She signed the last paper in the stack: Aurora Ashcroft. It was a small thing. Ink on parchment. Her hand hadn't even trembled. She set the quill down and looked at her name for a long time — the loops of the A, the clean tail of the t — and decided that she had deserved it, after all, she had written the thing.
A small raven, landing with a soft thud, perched on her left shoulder. He tilted his head at the sight of empty ink bottles scattered across the table, his beady eyes seeming to survey the damage.
In Aurora's mind, his voice was as clear as the sky outside. "No credit to me? I gave you half the ideas." It was the voice of an old man, not a caring one, but a cranky grouch scolding her.
She frowned and scribbled "Arden" below her name in letters small enough to be mistaken for a smudge. "Happy now?"
The bird croaked unhappily but said nothing more. Knowing he wouldn't get anything else out of her, he flew back to the rafters. Letting him go, she smiled brightly and placed the signed page at the very bottom of the stack.
"The Core Of Magic: The Resonant Heartbeat." A fitting title for her "magnum opus," or so she thought. One hundred and forty-three pages, two months, and more forgotten meals than she had cared to count. It delved deep into, scientifically speaking, how magic operates in the world of Aethel. At the heart of all magic was the Resonant Heartbeat—not a physical organ, but the unique magical frequency and vibrational signature of an individual's soul. It was a pulse that dictated their connection to the inherent mana of the world. Each Heartbeat was distinct, akin to a personal song or aura, its intensity and complexity directly reflecting a person's magical capacity and potency.
Aurora stood up and stretched, finally giving herself a well-deserved break. Her spine disagreed with the movement, registering several built-up complaints that she chose to ignore.
Her ears perked, and her nose twitched. "Someone is here… and they brought food!" Or so she hoped. A moment later, a knock echoed from the plain wooden door separating her shut-in self from the outside world.
She crossed the cabin in four steps and pulled it open expecting Sally — eleven years old, reliable, and usually carrying her mother's bread, which Aurora had been thinking about for approximately six hours. Instead, a tall man in an expensive suit stood in her doorway, golden eyes catching the afternoon light in a way that was frankly unnecessary given how handsome he already was.
Julian Albright. Unfortunately.
"J-Julian… uh—"
He walked inside. She hadn't finished the sentence. She wasn't entirely sure she'd been about to say anything coherent anyway, but the option would have been nice. Isn't barging into people's homes without permission illegal? He sat down at her table without asking, with the ease of someone who had genuinely never considered that asking might be appropriate. That definitely has to be illegal. What if he broke the chair with his fat-
"Aurora."
She squirmed, not out of affection — definitely not — but because she knew why he was here. Trouble.
"You never showed up to the Summit at the Royal Capital. His Majesty very much wanted to thank you personally for saving the port city of Aurelio."
Aurora plopped into the chair across from Julian, her fingers intertwined in her lap, her thumbs twiddling like panicked mice. She refused to look up at him, finding her hands far more pleasing to gaze upon.
"Sorry…"
He narrowed his beautiful golden eyes. "Don't 'sorry' me." He glanced at the stack of papers on her table, then back at her, before adjusting his glasses. "I assume this is the reason you did not attend?"
"Yeah," She glanced up for a brief moment before looking back down and biting her cheek—a habit she used when nervous, which was often. "I got a little distracted, is all."
"Hyperfixated is more accurate." He flipped through some pages of her "magnum opus" and sneered. "You need an editor. Far too many of your pages are of you rambling like a madwoman."
She crossed her arms and looked up into the rafters, spotting Arden looking back at her. She felt like they were both mocking her. "Is that the only thing you came here to do, mock me?"
"Heavens no. I came here to punish you."
She was across the room before she'd consciously decided to move — back against the far wall, maximum available distance achieved. The cabin was not large. It wasn't enough.
"Nope. Nope. No punishments. I'm allergic to punishments. Medically." She wanted no punishment from the man known as the "Demon of the Order."
He laughed, a rare occurrence—not because he was stoic, but because he believed all jokes were beneath him, except his own.
"Fret not, Aurora. Think of it more as blackmail rather than a physical punishment."
That was not better. That was categorically not better. She wanted no part in his schemes; they would distract her too much from her work.
"Nuh-uh."
