Chapter 3: Royal Academy
Royal Academy stood on the far side of the city behind high gates, old towers, and walls that felt more like fortifications than school boundaries.
JJ knew the moment she saw it that this was not an ordinary place.
Students in uniform crossed wide courtyards carrying training weapons and textbooks. Some argued over combat scores. Others practiced elemental control in open side yards. A boy passed with a small wind-type spirit beast on his shoulder. Somewhere deeper inside the grounds, something exploded loudly enough to send birds out of the trees—yet no one panicked.
Father Michael walked her to the gate and handed her a dark blue bag.
“Don’t be nervous,” he said.
JJ looked at him. “I’m not.”
He smiled. “Even better.”
Her testing began almost at once.
First came reflexes and endurance. JJ did well—quietly, cleanly, without spectacle.
Then came a resonance scan. The machine lit more brightly than expected the moment she touched it.
Then elemental control.
Twelve crystal pillars stood in the center of the training ground. Instructor Elena Frost explained the process in a cool, efficient voice.
“Place your hand on the focus crystal. Direct whatever energy you can feel into the pillars. We are measuring control, not brute force.”
JJ nodded and stepped forward.
She touched the crystal.
At first, nothing.
Then the shard at her chest pulsed.
A cold current uncoiled from somewhere inside her—not wild, not furious, but old, immense, and precise. JJ tried to contain it.
Too late.
Frost spread over the nearest pillar in a breath.
Then the next. Then all of them.
Ice raced across the ground, freezing half the training field in an expanding wave of silver-white. Students stumbled back. A recorder dropped her clipboard. Even the instructors rose from their seats.
The air turned knife-cold.
JJ pulled her hand away.
The ice stopped, but the silence held.
Elena Frost stepped down from the platform, heels clicking over the frozen stone. She looked from the perfect casing of ice around the pillars to JJ’s face.
“Your name.”
“JJ.”
Elena gave the slightest nod. “Elite track. Immediate placement.”
The stands erupted in whispers.
JJ only stared at the ground. She had not meant to reveal so much. She had not meant to reveal anything.
When Father Michael came to meet her later, JJ asked the question right away.
“You knew when you saw the cup, didn’t you?”
He adjusted the edge of her scarf against the wind. “I knew you didn’t belong in a place that would fear you for what you are.”
He said it so simply that JJ had no answer.
In Chapter 4: The Strange Genius — When JJ touches the Academy’s resonance machine, it wakes with formulas no student should know. And on the Academy’s honor wall, one name appears again and again, across a hundred years of records: Elon. Who is he?
The free preview ends here — but the saga is just beginning. Froststar (Book One) is 24 chapters.