Aria’s POV

Morning training should have felt like discipline, like duty — but that dawn, with frost clinging to the grass and my breath curling into the cold like a fragile ghost, it felt like stepping into a kind of quiet worship.

The world was blue and pale and waiting.

“Elric,” I murmured when he approached. His presence broke the stillness without disturbing it, as if he’d been carved from the same stone that built our history.

“We begin before the sun fully wakes,” he ...