The jet was silent.
Not quiet—silent.
For the first time in three days, there was no hum beneath the surface of Alarien Vey's thoughts. No phantom ticking. No static whispering behind glass. Not since the moment she Awakened had she felt this kind of stillness.
She sat alone in a luxuriously minimal cabin. Every surface was sleek, matte, and seamless. The lighting adjusted itself subtly as the sun shifted. Her senses, sharper than they had ever been, told her the entire craft was a pressure-locked vacuum shell stabilized by technology that hadn't been shared with the public. It hadn't been designed by companies or even governments.
This was the work of Awakened minds.
Others were seated throughout the cabin, spaced apart by deliberate design. Some sat in stunned silence, locked in their own thoughts and heightened intelligent. Others simply rested, visibly relieved to be somewhere that didn't scream at their senses.
Alarien had tried to study them. To read the lines of their posture, to pull meaning from their gestures. But it was like looking into fog. Even though none of them were shielding their emotions or intentions, even though many were clearly lost in thought or staring ahead without any pretense—she couldn't read them. Not like she could with her parents. Not at all.
They were the same as her now. And somehow, that made them harder to understand.
She exhaled and rested her forehead against the cool pane of reinforced glass beside her. The world stretched far below, a wash of open ocean beyond the clouds. There was no land in sight. No city skyline. Just a thin blue horizon bending into the impossible.
Her reflection stared back at her. And somehow, it still surprised her.
Her features hadn't changed much at a glance—oval face, a braid of golden-blonde hair coiled tightly over one shoulder—but everything had refined. Her cheekbones stood more defined, her skin cleared of all impurities, her posture straightened without effort. But her eyes…
They had once been bright blue.
Now they were dark. Deep dark blue. Like the ocean at midnight—depthless, reflective, quiet.
Her nearsightedness had vanished within a day of the change. Her digital addiction had crumbled with it. She hadn't touched her phone in over 72 hours, not because of discipline but because it suddenly seemed… irrelevant.
Her thoughts were too fast for swipes and scrolling.
And her mind no longer craved filler.
In the quiet hum of the cabin, her body relaxed. Not from comfort—she wasn't comfortable—but from precision. Everything around her had been designed with function in mind. Every wire, panel, and reinforced system was smarter than anything she'd seen in her family's towers. It made her feel small in the right way.
Small inside something vast.
---
It had started on a Tuesday.
She remembered sunlight breaking against her window as she leaned forward over her tablet. The world shifted—not visibly, but viscerally. The sound of her fingers tapping glass came back to her like thunder. Her lungs pulled air too rich, too sharp, and for one vertiginous moment, she thought she was going to die.
She dropped the tablet. Stumbled backward. Vomited.
It didn't stop there.
She looked out the window, heart racing, and the sky seemed to ripple. She could see the stars through the blue—not as points of light, but as meanings. Each one humming with something she couldn't explain.
In that instant, something inside her broke open.
She understood—life and death, time and fate—not as concepts, but as forces. Living. Vast. Threaded through her, bonded to her, to everything. And that understanding came not with peace, but fear.
She had wanted to reach out and grasp that infinite, echoing knowledge—but something in her pulled back. As if her soul, her mind, her self would never return the same. And deep down, she felt she had been right to fear it.
By the time she hit the floor, her father had arrived.
He didn't panic. He didn't scream. He just helped her up, jaw locked.
He knew.
He'd seen it once before. Not up close. But close enough. The Vey name opened doors—even ones guarded by secrecy. Her father had invested quietly in emerging sciences, rare education networks, fringe military intel groups. He didn't understand the Awakened. But he understood enough to know what the signs meant.
It was real. She had Awakened.
And from that moment forward, the clock began ticking.
---
The world had given her three days.
Three days since the colors began to scream, and the sky rippled with structure she couldn't name. Three days since she could taste electricity in the walls.
She had done nothing but research.
Using her father's private networks, proxy access, and a ghost terminal set up by one of his unnamed consultants, Alarien dove into the fragmented and often blacklisted world of Awakened knowledge.
But everything she found… was old.
Archived. Sanitized. Heavily redacted. The real Awakened world was sealed away now—Academy operations, active personnel, development protocols—impossible to access.
Everything available to her was obsolete.
Outdated by years, maybe decades.
