Chapter 27

Aster and Lena reached Spellcraft early—not out of enthusiasm, but because the Synphri wing sat mercifully close to the lunch hall, and Lena's planner didn't acknowledge the concept of casual pacing.

The classroom, however, immediately stole Aster's attention.

Forty-two glowing posters line the walls in perfect symmetry, each one in dense alien script, radiating a low hum of aether. Their symbols flicker with elemental intensity—heat shimmers from one chart, mist drifts around another, and wind pulses like a heartbeat in the next, times forty-two. The room is practically breathing.

"The foundational rune structures for every hue type," Lena explained.

Aster mutters under his breath, scanning them. “Neon signs with a superiority complex.”

She elbowed him.

“This class is important. Spellcraft governs almost everything—combat, alchemy, enchanting, everything that makes up the Astral Plane. It’s the skeleton of cultivation. Without it, you’re just a sack of meat flinging sticks.”

“Charming visual as always.”

They make their way down the rows toward a teacher deep in conversation with a girl who looks like she stepped out of a prestige perfume ad. The teacher—probably mid-thirties, overalls and massive glasses—gestures animatedly while the girl responds with a voice that rings with easy confidence.

Then Aster catches the name of the girl.

"...Miss Mesha..."

Aster stopped.

Mesha.

His stomach drops.

The people who butchered his bloodline.

Who'd stuffed a Void Wyrm into his chest like a party favour.

The reason he'd spent half his life clawing through poverty and the other half clawing through trauma.

Now packaged into a fellow first-year instead of the authority of a god.

His vision narrowed.

His feet moved before he realized it.

"Are you part of the Mesha family?"

His voice doesn’t shake, but it cracks like a whip.

Lena stiffened.

“Aster—wait—”

“Answer me!” he snaps. “Are you a Mesha?!”

That gets the teacher’s attention. The girl turns fully now, her amusement flickering like candlelight across her face.

And gods help him—she is beautiful.

Full lips, sharp cheekbones, long dark curls tumbling down her back—freckles scattered like stardust across the bridge of her nose. She looks like a desert storm personified.

Beautiful in the way volcanoes were beautiful.

Magnificent.

Catastrophic.

Like something that reshapes the world and doesn’t care who gets caught beneath it.

She tilted her head.

"What if I am?"

Her voice remained perfectly calm.

"What does my family have to do with you?"

Aster steps forward, his hand shaking. “Your family,” he says, “implanted a Void Wyrm into me, wiped out my bloodline. You’re the reason I spend every day of my life clawing to survive. The reason people like Anathi—”

“Oh gods,” Ziya interrupts, rolling her eyes, “you’re that one.”

Her smile turns sharp.

“My father told me about you. The orphan with a chip on his shoulder and a martyr complex the size of a mountain range. The one who thinks the world revolves around what was done to him.”

“You murdered my family.”

“No. Your family failed your family,” she says, her voice suddenly hard. “Three times in my life, we’ve had to deal with Wyrm infection. Three family members. You know what we did?”

She steps forward, eyes locked with his.

“We ended them. Quick. Painless. Because we had the strength to make hard choices.”

Aster’s pulse roars in his ears.

“You think that makes you strong?” he hisses. “You think killing your own people is noble?”

“I think letting a Wyrm grow in a child,” Ziya snaps, “then doing nothing—letting it fester, letting it twist fate until it devours everyone they love—and then blaming the people who had the spine to do what yours couldn’t? That’s weak.”

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His staff hisses into his hand.

“I was a baby,” he growls. “And they tried everything—”

“They should’ve tried a knife,” Ziya says, and her voice isn’t mocking anymore. It’s clinical. Cold. “But they didn’t. And now you—what? You walk around pointing fingers? You think the aftermath of their cowardice is somehow our crime?”

Aster’s hands tighten on the staff. The Point Burst Scripture surges through his bones, crying for release. The world around him blurs as his Will anchors, tethered to the space just behind her—

“I’m not the monster here,” he snarls.

Ziya’s lips curl.

“No,” she says. “You’re a mistake your family were too weak to erase.”

Something inside Aster cracks in half. His body moves before his mind does, the scripture screaming to life through his spine.

And in that infinitesimal sliver of time—between decision and action—Ziya moves.

There is no burst of energy. No scream. No flash.

Just absence.

And then—

His perspective changes.

The floor is... above him?

Now below him?

Is that his body?

Oh.

It drops to its knees, staff clattering beside it, then slumps, stump first, with all the tragic dignity of a sack of wet laundry.

His head hits the stone with a soft thunk.

So this is what it feels like to be decapitated. He expected more... drama. Instead, there is only the dull pressure of everything going very still.

Aster blinks. Once.

Twice.

And then darkness sweeps in, silent and absolute.

A beat of silence. Then the familiar voice of Blenskop in his head, half-impressed, half-wistful:

📎 [Well, that escalated predictably. Next time, use your words. She radiates Size Queen energy, and your training staff is coming up a little short.]