"I believe you meant to say 'yuh-uh.'" He pulled a small piece of parchment from his coat pocket and released it into the air. A faint green shimmer surrounded it as he released it into the air, and it drifted across the room and settled into her reluctantly extended hands. "Because you have no meaningful choice in the matter."
She looked down. It was a magically rendered image of Princess Alara of Astoria. Her long silver hair stark against the yellow parchment, her violet eyes seeming to pierce right through the paper and into Aurora's soul.
"Um…" She looked Julian directly in the eye for the first time that day. "Why are you keeping images of young women in your pockets?"
He coughed, taken aback by her question. "I uh... the only reason I brought that with me was because I feared a shut-in like you would have forgotten the faces of the royal family."
Aurora smirked and looked at him confidently, a rare occurrence, almost as rare as him laughing. "I recognized her immediately."
"Not exactly something to brag about." He sighed and adjusted his glasses. "To think that my opinion of you was already rock bottom."
"I will still graciously accept your applause."
Julian narrowed his eyes but held back. As a fellow Order member, he couldn't harm her—not today, at least.
"Back to the matter at hand."
"Nuh-uh."
His patience was running thin; his eyes turned cold. "Enough of your childish reactions." Aurora visibly shivered. If her cabin had more square footage, she would've backed up further.
"Your task is simple: Ensure the Princess' Resonant Heartbeat is not tampered with."
"Tampered with?" She tilted her head in wonder. Heartbeats were part of the soul; to tamper with it meant the potential to kill that person. Only a few factions dared to take that risk, to silence the songs that played within all the souls dwelling within Aethel. There were entries in the Compendium's forbidden arts section that described, in careful clinical language, exactly what that silencing looked like.
"What's wrong with it?" she asked.
"Princess Alara's Heartbeat is unlike anything in the documented literature. It does not produce a coherent resonant frequency in the way that all living souls do." He paused. "It leaks. Raw, unaligned mana, with no structure, no song. In every measurable way, it behaves less like a Heartbeat and more like a Mana Shard."
The room was very quiet.
Aurora looked down at the parchment in her hands. The princess's violet eyes stared back, serene and unknowing, two dimensional and unbothered.
A Heartbeat that functioned like a Mana Shard. Primordial, unaligned resonance, with no elemental frequency to settle into — but housed inside a living person rather than drifting loose through the world. The implications unfolded in her mind faster than she could organize them. The structural questions alone — how the soul maintained coherence without a stable frequency, how the body tolerated the constant mana leakage, whether the Substrate was even capable of entering a normal exchange with a Heartbeat in that state —
She realized Julian was still speaking.
"— tampered with, the result would not be confined to the Princess alone." He stood. "The destabilization of a Heartbeat of that magnitude, in that condition, would not simply end her life. It would end the lives of everyone within the kingdom."
Aurora stared at him. He picked up his gloves from the table — she hadn't noticed him put them down, which was the kind of thing Julian did — and walked to the door. Aurora's eyes were wide. This new information could lead to many discoveries in the field of magic, just like what her father wanted.
"Aurora," Julian held the handle of her door. "I expect you to be at the Royal Palace by noon in two days." He opened the door and turned only his head, his beautiful golden eyes gazing down at her. "If you are not there, I will return. And I will not be in a charitable mood."
She audibly gulped and nodded her head vigorously, so much so that it seemed like her brain would turn to mush from the force. With those final parting words, he left, the door closing behind him.
Once she knew he was well and truly gone, she slid down the wall and sat on the floor, legs pulled to her chest, back against the wood. Sure, the potential to discover new magical breakthroughs was tantalizing, but this was a lot of work.
Arden descended from the rafters and landed on the floorboards nearby, tilting his head at her with what she had come to recognize as his version of concern — which looked identical to his version of judgment, but was subtly different if you knew him well enough.
"Mana Shard Heartbeat," he said.
"I know." She rested her chin on her knees.
On the table, one hundred and forty-three pages sat in a neat stack, her name written at the bottom of the last one.
She'd thought finishing the paper was the hard part. Imagining all the court politics and intrigue she would have to navigate just to stay by the Princess' side, it irked her. Groaning, she closed her eyes, mentally preparing for the headache that was to be her future.