Morning at Dominion began not with alarms or chimes, but with silence.
A silence too perfectly maintained—like something fragile being preserved.
Julius sat up in bed the moment his eyes opened. He hadn't dreamed, or if he had, the memory had burned out before waking. The ledger sat exactly where he'd left it—top drawer, left open, facing north.
Except now… something was inside it.
Not a page.
A note.
Unbound. Unaged. Placed with too much care to have been slipped in by accident. The parchment was black, the ink silver. No seal wax—just a pressed symbol at the bottom:
Thirteen lines radiating from a blank circle.
It was not a crest he recognized.
He read the note:
"To those who do not wait to be remembered—
The Thirteenth Seat recalls you first."
Midnight. Behind the West Library mirror.
Bring nothing except what remembers you."
No signature.
He turned the note twice. Felt it. No fold lines. The ink didn't smudge. It wasn't printed—it had been written, possibly as he slept.
Kaela's voice came from across the partition.
"Did it find you?"
He didn't reply.
She stepped through the curtain a moment later, tying her hair up with practiced ease. No makeup. No armor. Just that faint glint in her violet eyes that meant she already knew.
"You're not the first they've called," she said. "But if you go, you might be the last."
Julius held up the note.
"This symbol. What is it?"
Kaela studied it from across the room, not coming closer.
"That's not a symbol," she said quietly. "That's a chair."
"A chair?"
"The Thirteenth Seat. The one that was never supposed to be filled."
He narrowed his eyes. "Why not?"
"Because it doesn't grant power," she said. "It reveals it. And most people don't survive knowing what they are."
She turned to go.
"You should ignore it."
"Would you?"
She stopped. Tilted her head.
"No," she said. "But I like watching things burn."
He tucked the note into the back of the ledger.
Midnight.
West Library.
Bring nothing—except what remembers you.
He smiled faintly.
That narrowed it down.
The West Library of Dominion was not built for reading.
It was a vault disguised as a sanctuary—five floors tall, its spiral shelves guarded not by locks but by memory wards: glyphs etched into the floor that recorded who read what, how long they stared, and whether their eyes moved too fast for comprehension.
Midnight came with no bell, only a stillness so complete it became loud.
Julius slipped through the third-tier archway like a shadow in uniform, the note folded neatly into his coat lining. He passed no one—though he felt watched.
At the far wall, between the last two stacks of pre-imperial scrollwork, hung a mirror.
It was dull. Old silver. Slightly warped. The frame was cracked at one corner.
But as he stepped toward it, the air shifted. The temperature dropped by degrees. His ring—silent since the rankings—pulsed once. The mirror darkened, then rippled.
He reached out.
Touched the surface.
And stepped through.
There was no transition.
One moment: book dust and archival hush.
The next: stone silence.
He stood in a circular chamber with no visible ceiling. Torches burned with violet flame, though none had wicks. The air smelled of wet stone and something older—ink mixed with bone ash.
Twelve chairs encircled the room.
Each was carved from a different material—onyx, bone, charred wood, cold iron, deep green jade, and others he couldn't name. Each bore a different crest above it, half-eroded, as if ashamed to be remembered.
But it was the thirteenth that drew him.
It sat apart—raised on a step, facing the others, empty.
Its stone was darker than night, but shimmered with buried light—like a black sea lit from below. There was no crest, no name.
Only a sigil carved into the back:
Thirteen radiating lines. A blank circle in the middle.
The symbol from the note.
Julius approached it but did not touch.
Instead, he ran his hand along the outer edge of the nearest chair—charred wood with a broken arrow crest.
He felt nothing. Until—
A voice.
Smooth. Calm. Echoing not in the room but in his bones.
"Most who enter this hall believe they are discovering something."
He turned.
A figure emerged from the shadows behind the thirteenth chair.
Robed in layered grey. Face hidden behind a mirrored mask shaped like a skull—no eyeholes, no mouth. Just one vertical crack down the center.
"Very few understand," the figure said, "they are the ones being remembered."
The figure moved like he weighed nothing.
No sound. No drag of robes. Just presence—calculated, unhurried, anchored. Like the air deferred to him, unsure of its place.
Julius didn't move. Not yet.
"You're not surprised," the figure observed, voice calm and precise. Masculine, mid-toned, accentless in a way that suggested deliberate erasure.
"I rarely am," Julius replied.
The figure chuckled softly. "Then you're about to become useful."
He approached the circle and walked between the chairs, fingertips trailing across their ancient arms—not with affection, but with... inventory. He stopped beside the cold iron seat, tapped it once with his knuckle.
"This one belonged to a woman who tried to cauterize the bloodlines. She failed. Her name has already been lost. Do you know what that means?"
"That she was irrelevant?"
"No. That she was dangerous." He turned, mirrored mask catching faint firelight. "Irrelevance is not when history forgets you—it's when it chooses not to remember."
He gestured toward the thirteenth chair.
"You were chosen. But not by me."
Julius's gaze didn't waver. "Then by who?"
The man's pause was precise.
"By what."
Julius tilted his head slightly.
The figure continued, voice lowering like a door creaking open. "Tell me. When did it first speak to you?"
