Dawn gnawed at the Academy gates like a starving beast, its pale light seeping through cracks in the iron as if reluctant to enter. The towers loomed against the sky, jagged silhouettes that looked less like places of learning and more like the teeth of some ancient leviathan. The fog clung to the stones, whispering against the walls, and Shiro woke with the taste of dread already in his mouth.
On his desk lay another folded letter one he must've not seen last night. He sighed, weary of cryptic summons, certain it was another of Kuro's deceptions, another mask. He broke the seal with bitter resignation. But the words inside stole his breath.
It was Aki. Her handwriting was shaky but alive, her words filled with warmth he hadn't dared hope for. She told him of healing, of how much better she felt under Valeria's parents care. She wrote that she hoped to see him once Valeria returned. She admitted she had been wrong about them, wrong to say Kuro and Valeria were only using them. She said she had seen something different, something real. And then the line that broke him.
You and Kuro are brothers.
That's what you are.
We are family.
So Trust each other.
Shiro pressed the letter to his chest, tears burning his eyes. It was bittersweet, her faith in Valeria was a balm, her hope a lifeline. But her plea to trust Kuro was a wound. He wanted to believe it, but the contradictions were too sharp, the masks too many. He trusted his mother. He trusted Aki. But Kuro? Not yet. Not until he knew the truth.
The day began with Kael's droning lecture. Shiro sat stiff in his new uniform, scarlet and black with gold accents, the fabric heavy on his shoulders. Reo approached before the lesson, his expression uncharacteristically soft.
"I owe you an apology," Reo said, voice low. "When I lose, I become bitter... Its unbecoming of my house. I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that."
“Its alright happens to the best of us don’t worry about it”
He glanced at Shiro's uniform and gave a faint smile. "Nice uniform its about time you looked like one of us."
Shiro thought of Kuro's warning, the squeeze of his tunic in the library, the whispered truth about masks. Is this another fa?ade? he wondered. But he dismissed it. Reo's apology felt real enough.
"The formula," Professor Kael intoned, his posture at the chalkboard rigid as a posted guard, the stiff, high collar of his robes obscuring his throat completely. He tapped the board where a string of symbols swam in a confusing dance. "Is not merely calculation. It is interpretation." He turned, and the movement released another soft, whistling sigh. "The angle of incidence against the atmospheric refraction at a given latitude…" he paused, his pale, assessing eyes sweeping the room, "who can tell me the variable for the Astralon capital in winter?"
Silence.
Shiro stared at his notes, where his own attempts at the formula lay in a smudged, incoherent tangle. The numbers refused to align in his mind the way the stars did in the sky.
A quiet sigh came from his left.
Reo leaned over, his own parchment pristine. "You've inverted the refractive index," he murmured, his finger pointing to a line in Shiro's work. His tone was helpful, but it carried a subtle, unshakeable condescension, the sound of someone explaining something simple to a very slow child. "See here? The value 'n' is derived from the air density, which you've taken from the summer tables. We're in the Frost cycle. Use this column." He slid his own chart over, the numbers organized with brutal clarity.
Shiro glanced at him. The apology had seemed genuine, but this assistance felt like a performance of its own. Is he helping, or is he proving he can? Shiro wondered, the ghost of Kuro's warning about masks whispering in his ear.
"Thanks," Shiro muttered, beginning to copy.
"Don't just copy," Reo said, a little sharper. "Understand it. Otherwise, the next problem will flatten you, and I won't be here to translate." He said it like a concerned tutor, but the subtext was clear. Your understanding is my burden.
Kael's eyes swept the room. "Malkor. Since you seem to be conferring, explain the application to stellar parallax."
Shiro's mouth went dry. He looked at the formula, at Reo's perfect notes, and his mind blanked. He saw the numbers, but the logic that tied them together was a locked door.
Reo shifted slightly, drawing Kael's gaze. "Professor, if I may? The parallax correction is embedded in the third term, which adjusts for the observer's orbital position. Malkor was just clarifying the seasonal modifier's effect on that term." He spoke smoothly, deflecting the question while showcasing his own knowledge. It was rescue, but it was also a demonstration. See? I am the competent one.
Kael's gaze lingered, unimpressed by the theatre. "Adequate, Lord Veyne. Malkor, see that you achieve clarity on your own time. The heavens do not offer collaborators during an exam."
The lesson moved on. Reo gave Shiro a small, tight smile that didn't reach his eyes. The help was real, but its texture was all wrong. It wasn't the passionate, frustrated corrections of the shack. It was polished, public, and it left Shiro feeling more like an invalid than a student. He missed the brutal, honest wrongness of his own mistakes.
When class ended, Shiro asked Reo quietly, "Where's Kuro?"
