Cocoon Butterfly

Lian arrived at the academy with a borrowed name and a letter that smelled of nothing at all, the one detail, he suspected, that might give him away as a fraud among the bloodline-registered sons and daughters of the empire’s oldest houses.

He never expected to lose his very first match to a fellow scholarship student who moved like stillness itself, flat-voiced, unreadable, and utterly unbeatable in the yard. He never expected to call that student a friend. And he certainly never expected to learn, three months and one badly-hidden wound later, that “Feng” was a lie built to survive a world that polices magic by blood and punishes anyone who dares to be more than their family’s name.

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