Damar showed them the asterisks on the morning of the fifteenth day.

  He had been waiting, Raka understood, for the right moment — for the group to be ready for the information, not just willing to hear it. After the Void tear, after the night of closing something that should not have been there with nothing but borrowed force and careful coordination, the threshold for what they could absorb had shifted. Damar had noticed this. He noticed most things.

  He spread the map across the common room table after breakfast, weighted its corners with books, and pointed.

  'Seven locations,' he said. 'Marked because they share a characteristic that took me several days to verify.'

  'What characteristic?' Lenne asked.

  'They are all places where the academy's protective barrier is thinner than it should be,' Damar said. 'Not broken. Not compromised. Thinner. As if the barrier was not installed uniformly, or as if something has been applying low-level pressure to those specific points for a long time.'

  Silence at the table.

  'How did you find this?' Mira asked. Her voice was careful in the way it got when she already suspected an answer.

  'I used Temporal Pause in each location,' Damar said. 'When time is frozen, certain things become visible that aren't visible in normal time. Aether constructs. Barrier architecture. The way force is distributed through a structure.' He paused. 'The thin points form a pattern. They are not random.'

  He traced the seven marked locations with one finger. They were spread across the island's perimeter, one at each cardinal direction and three at intermediate points. When Raka looked at them as a group rather than individually, the pattern resolved itself immediately and his stomach did something unpleasant.

  'It's a circle,' Raka said.

  'An incomplete one,' Damar said. 'Each thin point corresponds to a position in a larger geometric structure. If the barrier failed at all seven points simultaneously, the failure would propagate along the structure's lines and collapse the entire barrier.'

  'The whole academy,' Tobas said quietly. 'Unprotected.'

  'All at once,' Damar confirmed.

  Lenne had leaned back in her chair and was staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone doing mathematics they had not expected to be doing before nine in the morning.

  'Someone has been setting this up,' she said. 'Not recently. This took time.'

  'The pressure signatures are old,' Damar agreed. 'My estimate, based on the depth of the thinning, is several decades at minimum. Possibly longer.'

  'Before any of us were born,' Mira said.

  'Before most of the current faculty were students here,' Damar said.

  Raka looked at the map. Seven thin points. Seven students in a dormitory. Seven anomalous abilities that matched seven abilities from three centuries ago. He was aware of the number accumulating around them like a tide, each seven adding weight to a pattern that was becoming impossible to dismiss as coincidence.

  'This is what Arkhavel has been doing,' he said. 'While it waited for the right signatures to appear. It's been thinning the barrier. Preparing the structure for a collapse.'

  'And now we're here,' Sena said. 'The signatures it needed. And the barrier is ready.'

  The morning light came through the common room windows and made everything look ordinary, which it absolutely was not.

  'We need to tell someone,' Tobas said. He said it with the tone of someone who had been saying this internally for several days and had finally said it out loud.

  'We do,' Raka said. 'The question is who.'

  'Instructor Hale,' Mira said, without hesitation.

  Everyone looked at her.

  'He's the only faculty member who has spoken about anomalous abilities with something other than pity or management,' she said. 'He knew about Resonance specifically. He looked at Raka when he mentioned it. He's been expecting something like this.'

  'He might be the one who's been watching for us,' Lenne said. 'Could be a trap.'

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  'It could be,' Mira said. 'I've considered that. But the alternative is going to Crane, who knows more than she shows and whose motivations I can't assess yet, or going to Headmaster Vel, who I know nothing about. Hale is the least unknown.'

  Damar folded the map and looked at Raka.

  'Your call,' he said.

  Raka thought about Instructor Hale — his genuine smile in the Aether Theory class, the way he had said the system failed to anticipate them, not the other way around. The way he had written something when Raka demonstrated Resonance in the training yard and had not seemed surprised.

  'Hale,' Raka said. 'Tonight.'

  * * *

  Instructor Hale's office was on the third floor of the east academic wing, marked by a door that had books stacked against it from the inside and required a specific knock to open without avalanche risk. Mira had found this out from the library's floor records. She found out most things from records.

  Raka knocked. There was a sound of shifting paper, a muffled word that might have been an expletive, and then the door opened.

  Instructor Hale looked at seven students standing in his corridor at eight in the evening and went through several expressions in quick succession before arriving at something that was not quite surprise.

