Cassian's silence was a blade between Ezra's ribs—sharp, unexpected, but not unwelcome.
For days, the absence of his voice had been a reprieve, a pocket of stillness in the relentless grind of Blackspire's expectations. Ezra had always been good at silence. Better, perhaps, than he was at anything else. He wore it like armor, let it settle into the hollows of his bones until it became part of him.
And so, he wandered.
The academy was a beast of stone and shadow, its corridors lined with the ghosts of students who had come before, their failures etched into the walls like scars. But beyond the manicured courtyards and the regimented training grounds, beyond the places where the masters could see, there were cracks. Forgotten spaces. Places where the world bled through.
The garden was one of them.
It was a ruin of wild, untamed beauty—a rebellion against Blackspire's sterile order. Vines clawed their way up the crumbling walls, throttling the statues of long-dead scholars, their faces worn smooth by time. Flowers burst through the cracks in the flagstones, their petals a riot of color against the gray. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and something sweeter, something almost intoxicating.
Ezra came here when the weight of it all became too much. When the eyes of the masters, the whispers of the other students, the ever-present knowledge of his own inadequacy pressed down on him like a physical thing. Here, he could breathe.
Or so he thought.
"You're late."
The voice was low, amused, and it sent a jolt down Ezra's spine. He turned, slow, deliberate, and found Theodore leaning against the gnarled trunk of an ancient oak, a flower spinning idly between his fingers. It was a strange, luminous thing, its petals a deep, unnatural violet that seemed to pulse in the fading light.
The professor looked out of place here, in this ruin of a garden. His robes were too fine, his beard too carefully unkempt, his presence too large for such a forgotten corner of the world. And yet, he fit. Like he had been waiting.
"I see you've found my little paradise," Theodore mused, pushing off the tree with a grace that belied his age. "Not that I mind. People always find their way here eventually."
Ezra said nothing. The last few days had been a blur of exhaustion, of punishment, of stumbling through the motions like a ghost in his own skin. He didn't have the energy for Theodore's games.
The professor didn't seem to care. He flicked the flower in his hand, watching it spin. "This little thing," he muttered, almost to himself, "took me years to cultivate. Delicate, isn't it? People think plants grow themselves. They don't. Everything needs time. Everything needs care."
Ezra shifted, uneasy. Theodore's words always had a way of curling under his skin, of settling in places he couldn't scratch.
"You're probably wondering why you're here," Theodore continued, his sharp eyes cutting through Ezra like a scalpel. "Everyone else will tell you to follow the rules. To kneel. To obey. But you and I both know that's not how this works, is it?"
Ezra opened his mouth—to protest, to deny—but Theodore raised a hand, silencing him before he could speak.
"No need for words," the professor murmured. "You'll learn in time. Or you won't. Either way, it's all the same."
He stepped closer, the flower still spinning between his fingers. Then, without warning, he held it out to Ezra.
"Take it."
Ezra hesitated. The flower looked fragile, its petals trembling in the breeze. But there was something else—something beneath the surface. A thrum of energy, a whisper of power.
He reached out.
The moment his fingers brushed the petals, the world shifted.
A rush of images flooded his mind—fire and shadow, blood on stone, a voice screaming in the dark. He gasped, wrenching his hand back, but the flower clung to him, its stem curling around his wrist like a living thing.
Theodore watched, his expression unreadable.
"You're not like the others," he said softly. "You have no place here. Not yet. Not in this world of order and rank and power." He leaned in, his breath warm against Ezra's ear. "But maybe you will. You'll learn how to make the world bend. Just like this flower."
A pause. A heartbeat.
"But it's not a kindness, Ezra. It's a curse."
The flower crumbled to ash in his hand.
The air in Professor Krill's classroom didn't just smell of dust and old parchment—it reeked of centuries of unwashed blood. The scent clung to the stones like a curse, seeping into the students' uniforms, their skin, their very breath. When the door slammed shut behind them, the sound didn't echo so much as drown every other sense, leaving only the pounding of hearts and the slow, measured tap of Krill's boots against the worn floorboards.
No one moved.
No one dared.
Krill stood before them, a specter carved from battlefield remnants, his hands clasped behind his back in a mockery of patience. Every muscle in his body spoke of violence restrained—the twitch of a finger, the roll of shoulders beneath his threadbare coat, the way his jaw worked as if chewing on the words before spitting them out.
The silence stretched.
Broke.
"History," Krill began, his voice the sound of a sword being drawn from a corpse, "is not your grandmother's bedtime story. It is not the pretty lies they engrave on monuments." He stepped forward, his shadow swallowing the first row of desks whole. "History is the knife in the dark. The child starving behind castle walls. The thousand unnamed dead heaped into mass graves while kings debate whose signature belongs where on a piece of parchment."
