The Will of the Many

The Transvect detonates mid-flight over the Tensian wilds. Ulciscor² drags Vis¹ clear before it crashes, then confronts survivors at the wreck, killing one and collapsing when a strange stone arrow drops him. From the trees steps the girl from the Theatre, calling herself Sedotia³ and calling Vis by the name he buried three years ago: Diago.

She is Anguis, the rebels still fighting the Republic, and she engineered this entire encounter to plant him inside the Academy for her own purposes. Vis¹ refuses to become her instrument, hauls the unconscious Ulciscor² to the vehicle's controls, and steers the ruined behemoth onward himself. Sedotia³ lets him leave with a warning: meet her at a coming festival, or she reveals exactly who he is.

At Ulciscor's² country estate, Vis¹ is delivered to two keepers. Lanistia,⁷ a young woman who moves flawlessly despite empty eye sockets, sees by imbuing the air around her hundreds of times a second. Kadmos,⁸ the jowly steward, was once Sytrece's youngest master scholar before the Hierarchy proscribed and enslaved him.

Lanistia's⁷ methods are merciless: she ambushes him in his sleep to test recall under pressure and thrashes him bloody with a switch to prove how outmatched he remains.

In a concealed cellar she unveils an illegal replica of the Academy's Labyrinth, a shifting stone maze steered by a stone-studded bracer that demands flawless precision. Vis¹ shatters control stones, bleeds, and slowly sharpens. He learns Lanistia⁷ lost her sight in the very Iudicium that killed Caeror.

Ordered to a staged naval battle in Caten's colossal arena, Vis¹ is led through the sewers to meet the Anguis leader Melior, who proves to be Estevan,¹³ one of his dead father's most trusted advisors. Sedotia³ forces a blood-imbued stone stylus into his flesh. When Estevan¹³ unleashes an unimaginable pre-Cataclysm power, bursting whole sections of the crowd into red mist and slaughtering tens of thousands, Vis¹ alone can approach him unharmed.

Pressing the spike to his old friend's¹³ throat, Vis pleads with him to stop. Instead Estevan¹³ drives the blade into his own brain. The Republic hails Vis¹ as Catenicus, the hero who ended the massacre and killed its most wanted enemy. He has never felt more like a fraud.

Vis¹ finally reaches the Academy, with its rigid caste of classes: Seven at the bottom, Three the elite peak. Within an hour he shatters the nose of Eidhin,⁹ a hulking, surly Sixth, to stop him bullying Callidus,⁵ the sharp, self-mocking Seventh assigned to guide him.

Striking a superior should mean expulsion, but Vis¹ tricks the barely-Common-speaking Eidhin⁹ into unwittingly accepting a binding Threefold Apology, escaping with only nightly stable-mucking penance. He later learns the ambush was quietly arranged by Veridius⁶ himself.

Callidus⁵ becomes his first genuine friend, while Emissa,⁴ the warm, quick-witted Third he first met dazed in the infirmary, keeps appearing to help him shovel manure. Beneath the routine, Vis¹ measures walls and plots how to reach the forbidden ruins.

Promoted into Class Six, Vis¹ collides with Praeceptor Dultatis,¹⁸ who nurses an old grievance against the Telimus name and refuses to advance him no matter how brilliantly he performs. Paired with Eidhin,⁹ Vis¹ runs the Labyrinth flawlessly by barking commands in the dead Cymrian tongue, only to be disqualified on a technicality.

Callidus,⁵ whose father is the powerful Censor, secretly reveals the truths Vis¹ needs: the Republic teeters toward civil war among its three senatorial factions, and for four consecutive cycles students have died during the Academy's final Iudicium, their deaths quietly buried under bribes and silence.

Vis¹ grasps that advancement through merit alone is impossible here. Cornered and seething, he resolves to gamble everything and scale the boundary wall to the ruins beyond.

One night Vis¹ scales the spiked boundary and hikes to an excavated ruin east of the Academy. Descending a rope, he finds tunnels of stone scrawled with luminous green script, diagrams matching the Labyrinth's control bracer, and a vast hall lined with naked corpses impaled on obsidian blades.

