Later that evening, the training courtyard is empty except for Aster. The rain has stopped, but the stone still glistens under the floodlamps, thin mist rising from the tiles. He has been running Point Burst drills for nearly an hour—the staff cracking sharp and rhythmic against the air, Will flaring white-gold with every impact. Each movement lands like punctuation in a sentence he has been writing too long in his head.

  The tether’s hum inside him is steady now, threading from his spine to the staff, responding without hesitation. He has learned to ride its recoil, to feed it just enough Faith to keep his body from tearing itself apart. Progress, Musa calls it. Sanity by repetition.

  He wipes his face with a towel, steam curling from his breath in the chill air. That’s when he notices Rohan at the edge of the courtyard.

  The boy looks better—the bruises fading to mottled green, the bandage at his collarbone clean and tight. His stance still carries the stiffness of a body half-healed, but his eyes are clearer, calmer. He doesn’t speak at first. Just watches, arms folded, weight settled carefully on one leg.

  When Aster finally drops the towel, Rohan breaks the silence.

  “You know, I think you’re trending.”

  Aster turns, deadpan. “That supposed to mean something?”

  Rohan smirks faintly. “Means half the school thinks you committed a hate crime against a trust fund.”

  Aster’s grin flickers. “You’re not wrong.” He pauses. “You doing alright?”

  Rohan snorts—then winces when it pulls at his ribs. “Been worse. Usually didn’t have an audience, though.”

  Aster nods once. He understands that. Pain is survivable; humiliation lingers like smoke. You can wash off the blood, not the laughter.

  They stand in quiet for a moment, the faint hum of the campus energy grid filling the space between words. Then Rohan speaks again, voice quieter.

  “They ever tell you what I am?”

  “A Wanderer,” Aster ventures. He hasn’t asked Lena what it means yet; the word carries the same cadence as an insult when spoken in these halls.

  Rohan chuckles under his breath, a sound more tired than amused. “You even know what that means?”

  “I’ve heard enough people say it like a slur,” Aster says. “Didn’t sound like a compliment.”

  “It’s not.”

  Rohan steps closer to the ring’s edge, staring at the chalked boundary lines as if they mark more than a training circle—maybe they do.

  “Wanderers are the ones who weren’t born into this,” he says. “Didn’t have grandfathers who carved cities into the Archipelago or bloodlines sitting on five generations of scriptures.”

  He looks up at Aster. “I heard you were only made aware of the Astral Plane by the guy who sealed that thing buried in your core away. You know how others find out about this place?”

  Aster shakes his head, having never really thought about it.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “The Legacies have an entire tradition bridging both the Astral and the Material Plane. Kids grow up knowing about this place from the time they can walk. But Wanderers? Wanderers are the ones who find their way here the wrong way—through blind luck, through half-burned grimoires, cult rumors, scraps of old knowledge, or favors bought from Legacy families. Some of us earn our passage. Some beg. Some bleed for it. Either way, we aren’t born into it. We arrive after the gates are already closed.”

  He says Legacy like a curse.

  Aster listens. The staff feels heavier in his hands.

  “The Astral Plane,” Rohan begins, “belongs to the Legacies. Always has. Their families carved empires out of the Archipelago generations ago. They’ve got ancestral scriptures older than nations, vaults of Aether formulas no one outside their bloodlines is allowed to read. Every spell, every technique, every inch of the sky up there”—he nods toward the invisible expanse above—“is built on their inheritance. Every inch of the Astral Plane that isn’t wilderness has their seal burned into it. They say they tamed the Wilds, built civilization out of chaos, so now they get to charge rent on the soul of reality.”

  Aster’s lips twitch. “Efficient, I’ll give them that.”

  Rohan doesn’t laugh. “The rest of us—Wanderers, Bastards, whoever didn’t crawl out of one of their direct bloodlines—we either make our own way here or we work under them. Guild laborers, spellwrights, astral miners. The Bastards at least have a name on a family tree. We don’t even get that. We barely get the scraps, even if we work ourselves half to death. But without those scraps, we’d have no chance of reaching past the Acolyte rank.”

  He meets Aster’s eyes. “You ever notice the Guilds always have a Legacy crest on their gates? That’s not decoration. It’s a sign of ownership.”

  Aster thinks of Musa, calm, careful Musa, who always sidesteps questions about his own past. The thought settles like grit behind his ribs.

  Rohan keeps going, quieter now. “They call us ‘free agents,’ but it’s a joke. No Wanderer gets far without a sponsor, and sponsors always collect. Most of the big names from outside the Legact structure—Guildmasters, Artifact Lords—started under a Legacy contract. Half their profit still goes back to the families.”

  Aster frowns. “So it’s caste. Dressed up as merit.”

  Rohan huffs. “Pretty much.”

  The courtyard wind stirs, catching the mist and swirling it between them. Aster finds himself studying the faint scars running along Rohan's wrist, the calluses of someone who has fought for every inch of progress.

  Rohan continues, tone softening. “That’s why I was so pissed at you before. You came from the streets, barely knew about the Astral Plane, yet you’re given a Legacy title and all the resources you could ever ask for. I wasn’t angry about the prospect of losing to you. I was angry that you would be no different from the others who were handed their power on a silver spoon.”

  Aster looks away, jaw tight. “And yet I hit back anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Rohan gives a small laugh. “But not to humiliate. You faced me like an equal, not a bug to be squashed..."

  Silence stretches again. The night hums with distant lay lines and the faint pulse of Faith reactors under the campus floor.

  Rohan exhales. “You could’ve just used the artifact and earned the respect of the rest of the Legacies.”

  He tilts his head. “But you didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Aster says. “Legacy or not, I don’t like seeing people bully those weaker than them. Used to be me more often than not.”

  That earns him a quiet, surprised laugh—brief, real. The kind that carries the relief of shared recognition.

  They stand there for a while, silhouettes against the cold blue glow of the floodlamps.

  Neither talks. Neither needs to.

  Something small and stuborn has already started to push roots—not friendship, not yet, but respect.

  Aster finally slings his towel over his shoulder. “So, if Wanderers aren’t born into scripture… what keeps you here?”

  Rohan shrugs. “Same thing that keeps anyone here. Faith, Destiny, and Power. If I can make it to Hierophant tier, I can enter the caverns. The riches buried there would be enough to establish my own Legacy bloodline, giving my future children the chance to inherit the Astral Plane like they’re meant to.” His grin returns, wry and thin. “Also, someone’s gotta remind the Legacies they don’t own every breath of Faith that moves through this plane.”

  Aster smirks. “Revolutionary of you.”

  “Careful,” Rohan says, deadpan. “If they hear you say that, they’ll revoke your dining privileges.”

  That earns a real laugh from Aster, short, sharp, unexpected.

  Two boys—an Orphaned Legacy and a Wanderer—walking the same path, muddy, bruised, and quietly aware of how absurdly unfair the whole system is.