She walked through the hallway. It stretched long and pale, washed in the dull orange glow of wards decorated the walls. The further she walked, the quieter it became, not the peaceful kind but a kind of quiet that pressed in from all sides. Stone tiles clicked softly underfoot, each one marked with faint inscriptions she couldn’t yet read. Some doors were shut tight, sealed with magic.

  It was time. This is it. She thinks The experiment.

  Even at the orphanage the word alone had weight. Research facility was never said outright, only whispered. Like a curse. Stories passed between beds after lights went out. Of children who left and didn’t return. Of strange needles and people who didn’t blink. Of bodies that came back thinner, paler, eyes no longer focusing on anything. Some of the younger ones cried just hearing about it. Others older, harder scoffed. But they too fell silent when night came, and the wind scraped the wooden window frames just a little too long. It gave them nightmares. It gave her nightmares. While her thought drifted away she hasn’t realise that she arrive in front of a black door.

  The door opened with a flick of a rune, magical door it seems, and she was led in without a word. The handlers didn’t need to push her because her feet moved anyway, pulled forward by a concoction of fear and inevitability. The room was colder than the hallway. Too bright. In the center stood a chair bolted to the floor, its leather straps hanging loose from the arms and base like waiting hands. The seat was worn. The metal beneath it stained in places she didn’t want to look at too closely. Two more figures stood nearby, dressed in white. She recognized one of them. Herr Halwen, she thought. He’d taught mana manipulation before.

  Above the chair, something worse.

  A large contraption of blackened brass and steel hung from the ceiling on a hinged rig, arms folded inward like a waiting insect. At the tip of one, gleaming beneath the light. A needle. Long. Straight. Far too large. It didn’t look like an apparatus meant for medicine. And it waited above the chair, poised and still, as if ready to drop the moment a body was strapped beneath it. Like a hammer raised above an anvil. Carved along its length were faint runic inscriptions, thin, sharp lines carved with precision and glowing faintly with a cold, steady light. Not decorative. Not comforting. These were the kind of runes that weren’t meant to be understood by children. The kind that made the needle feel less like a tool and more like a sentence.

  One of the handlers stepped forward stoic, professional, almost gentle in tone.

  “We believe that by stimulating your mana from the inside,” he began, “we can encourage both your capacity and your reserve to grow. The instrument above is designed to pierce through your body and into your soul. It will channel energy directly into your core, forcing a response.”

  He said it plainly, like reading from a manual.

  But the girl wasn’t listening anymore. Her eyes were fixed on the needle. On the impossible length of it. On the faint blue runes carved along its spine like veins of frozen lightning. On how still it was how precise like it was waiting for its moment. She heard the handler’s voice as if through water. Words broke apart. Drifted past.

  Pierce.

  Body.

  Soul.

  She couldn’t breathe right. Not because she didn’t understand. But because she did.

  They were going to drive that thing into her. Through her skin. Through her mana. Into whatever place made her her. And somewhere beneath the flood of numbness, a thought surfaced She might die. Not metaphorically. Not someday. Now. Today. In this room. In that chair. The door opened again. Not loudly. Not even slowly. Just enough to create a shift in the air. She knew the sound. The rhythm of boots that didn’t rush but never paused. She didn’t need to look to know who it was.

  Arkmarschall Leopold.

  She have seen him a few times but this time, something was different. Her hands were free, but they felt like they shouldn’t be. Her legs, untouched, but tense, as if shackles waited just outside the edge of vision. Her breath, shallow. As if her lungs didn’t trust the air anymore.

  Leopold stepped forward, his pace unhurried, his coat trailing faintly behind him. He stopped just in front of her. For a moment, he said nothing. He simply looked at her.

  “Name?” Leopold asked.

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  His voice was quiet. Measured. It didn’t rise, didn’t soften. It simply existed—like the question had always been there, waiting for her to hear it. Her lips parted. She tried to speak. But nothing came out. The words caught somewhere between her chest and her throat, stuck behind the tightness she couldn’t quite breathe around. Her mouth moved once, then again as if the answer might push its way out if only she tried hard enough. That question so simple yet unraveled her.

  He then turned to the researcher. “Subject N number four, correct?” “Yes Arkmarschall”

  Leopold looked back at her, at her eyes exactly, and then he said

  “From now on, you are Vierna, you serve House Einhart. And there is only one thing you need to do, Vierna.”

  “Endure.”

  “Just like you always did.”

  Her heart beat once, then again, high and hard in her chest like the beating of a war drum before battle. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until it broke free in a trembling rush.