  'I wondered when this would happen,' he said. 'Come in. Mind the stacks on the left.'

  His office was exactly what Raka had expected: small, overwhelmingly full of books and papers, with a desk that had been buried under research materials and a window that hadn't been cleaned in what appeared to be a geological era. He cleared chairs with the practiced efficiency of someone who had students in his office frequently, and when they were all seated — Kai having appeared in the corner without the formality of entering through the door — he sat behind his desk and looked at them.

  'You've been to the library,' he said, looking at Mira.

  'Yes,' she said.

  'You found the Bael Register. The record of the first Seven.'

  'Is that what it's called?'

  'That's what it's called in the unrestricted section,' Hale said. 'The version you found. There's another version in the Underground Archive. The restricted one.' He paused. 'It has more detail.'

  The office was quiet except for the sound of the academy outside — distant voices, wind against the windows, the ordinary noise of a place where nothing dramatic was happening.

  'You knew we were coming,' Raka said.

  'I suspected,' Hale said carefully. 'When the seal on Arkhavel began showing stress indicators three years ago, the Academy's senior researchers began monitoring for anomalous ability signatures in new students. I was part of that monitoring group.' He looked at his desk. 'We expected one, perhaps two. The probability of all seven appearing simultaneously was considered so low as to be functionally impossible.'

  'And yet,' Lenne said.

  'And yet,' Hale agreed.

  'How long has the seal been deteriorating?' Damar asked.

  'Actively? Three years. Passively, over a much longer period. The original seal was designed to last five hundred years. We are at three hundred and twelve.' He met their eyes. 'We have been in the margin of error for some time.'

  'The barrier,' Raka said. 'The thin points. The geometric pattern.'

  Hale went very still.

  'You found those too,' he said.

  'Damar found them,' Raka said. 'Seven points. A circle. Old pressure signatures. Someone has been working on this for decades.'

  Hale was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost its classroom energy and become something quieter and more serious.

  'There is a faction within the academy,' he said, 'that believes the seal should be allowed to fail. That Arkhavel's emergence is inevitable and that the correct response is accommodation rather than resistance. They have been... preparing. For a long time.'

  'A faction,' Mira said. 'Faculty?'

  'Some,' Hale said. 'Not all. I don't know all of them. I know some. And I know that whoever has been thinning the barrier points has access to the academy's infrastructure at a level that requires either seniority or very good forgery.'

  The room settled into a silence that had weight.

  'You should have told us,' Raka said.

  'You were students,' Hale said. 'First-years. You had been here two weeks.'

  'We closed a Void tear last night with what we had and no preparation,' Raka said. 'We're not just students.'

  Hale looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, with the expression of someone updating a significant assumption.

  'No,' he said. 'I suppose you're not.'

  * * *

  They left Hale's office two hours later with more information than they'd arrived with and a specific, uncomfortable awareness of how much they still didn't know.

  Hale had agreed to investigate the faction — carefully, without alerting whoever had been thinning the barrier points. He had asked them, in turn, to continue as normal: attend classes, do not draw attention to what they knew, report any Void activity to him directly rather than through standard channels.

  He had also given Raka something. A small notebook, old, its cover worn smooth with handling.

  'It belonged to the Resonance user I mentioned in class,' he said. 'She left it with me before she retired. She said it was for the next one, whenever they appeared. I have been carrying it for eleven years.'

  Raka held the notebook on the walk back to the dormitory and did not open it yet. He was not ready to open it yet. He could feel it in his hands — not magically, just the weight of something that had been kept for a specific person for eleven years, waiting.

  For me.

  She left this for me, and she didn't know my name, and she knew I would come.

  He put it in the drawer of his desk when they returned and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling of his alcove and thought about the shape of the thing they were inside, which was much larger than he had known when he touched the Sorting Crystal and watched it crack.

  Outside, the academy's lights burned in their six colors around a window that had no particular color at all.

  Inside, seven students lay in seven alcoves in various states of sleeplessness, carrying the weight of information that was, collectively, too large for any one of them alone.

  This is what it was like for them too.

  The first Seven. The ones who came before.

  This exact weight, in this exact room, three hundred and twelve years ago.

  He did not find this thought comforting. But there was something in it — some texture of company across an impossible distance — that made the ceiling of the alcove feel slightly less narrow.

  He closed his eyes. Eventually, much later, he slept.