The Will of the Many

Vis begins in the bowels of Letens Prison, guiding a Governance agent, Sextus Hospius, to interrogate a Sapper-bound prisoner. The encounter exposes the Hierarchy’s machinery—Sappers that drain Will—and brushes a secret Vis must hide: contact with a Sapper barely affects him. Questions in an old tongue about Caeror, Obiteum, Luceum, and a gate hint at a mystery stalking the Academy. That night at the Theatre, Vis is punished with a bout against a ceding Sextus; he fights greased and naked to foil imbuements, weathers taunts about his scars and past, and explodes in a ruthless counterattack that forces the Theatre’s owner to fabricate a cheating scandal to keep the Hierarchy away.

The next day the visitor from the prison reveals himself: Quintus Ulciscor Telimus, a Military senator. He unmasks Vis’s stolen learning, demands a ceding test that Vis refuses, deduces Vis never underwent the Aurora Columnae, and offers adoption in exchange for cooperation. On the Transvect to Caten, Ulciscor recruits Vis for a covert mission: infiltrate the Religion-controlled Academy on Solivagus, quietly probe Principalis Veridius Julii, and learn what the Academy hides among pre‑Cataclysm ruins. Midflight, the Transvect explodes. Ulciscor saves them in a perilous leap; at the wreck, he kills a lying raider, then is felled by a strange arrow. An Anguis archer—Sedotia—forces a parley with Vis, claims the ambush was accelerated to recruit him as Domitor, and gives him a blood-marked stylus for protection before reinforcements arrive. Vis drags the unconscious Ulciscor into the cockpit and, guessing at unfamiliar controls, flies them away.

At the Academy infirmary, rumors spread that Vis saved a Magnus Quintus. Veridius greets Ulciscor as an old friend, accepts Vis’s admission, and ushers them through a Will-caged gate that signals pervasive security. Outside the walls, Ulciscor quietly assigns Vis two ruin sites to investigate and confides that his brother, Caeror—Veridius’s classmate—died nearby after hinting at a pre‑Cataclysm discovery. In Caten, Ulciscor hides Vis in his country estate for training under Sextus Lanistia, a blind tutor who perceives by rapidly re‑imbuing air. She dismantles Vis’s overconfidence, reveals a clandestine replica of the Academy’s Labyrinth, and forces precision under duress. Political currents swirl: a Quartus, Advenius Claudius, tests Vis and arranges that his daughter, Aequa, train with him and provide cover to attend the Festival of Jovan.

At that festival, an Anguis leader steps from myth into catastrophe. In the arena’s floodlit naumachia, Estevan reveals himself as Arturus Melior Leos, suppresses Will, condemns the empire’s complicity, frees the condemned, and annihilates thousands with impossible, rippling strikes. Vis shepherds Aequa to the sewers, then turns back alone. The blood‑marked stylus lets him approach; when he presses it to Melior’s throat, reality lurches—an alien, storm‑lashed city flashes across his vision—and Melior drives the stylus into his own brain. Vis hides his role, collapses, and later wakes a hero: the Senate names him Vis Telimus Catenicus and ratifies his adoption. Ulciscor finally shares Caeror’s cipher—“Obiteum lost. Luceum unknown. Scintres Exunus worked. Gate still open”—and memories from Lanistia that point to ruins east and west of the Academy.

Under new scrutiny, a Senate envoy takes invasive samples and flashes sketches of a black pyramid that snag Vis’s memory of the stylus’s vision. Back at the Academy, Vis’s first day ends in a confrontation: he floors a Class Six bully targeting a Seventh and survives punishment by maneuvering a formal Threefold Apology. He is rapidly promoted to Six, only to meet Praeceptor Dultatis’s naked bias. A disqualified but brilliant Labyrinth run and Veridius’s quiet hint about early practice drive Vis to act outside channels: he scales the wall and infiltrates a ruin. In a glowing‑script tunnel he finds Labyrinth schematics and a hall of fresh‑looking corpses pinned by obsidian blades. A triggered relief map shows multiple versions of Solivagus and a repeated Vetusian warning: “Obiteum is lost. Do not open the gate. Synchronous is death.” Veridius arrives after an alarm; Vis escapes back to bed under his roommate Eidhin’s protection, stages a kitchen “accident” to cover a torn hand, and mends trust by tutoring Eidhin in Common.

