Chapter 1: Threads of Fate
The air in the dressing room was thick with the smell of cold cream, bourbon, and regret. Sera Moreau held a sequin between her thumb and forefinger, the tiny disc catching the weak light from the single bulb overhead. With a sigh that was more habit than emotion, she pressed it into place on the seam of a feathered headdress, repairing the damage from last night’s finale. The cracked mirror in front of her reflected not her own face, but the ghost of the performer, Lulu, who had worn it—a smear of crimson lipstick on the glass’s edge the only evidence of the frenzy.
From below, the bass of the piano thumped a lazy rhythm against the floorboards, a familiar heartbeat. The Velvet Curtain was waking up. Sera could feel it, a low-grade buzz of anticipation and want seeping through the worn velvet drapes and the scuffed floor. It prickled against her skin, a sensation she had never learned how to name, only how to absorb. The sharp tang of a stagehand’s anxiety, the sugary burst of a chorus girl’s hope, the stale, dusty ache of a regular nursing his third gin. They all just… drifted into her, a passive intake she could no more control than breathing.
“Seraphina.” The voice at the door was a smoke-rasp, affectionate. Her aunt, Esme, leaned against the frame, a statuesque silhouette in a tailored trousers and silk shirt. “Heads-up, chérie. Unusual crowd filtering in tonight. Feels… crisp.”
Sera nodded, pushing her oversized glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Crisp” was Esme’s code. It meant the energy wasn’t the usual warm, messy human muddle. It meant guests who wore their strangeness not as flamboyance, but as a fitted glove. Guests who didn’t quite belong to the world outside the club’s heavy, blood-red door.
“I’ll keep my head down,” Sera said, her needle already moving again, a silver flicker in the dim light.
“See that you do.” Esme’s gaze lingered on her for a moment, a look that was equal parts protection and assessment, before she melted back into the hallway’s shadow.
Downstairs, the atmosphere shifted as the night deepened. Sera felt it from her perch on a stool behind the stained-wood bar, ostensibly mending a tear in the lace of a waitress’s cuff. The usual emotions swirled—drunken joy, predatory interest, performers’ jitters—but they were pushed outward, displaced by a new presence. It felt like a pocket of still air in a storm.
She glanced up.
Three figures stood just inside the entrance, letting their eyes adjust. An older man with a beard the colour of iron filings and a bearing that suggested he was used to rooms falling silent. A woman, pale and severe, her hair a platinum cap, her gaze scanning the club like she was inventorying its faults. And between them, a younger man.
Sera’s needle stilled.
He was tall, built with a lean grace that his expensive, somber suit couldn’t conceal. Raven-black hair, a shade too perfect. But it was the feel of him that arrested her. Where everyone else in the room bled their feelings into the air, this man was a closed door. There was nothing. A void. It was so profoundly unsettling that she actually took a sharp, quiet breath. The absence was louder than any scream she’d ever absorbed.
The older man, Professor Thorne, Esme had called him, led them to a table near the stage. The pale woman, Elara, sat with spine-stiff disapproval. The young man, Lucian, just… absorbed the room. His eyes, a shock of intense green even from across the smoky space, moved with analytical slowness. They passed over the glittering dancers, the rapt audience, the worn velvet, and landed, for a fleeting second, on Sera.
A jolt, electric and cold, shot down her spine. Not an emotion. A recognition. As if he’d seen the stitch she’d just hidden in the lace. She looked down instantly, her heart hammering against her ribs. When she dared to look back, he was conversing with Thorne, his profile a study in detached arrogance.
The show began. Lulu took the stage, all sinuous curves and manufactured delight. The room’s energy swelled, a warm, lustful wave. Sera let it wash over her, through her, a fullness that was almost satisfying. She watched the strangers. Thorne watched with academic interest. Elara watched with disdain. Lucian… Lucian watched as if he were reading a technical manual. His controlled blankness was a rock in the emotional current.
During intermission, the crowd’s noise crescendoed. A drunken admirer stumbled toward Lulu’s table, his intentions a sloshy, aggressive orange in Sera’s perception. Without thinking, she moved. She was small, and people rarely saw her coming. She intercepted, a polite smile on her face, a steadying hand on the man’s arm. “Another drink, sir? On the house.” She let a thread of calming intention, something Esme had taught her to weave, seep into her touch. The man’s aggression dulled, blunted by confusion and offered bourbon. She guided him gently back to the bar.