When he brushes a bronze plate, a shimmering map of the island blooms in three versions, one whole, one subtly altered, one blasted to a barren crater, while the eyeless dead whisper in eerie unison: Obiteum is lost, do not open the gate, synchronous is death.

Veridius⁶ and an assistant nearly catch him inside. Vis¹ flees, slicing his palm on the wall, and races back before dawn. Only Eidhin,⁹ awake and reading, witnesses his bloodied return and silently covers for him.

At the Festival of the Ancestors, Vis¹ joins the Telimus family at their mountain crypt and meets Ulciscor's² wife for the first time. She is Relucia, and she is Sedotia,³ the Anguis agent who shot Ulciscor² and orchestrated everything from the start.

Behind a giddy public performance she confirms her true design: she wants Vis¹ to win the Iudicium and seize a position of influence, promising to murder his friends if he refuses. She admits Estevan¹³ sacrificed himself deliberately and that the naumachia massacre was a calculated wound to the Republic.

Reeling, Vis¹ borrows an imbued Will-grapple from Ulciscor,² rides the underside of a departing Transvect across the sea, and swims to Solivagus's far shore to investigate the second, larger ruin, all while pretending he never left the festival.

The far ruin conceals a colossal dome of red glass that opens only to a phrase drawn from Caeror's coded letters. Inside, a hollow-eyed servant named Artemius offers a control bracer and names the whole structure a test: cross the Labyrinth to reach a gate leading to places called Obiteum and Luceum.

When Vis¹ has the dead demonstrate, swirling storms of black obsidian shards, the Remnants, tear them to paste. He also reunites with an alupi, one of the island's giant intelligent wolves, that he once saved as a wounded cub and named Diago;¹⁵ the beast tolerates him yet still bites.

Vis¹ studies a warning inscription he cannot fully translate and retreats, now certain Veridius⁶ has engineered the entire Academy as a machine to find someone capable of surviving that maze.

Back at the Academy, Vis¹ needs the Praeceptors' notice to climb past the obstinate Dultatis.¹⁸ When a Class Four student dies and a slot opens, Vis¹ stakes his advancement on a training duel against Ianix, the reigning youth champion, using Will-linked Amotus armor he has never worn.

Drawing on years of real swordwork from his concealed princely childhood and hard nights in the Theatre, and coached secretly by Emissa⁴ and Eidhin,⁹ he outfights Ianix even after Dultatis¹⁸ rigs the equipment against him.

Enraged by the cheating, Vis¹ smashes the boy's helmet against the stone until it buckles. He wins and advances to Class Five, but the entire school now watches him with wary dread, seeing not a promising scholar but a killer barely restraining his temper.

Advancing into Class Four under the tireless Praeceptor Scitus,¹⁹ Vis¹ attends the raucous Festival of Pletuna in Caten, where Relucia³ summons him once more.

She orders him to infiltrate a Military summit soon to be held on his conquered homeland and drops a staggering revelation: Military itself secretly armed the Anguis for the naumachia massacre, sacrificing its own people to tighten its grip on the Senate. That same night Aequa,¹⁰ the top-ranked Fourth convinced Vis¹ has been cheating with concealed Will, springs a staged mugging meant to force him to defend himself with hidden power.

Vis¹ beats the attackers off with fists alone, exposing her false accusation. Scitus¹⁹ strips Aequa's¹⁰ ranking for the reckless gamble, and Vis¹ gains a bitter rival who will slowly, grudgingly, become something like an ally.

The Military summit convenes on Suus, the island kingdom Vis¹ fled as a boy, now repainted in Republic colors, his family's palace defaced with Catenan friezes. Posing as a proud student, he endures senators joking about the bloodless conquest that hanged his parents and sister.

He saves Emissa⁴ from a killing riptide, and marooned together in a sea cave they finally become lovers. In the palace's secret childhood tunnels he is found by Fadrique,¹⁴ his father's old advisor, now a reluctant Sextus caretaker who has hidden relics of the murdered royal family.