Julius said nothing.
"You don't have to answer. It always speaks first to those with fractures in their core. Men of strategy. Women of blood. Children who learn to kill before they learn to lie."
He stepped closer.
"I know what it said to you. It says it to all of us—eventually. But you? You're different."
Julius raised an eyebrow. "Because I listened?"
"No," the figure said. "Because it listened back."
He circled the thirteenth seat but did not sit in it.
"You have a name now," he said. "But it isn't your first. The ledger keeps that. But do you know what name it writes under your current one?"
Julius crossed his arms.
"Try me."
The masked man tilted his head.
"Midas Vitae," he said. "The Blooming Rot. The King of Gold Teeth. The One Who Inverts."
The name lingered in the chamber like smoke that refused to dissipate.
Julius said nothing, but the ledger in his coat pulsed once.
The man turned and walked slowly back toward the shadows behind the seat.
"I am Merik Valen," he said over his shoulder. "You may call me 'Professor.' The others did."
"Others?"
The figure stopped.
"Before you," he said, "there were twelve."
He paused.
"They all sat there."
Another pause.
"They all died."
Merik Valen's figure blurred slightly at the edges—not from magic, but from sheer stillness, like the world wasn't sure whether to finish rendering him.
He gestured toward the thirteenth seat, not touching it, never touching it.
"You know the stories," he said. "Dominion teaches you to inherit. To compete. To survive. But no one tells you what's underneath all that."
Julius said nothing. The silence was working for him.
"This place wasn't built to elevate bloodlines," Merik continued. "It was built to detect contamination in them. To find those who carry echoes. Those who awaken things that should remain myth."
He turned to face Julius fully. The mirrored skull mask reflected nothing.
"You've already been flagged."
Julius's voice was steady. "By who?"
"By the system itself. The moment your blood hit the mirrorstone, the vault markers responded. They haven't pulsed in two centuries."
Julius narrowed his eyes. "You're saying I opened something."
"I'm saying something opened you."
A long pause.
Merik gestured again—this time not to the seat, but to the wall behind it.
It shimmered.
An opening appeared.
Beyond it: rows of tablets. Tomes bound in black scale. Charts with glyphs burned in gold. And at the center, a suspended page—framed in bone—that flickered like a film reel caught between images.
"The Vault of Vitae," Merik said, voice nearly reverent. "All that's known. All that's hidden. You want it. I see it in your stance."
Julius didn't move.
"Take the seat," Merik said. "Declare yourself a candidate. And this is yours."
"And if I don't?"
"You'll be fed back to the curriculum. Kept alive, watched, catalogued. Maybe even graduated, if you're clever enough to lie to your own blood."
"Tempting," Julius murmured.
Merik laughed. "But you won't do that."
He stepped back into the dark. "Because the rot already whispers. And sooner or later, the bloom must burst."
The wall began to seal itself.
"But there is one condition."
Julius turned his head slightly.
"You'll face a trial," Merik said. "Soon. No warning. No rules. If you live, you keep the seat. If not... the thirteenth goes empty again."
Julius waited.
Then stepped forward.
"I'll take it."
Merik paused in the dark.
"Of course you will."
The thirteenth seat pulsed once behind Julius, though he never touched it.
The torchlight dimmed.
The torchlight dimmed behind him. The scent of the room—aged blood and burnt vellum—deepened as Merik Valen's presence receded fully into the gloom.
The thirteenth seat stood untouched.
Julius didn't sit.
He didn't need to.
The acceptance was not in the gesture, but in the silence he left behind. He turned, stepped away, toward the passage that had re-formed from black stone. The sealed wall was already peeling itself open, slow and ritualistic, like a wound revealing muscle.
Just before he crossed the threshold, Merik's voice returned—disembodied, subtle.
"You think you're using the seat."
Julius stopped.
"You think it's leverage. That it offers power, and you'll take just enough to make your enemies bleed."
A pause. Then—
"You're wrong."
Julius said nothing.
"The Thirteenth Seat doesn't serve," Merik whispered. "It doesn't wait. It doesn't obey."
A crack of subtle force rippled through the chamber.
"It chooses."
Julius turned his head slightly.
"You're saying it's alive?"
"I'm saying," Merik said, voice low and close, though no footsteps followed, "that you are already sitting on it."
The mirror behind the library did not shimmer when Julius stepped through. It swallowed him.
He returned to the main stacks as if he'd never left. The note was gone. The reflection didn't match his walk. The air tasted like metal.
Back in his dormitory, Kaela glanced up from her bed as he entered.
She didn't speak.
But she looked at him just a beat too long.
The ledger glowed faintly as he placed it on the shelf.
That night, Julius did not sleep.
But he dreamed.
He stood in a circle of thrones—twelve, carved of rot and silence. Each one occupied. The figures were dead and not-dead, royal and wrong. Some missing jaws. Others draped in veils of black honey. Their eyes bled gold. Their crowns were thorns, broken teeth, and inverted halos.
They looked at him.
Not accusingly.
Expectantly.
The thirteenth throne behind him pulsed once.
And every corpse-king nodded in unison.