I crossed to the line of students and took a place at the far end, careful not to draw attention. The sun pressed against my skin, already dampening the back of my neck. Around me, bodies moved in silence, staves turning in arcs, sliding low, rising high. It was like a dance, but one built not on beauty, but balance. Precision.
I mimicked them awkwardly at first. My staff swung too wide. My footing lagged. My arms weren’t used to this weight, this rhythm. But no one corrected me. No one laughed.
The bell rang.
And I moved.
Not well, not fast, not with grace—but with a growing certainty. I could learn this. Not for vanity, not for show. For me.
The days passed not in idleness, but in rhythm.
By the end of the third, I knew the pattern of my mornings as well as I had once known the narrow streets behind the temple walls of home. I woke before the sun breached the domes, when the sky was still colored with pale silver. The light in the stones embedded in my chamber’s walls had dimmed by then, a soft retreat of the moon’s glow, yielding to the warmth of the rising day.
At the Temple of Aerius, I sat at a long, low desk among a dozen others—silent boys bent over parchment with calloused fingers and careful hands. I copied from old scrolls and crumbling texts, the inksmelling of oil and smoke, the words winding like rivers across the page. Mythic parables, philosophical riddles, tales of men who rose to greatness not by arms, but by surrender.
The alcove cleaning followed: slow, methodical work with cloth and oil and patience. The western alcoves were half-forgotten places, shadowed and dusty, tucked away beneath a cluster of flowering arches. I cleaned alone, mostly. It gave me time to think.
It was during those hours that the ache in my muscles made itself known. A deep, lingering burn across my shoulders, down the backs of my thighs. The kind of pain that made standing feel like a punishment and walking a challenge. Still, I returned to the Gymnasia each afternoon. My staff felt heavier each time I lifted it, but I lifted it still.
By the third day, the soreness began to recede. Not fully—but I could move again without flinching. My limbs felt tighter. Tethered to me in a new way. When I touched my upper arm absently that night, I thought I felt something firmer beneath the skin. Not vanity. Just… change.
Life here wasn’t the punishment I had feared.
The food was rich—bowls of spiced grains and roasted figs, cheeses aged in olive leaves, citrus-sweet preserves spooned onto warm bread. The teas were fragrant and strange, some calming, others bright with something almost electric. And the wine—always diluted, always served cool—went down like honeyed sighs. I slept deeply for the first time in months.
No one had tried to use me. No one had asked me to prove myself.
I had not been sacrificed to the gods, as some had once whispered on my island, voices sharp with ignorance. I had not been dragged into dark rites or forced into robes I could not bear. I had been given a bed. A room. A staff. A task.
And then, on the morning of the fourth day, I opened my door to find an attendant waiting just beyond the threshold.
He was young—maybe my age of nineteen summers—but his face was bright with excitement, his eyes wide and nearly shining. He held a single scroll in both hands, reverently, as if carrying a relic.
“You’ve been summoned,” he said, unable to contain the joy in his voice.
I blinked, still groggy from sleep. “What?”
“Here.” He stepped forward and pressed the scroll into my hands, bowing once, then grinning. “You’ve been chosen. It will happen at sundown.”
And then he was gone, half-skipping down the hall like he could barely hold the news in his skin.
The scroll was sealed with a darker wax this time. The impression was not Aerius’s wings, but a mark I didn’t recognize—curved, radiant, almost like a sigil of flame caught mid-flicker.
My hands trembled slightly as I broke it open.
To Callis, newly arrived:
At the hour when the sun greets the horizon,
you are summoned to the Ritual Chamber.
Come cleansed, clothed in silk, and unburdened.
Let your thoughts be quiet, your heart unguarded.
The gods have whispered. You have been heard.
I read it twice. Then a third time. My breath caught in my throat. It was happening. After only three days.