Fadrique¹⁴ confirms the executions and grieves with him through the night. Eavesdropping on the summit, Vis¹ learns Military intends another sponsored Anguis strike, using a doomed ship crewed by expendable men as bait.

Callidus⁵ finally confesses why he languishes in Class Seven: years ago he stole classified records from his father the Censor to warn Belli,¹¹ a brilliant, glacial Third, and she has blackmailed him ever since, holding papers that could destroy his entire family.

To rescue his friend⁵ and vault classes at once, Vis¹ baits the proud Belli¹¹ into a public Foundation match, wagering his own allegiance against her rank. Trained in the strategy game since childhood, he steadily traps her, then quietly offers a stalemate in exchange for Callidus's⁵ documents.

She surrenders them, Callidus⁵ spirits the evidence away, and Vis¹ crushes her anyway to seize her place in Class Three. Belli¹¹ flees the hall in tears, her reputation ruined, and Vis¹ takes one more step toward the deadly Iudicium.

The Iudicium scatters the six Class Three students across Solivagus's wilds to seize the Heart of Jovan and race it home, each commanding two chosen juniors while safety teams supposedly watch from the trees. Vis¹ picks Callidus⁵ and the now-trusted Aequa.¹⁰

Ambushed early by Iro¹⁷ and Belli,¹¹ he is beaten, bound, and stripped of the medallion that keeps him in the contest, while Aequa¹⁰ pretends to defect to preserve their plan. She slips back that night, frees Vis¹ and Callidus,⁵ and reveals she has planted a tracker in Iro's¹⁷ food to eliminate his whole team.

Since the trial is rigged against a boy who can track no one, Vis¹ steals a tracking plate from two guardian Sextii, then quietly slips away alone toward the forbidden dome, telling his friends he was merely delayed.

Alone, Vis¹ crosses the boundary river to the red dome and finally runs the lethal Labyrinth toward the gate. Midway he stumbles on Belli's¹¹ mutilated corpse pinned to the wall, a horror that nearly costs him his life as he loses his count.

Passing through a ring of bronze blades, he is torn apart and reassembled, waking to a single word cut bleeding into his own arm: WAIT, then RUN. Unseen forces slaughter the eyeless guardians blocking his return, and the grown wolf Diago¹⁵ hurls himself into the pursuing husks so Vis¹ can escape.

He flees clutching fragments of an inscription he cannot decode, his arm blackening from a wound and something stranger, dawning on the terrible suspicion that whatever waits beyond that gate reaches across separate worlds.

Vis¹ discovers the safety teams butchered, their skulls crushed, and realizes the sponsored Anguis attack has begun. Warning Indol¹² to flee, he climbs a ruined tower where Emissa⁴ is stealing the Heart, and helps her kill an Anguis Sextus sent to murder him. Then she glimpses his tainted, blackened blood, weeps, and drives an obsidian dagger into his stomach, hurling him from the tower to a death that should be certain.

He survives the fall; the wolf¹⁵ drags him ashore. He finds Callidus⁵ tortured and dying, carries him for hours through the forest, and reaches the Academy only after his friend has gone cold in his arms. Laying the body at Veridius's⁶ feet, Vis¹ slams the Heart of Jovan into place and collapses, the Iudicium's bloodied victor.

Vis¹ wakes days later to find his rotted left arm amputated, the price of blood poisoned by the gate. Veridius,⁶ who has been quietly shielding him, confesses the true stakes: everything on Solivagus exists to prevent another world-ending Cataclysm, and he needs Vis's¹ help.

Sickened by Belli's¹¹ death and Emissa's⁴ blade, Vis¹ refuses to trust him. Knowing now that Military secretly fueled the massacre, he cannot stomach joining them either.

Instead, defying Ulciscor's² expectations and his own long-held escape plan, the new Domitor¹ asks to serve the Censor's office, where all the Republic's information flows, resolving to make those responsible burn. On his bedside sits a crudely carved toy ship bearing the name Diago,¹ smuggled from a home he can never return to.