At the Festival of the Ancestors, Ulciscor debriefs Vis atop the Necropolis and agrees to craft an imbued grapple for a risky return to the island’s western dome. The family gathering detonates: Ulciscor’s wife, Relucia, is Sedotia—the Anguis archer. In private, she coerces Vis to keep climbing the Academy, threatens exposure, and sets a future rendezvous. Ulciscor arms Vis with attracting cuffs and locator stones; Vis leaps from a Transvect, opens a crimson dome by speaking Caeror’s phrase—“Luceum, Obiteum, Scintres Exunus”—and reaches a subterranean hall where eyeless guides offer a control bracer. A demonstration shows Remnants—obsidian swarms—take the shortest path at constant speed and devour anything beyond a shifting line of safety. Withdrawing, he grapples from the sea back to the Transvect.

Back on campus, Dultatis rigs a dueling Amotus to deny Vis’s clean hits; Vis abandons finesse, mauls his opponent, and forces a promotion. Under Praeceptor Taedia he surges to Class Four, reconciles with Callidus Ericius, and learns of covered‑up deaths in prior Iudicia. On Suus for a Military retreat, Vis walks a razored homecoming: a palace overwritten by Caten, a loyal steward, Fadrique, who reveals the royal family was hanged, and secret tunnels intact beneath the halls. Spying through a listening slot, Vis hears Dimidius Quiscil order illicit support to the Anguis—weapons, designs, and a “missing” trireme, the Navisalus—under the Princeps’s aegis. Relucia’s true aim was confirmation, which Vis transmits via her Will‑locked stylus. Fadrique, who preserved Vis’s childhood relics, recognizes him but pleads pragmatism; Vis rejects revenge that would destroy his people.

Returned to the Academy, Vis protects Callidus from blackmail by publicly outplaying Belli at Foundation and claiming a Class Three seat. Praeceptor Nequias accelerates the Iudicium: Thirds must retrieve the Heart of Jovan while tracked by swallowed beacons; Fourths can bind to them, defect, or claim a separate prize. Vis recruits Callidus and Eidhin; Eidhin declines under coerced obligations, so Aequa joins. Ambushed by Iro Decimus’s team, Vis and Callidus are tied to trees as Aequa seemingly defects—then returns at night, frees them, and reveals she planted Vis’s internal tracker in Iro’s food to draw Sextii safety teams and eliminate him.

Vis and Callidus steal a safety team’s tracking plate under a hail of uprooted trees and split: Aequa re‑infiltrates, Vis heads west. He slips inside the crimson dome, uses condemned guides to learn Remnants’ rules, and runs the maze on timing alone. A fresh corpse—Belli—almost breaks his count, but he dives through the exit as Remnants crash against the threshold. Deeper within, a Vetusian ring clamps shut, crushes and tears at him, and a hurricane of shards annihilates armed silhouettes while letters carve into his forearm and voices command, “Complete the journey.” Eyeless warriors swarm the stair; Diago—the alupi Vis once saved—erupts from the dark to clear a path, then later saves him again outside at terrible cost.

Reuniting, the trio reverse‑engineers the stolen plate and discover Anguis have massacred safety teams and replaced them. Vis warns Indol Quiscil, who disperses his people with decoys and flees west. A scarred Anguis operative corners Vis, outlines a broader plan to leverage the massacre for Military power, and coercively dangles a living hostage important to Vis. On the tower, a black‑eyed guard with alupi parasite nearly kills Vis until Emissa emerges from hiding and severs the thing at the base of the man’s skull. Believing Vis about the coup, she tends his wounds—then her eyes blacken; she demands the Heart, stabs Vis, and knocks him into the river. The Heart snaps back into his hand as he falls.

Diago drags Vis ashore. Tracking plate stones show his medallion unmoved, so he staggers to reach Callidus and finds an Anguis corpse with its throat torn out and Callidus dying from torture. Callidus presses a white medallion on Vis; Vis carries him toward the Academy, talking, pleading, and promising, until his friend dies unnoticed against his shoulder. At the quadrum, Vis lays Callidus at Veridius’s feet, vows that Veridius and Emissa will burn for this, and finishes the trial by seating the Heart on Jovan’s chest before collapsing.

Days later, Vis wakes in restraints to learn his left arm was amputated to stop a spreading rot and that his blood is tainted—knowledge that could be fatal in the wrong hands. Veridius urges a Religion posting under Magnus Tertius Pileus to help avert another Cataclysm; Eidhin counsels that Callidus’s death must change them. When senators demand his assignment, Vis rejects Religion and Military and claims the Censor’s office, choosing a path to expose rot rather than serve it. Alone, he confronts Veridius for sacrificing students to reach the gate, then finds a wooden toy ship hidden with the carved name from his childhood—Diago—and remembers a father’s last counsel: courage.