When she turned, Lucian was watching her again. This time, his gaze held. It was not friendly. It was an appraisal. He’d seen something. The lack around him shifted, stirred by a spark of pure, sharp interest. It felt like a spotlight.
Flustered, she retreated to the back hallway, toward the sanctuary of her workroom. The tarnished brass knob of the half-hidden door was cool under her palm. She slipped through, into the darker quiet of the staircase that spiraled down to the sub-basement, to the real workrooms, to where the club’s other, deeper secrets were kept.
She was halfway down the narrow stairs when she heard a sound behind her. A footfall on the top step that was too light, too deliberate.
Her breath caught. The emotional void was following her. Filling the stairwell behind her with its silent pressure.
She didn’t turn. She couldn’t. She just kept descending, each step echoing in the sudden, immense silence, feeling his green eyes on the back of her neck like a touch. The mundane world of needles and sequins was above her now. Down here, in the deepening dark, something else had begun.
Down here, in the deepening dark, something else had begun.
The silence behind her was absolute. It wasn’t an absence of sound—she could hear the distant thump of music, the creak of the old building—but an absence of feeling. That void followed, a step for each of hers. Her own heartbeat was a frantic drum in her ears, her breath shallow. She reached the bottom landing, a small concrete space lit by a single sconce, a dusty storeroom door to her left. The workroom was just beyond it.
She spun around, her back to the cold wall.
Lucian stood on the last step, his tall frame filling the narrow stairwell. The green of his eyes was almost liquid in the low light. That unsettling blankness radiated from him, a vacuum sucking at the edges of her own scrambled fear.
“You’re quite the little peacemaker,” he said. His voice was smooth, lower than she’d expected. It didn’t match the void; it was a real, physical sound that vibrated in the small space.
“This area is for staff,” Sera said, forcing her voice level. It wavered. She hated that it wavered.
“I’m aware.” He took one step off the stair, onto the landing. He was too close now. The void pressed in, making her skin prickle. “That was a neat trick upstairs. The drunk. You didn’t just talk him down. You… softened him.”
Her blood went cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I offered him a drink.”
“You offered him a suggestion,” Lucian corrected, his head tilting slightly. “And he took it. Like he’d thought of it himself. Interesting skill for a seamstress.”
He moved again, not toward her, but sideways, cutting off her path to the workroom door. It was a predator’s move, efficient and calculated. The intention behind it was still hidden, locked behind that impenetrable calm, but the action itself was a threat.
Her fear crested, sharpened into something clearer. Cleaner.
Esme’s lessons, drilled into her over countless nights in the club’s underbelly, surfaced not as thought, but as instinct. Never wait for the strike. Assume it’s coming. Act.
As he shifted his weight, preparing to speak again, she moved.
She wasn’t fast in a conventional way. She was immediate. One moment she was pressed against the wall, a frightened thing in glasses. The next, she had closed the small distance between them. Her hand, which had been clutching the folded headdress, flashed empty. The small, sharp tailoring scissors she kept in her apron pocket were now in her fist. Not as a tool. As a weapon.
She didn’t aim for his heart or his neck. She went for the threat. The space just below his jaw, where a pulse should have been throbbing.
The metal point pressed against his throat, right over his carotid. She’d moved with such silent, practiced speed that he hadn’t even begun to raise a hand in defense. He froze.
For the first time, the void around him shattered.
A shockwave of pure, unguarded sensation hit her—not an emotion she could name, but a raw blast of adrenaline-laced surprise. It was so potent, so sudden, it nearly made her gasp. Under her blade, his body went rigid. Not with fear, but with a stunned, electrified awareness. She saw his eyes widen, the pupils dilating. He looked at her, truly looked, past the glasses and the mousy clothes, and saw the person who had just put a blade to his throat without a sound.
He was visibly shaken. Not scared, but profoundly, deeply startled. His controlled mask was gone, replaced by the stark reality of cold steel against his skin.
They stood like that for a heartbeat, two. The only sound was their breathing, his now slightly more ragged than hers.
