You dress quickly, your fingers fumbling with buttons and laces.

The ceremonial clothes laid out for you are finer than anything you’ve worn before—soft fabric dyed in the deep purple of the gem, trimmed with silver thread that catches the light. Every gem-born child wears these colors on the day of their coming of age. A symbol of what you are. What you’re meant to become.

As you pull on the tunic, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror again. The vision is gone, replaced by something almost as unsettling: yourself, dressed like someone important. Someone with a destiny.

You look away.

In the common room downstairs, you find the others.

Three of them today—four including you. The gem-born children who share your birth year, who’ve grown up alongside you in this house. You know their faces better than your own, but this morning they feel like strangers.

*Sera* sits by the window, her dark hair braided with silver ribbons. She’s always been the thoughtful one, the one who asks questions the caretakers don’t like answering. Her eyes meet yours, and you see the same unease you feel reflected back.

*Tommin* paces near the fire, broad-shouldered and restless. He’s never been good at waiting. “Finally,” he says when he sees you. “I thought you’d sleep through the whole ceremony.”

*Lira* doesn’t look up from her bowl of porridge. She’s the youngest of your group by a few months, small and quiet, but there’s a sharpness behind her eyes that makes people underestimate her at their peril.

“Bad dreams?” Sera asks quietly as you sit down beside her.

The question hits different after this morning.

“Something like that,” you say. “You?”

She hesitates. “No. Nothing.” But her hands are shaking slightly as she smooths her ceremonial robes. “I just have this feeling. Like something’s about to happen.”

“Something is about to happen,” Tommin says, grinning despite the tension in his shoulders. “We’re about to become adults. Get assigned our paths. Finally start our real lives instead of being stuck in this house.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Sera says.

Lira looks up from her porridge. “She means something bad.”

The room falls silent.

Outside, you hear the first bells beginning to ring. The call to the ceremony.