A small burst of light had appeared in the center of the hall.

The door opened at the same moment, letting in extra light and adding to the distraction.

Ren had appeared.

Externally, Luna Starweaver was trembling slightly with shivers and emotion, yet she didn’t move.

Internally, she was having the most intense reaction of her entire life in a room full of people who couldn’t know it, in front of a man who didn’t deserve a single one of her emotions, wearing the same expression of perfect neutrality she had learned to carry and that her mother had called, once, ’your precious statue face’.

Lykea Starweaver would have screamed.

Luna Starweaver smiled one millimeter.

Luckily enough to express the internal mayhem.

’You have to be okay. You have to be okay. You have to be okay...’

Ren walked...

His pace was regular, the posture was correct, the clothing was appropriate to the occasion. No visible signs of transformation, no crystallization marks, no darkened veins, nothing that confirmed in any immediate or obvious way the picture Orion had spent a good hour of this session constructing.

But his head was slightly forward. Only by the degree necessary for his gaze to stay hidden in his hair. And he moved with an economy that wasn’t quite the most natural, the stoic, too deliberate motion of someone for whom each movement required a small amount of additional intention.

He reached the podium.

He stopped.

He didn’t look at anyone.

Luna had taken half a step forward. Larissa’s hand on her arm stopped her yet again, the same gesture she had been using all session, luckily still working, sadly still necessary.

Liora had her eyes fixed on him with an intensity she wasn’t attempting to conceal.

Julius was looking at the boy with the face of someone evaluating a situation on insufficient data, running the available information against what he needed to confirm and not yet having enough.

Orion was watching too, and some of the composure he had maintained for the entire session had shifted, not broken, but adjusted. He wasn’t seeing exactly what he had expected to see. The calculation behind his eyes was updating.

The master of ceremonies cleared his throat and began the reading.

The name.

The classification. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

The verified merits.

The list of documented contributions was the longest list of its kind that the master of ceremonies had read in years. Possibly the longest he had ever read.

It grew in absolute silence, each line adding to the one before it while the hall didn’t move, because the room didn’t know how to respond to these numbers when the person who had produced them was standing there just after most of them had those thoughts about him...

Luckily he was with his head down not looking at anyone.

The lands, the titles, the resources. The master of ceremonies had verified several of them twice, because the first time through he had assumed he had misread something.

He hadn’t misread anything.

The quantity was absurd. Things that tamers of full careers didn’t accumulate in decades, all of it verified, all of it documented, all of it ’formally’ impossible to dispute in the record.

Which, in the context of everything Orion had installed in the first hour of the session, did not produce the effect it should have produced.

It should have silenced the doubts. A list that long, that clean, that thoroughly verified should have been its own answer, the kind of record that made the questions asked earlier look small.

But it didn’t.

Every line was one more line of something too perfect, too complete, too impossible for a young man his age. And a ’figure so young’ standing in the center of the hall with his gaze on the floor offered nothing that made it easier to believe him as an ordinary person who had arrived here by ordinary means.

No expression directed at anyone and no physical acknowledgment of what was being read didn’t help either.

Just presence, quiet, like waiting for it to be over.

Orion saw all that and said nothing during the reading.

He didn’t need to.

The hall was doing it for him.

The silence that followed the last line of the recognition lasted exactly as long as Orion needed it to last.

Then someone from the Night faction spoke.

"A question." Not the main representative this time, a different voice, from a more lateral position, with the tone of someone asking a genuine question.

"Is there precedent for a list of this magnitude being transferred, including territories and jurisdictions of this scale, to an ’entity’ whose nature has not been verified in any way more transparent than the castle’s own internal judgment and its word?"

The master of ceremonies registered the question because registering questions was his function.

Julius responded before anyone else could.

"As I have already stated, tamer Ren Patinder is a citizen of Yano who entered the academy on his own standing and has a five-year verifiable record there. His nature has been supervised by the same instructors who oversaw every other student during that period. There is no basis for suggesting the castle managed him as an experiment of any kind, and considerably less basis for the word ’entity’ at any point."

"The official records document only what you in the castle permit to be documented," said Orion, with the calm of someone resuming an argument he had already established to his satisfaction. "Like what we witnessed in the coliseum appears in no official record because nobody has registered it yet. What we are requesting is that independent verification occur before this session proceeds to the transfer."

"You already made ridiculous accusations and you were wrong," Julius said. "The invented argument that we were concealing the tamer due to some ’corrupted appearance’ is demonstrably false now as you can see, he presents no visible corruption in his body."

He paused to breathe slowly and not explode in a passionate indignation.

"Nor any anomalous mana perceptible to anyone with sufficient sensitivity to evaluate it. If an anomaly exists, describe it precisely."

"That is not sufficient... What is visible may be precisely the problem," Orion replied, directing his gaze toward Ren, who remained still and unchanged in his position. "An illusion constructed well enough would present no visible corruption. It would present no perceptible anomalous mana. It would present exactly what we can all observe right now!"

Several faces in the hall processed that.

Those with verifiable mana vision dismissed it fast, people who had already looked and found nothing that justified the claim.

But those without it, a considerably larger portion of the room, processed it differently. The seed found different soil in different people, and Orion knew which soil he was planting in.

"That is absurd! Lord Starweaver has mana vision," Julius said. "If there is an anomaly, he can describe it with precision. Vague assertions do not constitute evidence under any verification system this protocol recognizes."

Orion looked at Ren for a moment.

"I am not certain what I am seeing," he said. "Which, given what my witness described and what we don’t yet know, seems to me sufficient reason for additional caution."

"That is the exact opposite of a precise description that supports your point," said Arturo, and the containment in his voice was visible as tension across his shoulders.

But it was enough for three or four people on Orion’s side to take the signal. They spoke in the order of people who had agreed in advance what to say and when to say it.

They "saw"...

Anomalies in the aura. Fluctuations that didn’t correspond to any documented element. Patterns that resembled what they had seen in the corrupted mutants but more organized. Even an insinuation of an elemental light illusion of very high quality.

Lies... and not consistent ones.

No two descriptions matched each other in the details.

But in the minds of the majority, all of them arrived at the same conclusion.

Arturo refuted them point by point with the efficiency of someone whose mind moved quickly and who even seemed to have prepared the responses because it was that logical, but his irritation was becoming more visible with each exchange.

Julius had more composure and added the technical framing that made most of the vague claims dissolve the moment they were asked for precision. Larissa, still unable to intervene directly, adjusted her posture in a way that reached Arturo as a reminder of a specific argument to relax, which he incorporated without the connection being visible to anyone watching.

But the damage wasn’t the kind that technical arguments repaired.

Julius saw it in the faces while he spoke. Orion hadn’t come to this session only to secure Luna’s situation. He had come with this prepared, with considerably more lead time than Julius had calculated. The attack on Ren’s public image was an independent strategy, built on months of gathered information, engineered to function regardless of whether the technical arguments held.

Because technical arguments reached the people who already knew how to listen for them.

The seeds reached everyone else. Which was, unfortunately, the majority.