The letter arrived on a Tuesday.

  Raka Arden had been expecting something — a sign, a summons, perhaps even a mistake — ever since the incident at the riverbank three months ago. That was the day he had reached out to steady a drowning boy, felt something enormous and electric surge through his chest, and watched the river part. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the boy to breathe.

  Then it had collapsed back into itself, and Raka had run.

  He still did not know exactly what he had done.

  The letter arrived sealed in deep-blue wax stamped with a six-pointed star. His name on the envelope was written in ink that shimmered faintly, like light seen through clear water. Inside, a single page:

  Mr. Raka Arden,

  You have been identified as an individual capable of channeling Aether. Your ability has been assessed as extraordinary and warrants formal training at Astra Academy, the foremost institution for Aether Guardians in the world. A transport will arrive at your location on the morning of August 21st. You are expected to be ready.

  — Headmaster Orin Vel, Astra Academy

  There had been no further explanation.

  Raka read it four times standing in the doorway of his small bedroom, while his grandmother called him for breakfast and the smell of frying rice drifted up the stairs. He folded the letter carefully, pressed it flat under his mattress, and went down to eat. He said nothing about it. He had two weeks.

  * * *

  August 21st arrived on a morning that felt like any other, which Raka thought was unfair.

  The transport, as it turned out, was a man. A tall, lean man in a gray coat who appeared in the alleyway behind Raka's house at exactly six in the morning and introduced himself as Instructor Vael, Academy Transit Officer, in the tone of someone who delivered students to floating islands every day of his life.

  He probably did.

  'Do you have everything?' Instructor Vael asked.

  'I think so,' Raka said, hoisting his pack. 'How far away is it?'

  'Distance is complicated when discussing Astra,' Instructor Vael said. 'Think of it less as a location and more as a state of arrival.'

  'That doesn't answer my question.'

  'No,' the man agreed pleasantly. 'It doesn't.'

  He pressed two fingers to the wall of the alley. The brick shimmered, like heat haze over summer pavement, and then collapsed into a doorway of pale white light. Raka stared at it. The light smelled, improbably, like ozone and pine needles.

  'Through,' said Instructor Vael.

  Raka walked through.

  * * *

  The first thing he saw was sky.

  Endless, brilliant, cloudless sky — and then, below it, an island. Not the kind of island that sat modestly in the sea. This was a vast slab of earth suspended impossibly in the upper atmosphere, its underside trailing waterfalls that dissolved into mist before they reached the clouds below. Dense forest covered most of its surface. And from its center rose the academy.

  Astra Academy was a collection of towers clustered together like a crown, their spires of pale stone and dark glass catching the morning sun. Connecting bridges arced between them, wide enough for students to walk six abreast. The outermost ring of the island was farmland and orchards; further in, training grounds; further still, dormitory wings that spread from the central towers like the petals of a flower.

  Raka and Instructor Vael had emerged onto a broad landing platform of smooth white stone at the island's eastern edge. Perhaps a dozen other students were already there, new arrivals like him, all wearing the same expression: jaw slightly slack, eyes wide, head slowly tilting back.

  Raka tilted his head back too.

  It's real. All of it is actually real.

  His Aether — the thing inside him he had tried very hard not to think about since the incident at the river — hummed against his ribs like a plucked string. As if it recognized this place. As if it had been waiting to come home.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  'First years assemble at the Grand Gate!' a voice called. 'Transport groups, this way!'

  * * *

  The Grand Gate was the formal entrance to the academy proper: a massive archway of interlocking stone carved with the histories of three hundred years — battles, creatures, heroes with their hands raised and their Aether blazing. Raka slowed as he passed beneath it, craning to read the words cut into the keystone.

  We stand so that others need not know what stands against them.

  He almost walked into the boy who had stopped directly in front of him.

  The boy was broad-shouldered and a head taller than Raka, with dark skin and close-cropped hair, wearing the expression of someone doing complex mental arithmetic. He turned when Raka nearly collided with him, and didn't apologize, but looked Raka over with flat, evaluating eyes.

  'You were staring at the gate,' the boy said.

  'So were you,' Raka pointed out.

  A pause. Then, very slightly, the corner of the boy's mouth moved.

  'Damar Kairo,' he said.

  'Raka Arden.'

  'You're new.' It wasn't a question.

  'We're all new,' Raka said. 'It's the first day.'

  Damar considered this. 'That's true,' he allowed — and then the crowd pushed them both forward through the gate and they lost each other in the press of bodies.

  Raka tucked the name away. Damar Kairo. Something about the way the boy had stood — entirely still, entirely calm, like he had all the time in the world — had stuck in Raka's mind. He filed that thought away and followed the crowd.

