breakfast of smoked ham and fresh sourdough, instantly performed a triple-axel backward somersault and slammed violently into his diaphragm.

Standing fifty yards ahead, directly in the path of the Everhart carriage, was a young man.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, and possessed the kind of breathtaking, almost offensively sharp facial structure that belonged on a religious fresco painted by an artist who had sold his soul to a beauty deity.

His jaw looked as though it could chisel granite; his nose was straight; and a thick, windswept mane of midnight-blue hair fell across a brow that was currently furrowed into an expression of such biblical gravity that one might assume he had just watched his entire lineage get cast into the Netherworld.

He wore the pristine, dark-indigo uniform of the elite division, but he omitted the ornamental cape, wearing only a heavy, high-collared military tunic cinched by a belt of black drake-hide. Across his back hung an empty, runic scabbard—the hallmark of someone whose weapon was not forged of steel, but summoned directly from the starlight of his own soul.

His posture was rigid.

He stood with his leather-booted feet planted shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back, staring straight ahead with unblinking, burning intensity.

He looked like an ancient general awaiting the arrival of his arch-nemesis for a duel to the death.

He looked like a martyr waiting for the executioner’s blade.

He looked like Cassian Valemont.

"No," Lucien whispered, sliding down into his velvet seat until his knees were nearly touching his chin. "No, no, no. Absolutely not. Turn the horses around. Edwin! Driver! Throw the carriage into reverse! We forgot my favorite socks in the western provinces!"

"Lucien, what are you babbling about?" Caelan barked, squinting harder through the glass. "Wait... is that...?"

Caelan’s eyes widened.

An audible SNAP echoed through the carriage as a fork of yellow lightning violently leapt from his knuckles, instantly charring a two-inch circle into the mahogany window frame.

"Valemont," Caelan snarled, his voice dropping into a register of primal, bloodthirsty fury. "That arrogant, celestial-blooded bastard. He dares show his face in the plaza?!"

"Caelan, calm down, let’s just reverse—" Lucien pleaded, frantically clawing at his brother’s sleeve.

"He stood there while you were carried out of the catacombs on a stretcher, Lucien!" Caelan roared, the hair on his head literally standing on end as static charge flooded the carriage cabin, causing all of Lucien’s loose travel notes to adhere firmly to the ceiling. "The reports said his vanguard pushed forward to secure the lower rune gate instead of immediately making an extraction perimeter! He let you get skewered by a crawler! And now he stands in our path?!"

"Technically, I was only partially skewered—"

"That is not helping!"