Systemic problems aren't any one person's fault—the whole rule structure is broken.

  The words surfaced from somewhere deep, rising through layers of memory like a bubble through still water. Aldric sat on the edge of his stripped bed, Felix's letter fragment in his hands, and let them come.

  ---

  Twenty-eight days.

  The number sat in his chest like a stone. Twenty-eight days until the Order's doors closed behind him for good. Twenty-eight days to figure out where to go, what to do, how to survive without the meager protection of disciple status.

  He'd spent the morning walking. Through corridors that felt different now—wider, somehow, or maybe just emptier. Past disciples who looked away or through him. Past the training yard where he'd fought Dorian and won, the packed earth still bearing the faint impressions of their footwork.

  Now he was back in his empty room, holding a torn piece of paper that might be the most dangerous thing he owned.

  ---

  The fragment was smaller than his palm. The edges were ragged where it had been torn—deliberately, he thought. Someone had wanted to separate these words from whatever came after.

  The Hollowed Rite. They know about—

  About what? About the blood-rite symbols in the hills? About Felix himself? About the catastrophe that had shattered his family ten years ago?

  He'd been carrying these questions for weeks. They'd grown heavier with each passing day, each new discovery, each fragment of evidence that suggested everything was connected—his scar, his friend's death, the symbols carved into stone in a hidden clearing.

  But tonight, a different question pressed against his mind.

  Why had he refused?

  ---

  Not the surface answer. Not the one he'd given in the assembly hall, the one that had earned him expulsion and a handful of loyal friends. I will not trade their futures for mine.

  That was true. But it wasn't complete.

  He could have refused quietly. Could have said no in Caelen's office, accepted the consequences in private, avoided the spectacle that had turned him into an example. Instead, he'd stood in front of the entire Order and made his refusal public. Loud. Impossible to ignore.

  Why?

  ---

  The memory came like a wave.

  ---

  Two years ago.

  The storage cellar beneath the eastern wing was supposed to be empty. It wasn't.

  Aldric found Felix there one afternoon, sitting on an overturned crate, surrounded by old records and dusty ledgers that looked like they hadn't been touched in decades. A single candle burned beside him, casting dancing shadows across the stone walls.

  "What are you doing?" Aldric asked, ducking under the low doorway.

  "Reading." Felix didn't look up. His finger traced a line in one of the ledgers, his lips moving slightly as he worked through the numbers. "Did you know the Order used to have twice as many spellblade disciples as it does now?"

  "No."

  "It's true. Look." Felix held up the ledger, pointing at a column of names. "Thirty years ago, there were sixty-two spellblade disciples. Now there's what, thirty? Maybe less?"

  Aldric took the ledger and squinted at the faded ink. The numbers were there—clear as day, if you knew what to look for. A steady decline, year after year, like water draining from a cracked basin.

  "What happened to them?"

  "Nothing dramatic." Felix's voice was casual, but his eyes weren't. "They didn't all die or get expelled. Most of them just... left. Transferred to other orders. Became wanderers. Found work as guards or laborers. The Order didn't kick them out—it just made staying impossible."

  He took the ledger back and flipped to another page.

  "Look at the stipend records. Thirty years ago, spellblades got the same as mages. Then, bit by bit, the gap widened. A small cut here. A 'temporary' reduction there. Nothing big enough to protest, just enough to make life harder. And the resource allocations—training grounds reduced, equipment denied, healing supplies 'prioritized' for mage disciples."

  Aldric felt something cold settle in his stomach. "They've been doing this for decades."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Longer, probably. These records only go back thirty years." Felix set the ledger aside and leaned back against the wall. "The thing is, there's no single person to blame. No evil elder cackling in a tower, deciding to crush the spellblades. It's just... the system. Working as designed."

  "What do you mean?"

  Felix was quiet for a moment. The candle flickered, throwing his face into shadow and light.

  "Imagine a river," he said finally. "A river that's been flowing the same way for a thousand years. The water goes where it goes because that's where the channel is deepest. Nobody decided to make it flow that way—it just does. And if you're standing on the wrong bank, you can't blame the water for not reaching you. You can't blame the riverbed. You can't even blame the people who dug the original channel, because they're long dead."

  He spread his hands.

  "Systemic problems aren't any one person's fault—the whole rule structure is broken. The Order doesn't need to hate spellblades to crush them. It just needs to keep doing what it's always done, and the crushing happens automatically. Like... like a machine. Nobody has to pull a lever. The gears just turn."

  Aldric stared at him. "That's horrifying."

  "Yeah." Felix's crooked smile appeared, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Here's the worse part. Most people inside the system don't even see it. They think the river flows naturally. They think the channel is just... where water's supposed to go. And if you try to tell them otherwise, they look at you like you're crazy."

  "So what do you do?"