  Her lips parted softly.

  “…Vierna.”

  The name sparked inside her mouth like flint striking stone, like reigniting embers long faded. It settled deep, meanings uncovered from beneath ashes, long hidden but always waiting.

  Weariness evaporated, and isolation peeled away, discarded like shed skin. Her disappointment—the ache of being unwanted, unseen—fell behind, useless now. For the first time, someone had looked at her and offered more than pity or praise.

  He had seen her clearly, like an artisan selecting obsidian from a sea of discarded stone. Volcanic glass, brittle in the wrong hands, yet waiting to be honed into a blade.

  Pride and dignity bloomed within her chest like a helleborus in winter, enduring and commanding, forcing the surrounding cold to bow and obey. Fear no longer ruled from the throne of her mind. It had been deposed, now a servant in the place it once held with an iron grip.

  She wasn’t here by accident. She had been placed, selected precisely because of her condition. And for the first time, she understood that clearly.

  She straightened her spine, enough to breathe evenly, enough to meet Leopold's gaze as he stepped aside, as handlers moved toward her with quiet certainty.

  She didn’t flinch when one gestured to the chair. Didn’t recoil when leather straps creaked. The needle loomed above; the chill remained, biting at her skin.

  But her steps were steady.

  Because now she had a name. And a name was a reason.

  She was Vierna.

  She would endure.

  She held still as the machine hummed to life.

  At first, it felt like pins pricking her from inside, a scattering of needles threading through her nerves. Then came the pressure, as if her blood was being replaced with smoke, her veins turning hollow and inflamed. The mana wasn’t being added from outside, not yet. The machine was trying to provoke her own dormant mana to awaken, to expand itself from within. Internal ignition.

  Then it surged.

  A heat bloomed from her chest. Not warmth, but a crawling, unnatural fire that spread through her ribs and licked up her throat like smoke turning to flame. It didn’t burn her skin. It burned under it. A searing pulse threaded through her bones like molten wire, too deep to touch, too wide to escape. Her lungs seized, as if the air had thickened into something she wasn’t meant to breathe. Each breath came as a gasp through embers. Her stomach coiled into a knot that refused to loosen, a twisting pressure that narrowed her vision. Her muscles trembled, not from exertion but from something inside uncoiling, something that had slept too long and now woke with violence. A tide of magic, unfamiliar and raw, scraped against the inside of her flesh, testing it, pressing outward like it didn’t belong to her.

  The light in the chamber flared briefly. Copper sigils along the braces brightened.

  “Response detected,” someone said. “Added mana level detected. Increasing the stimulation.”

  The next wave slammed through her like liquid lightning. It didn’t cut. It didn’t burn. It invaded, a violent surge that coursed through every nerve like barbed wire dragged through her veins. The pain wasn’t localized. It was everywhere. Writhing under her skin, threading into muscle, curling around bone. Her own mana felt foreign now, like something feral that had been caged too long, snapping and clawing to be free, ripping at her from the inside out. Her stomach convulsed. Acid surged up her throat, and she nearly vomited, her jaw clenched so tight it popped with a sickening crack. Her hands spasmed open, then curled, fingers twitching like marionette strings pulled too taut. Her legs jerked against the restraints, not in rebellion but as a body trying to flee itself. It was too much. It was designed to be too much.

  And still, not a single scream escaped her lips. Only the raw rasp of breath sucked between clenched teeth. Her blood pounded against her eardrums, a frantic drumbeat in the silence. Her skin was cold, soaked in sweat, but inside, everything burned.

  A researcher whispered, uneasy, “This should be overwhelming. Are the readings wrong?”

  “No,” said Halwen. “She’s just not screaming.”

  At the edge of the room, Leopold watched silently, arms folded behind his back. His gaze never left her. Vierna’s eyes met his just for a moment between pulses of agony.

  And in that moment, something clenched, not in her body, but somewhere deeper. She saw no pity in his eyes. No softness. But neither was there coldness. His gaze held weight. Not pressure, but discipline. Recognition that asked nothing, offered nothing. It only saw. Saw her pain, her silence, and did not look away.

  It wasn’t kindness she found in him. It was acknowledgment. And for her, that was rarer. Priceless. He saw her. As something real. Something worth polishing.

  That was why she didn’t scream. Not because the pain was bearable. Not because she was strong. But because she wanted to prove herself. Not to the researchers.

  But to him. To the man who looked at her and saw not a victim, but someone who endures.

  And endure she did.