“Sera.” The voice came from the top of the stairs. Esme. It was flat. Commanding. “Lower the scissors, chérie.”
Sera didn’t look away from Lucian’s green eyes. She saw the surprise harden into a new, intense calculation. He gave a barely perceptible nod.
She stepped back, the scissors still held ready, but pointed at the floor.
Lucian slowly raised a hand and touched the spot on his neck. His fingertips came away clean. No blood. But the impression would be there. He stared at the faint mark on his gloves, then back at her. The void was rebuilding itself, but it was thinner now, crackling with a new, dangerous energy. “Not just a seamstress,” he murmured, the words almost for himself.
“Upstairs. Both of you. Now,” Esme said. Her tone brooked no argument.
The office was a cocoon of old velvet and older secrets. The sounds of the club were muffled here. Esme stood behind her heavy oak desk, Professor Thorne and Elara seated before it. Lucian leaned against the doorframe, his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on Sera with an unsettling focus. The small scratch on his neck was visible.
“You have an interesting way of greeting guests, Miss Moreau,” Professor Thorne said. His voice was calm, deep, like stones grinding together.
“He followed me into a restricted area,” Sera said, her own voice stronger now. She stood beside Esme, the scissors back in her pocket, her hands trembling slightly from the aftershock.
“He did,” Esme confirmed, lighting a cigarette. She blew the smoke out slowly. “But they’re not here for the club, Sera.”
Sera looked at her aunt, then at the three strangers. “Then what are you here for?”
Thorne leaned forward, his iron-colored beard catching the lamplight. “For you.”
The words hung in the smoky air. They were absurd. Impossible.
“Me.” It wasn’t a question.
“You are a latent,” Elara stated, her voice crisp and cold. “A being with innate, unawakened magical ability. What you did upstairs, and downstairs, is evidence. Your empathic absorption, your kinetic influence on the man’s mood, your…” she glanced at Lucian, “…instinctual defensive precision. These are not human traits.”
Sera’s mind reeled. Empathic absorption? Is that what the buzzing, the feeding was? A trait?
“You are also, we suspect, unaware of your true parentage,” Thorne continued. “Your lineage. The power in your bloodline is considerable, and it is beginning to manifest. It will attract attention. The wrong kind.”
“We are from the Astraeus Academy,” Lucian said from the doorway. His earlier shock was gone, replaced by a cool, academic intensity. “A university, of sorts. For people who are not entirely human. Where you can learn what you are. Where you come from. How to control what’s waking up inside you.”
A university. For monsters. For things like her.
“No,” Sera said immediately. The word was out before she could think. This was her life. The Velvet Curtain, the needle and thread, the quiet absorption of other people’s nights. It was strange, but it was hers. “Thank you. But no.”
Esme stubbed out her cigarette. “Sera.”
“I’m not going with them. This is insane. I’m fine here.”
“You are not fine,” Esme said, her voice dropping, becoming terribly soft. “You think I haven’t seen it? The hunger in you growing? The way you look at a crowded room now not with discomfort, but with… appetite? The club’s glamours, the distractions, they’ve been shielding you. Muffling your signature. But they’re weakening. I’m weakening.” She looked older suddenly, the lines on her face deepening. “What came for your mother will come for you. And I can’t stop it. Not anymore.”
Sera stared at her. Her mother was a faded photograph, a story of a fever that took her young. A lie. Everything was a lie.
“The world outside this building is not what you think,” Thorne said. “There are factions who would use a power like yours, untrained and vulnerable, for their own ends. Or extinguish it as a threat. The Academy offers knowledge. Protection. A community.”
“It’s not a request, Sera,” Esme said, and her eyes glistened. “You cannot hide here forever. And I can no longer protect you here. You must go.”
The finality in her aunt’s voice was a wall. Sera looked from her tired, fierce face to the three strangers. To Lucian, who watched her with that unblinking green gaze, the mark on his throat a silent testament to what she already was, even unknowing.
She thought of the void he carried, and the shock she’d felt within it. She thought of the hunger, the strange satiation she felt after a busy night. She thought of the scissors in her hand, the perfect, instinctive knowledge of where to place the point.
A seamstress. A monster. A latent. A weapon.