Reo frowned. "Why do you care?"
"I just want to know," Shiro said flatly.
Reo hesitated, then answered. "He's at the palace. His father's orders."
Shiro blinked confused. "The palace?"
Reo's confusion sharpened. "Do you not know who he is? Despite being your cousin?" The question was a red flag in Reo's mind.
What sort of cousin didn't know?
Shiro shook his head.
Reo's voice dropped, heavy with revelation. "He's Prince Kuro Oji. The heir to Ryo Oji, the Butcher King. They call him the Black Prince. The sharpest blade in the Academy."
The titles were like physical blows. Prince. Oji. Heir. They crashed into the image of the boy in the shack, the boy with the river stone, the performer in the library. They fused into something monstrous and gilded.
Reo continued, his voice low and edged with a strange mix of awe and contempt. "His cruelty isn't random. It's a tool. He purges the academy of weakness every time his guardian is away. Last year, thirty five students left, resigned, or were 'encouraged' to pursue other studies after a term of his attention. He calls it curation. Weeding the garden."
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Shiro's mind was reeling. "Why are you telling me this?"
Reo's gaze was calculating, his polite mask firmly in place, but his eyes were sharp as glass. "Because you asked. And because you seem... unaware. You wear the Malkor name, you have his guardian's sponsorship, yet you don't know the most basic fact about the boy you apparently spent time with in the city?" He let the question hang, a delicate trap. He didn't say slums. He didn't have to. His careful phrasing, the city and the slight emphasis on apparently spoke volumes. He was probing, testing the boundaries of Shiro's story without revealing his own suspicions.
"He was just Kuro to me," Shiro said weakly, the truth feeling dangerously thin.
"Just Kuro," Reo repeated, a faint, knowing smile touching his lips. It was the smile of someone watching a poorly told lie unravel. "How novel for him. To be 'just' anything." He leaned in slightly, his tone conspiratorial yet cold. "Let me be clear, Malkor. That uniform doesn't change what you are to him. You are either a new toy or a new test. A prince doesn't have friends. He has assets and obstacles. I'd advise you to figure out which you are, quickly. Before you become one of the weeds."
The warning was delivered with perfect, polite concern. But beneath it, Shiro could feel Reo's mind working, fitting the jagged pieces together: the rough hands, the unfamiliarity with courtly basics, the shocking ignorance of royal lineage, the intimate yet fraught connection to the Prince. Reo didn't know the full truth, but he knew a facade when he saw one. And he had just identified Shiro as a living, breathing crack in Prince Kuro Oji's armour. That made Shiro either very interesting or very dangerous. Reo's internal suspicion was now a high, silent wall between them, all the more impenetrable for being hidden behind a mask of helpful counsel.
The words hit Shiro like a hammer. The mask had a name now. The cruelty had a crown. But despite this the classroom was peaceful without Kuro. No barbs, no staged cruelty. It felt like respite.
Reo introduced Shiro to a cluster of nobles, and together they attended Harken's lesson. The skeletal professor guided them through telescopes, demanding precise alignments. Shiro was terrible at it. His hands shook, his angles skewed. The nobles laughed, but it wasn't cruel, it was the laughter of classmates, sharp but ordinary.
"Again, Malkor," Professor Harken's reedy voice cut through the observatory's chill. "Your alignment is three arcminutes off. You are looking at Castor's twin, not Castor itself. Precision, boy. Not approximation."
Shiro's eye ached from squinting into the brass eyepiece. The world was reduced to a circle of blurred light and the relentless, tiny gears of the equatorial mount. His hands, calloused from hauling buckets and gripping chisels and swords, were too coarse for this delicate work. Every tiny adjustment was too much or too little.
"Let me," said Elara, the daughter of some minor count, nudging him aside with a friendly hip check. Her fingers danced over the knobs. "You're fighting the fine adjustment. You need to breathe out, then turn. Like this." In seconds, the blur snapped into a crisp, brilliant point of light. "See? Castor. Now try Pollux."
It was help, but it was also a removal. He was being gently edged out of his own failure. The other nobles in their group, Lin and Lady Mara, watched with amused tolerance. Their laughter when his stars vanished wasn't malicious, but it was constant. A running joke of his incompetence.
"Imagine if the Black Prince were here," Lin chuckled quietly as Shiro fumbled again. "He'd have taken the telescope apart by now and carved his initials on the lens for wasting his time."
"Don't," Lady Mara said, but she was smiling. "Prince Kuro would just stare at you until you did it right out of sheer terror. Simpler."
They spoke of Kuro like a natural disaster, a fearsome, accepted part of the landscape. Their humour was a way of mastering their own fear of him. Shiro said nothing, keeping his eye to the lens, trying to filter their words from the task. He finally managed to centre Pollux, his arms trembling from the strain of minimal movement.