  * * *

  Crystal Hall was the sorting chamber, and it was exactly as dramatic as the name suggested.

  The hall itself was enormous — cathedral-scale, with a ceiling that curved up into a dome of what appeared to be living crystal, each facet alive with shifting color. The floor was black stone, polished to a mirror finish. Hundreds of chairs had been arranged in semicircular rows around a raised central dais, and upon the dais stood a plinth, and upon the plinth rested the Sorting Crystal.

  Raka had heard nothing about it before today. Nobody had briefed him. But the Crystal was obviously the Crystal — it was the size of a human torso, faceted, and it pulsed with a deep interior light the color of the space between stars.

  Every existing student had turned out to watch. They filled the upper galleries in their dormitory colors — red for Ignis, gold for Tempest, brown and green for Terra, blue for Aqua, white for Lumina, dark violet for Umbra. They watched the new arrivals with the comfortable superiority of people who had already survived what you were about to face.

  A woman stood at the podium beside the dais. Perhaps fifty, with close-cropped silver hair and an air of absolute, untroubled authority. She wore no dormitory color. Her coat was simply black.

  'Welcome to Astra Academy,' she said. Her voice needed no amplification. 'I am Deputy Headmaster Sela Crane. The ceremony is simple. You will approach the Crystal in the order your name is called. You will place your palm upon it. It will read your Aether signature and assign you to your dormitory. This takes approximately four seconds. It does not hurt.'

  A beat.

  'Try not to faint,' she added. 'It happens. It is not a good first impression.'

  Quiet laughter ran through the upper galleries. The new students exchanged nervous glances. The names began.

  Raka watched each student approach and touch the Crystal. Each time, it blazed with color — red for fire-types, gold for wind, blue for water — and a chime sounded as the assignment was confirmed. Most students smiled or exhaled with relief. One girl burst into delighted tears when the Crystal lit up brilliant white for Lumina and the entire gallery broke into applause.

  Raka noticed the girl he had half-seen on the landing platform — slight, with a careful, watchful quality, dark eyes that moved just a fraction of a second ahead of events, as if she was always anticipating the next moment. She touched the Crystal. It glowed white. She was sorted into Lumina and walked to her place with a small, private smile.

  Then there was a tall boy near the back who watched the whole ceremony with mild boredom — or perhaps something more unsettling, as if he simply wasn't quite there. Raka blinked, and for a moment the boy seemed to flicker, like a candle in a draft. Then he was solid again. His name was called: Kai Noctis. He approached, touched the Crystal briefly, and when it flickered between colors without settling, Deputy Headmaster Crane marked something in her register without expression.

  There was a girl who stood apart from the others — not out of confidence but out of something more complicated. A slight tension, as if she was listening to sounds no one else could hear. When her name was called — Sena Valis — she walked to the Crystal slowly and pressed her palm to it with the careful gentleness of someone approaching something that might startle.

  The Crystal went very quiet. The light inside it moved strangely, in directions that didn't quite match the geometry of the room. Crane noted something. Sena walked to the side.

  Then: 'Raka Arden.'

  He stood.

  The walk to the dais felt longer than it was. The Crystal's interior light seemed to intensify as he approached, though he told himself that was his imagination. He could feel the eyes of every student in the room — the curious ones, the bored ones, the ones already mapping social hierarchies and deciding where new arrivals would fit.

  He placed his palm on the Crystal.

  The world stopped.

  Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The Crystal's pulse synced with something inside his chest, and for one breathless second Raka felt everything — every Aether signature in the room, every dormitory's resonant frequency, every flavor of power humming in the bodies of three hundred students — wash through him like a wave through open water. Fire. Wind. Stone. Light. Shadow. All of it flooding into him at once, too much, too fast, too everything —

  The Crystal cracked.

  It was a sound like a gunshot, sharp and absolute, and every voice in Crystal Hall went silent at once. A fracture ran from the base to the apex of the Crystal, hairline-thin but unmistakable, releasing a breath of light that faded immediately into the air.

  Raka pulled his hand back. He was shaking. He hadn't realized it until now.

  Deputy Headmaster Crane looked at the Crystal. Then she looked at Raka. Her expression was unreadable in the way that very controlled expressions always are — the blankness of someone who has decided not to reveal what they know.

  'Dormitory Seven,' she said, very quietly.

  The silence stretched another full second. Then the whispering began.

  Raka stood on the dais with the cracked Crystal behind him and the weight of hundreds of eyes pressing down, and he thought, distantly and with absolute clarity: I don't know what I am.

  But I think I'm about to find out.