Chapter 30 Threads of Fire and Starlight

Aurelia Vael Taranis

I slammed the door to my chambers hard enough to make the light crystals flicker, the delicate mana-filaments buzzing in protest. Mana flared at my heels as I crossed the room, a controlled burst of frustration. Not enough to scorch the polished floor, but certainly enough to scatter the neatly stacked scrolls from my desk. I didn’t care. Let the illusion of composure burn for once.

Serephina Valette du Lys had smiled.

Smiled.

Right there in front of everyone in the amphitheater—as if what she was doing was polite. As if offering her House crest to Zane Myles in such a public forum wasn’t a blatant power play, dressed in silk and a calculated amount of cleavage. She treated him like a pawn. A shiny new sword to wear at her hip, a prize to parade before the world. The arrogance was infuriating.

I pulled open the slate from my mother’s secretary and loaded the internal feed. No mere rumors. No wild speculation. Just raw data. Numbers. Confirmed and terrifying, pulled from the deepest Tower archives and our own House’s discreet surveillance.

I read through Zane’s stats. Different from what I’d seen before. His profile had been altered. How was that even possible? I read it once. Then again. Slowly. Every word burned into my visual overlay like a brand.

Twenty years old.

Same age as me. Same class.

But already completely balanced stats in the hundreds. His metrics were insane—Strength, Mana flow, Control, Intelligence, Endurance—all past 170, all tightly balanced. These numbers weren’t just impressive. Not even extraordinary. They were absolutely unprecedented.

He was basically A-Rank. At twenty years old. On par with my father.

I had been hailed as a prodigy since I was six. My form, my discipline, my command of mana—all drilled, refined, sculpted by the best instructors the Kingdom could buy or intimidate. My entire life had been a meticulously planned ascent.

And yet Zane?

Zane had done this quietly. He’d outpaced me with no crest. No training lineage. No fanfare. No System-sanctioned Path. At least, none I could see. He had achieved the impossible while remaining utterly uncataloged.

When I first met him, I knew he was special, but I thought he was just careful, avoiding the spotlight. I had been right. Kind of. He wasn’t just avoiding attention. He was hiding. Hiding a power that should have shattered every gauge in the Kingdom.

I sat alone in my room, wondering how. How had Zane gotten to this point? What in his life had created such a monster?

[Allan: Pretty simple, actually. His parents died when he was young.]

I stilled. I wanted to ignore my overly chatty AI.

“Go on.”

[The records say accident. A collapse. Mana instability. But that’s not what it was. It was intent. Someone tried to end them. And then someone tried to end him and his siblings.]

My eyes narrowed. “You’re certain?”

[Certainty is for scribes. But the evidence points toward that conclusion. There are security reports and investigation logs in the Tower. Zane became who he is because of a competing desire to protect and destroy.]

I arched a brow. “That’s awfully poetic.”

[Allan: It’s also real. Look at the boy. The way he never sits with his back to a door. The silence he carries—it isn’t discipline. It’s survival. That doesn’t come from tutors. It comes from nights running. From shielding siblings smaller than himself. From steel flashing in dark rooms where no one came to help.]

My voice faltered, softer. “And he lived.”

[Someone always survives. Not the strongest. Not the noblest. The ones who refuse to fall. That is what Zane is.]

I leaned back slowly, piecing the threads together.

“So someone tried to kill him. Him and his parents. At fifteen.” The words felt heavy, brittle in my throat. “Which is why he’s been staying under the radar. He’s afraid someone will come back.”

[Logical.] Allan’s voice was steady, detached. [Survivors often behave as though the blade is still raised, even years later. They hide because they remember.]

My gaze flicked toward the window, the passing towers blurring in pale streaks of light. “And if they do come back…”

[Then he will be forced to stop hiding.]

Silence stretched, taut as a bowstring.

Then Allan’s tone shifted, carrying that faint, otherworldly resonance I’d learned to recognize.

[Speaking of someone coming back—you have a summons from your father. Would you like to see it?]

My jaw tightened. Of course.

From the seat beside me, I gave a long-suffering sigh, rolling my eyes with all the grace of someone who had seen this dance before. “Go ahead.”

I lifted a hand, the projection flaring to life above my palm.

My father, grandfather, mother—practically everyone who mattered in my family—had seen the projection of my proposal. To say they were not amused was an understatement.

“Allan,” I said, my voice clipped and cold, “inform Dara that I’ll be returning to the Star Tower.”

[Of course.]

The name itself carried weight.

The Star Tower.

It was no ordinary fortress or seat of power. Rising from one of the great floating isles suspended over the Crown City, the Tower had been both sanctuary and crucible for House Taranis for more than seven centuries.

There were only two islands in the sky large enough to hold entire estates. The first, the Imperial Spire, belonged to the Crown itself—a sprawling citadel of silver and glass, the nerve center of the Kingdom. The second, smaller yet no less imposing, was ours: the Isle of Starlight.

From its edge, sheer cliffs of pale crystal dropped away into endless air, waterfalls of raw mana spilling into the clouds below. The winds were strong enough to rip lesser wings to tatters, but ours had been bred for generations in that crucible. The Starlight Crest carried with it the manifestation of wings: luminous, spectral arcs of feathered radiance that shimmered with starlight mana. Here, at home, we could fly freely, weaving between the island’s jagged ridges and moonlit gardens like hawks in their domain.

The Tower itself speared upward from the isle’s heart, a colossal spire of mana-forged stone laced with veins of silver and violet crystal. Its windows caught the light of both sun and stars, scattering it across the clouds like constellations etched into the sky. At night, the runes carved into its surface awoke, burning with pale fire until the Tower looked less like a fortress and more like a star that had descended to earth.

It was a place of judgment as much as refuge. Every decision I made, every step I took, was measured against the legacy of those walls. The Tower was where my family plotted wars, where they married off heirs, where they bound their blood to laws older than the Kingdom itself.

And now, it would be where they demanded answers.