Shiro clenched his jaw, forcing his eye back to the brass eyepiece. The stars themselves were clear, steady, eternal, but the tools they gave him to see them were lies, twisted by decree and precision he could never master. It struck him as bitter irony: the heavens were honest, yet the Academy demanded he use instruments designed to confuse, to make him fail. The laughter around him wasn't cruel, but it carried the same weight, mockery born not from the stars, but from the cages built to hold them.
"There! You've got it!" Elara said, patting his back. The praise felt earned, and for a moment, the shared struggle against the instrument felt like camaraderie. It was simple. He was the clumsy one; they were the skilled ones. There were no hidden layers, no double meanings in their teasing. It was the ordinary, exhausting work of learning, and in its mundane difficulty, he found a sense of relief. No one here was performing a tragedy. They were just bad at telescopes. For the first time, Shiro felt part of something normal.
After class, Shiro climbed to the rooftops. Not because Kuro had told him to, but because he wanted to. He gazed at the real stars for hours, cataloguing truths, comparing them to the King's mandated charts. The differences were mockery. The lies were endless. But the stars themselves were steady, constant.
He worked methodically, his finger tracing from parchment to sky and back. Cassiopeia: West tilt. Yes. He checked it off. Polaris: Declination 61° North. Yes. Each confirmation was a quiet victory, a tiny act of rebellion against the lie bound world below. Ursa Minor's tail: elongated, curling. Yes. But the work was lonely. In the shack, this would have been a whispered conversation with Aki, or a heated argument with Kuro. Here, it was a silent, monastic ritual. The immensity of the truth was crushing in its solitude. He wasn't just learning the stars; he was unlearning a kingdom.
He found the discrepancy near Lyra. The new King's chart showed the harp's frame with one string snapped, a deliberate break in the pattern. The true constellation showed the string whole, a faint but unbroken line of stars. Aki's story floated back: Lyra's hymns... they didn't just comfort. They arranged things. Was the broken string a metaphor? A statement that such harmony was not permitted? That order itself must be flawed to reflect the current reign? A deep, weary anger settled in him, colder than the wind. This wasn't just vanity. It was vandalism. A deliberate mutilation of meaning itself.
He lay back on the cold lead, the stars wheeling above in their silent, truthful dance. For hours, he just watched, letting their constancy soothe the turmoil in his chest. They were the only things in his life that hadn't lied, hadn't changed, hadn't worn a mask. Up here, with the evidence of the conspiracy laid bare above and below him, he felt a terrifying clarity. He was small, but he was seeing truly. And in a world of lies, that felt like the first real power he'd ever held.
For once, the day had been just a day. No cruelty, no masks, no cages. A day of learning, of laughter, of quiet discovery. Shiro clung to it, fragile and precious. He looked up at the sky, whispering to himself, "Maybe it isn't all bad."
But as the stars wheeled overhead, his heart ached. He wished for Valeria. He wished for Aki. He wished for family. The clarity of the rooftop was a cold comfort. It didn't change the reality waiting below. The Black Prince. The Butcher's heir. The boy from the shack. They were all the same person, and Shiro could no longer pretend otherwise. Understanding the lies in the stars was simple math compared to understanding the lie of a person.
He had two choices, he realized, both terrifying. He could retreat. He could play the meek, ignorant Malkor cousin, avoid Kuro, cling to Reo's conditional help and the ordinary cruelty of the other nobles. He could survive, maybe even learn, but he would always be looking over his shoulder, always wondering which face was real.
Or he could seek the truth. Not the celestial truth, but the human one. He could answer the next summons. He could confront the boy behind the prince, the prisoner inside the cage. It was a risk that could get him broken, expelled, or worse. But the not knowing was its own kind of death. Aki's letter felt heavy in his memory. You and Kuro are brothers. She saw a thread he couldn't grasp. Valeria believed in it enough to tie their fates together. They saw a reflection he was too close to see.
Shiro stood, his limbs stiff from the cold. He looked down at the academy, a maze of stone and secrets, and then up at the uncaring, truthful stars. He couldn't hide on the roof forever. The sky offered no answers, only questions written in light. The answers, the terrible, human answers, were down in the dark with a boy who wore a crown like a collar and a mask like a second skin.
He would go to the rooftop when Kuro was back. Not because he trusted Kuro, but because he no longer trusted his own fear. He had to know which was the performance: the cruelty, or the kindness. His survival, he understood now, depended on knowing what was real.
He whispered into the wind, voice raw and trembling: "If I don't confront him, I'll never know. And not knowing is worse than death."
The words hung in the night like a vow, binding him to the terrible choice waiting below.
Will Shiro's New Friendships Last?
