The world always felt different in the early hours—still, hushed, like it was waiting for something to go wrong.
Caelum rose before the sun. Sleep had been fitful, filled with dreams that weren't his: flames licking at the sky, chains coiled around a ruined tower, a symbol carved in light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. He couldn't remember it clearly—only the feeling of something ancient, something vast, calling him from a place just outside thought.
When he stepped outside his tent, he found Serapha already there.
"You didn't sleep," she said.
"Neither did you."
A flicker of something passed between them. Not quite friendship. Not yet. But the quiet recognition of shared burdens.
She gestured toward the woods. "Today, we test your silence."
Caelum frowned. "What does that mean?"
But she was already walking.
They moved through dense forest, the air thick with dew. The trees stood tall like sentinels of the past, their roots buried in forgotten centuries. Eventually, they arrived at a clearing surrounded by rune-marked stones. The grass in the center was scorched in a perfect circle.
Serapha stopped at the edge. "This place is called a Weave Scar. When magic tears through the world unnaturally, it leaves wounds like this."
He stepped closer, sensing a subtle tension in the air—as if reality had been stitched together imperfectly.
"This is where I want you to try again," Serapha said.
Caelum blinked. "Try what?"
"To use what isn't yours." She stepped behind him. "To call on the Current."
He stared at the scarred earth. "You said before that I wasn't ready."
"You're not," she said. "But neither was the last Nullform. And waiting did them no favors."
He swallowed. "What if I can't control it?"
"Then I'll stop you. Or kill you," she said flatly.
Caelum turned, startled. "That's a joke, right?"
But Serapha's face was unreadable.
He stepped into the circle.
The moment his foot crossed the boundary, the world went quiet. Birds, wind—gone. As if someone had muted the forest.
Caelum felt something press against his thoughts. Not a presence, exactly, but an absence. A space where mana should be, but wasn't.
He reached for it instinctively.
And something reached back.
His breath caught. It wasn't like drawing Vein or Core—this wasn't a flow. It was more like breaking open a door that had never been meant to open again.
Power bloomed from his chest. But it wasn't radiant or fiery. It was cold. Still. Ancient.
The trees surrounding the clearing shivered, their bark cracking.
Serapha stepped forward immediately. "Breathe. Center it. Don't pull too much."
But Caelum couldn't stop.
The world bent—just slightly. The air around him shimmered, then darkened. Not with shadow, but with void.
One of the rune-stones cracked in half.
Serapha's eyes widened. "That's enough!"
But Caelum didn't know how to stop. The force within him had no anchor, no rules. It was like holding a blade by its edge.
He gasped, clutching at his chest—and the magic snapped.
A pulse of silence exploded outward.
The trees buckled. Stones shattered. The ground cratered around him.
Then it was over.
He woke up on his back, vision blurred, blood in his mouth.
Serapha stood over him, panting, her robes scorched. "Well," she muttered, "that went worse than I'd hoped."
Caelum coughed. "Did I do that?"
"No, the forest spontaneously combusted from sheer boredom."
He blinked at her sarcasm, then winced. "I couldn't stop it."
"I know." She offered him a hand. "But you touched it. That's more than any Nullform in a century has done without collapsing entirely."
Caelum took her hand, his fingers trembling. "What was that? It didn't feel like power. It felt… empty."
"That's the Silent Current," she said. "It's not presence. It's subtraction. Most magic adds something—heat, light, strength. Yours removes. It doesn't flow through the Weave. It unwrites it."
He stared at his hands. "So I'm a threat to everything."
She didn't deny it.
Later, as they walked back through the forest, Serapha slowed.
"You need to understand something," she said. "The Arcanum isn't afraid of destruction. We have weapons for that. We're afraid of erasure."
Caelum's voice was low. "Like Durell?"
Her eyes flicked to him, surprised. "Yes. Like Durell."
"What happened there? Really?"
Serapha hesitated. "There was a war. Not of swords, but of magic. A group of ascendants tried to harness the Sixth Path and break the Weave itself. The result… wasn't a defeat. It was a forgetting. A kingdom erased. History undone. The Arcanum sealed the remnants and buried the truth."
He stared at the path ahead. "And now I'm walking the same line."
"You are," she said. "But you have me. And I won't let them erase you."
That night, alone again in his tent, Caelum sat cross-legged and tried to feel that strange current.
He didn't try to summon it this time. Just to understand it.
The Silent Current didn't flow like mana. It whispered like breath on glass. When he closed his eyes, he didn't see fire or lightning—he saw threads unraveling, patterns breaking.
And within that emptiness, a symbol burned behind his eyelids: a circle, split by a single vertical line.
The same mark from his dreams.
He didn't know what it meant yet.
But something inside him had woken.
And it would not sleep again.