She had no words left. She just nodded, a tiny, defeated dip of her head.
The next morning, she stood in the alley behind the Velvet Curtain with a single, small bag. She owned little that mattered. Her best shears. A few photographs. A length of silk the color of twilight she’d been saving for no reason at all.
Esme hugged her tightly, smelling of gin and jasmine and home. “Remember everything I taught you,” she whispered into Sera’s hair. “Even the things I didn’t say out loud.”
Then she let go.
Professor Thorne held out a hand. In his palm rested a simple, grey river stone. He murmured something, the words sounding like shifting gravel, and the air before them tore.
It wasn’t a flash of light. It was a peeling back. The brick wall of the alley wavered, its reality dissolving to reveal a path through a shimmering, mist-wreathed forest under a violet sky. The air that washed out smelled of ozone and old magic.
“The way is open,” Thorne said.
Elara stepped through without a backward glance. Thorne followed.
Lucian waited, looking at Sera. “Coming?”
Sera looked back once at the club’s weathered door, at her aunt standing straight and alone in the dim alley. Then she turned, gripped her bag tighter, and walked toward the tear in the world.
As she crossed the threshold, the sensation was not of traveling, but of unfolding. The fabric of everything she knew—the comforting weight of the Velvet Curtain, the muted emotions of the city, the entire mundane tapestry of her life—was pulled apart thread by thread. For a second, she existed in the seam between realities, a place of howling, formless potential.
Then her foot landed on soft, mossy earth.
The portal sealed behind her with a soft sigh, leaving only ancient trees and strange, calls. They stood on a wooded path leading toward distant, impossible spires that pierced a lavender sky.
Lucian fell into step beside her, his earlier arrogance softened by something resembling respect. Or maybe just caution. “Welcome to Astraeus,” he said.
Sera adjusted her glasses on her nose, a habitual, grounding gesture that felt absurd here. The air here was different. It didn’t just carry sound and scent. It carried whispers of power, faint traces of emotions that tasted foreign—sharp, clean, potent. And beneath it all, within the very marrow of her bones, something dormant and vast began to stir, uncurling like a sleeping beast opening one eye.
She was not a seamstress here. She was something else. And for the first time, she was afraid not of what she might be, but of the sheer, terrifying scale of it. The journey was over. The discovery was just beginning.
The discovery was just beginning. The air in Astraeus didn’t just feel different; it had a texture. It pressed against Sera’s skin with a subtle, living weight, humming with a frequency that made her teeth ache. The path led them from the woods to the edge of a vast, open grounds. The spires she’d seen were connected by sweeping bridges of crystal and weathered stone, buildings that seemed grown rather than constructed, with veins of shimmering light pulsing behind opaque walls.
Lucian walked slightly ahead, his silence a resumed cloak. Elara had vanished, probably toward some administrative heart of the place. Thorne guided Sera with a firm, paternal hand at her back, steering her toward a lower, broader building made of dark basalt. “My offices,” he said, his gravelly voice cutting through the low thrum of the place.
Inside, it was like stepping into a giant’s library crossed with a museum of oddities. Books floated in mid-air, turning their own pages. Globes of captured lightning crackled softly inside glass spheres on shelves. The air smelled of ozone, old parchment, and something sweetly decayed. Thorne settled behind a massive desk of black wood, gesturing for Sera to sit in a chair that seemed to adjust to her shape with a sigh.
“You’ll have questions,” he stated.
Sera swallowed, her throat dry. “That’s one way of putting it.” She forced her hands to be still in her lap. “What am I?”
“A Thaumavore,” Thorne said, leaning back. The words were heavy, final. “An emotional and psychic energy feeder. A very rare kind. Most empaths simply read emotions. You… consume them. You metabolize the psychic energy of others, usually passively. It’s how you’ve sustained yourself. The Velvet Curtain was a perfect ecosystem for you—a constant, buffet of heightened human sentiment.”
The words clicked into place with terrifying logic. The fullness after a busy night. The way crowds didn’t overwhelm her, they… nourished her. She felt sick. “So I’m a parasite.”
“You’re a specialized organism,” Thorne corrected, though not unkindly. “Your mother was one, too. A very powerful one. Your aunt, Esme, is a different classification—a Glamour-weaver. She used her skills to mask your signature, to dampen your… appetite. To keep you safe, and to keep others safe from you.”