_________________________________________________________________________________

When Aster came to, his head was being reattached.

Apparently the Sergeant's time reversal wasn't the only mechanism for undoing death. In his absence, Aster was entrusted to the academy nurse, who applied healing salves with the focused professionalism of a woman determined to prove that patient care and personal contempt were not mutually exclusive.

Cold fingers gripped his jaw as green paste is smeared across the seam of his neck.

It smelled of fermented moss and industrial regret.

First it burned.

Then it tingled.

Then flesh began knitting itself together in real time.

Nerves reconnected beneath his skin with the unsettling crackle of old wiring remembering electricity.

Two deaths.

One day.

At this point the universe either owed him compensation or a loyalty rewards program.

“Could the Void Wyrm still be active?” Aster mutters, staring at the ceiling.

Lena helps prop him upright. “What?”

“Nothing. Just trying to determine whether I’m still cursed or if this is simply the natural consequence of my own decision-making process.”

"Well..." she says carefully,

She watches the last of the flesh seal together along his throat. The skin there still feels wrong. Too new. Like his neck remembers getting removed and hasn’t fully forgiven him for reinstalling it.

"It's probably not the Wyrm."

He flexed his neck experimentally.

"I do appreciate narrowing down the suspects."

"So..." Lena said carefully.

"The Mesha family… You’re saying they're the ones who infected you?"

"That's what Matter told me. I saw another Mesha during the Celestial interrogation."

He glanced sideways.

"Are they actually that strong, or is this just another rich-family tradition where everyone mistakes genetics for personality?"

Lena hesitated.

Unfortunately, that answered the question before she spoke.

“They are powerful, even outside the Southern African Expanse. They make the Vale family look like chihuahuas by comparison.” Lena paused. “In fact, there are rumours that House Mesha might be holding House Vale's leash.”

“The Vale family is granted Void Hunter contract through the council," she said. "Has for three generations. They built the operational infrastructure — the tracking systems, the Wyrm Eater constructs, the extraction teams, etc. They're the reason Void infections don't become Void emergences more often than they do." A pause. "Officially."

Aster watched her face. "And unofficially?"

"Unofficially, they have never been audited." She said it simply, the way you said things that were simply true. "The contract gives them sole access to infected hosts before anyone else reaches them. It gives them jurisdiction over the containment process, the extraction timeline and the disposal of remains." She looked at him. "That's a significant amount of unsupervised access for something that dangerous."

Aster said nothing.

"No one knows what they do with the Void-Entities after they’ve delt with the host, but its an undisputed fact that the Vale family has consistently had more opportunity to — " she paused, selecting the word carefully — "encounter them, than anyone else in the Aware world."

"I'm not saying they're corrupt," Lena quickly clarifies. "I don't have evidence of that. What I'm saying is that the structure of the contract makes corruption very easy and accountability very difficult. The Council has never had reason to investigate because the infection rates stay manageable. From the outside, the system works."

"And the Mashes?"

Something shifted in her expression, the specific kind that came from knowing something for a long time without quite knowing what to do with it and now finally able to voice it.

"The Mashe family has held a Council seat for four generations," she said. "Kheno Mashe sits on the Celestial Council now. His family has voted to renew the Vale contract every review cycle for the past sixty years and have blocked any and all attempts for an official audit." She said this without emphasis. "I know this because other Legacy families have applied for the contract but have all been denied without question. Families with better cultivation infrastructure, newer construct technology, stronger track records in other sanctioned operations. The contract still went to the Vales every time."

"Some kind of political cover?" Aster asks.

"That's one interpretation." She met his eyes. "The other interpretation is that it's standard Legacy arrangement — old families protecting old arrangements, mutual benefit, the usual architecture of how things work up here. It happens constantly. It doesn't always mean what you might think it means."

"But."

"But," she said, "when you try to trace where the intelligence comes from — the initial reports that flag new Void infections, the case files that determine which hosts get prioritised for extraction — a disproportionate number of them originate through channels that connect back to Mashe family contacts." She folded her hands. "Again, this is complete conjecture, no one has any evidence of wrongdoing. Just a pattern that can't fully be explained."

She didn't say anything else.

She didn't need to.

Aster sat with that for a moment. The people who decided what happened to people like him. The families who controlled that process. Matter had known their names before any of this started.

His hands tighten slowly into fists.

Right.

Excellent.

Not only did he antagonize the magical equivalent of the Blackrock mercenary group, but also the equivalent of their handlers in the form of a hereditary military-industrial empire.

Who needs a curse with Luck this bad.

He barely survived Ziya’s sigh.

But even now, something inside him burns—not fear, not really. Something colder. A decision, settling deep in his gut.

Like a blade being placed carefully onto a table.

He needed to become stronger.

Strong enough to end this curse. Strong enough to save Anathi. Strong enough to stand where Matter once had.

His spine straightens.

Lena notices the shift in his eyes, the way the haze of failure turns to something sharper.

The exhaustion is still there, but something underneath it has hardened into shape.