  "That's the question, isn't it?" Felix stood, brushing dust from his clothes. "You can't fight the river from inside the channel. The current's too strong. You have to get out entirely—find a different river, or dig a new one. And that takes more than one person. It takes..."

  He trailed off, his gaze distant.

  "Takes what?"

  "People who see the same thing you do. People who are tired of standing on the wrong bank, watching the water flow past." Felix picked up the candle and headed for the door. "Anyway. Enough philosophy. I found a secret passage behind the old armory. Want to see?"

  "Felix—"

  "I know, I know." He paused at the doorway, the candlelight catching the strange luminosity in his eyes. "You want answers. Real ones. The kind that make sense of everything."

  A beat.

  "I don't have those, Aldric. I wish I did. But I can tell you this much—when you find the people who see what you see, hold onto them. They're rarer than you think. And when the system comes for you—and it will, because that's what systems do—you're going to need people who understand that the fight isn't against any one person."

  His voice dropped.

  "It's against the whole structure. And the only way to win is to build something different."

  He disappeared into the corridor, leaving Aldric alone with the dusty ledgers and the cold certainty that nothing in this Order was what it seemed.

  ---

  The memory faded, leaving Aldric back in his empty room, the letter fragment still in his hands.

  He understood now. His refusal hadn't just been about honor, or loyalty, or the debt he owed to the spellblade disciples who had suffered beside him. It had been about something deeper.

  Refusing to be complicit.

  ---

  Caelen Wyndthorpe wasn't evil. The Ironwing Pact wasn't a conspiracy of villains twirling their mustaches while they crushed the weak. They were the river, flowing where the channel had been dug centuries ago. They were the gears of a machine that didn't need anyone to pull the lever.

  And the offer Caelen had made—advance yourself, betray your fellows—wasn't a test of character. It was the system working exactly as designed. Find the people who might cause trouble. Offer them a place inside the machine. Turn them into gears.

  Aldric had refused not just because it was wrong. He'd refused because accepting would have meant becoming part of the structure that had been crushing spellblades for decades. He would have become another channel in the riverbed, directing the flow away from people like Therin, like Joren, like Pell.

  ---

  He looked at the letter fragment again.

  The blood-rite symbols in the hills. The smudge on the back of this very paper, matching the carved symbol on the boulder. The growing certainty that Felix had known something—had been trying to tell him something—before he died.

  Garrett's warning. The hills aren't safe. Someone else knows too.

  The anonymous notes. They know you found something.

  Twenty-eight days until expulsion. But the investigation couldn't wait. Whatever was happening in those hills—whatever connection it had to Felix, to his family, to the catastrophe that had haunted him for ten years—it was still there. Still active. Still dangerous.

  And maybe, just maybe, it was connected to the system itself. To the structure that had been crushing spellblades for generations. To the gears that turned without anyone pulling the lever.

  ---

  Aldric stood.

  The room was empty. His belongings were in storage. His stipend was gone. His standing had evaporated like morning mist.

  But he still had questions. And he still had a direction.

  Find the people who see what you see. Hold onto them.

  Therin. Joren. Pell. They'd chosen to stand with him. They'd seen the same thing he'd seen—a system designed to break them, a river that would never flow their way.

  And somewhere beyond the Order's walls, the Wanderers' Guild waited. A different river. A different structure.

  But first, there was the matter of the hills. The blood-rite symbols. The evidence that someone—something—was operating in the shadows, connected to Felix's death and the catastrophe that had shattered his family.

  He couldn't leave without understanding what he'd found.

  ---

  The night was clear and cold when Aldric slipped out of the Order's eastern gate.

  The guards didn't stop him. Why would they? He was still technically a disciple for twenty-eight more days. They had no reason to care where he went.

  The path wound up through the hills, past the spot where he'd found the hidden clearing, past the ridge where the trees grew thick and the shadows deepened. Garrett's forge was dark in the distance, the old blacksmith surely asleep at this hour.

  But Aldric wasn't going to the forge.

  He was going to the place he'd avoided since the day he'd found the blood-rite symbols. The place where the grass had been deliberately pressed into patterns, where the old oak still bore the stain of something dark and old.

  There was more to find. He could feel it.

  And if Felix had been right about one thing, it was this: the system wasn't just the Order. It wasn't just the Ironwing Pact. It was something older, deeper, woven into the very structure of the world.

  The Hollowed Rite. Blood sacrifice. A different kind of river, flowing through channels that most people couldn't see.

  They know about—

  About what?

  Aldric intended to find out.

  ---

  The hills rose around him, dark and silent. The moon hung low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the rocky ground.

  Somewhere ahead, hidden among the trees and the stone, answers waited.

  Or danger.

  Or both.

  Aldric walked into the darkness, Felix's voice still echoing in his mind.

  First, he had to understand what he was fighting.

  ---

  Twenty-eight days until expulsion. But Aldric isn't waiting.

  He's going back to the hills.