The Outlier Wing was a place of forgetting. It clung to the back edge of Solvyr Academy like a tumor on a monument—no banners, no flame-runes, no morning bell. No one even looked at it unless told to. Kaien didn't blame them.
He hadn't spoken in two days.
No one remembered his last match.
No one remembered his name on the Ascendance Board.
When he passed instructors, they blinked at him with that hesitant frown reserved for people you almost recognize.
The world had begun to smudge him out.
The sparring chamber in the Outlier Wing wasn't a chamber at all. Just a roofless box of scorched stone, partially collapsed from some long-forgotten duel. And Kaien stood in the center, shirtless, fists trembling, his body steaming from the lashes of a failed invocation.
"Protocol Zero," he whispered again, teeth clenched. "You awake or just mocking me?"
No answer.
But the marks on his skin—the faint, fractal cracks of starforged pressure—glimmered for a moment like something ancient exhaling.
Then faded.
Professor Velle had stopped by twice, unannounced. Once to drop a half-burnt tome of Forbidden Protocol Theory. The second time to drop Kaien's meal on the floor and say:
"We are not the same thing twice. You are not the boy who failed. Stop pretending you are."
She didn't elaborate. She never did. But her eyes—always two steps past the present—lingered longer than before.
Ayari Thornveil hadn't visited.
Not once.
But Kaien had seen her. During fire-exams. During night drills. Laughing with the other Initiates in the upper courts. Always perfect. Always untouchable.
The world remembered her like scripture.
But him?
One night, a younger Outlier approached him hesitantly.
"Hey, um, what's your name again?"
Kaien looked at the kid. Blinked once.
And realized he didn't know what to say.
Not because he forgot.
But because saying it felt…
Wrong.
Not Kaien. Not anymore.
Not just Kaien.
"You'll need a name that survives when memory doesn't."
(A whisper. Protocol Zero. Or was it his own mind?)
The twist came on the 10th day.
A scroll—sealed in violet wax and laced with a reactive Protocol sigil—slid under his chamber door. It wasn't academy standard. It was older. Forgotten.
It read:
To the one who does not belong.
There is a door beneath Solvyr the world does not see.
Midnight. Alone. Leave all Protocol marks behind.
Do not speak your name.
Enter with the silence of the unwritten.
Kaien touched the sigil. It flickered… then hissed. His Protocol ring shattered.
At midnight, he walked beneath the spires of Solvyr's ancient wing, past broken archways and dormant fire-glyphs. A place even the sky had forgotten.
There was a door. Not of wood or metal—but of memory. It pulsed when he approached, as if sniffing the fabric of his soul.
When he reached for it—
The door rippled—then tore itself open.
Inside?
A chamber lit by fading stars.
And a figure cloaked in violet shadow stood waiting.
They did not bow.
They did not ask questions.
They only said:
"So. The Unwritten has come."
And somewhere, across the city, Ayari Thornveil awoke gasping—
—with a sudden, unshakable memory of a boy she shouldn't remember.