Mortality rate: 67%. For first-year Awakened. The statistic wasn't taught. It wasn't official. But it was real. Buried in abandoned academic PDFs, locked behind security audits of extinct agencies, echoed in exiled forums where former Academy students spoke in half-sentences and anonymized scars.
The Academy wasn't a school. It was a funnel.
The Awakened had one year to enter a Nightmare. If they didn't, they went insane. Not in metaphor or rumor—literally. Their minds collapsed inward. Hallucinations began. Dreams turned hostile. The world around them warped until it became impossible to separate thought from perception.
One user called it "a soul folding in on itself."
The Nightmares? No confirmed scientific theory. The top hypotheses included: pocket dimensions, splintered timelines, or constructed mental trials—none of them provable. What was known is that all Nightmares contained hostile environments, unique laws, and powerful, reality-altering entities. Survival was rare. Mastery even rarer.
And "resonance?" Even less understood.
Alarien found threads of scattered research: attempts to categorize it as a neurological metamorphosis or energetic harmonization. One archived lab labeled it a "sensory-hyperintegration condition." Whatever that meant. Another journal described it as a kind of internal frequency alignment. Most of the data had been redacted. Some entire research facilities had vanished from record weeks after publishing preliminary findings.
All she knew for certain was this: It was real. It was permanent. And it was alive inside her.
There was a quote she found, buried in an old and half-deleted forum thread, unsigned and uncredited. It stuck with her:
> "It was like waking up inside a book you'd never realized you were reading. Some pages were glued shut, others whispered as you passed. Corridors stretched in directions that hadn't existed before. Nothing was truly hidden—only waiting. There were no more peaks... no more limits. Only more secrets waiting to be unearthed, more truths coiled just beneath the skin of the world."
---
She'd read the reports:
Teams of Awakened—small, focused, brilliant. A task force of four who cracked fusion ignition math over six months. A medical cohort that redesigned synaptic scaffolding for degenerative brain disorders, solving what had once been deemed inoperable. A development group that reverse-engineered deep ocean tectonic filtration after years of modeling.
Others built megastructures, advanced artificial intelligence, recovered extinct languages, and pushed forward the frontiers of architecture, medicine, physics, and ecology. None of them worked alone. None of it happened overnight, but the results were staggering.
In only three generations, the Awakened had vaulted past myth and miracle. They weren't gods. They weren't monsters.
They were the next step.
The media called them pioneers. Scientists. Wonders. But buried deep in old documents, one word kept surfacing:
Overhuman.
Not stronger. Not faster. Just… more.
And Alarien was now among them.
---
Despite all the fear, despite the hallucinations and the inevitability of the Nightmare, something in her still pulsed with excitement. A defiant ember that refused to dim.
She had always longed for adventure. Not the childish fantasy of swords and dragons, but the feeling of going somewhere—of rising, of stumbling, of becoming something so much more than what the world expected.
But she had also spent her life coddled.
Her mother had insulated her from pain, from consequence. And she—Alarien—had allowed it. Welcomed it. Even as she resented the softness, she'd also clung to it. She had feared suffering, who didn't?
Now? She couldn't escape it.
Pain and suffering weren't optional anymore. They were part of her new reality.
And the strangest part was… that thrilled her.
She wanted to climb.
But sometimes, that desire came with a whisper of fear. If there truly were no limits, then her path could stretch forever—and yet be cut short at any moment. The idea of dying with so much left unexplored, with truths still buried, with pages unread… it scared her more than she liked to admit. That was the cost of ambition in a world with no ceilings: regret was inevitable if she failed.
Not just survive. Not just thrive. She wanted to become a legend. But part of her feared she'd barely begun to live.
---
A low pulse through the cabin interrupted her thoughts. Not a sound, exactly, but a shift in air pressure. They were descending.
She sat straighter, suitcases by her side, hands resting on the reinforced composite case that held everything she owned for the next year.
Through the clouds, she saw it.
The Academy.
Not a building. Not a base. Not even a school.
It was unlike any place she'd ever seen.
Built into an artificial island crafted by Awakened engineering, the Academy had the feel of something precise, deliberate. Towers rose in smooth, sweeping arcs. The architecture was seamless, beautiful in a restrained, functional way. Everything had purpose. No wasted space. No unnecessary grandeur.
This was not made for human eyes. This was made for the Awakened.
And this would be her home.
Alarien closed her eyes, just for a moment, and whispered to herself:
> "No more peaks... no more limits." The future was bright.