When the old magics wake, they do not roar-they organise. For centuries the Aegaians have stood as humanity's last defence against what breathes beneath reality. Their art is a grammar: fire and flux, cadence and order, the quiet that lives under every song. That grammar shatters when Aegaian talents begin manifesting in ordinary people, and with them come Fleshshapers-polite horrors who "remove the alone"-and whispers that the Primal Ones are stirring in their prisons of perfect, unyielding order. At Arcanum Academy, two senior apprentices are handed an impossible brief. Finagle calls heat from the spirit realm and makes motion his argument; Sinten coaxes the world into alignment until stone remembers its best shape. With Kanon-whose necromancy refuses endings rather than raising the dead-they're sent north to mend failing anchors with the Keys of Binding: red to draw chaos, amethyst to shape it, blue to reveal the Stillness beneath it all. The Keys are not what they were told. Far from Arcanum, on Seraph's Shelf-a chain of cities strung over a chasm-young Prince Hanatos is prepared for Ascension, a ritual that promises peace and delivers unity. His guardian, Palla, serves the terms no crown can see. When the ceremony makes the realm into a single obedient body, Hanatos walks out of a living city with his name in his mouth and a vow to draw doors where walls insist. As Finagle and Sinten discover that the blue Key's "mercy" files pain-and people-under finished, a zealot calling himself the Conductor (or Sectus, in older rumours) audits the land for perfect chords. Villages learn to drink quiet and pay in peculiarities they didn't know they'd miss. A basin in a square brightens when you agree. A valley decides itself into policy. The world starts practising for a song that will end argument forever. Thenris, a detective who died writing things down, learns a third line in death-seams that refuse conclusions. Through Kanon's art he tugs the living toward the places where endings lie about being the end. Paths converge at a World Wound that won't finish closing. There, the trio teach small, deliberate wrongs-heels half a shoe's breadth off chalk; breath held slightly out of time; an Unhymn knotted under a perfect cadence-so that choice can survive what calls itself kindness. To stop the Conductor's symphony without becoming its chorus, Sinten must learn to make the blue Key wait; Finagle must spend his fire without admiring the clean note; Hanatos must keep choosing while he changes. The Aegaian is a literary dark fantasy about consent, cadence, and the cost of tidy solutions. Lyrical and propulsive, it builds a magic system out of ethics and music-order, chaos, Stillness, and the seams between-and asks whether a world without friction would still belong to the people living in it. Fans of uncanny academies, living cities, and morally complicated miracles will find a new grammar for wonder and dread.