The moment my name passed through Professor Marwood’s mouth, the silence became alive.
“Aubrey Sinclair,” he said, not with warmth nor condemnation, but with the impassive gravity of a man delivering a verdict carved in stone. “Of no formal House. Bloodline… unregistered. Ashwood Academy’s first ever admitted Omega.”
The words didn’t fall like feathers—they struck like stones.
Each syllable felt like it echoed twice, once in the air and once inside my chest, a slow thunder that rolled and reverberated long after the sound itself had faded. My name. My blood. My station. Exposed. Declared. Final. And the crowd—oh, the crowd responded not with noise, but with stillness. With an almost unholy kind of quiet. One born not of reverence, but of recoil.
The ballroom, once brimming with candlel