“Safe from me?”
“In deep sleep, a Thaumavore’s control slips. The feeding becomes active, not passive. It can be draining, even dangerous, to those nearby. Your consciousness seeks out the richest source of psychic material—dreams, deep emotion.” He steepled his fingers. “Esme told me about the incident with the boarder. The girl who slept for days after staying in the room next to yours. You were what, twelve?”
A cold splash of memory. Elara, a dancer’s daughter, had stayed for a month. She’d been vibrant, loud. After two weeks, she’d become listless, sleeping eighteen hours a day. They’d called it a depression. She’d left, pale and hollow-eyed. Sera had felt a gnawing guilt she’d never understood. Until now.
“I didn’t mean to,” Sera whispered, the horror metallic in her mouth.
“Of course you didn’t. It was instinct. A sleeping breath. But it is why you cannot share a room. It is why you cannot be placed in the standard dormitories.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a large, iron key, ornate and old. “For a creature like you, the Academy has separate accommodations.”
Sera stared at the key. “A prison?”
A faint smile touched Thorne’s lips. “An apartment. A private one. With shielding on the walls so your sleeping mind doesn’t wander. And a very large bed.” He paused, watching her confusion. “Thaumavores are social feeders, in a sense. The capacity is… expansive. The architecture reflects the potential. One day, you may not always sleep alone.”
The implication landed, but didn’t fully settle. She was too caught on the immediate relief. She wouldn’t have to explain to a roommate why she made them feel hollowed out. She wouldn’t have to live in fear of her own dreams.
“You’ll begin classes tomorrow. Fundamentals of Arcane Theory. History of Aberrant Lineages. Control.” He said the last word with particular weight. “Lucian will be one of your senior mentors. He understands the burdens of powerful, dangerous gifts.”
She thought of the scissors at Lucian’s throat, the void around him, the shock she’d felt within it. “What is he?”
“That,” Thorne said, standing up, signaling the audience was over, “is for him to tell you, if he chooses. Your apartment is in the Perennial Suite, west tower. Lucian will show you the way. Try to rest. Tomorrow, you learn how to be what you are, instead of it simply being something that happens to you.”
Lucian was waiting outside, a shadow against the luminous hallway. He took the key from Thorne with a slight nod and started walking without a word. Sera followed, her mind reeling.
They crossed a courtyard where silvery trees chimed softly in a non-existent wind, entered a tower, and climbed a spiral staircase that seemed to ascend forever. Finally, he stopped before a door of dark oak, marked with a single, intricate rune that pulsed softly.
He handed her the key. “The rune recognizes you now. It will only open for you, and for those you invite. It’s shielded. Nothing gets in or out without your conscious intent.” He met her eyes, his green gaze unreadable once more. “No one can hurt you in there. And you,” he added, the barest hint of something in his voice, “can’t hurt anyone else.”
He left her there, his footsteps fading down the stairs.
Sera turned the heavy key. The door opened without a sound.
The space inside was not a cell. It was vast. A main room with a high, vaulted ceiling, windows looking out over the impossible twilight of the academy grounds. Bookshelves lined one wall, empty but waiting. A small kitchen area. And through an arched doorway, a bedroom dominated by an enormous, canopied bed. It wasn’t just big. It was monumental, a landscape of blankets and pillows, easily large enough for five or six people.
The architecture reflects the potential.
She walked to the center of the empty room, the weight of the key solid in her palm. The silence here was absolute, a perfect vacuum. For the first time in her life, there was no emotional static, no psychic murmur. Just her own mind, loud with fear and a terrifying, burgeoning curiosity.
She was a creature that needed a cage to keep the world safe. They had given her a castle.
Sera dropped her small bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the vast, empty bed. She was utterly, profoundly alone. And for the first time, she could hear herself think. The hunger was quiet here, sated by the solitude, or perhaps just waiting. She lay back, staring at the canopy above, and wondered what it would be like to never be alone in this bed, to have other presences, other souls, sharing that space. The thought should have scared her. Part of her was terrified.
Another part, deeper down, felt a quiet, undeniable stir of anticipation.