Vespera was quiet for exactly three seconds after Eclipse asked the question.
Then she said: "I'm going to bring the shadow bond candidate."
Alex processed this. "The what."
It wasn't his most articulate moment. He was five, shirtless, lying in a guest bed with a Mana Heart where his standard core should have been, and the sentence had contained at least two words he had no context for.
Vespera looked at him with the expression she used when she was deciding how much to explain and in what order. She settled on: all of it.
"The Abyss family has a branch family," she said. "They have served us for generations. Standard guards, administrative support, household staff." She paused. "And shadow guards."
"Shadow guards," Alex repeated.
"To become a shadow guard, compatibility is required. Not everyone has it. Shadow affinity is rare on this continent — rare enough that most people spend their entire lives without encountering it." Her eyes moved to him with something measured in them. "The bond is a formal tie between guard and principal. Deep. Permanent. The guard's shadow and the principal's shadow become linked — they can sense each other across distance, communicate in ways that don't require words, and the guard gains access to abilities through the bond that they couldn't develop alone."
Alex considered this.
The word permanent did a specific kind of work in his mind. Not a complication — a clarification. A bond that deep, that lasting, wasn't a guard assignment that ended when the threat did. It was something considerably more integrated than that. He turned the other pieces over. Sensing each other across distance. Communication without words. The guard gaining abilities they couldn't develop alone.
"And you think I'm compatible."
"I think," Vespera said carefully, "that what happened to your room tonight suggests you may be compatible with quite a few things." She folded her hands in her lap. "The bond needs to be tested and formed early for it to take properly. If the compatibility is there, now is the time."
Eclipse, who had been listening with the focused expression of someone absorbing information and cross-referencing it against things she already knew, said: "It's also protective cover. If anyone asks why Alex has a shadow guard at five, the answer is that we tested compatibility and found it. That's unremarkable. That's just the Abyss family doing what the Abyss family does."
Alex looked at his sister.
She looked back at him.
'She's smarter than she lets on,' he thought, not for the first time.
"Alright," he said. He looked at his mother. "If the bond is mutual — if we can sense each other across distance, communicate without words — that's not just protective cover. That's genuinely useful on its own terms, independent of what anyone watching might think about it." He paused. "Is there a candidate?"
"There is," Vespera said. "Her name is Zara."
But before that, Vespera's eyes hadn't left him with that measured quality, and Alex had enough experience reading her by now to know she wasn't done.
"There's something else," she said.
Not a question.
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He waited.
"When someone awakens early, genuinely early, outside the standard range, there is sometimes a corresponding awakening of something else." She chose the words with care. "A class. Not the standard progression most practitioners follow. Something better. Something rarer." A beat. "Something that reflects what the person is, not just what they've trained to be."
Eclipse shifted. "Mom awakened Umbrist," she said, with the particular tone of someone citing a fact they found impressive even after years of familiarity.
Alex looked at Vespera.
"Shadow class," Vespera said simply, in the way of someone who had been told their class was remarkable often enough that the information no longer required decoration. "One of the rarest on the continent. Shadow affinity classes almost never appear in the human population — they require either a bloodline connection to shadow or a species with natural affinity, neither of which is common here."
"Your father awakened Cold Surge," Eclipse said, and there was something in her voice now, a warmth that wasn't entirely about the information, more about the telling of it. "Ice and storm. Late awakening, actually, he was nearly sixteen. Everyone thought he was going to be ordinary."
"I was not ordinary," Alessio said from the wall, with a dryness that suggested ordinary was doing significant work as an understatement.
"And then there's Eclipse," Alex said.
His sister looked at him with an expression that was approximately forty percent pleased and sixty percent trying not to show it.
"Frost Shade," Vespera said, and the pride in her voice was so unguarded it was almost startling from a woman who was usually so precise. "Dual elemental class. Ice and shadow, combined at awakening rather than developed separately." She looked at her daughter. "The last recorded Frost Shade class was over two hundred years ago. The mages who evaluated Eclipse's awakening used the word generational."
Eclipse was looking at the wall with great interest.
"The empire's rulers, the Vectorians, they've produced exceptional classes," Vespera continued, pulling the thread back. "Perhaps the only population that consistently matches or exceeds what our family has produced. But within the human empire broadly—" She returned her attention to Alex. "Early awakening, exceptional class. That is the pattern."
She waited.
Alex understood what she was asking.
He looked at the ceiling.
Then at his hands.
Then, because there was no version of this conversation he could navigate by omission, because Vespera was Vespera and she would find the gap in anything he said and return to it with patience and precision until it was filled, he looked at his mother.
"I didn't awaken a class," he said.
The silence was immediate.
Not the loaded kind from earlier, not the charged, temperature-dropping silence of Vespera turning toward Alessio. This was different. This was the silence of a room where several very intelligent people had just received a piece of information that didn't fit the existing structure and were each, privately, attempting to rebuild the structure around it.
Eclipse's mouth had opened slightly.
Alessio had gone very still against the wall, stiller than usual, which was notable.
Vespera's expression didn't change. That was somehow the most significant response in the room.
"Something else," Alex said. "Something it's calling an Aspect."
He watched the word land.
Aspect.
Eclipse closed her mouth. "What does that—"
"I don't know yet," Alex said, which was partially true. He knew what the system had told him. He didn't know what it meant in the context of this world, in the context of how people here understood power and its structure, in the context of what his family was currently looking at and trying to categorise.
"An Aspect," Vespera repeated, quietly.
"Yes."
She was silent for a long moment. Not processing-silent, she had already processed it, he could tell, the assessment had happened faster than the pause suggested. This was a different kind of silence. The kind where you knew what you were going to say next and were deciding whether to say it yet.
Alessio spoke from the wall.
"It's not entirely unprecedented," he said.
Every head in the room turned toward him.
He said it the way he said things that he had been sitting on, quietly, with the weight of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to introduce the information. "There are records. Old ones. A person who awakened without a class, without the standard formation. Who had something else instead." He paused. "The records are incomplete. Most of what was written about her was written by people who were afraid of her."
Alex said: "Who?"
Alessio looked at Vespera.
Something passed between them.
Then Vespera looked at Alex with an expression he had never seen on her face before, not troubled, not proud, not the careful warmth she usually carried.
Something older than all of those.
"There is a name," she said slowly, "that is spoken carefully in the empire. When it is spoken at all."
The candle nearest the bed flickered.
"She didn't awaken a class either," Vespera said. "And she is—"