The Vortania Kingdom’s capital, Citadel, was known to have two faces, two sides of the same coin. The first was carved from polished stone and padded with red carpet and velvet cushions. Its walls were lit with magic lanterns, and rune enchantments were engraved upon even the simplest of items. Nobles wore smiles like masks, dined beneath massive crystal chandeliers, and danced in luxurious, spotless halls.

  The second face, though, Thalia knew all too well.

  It reeked of blood and sewage, the air always filled with the faint taste of rusting old metal. The little magic that was there was faded and flickering or gone altogether. The alleys and side streets were populated with malnourished children and rabid rats, where there was no laughter to be heard nor the sound of children playing. They were silent, watching and waiting, eyeing every passerby and assessing whether they would be the next source of food for the day, or someone to run from if they wanted to survive. If the footsteps got too close, the scrape of metal on stone and clinking greaves that only came from the guard, the children vanished in the blink of an eye, knowing well what it meant to be caught.

  That’s where Thalia had grown up, living on these streets and in these back alleys for most of her life.

  But once, ever so briefly, Thalia had known the first face. The one gilded in opulence and fake smiles.

  She remembered fragments, brief glimpses of peaceful days gone past. A garden full of beautiful flowers and wonderful little trees, strung up with glass chimes that sang like morning song birds in the gentle breeze. Her father’s hands, steady and warm, ink-stained from working with spellforms all day. Hands that seemed so large, yet so gentle. Her mother’s voice, bright and angelic in its maternal warmth, a soft symphony of love echoing in Thalia’s ears with every word she spoke.

  The House of Aletheia. A noble name, once spoken with respect and awe, held in high regard. It wasn’t lost in war, but smothered in silence, all that remained the ashes of a once bright House. Ashes, and Thalia herself.

  Treason, they said, though it was nothing but a purge dressed in law and pretty words. Other nobles whispered of corruption, dabbling in dark arts, and the ramifications of the bloodline that saw mana involved in blacklisted magic. Thalia’s father’s execution was swift. Her mother’s exile was slow. Thalia, only six years old at the time, was simply collateral damage, quickly forgotten in the wreckage and never spared a second thought again.

  No one knew or cared when her mother faded. Day by day, she withered, as if grief hollowed her out from the inside. Thalia tried her best, fetching water, begging for herbs, stealing what food she could. She had even resorted to the old, long forgotten prayers she remembered her father teaching her. It didn’t help. And one, cold winter night in the small little room of their run down hut, her mother stopped breathing.

  Thalia buried her with her own hands, the grave shallow with the deep chill of frost in the ground. She was ten.

  After that, memory lost its warmth, and emotions their usefulness. Not all at once, but gradually. Emotion dulled like iron in the rain, rusting around the edges. Memories once cherished slowly faded. She stopped crying not out of strength or growth but necessity. There was no place for sorrow or grief in this world. That was a luxury for people who could afford irrelevant things such as feelings.

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  Survival did not permit softness in this world.

  Thalia scavenged, stole, and adapted. She slept in the old forgotten places of the city—hidden crevices in run down buildings, molded over atriums, cellars reeking of waste and alcohol, ducts and gutters washed clean after the rain. Her hair grew long and matted, her fingers calloused, and her voice, unspoken with no one else left for her but silence, withered.

  Then, one fruitless day of gathering and begging turned into a desperate night of stealing and thievery, and her entire world was flipped upside down.

  Thalia had fled after lifting a coin purse from a drunken tavern goer, avoiding the guardsmen and their dogs by ducking through alleys, clambering over crumbling walls, and finally throwing herself into the rundown hollow of a collapsed alchemist’s shop. The air stank of scorched parchment and rancid, molding alchemical components. Runes, half-burned and fading away, flickered weakly along shelves and countertops. Collapsing behind one of the broken shelves, her breath came quick and sharp, the kind that cut on its way in.

  Then the world moved.

  Not in the physical sense, but in her vision all the same. The shadows shifted, deepened, and nebulous threads curled in the air, shimmering like spider silk. Some drifted lazily, others twined with frantic purpose. They wrapped around splintered beams, bled into stone, and coiled around her.

  She blinked. Once. Twice. Still there. It wasn’t a trick of the light, wasn’t a hallucination…at least, she didn’t think it was.

  It was mana. Not guessed at, not inferred, not sensed, but *seen*.

  In that moment, something ancient stirred within her blood, a long forgotten gift from the days of yore. The Aletheian gift was born again, opening its eye and washing the world before her in a whole new light.

  From then on, Thalia followed the threads, studying them. When a street mage prepared his act, she saw the mana coalesce before the spellform took shape. When a drunken mercenary drew his blade in front of the local tavern, she saw the lines of mana flare with power before his body was reinforced.

  No one taught her. No one was there to do so, so she taught herself.

  Thalia memorized patterns from discarded scrolls and scavenged parchments, long before she was able to enter the libraries around the capital. She drew spellforms and circuit maps in the grime of back alleys and collapsed buildings. When her tested spellforms didn’t work with simple grime, she tried with stolen chalk, then ash, then her own blood when nothing else worked. Learning what she could from what little she could scrounge together, Thalia carved the beginnings of her own Mana Matrix, the foundation and basis of all magic, from the lowest pits of the slums—every failure a lesson and every success a celebrated miracle.

  It was not without consequences. In such a poor, uncontrolled environment as the city slums, Thalia’s efforts were rewarded with a suffering body. Nosebleeds, fevers, and seizures, to say the least. Every incorrect circuit sequence she tried was met with rejection and pain.

  Pain was an excellent teacher, though.

  By thirteen, Thalia could spot a spellform taking shape and determine its type long before it was cast. By fifteen, she could mimic reinforcement techniques just from watching others’ use of them. By sixteen, she was able to finally stabilize her own Mana Matrix. It was crude, unrefined, but functional. By the time she reached eighteen years old, Thalia had reached her goal, and was ready for the Academy.

  The Grand Royal Academy—where bloodlines meant nothing and potential meant everything—opened its gates to her. She did not arrive in ceremonial robes, but they weren’t torn old rags, either. Thalia walked through the Academy’s prestigious gates wearing the dignified uniform of the most well established institution in the Vortania Kingdom. She did not announce her name. The instructors saw her scores. The other students saw her silence. No one saw what lived behind her storm-colored eyes. They would. Because she had not come for revenge. That word meant little to her now—too loud, too theatrical.

  She came to take back what the world insisted she had no right to: Truth. Power. And a name no longer whispered in fear, but spoken in full. Thalia Aletheia.

  The ghost in the ash.