The Academy was bigger than he'd imagined.
Kayan stood before the iron gates of "The Ather Academy" — the full name was longer, but no one bothered pronouncing it whole. Black stone walls. And above the entrance, carved into granite: a broken sword inside a ring of flame.
A broken sword. Kayan noticed that. Why would a warrior school choose a broken weapon as its symbol?
He didn't pursue the thought. He pushed the gate and walked in.
The main corridor was packed with new students. Similar ages, fresh uniforms, faces wearing carefully constructed confidence over poorly hidden fear. Kayan recognized masked fear — he'd been wearing his own version of it for years.
The difference was he'd learned not to show it.
As he walked, voices dimmed. One by one, heads turned. Not with the usual curiosity. With something else.
Recognition.
Oh. Him.
Kayan walked as though he hadn't noticed. He noticed everything.
He sat in the last row. Furthest seat from the board, closest to the door — an old habit. Not cowardice. Kayan had tried sitting in the front once, in early childhood. That day someone burned his notebook.
Door at your back means no one approaches from behind.
Psychology doesn't call it fear — it calls it adaptation.
He told himself that. He didn't fully believe it.
Professor Salar entered.
Not what Kayan expected. No imposing frame, no commanding voice. A man in his fifties, short, moving with a measured quietness as though each step had been weighed in advance. White hair, neatly kept. On his right hand, a black band wrapped around the wrist.
He sat. Said nothing.
Ten seconds of silence.
In the front rows, students began to fidget. Kayan watched. Silence unsettles people faster than shouting. He'd understood that early — very early.
Finally, Salar spoke. Calmly:
"I'm going to ask you one question. Your honest answer will determine whether you belong here."
A pause.
"What are you most afraid of?"
Students answered one by one. Failure. Death. Disappointing my family.
Reasonable answers. Socially acceptable answers.
Dishonest answers.
Kayan knew because he watched their eyes, not their mouths. In every single one of them, the words didn't match the face.
Then his turn came.
Salar looked at him directly for the first time. Brown eyes, deep-set — and inside them, something Kayan couldn't name yet.
"And you?"
Kayan was quiet for three seconds. Then he said the only truthful thing he'd been thinking since morning:
"That I'll discover I was right all along."
Silence fell across the entire room.
"Right about what?" said Salar.
"That something inside me isn't me."
Salar didn't respond. He moved through the rows, placing a small paper on each desk — the first week's schedule.
When he reached Kayan, he set the paper down.
Then, a breath before walking away, he said in a voice only Kayan could hear:
"I know what you carry, Kayan. And I knew your father."
He walked away.
Kayan sat completely still. The paper in front of him untouched.
He knew his father.
The father he had never seen. The father no one spoke of. The father who — by every account he'd ever heard — died before Kayan was born.
Or so he was told.
In his chest, the First Ghoul did not pulse this time.
Complete silence.
And Kayan had learned that silence is sometimes more dangerous than any sound.