The room went still.

No bell. No sound. No signal.

Only a shift in the glyphs above—subtle, but sharp. Like a sentence being finished mid-thought.

Zephryn glanced upward.

The floating symbols restructured mid-air, aligning into vertical symmetry before folding in on themselves like closing eyes.

Then—

A pulse.

No color. No flare.

Just authority.

And in the center of the room, without walking or stepping or sound—

he was there.

The instructor wore a long coat lined in metallic thread, fastened diagonally across his chest with a single bone clasp. His face was unreadable—not because of expression, but because of presence. His eyes held nothing, and everything.

He didn’t speak.

He simply raised his hand.

A glyph appeared midair. It spun once. Stabilized. Then fractured into seven perfect shards—each containing a sigil from a different element: flame, crystal, light, void, water, wind, and stone.

“Your pulse is memory,” he said.

“Your mark is grief.

Your glyph is the piece of yourself the world hasn’t earned yet.”

His voice didn’t echo.

It just… remained.

He let the silence linger.

Zephryn shifted in his seat, but only slightly.

The instructor’s eyes scanned the room once. Briefly. Not searching.

Counting.

And then—

they stopped on him.

Just for a second.

No words. No change in tone.

But Zephryn felt it.

Kaelen noticed too. His hand drifted to his chest without thinking.

Selka didn’t look away.

Yolti, whispering behind her teeth:

“He knows.”

The instructor raised his hand again.

“You are not here to become warriors. You are here to remember what you are, and who tried to make you forget it.”

A wave of pressure pulsed from the glyphs overhead. Everyone in the room inhaled at once.

“The Crucible is not a test of strength. It is a test of silence.

And some of you are already breaking.”

In the balcony, the masked student tilted their head slightly.

Then stood.

And left.

The instructor didn’t react.

But Zephryn saw the flicker in his fingers—a glyph flex, almost too subtle to catch.

It was a warning.

And the hum in Zephryn’s chest?

It flared.