A drop of sweat traced its way down Ezra's spine. The classroom felt smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in like the sides of a coffin.
"The Treaty of the Broken Crown?" Krill's laugh was the dry rasp of bone against bone. He picked up a piece of chalk, examined it, then crushed it to dust between his fingers. The white powder drifted to the floor like ash. "They told you it brought peace. What it brought was a slower death. The kind that lets men pretend they've won while the rot sets in."
Outside, thunder growled. The storm had been building all morning, its hunger palpable in the air.
Krill moved between the desks, his footsteps precise as a headsman's approach. "Arkanis stands on a foundation of skulls. Sylvanna smiles while sharpening its knives. Drakonis and Lycanthos lick their wounds and count the years until their fangs grow back." He paused at Ezra's desk, his yellowed fingernail tapping once, twice against the wood. "And the Moravean Wastelands? They remember. Oh, how they remember."
The temperature dropped. Ezra could see his own breath fog in the air, could feel the ghostly press of countless dead leaning in to listen.
"The gods?" Krill's lip curled, revealing teeth stained dark at the gums. "We outgrew them. Or they outgrew us. Either way, they left us to our butchery." He turned to the blackboard, picking up another chalk only to snap it in half. "The Ashen War wasn't a war. It was an autopsy. A cutting open of the world to see what filth lay inside."
Lightning flashed. For a heartbeat, Krill's shadow on the wall wasn't that of a man, but something hunched and many-limbed.
"The next war?" He turned back to them, his eyes reflecting the storm outside. "It's already begun. You just haven't recognized the battlefield yet." Krill leaned down, his breath hot and rancid against Ezra's ear. "Will you be the blade or the flesh it parts?"
The first raindrops hit the windows like bullets.
Krill straightened, wiping his hands on his coat, leaving streaks of chalk like old scars. "Open your books to page forty-three. Let me show you how empires are really born."
He smiled then, wide and terrible.
"Welcome to history."
The storm screamed its approval.
Silence pooled thick as oil in the dormitory, broken only by the restless sigh of fabric and the dry whisper of pages turning. Then—
Octavia's voice, honed to a razor's edge
"That was a waste of my fucking time," she spat, throwing herself onto her bed with enough force to make the frame shriek. "Couldn't even bother with decent mattresses."
Asli's fingers paused over his notebook, the raised dots beneath his fingertips suddenly more interesting than her tantrum."You'd complain if they gave you silk sheets,"he murmured, voice flat as a dulled blade.
Ezra's gaze flickered between them, his brow furrowing in confusion. For someone who was blind, Asli had no trouble reading the room. He was like a shadow in the corner, always aware of everything around him, as though he could sense things others couldn't. Ezra couldn't figure out how it worked. It made no sense to him, but then again, Asli himself made little sense.
The back-and-forth between Octavia and Asli was more than just bickering. It was a game they both played, their words loaded with something darker—resentment, frustration, maybe even some deeper, unspoken history. Ezra could feel the crackling tension in the air, thick and palpable. It wasn't just their personalities that clashed; there was something more, something deeper beneath the surface.
For a fleeting moment, Ezra almost pitied them.
Almost.
He wasn't the most social of people, but this? This was different. Their dynamic wasn't the usual banter or friendly rivalry; it was more like a powder keg, always on the verge of exploding. It reminded him, uncomfortably, of his own unresolved frustrations.
Then Octavia rose.
"Octavia, don't even think about it," Silas warned, his voice low but firm, eyes never leaving the page he was scribbling on.
His fingers, stained with paint, hovered just above the paper. Ezra couldn't help but wonder where Silas even got the paint from, considering how out of place it felt in the otherwise dull, grey dormitory.
But Octavia didn't heed the warning. With an almost predatory grace, she moved closer, arms outstretched as the air in the room suddenly shifted.
The temperature plummeted, an icy grip seizing the air. A cold that clawed at Ezra's skin, sinking deep into his bones. The stale, lifeless atmosphere in the room suddenly thickened, heavy and suffocating. Ezra could feel the weight of it in his chest, his breath shallow, as the shadows around the room began to stir, coiling like restless serpents.
They twisted, stretched, and writhed in the corners, gathering, pooling like dark ink in the corners of the room, until they began to move, as if alive.
They unspooled from the corners like living things, sinuous and hungry, winding around Octavia first, tasting her skin, swallowing the light whole. Then—
They turned to Asli.
And bowed.
Darkness pooled at his feet, coiled around his wrists, his to command. The squad went statue-still.
The darkness clung to Asli now. It was as if the shadows themselves had heard his call. They flitted and danced around him, twisting with his every movement, becoming extensions of his will. The rest of the squad watched, frozen in place.
Silas's pencil snapped. Rin's muscles corded, ready to spring. Even Cassian's ever-present smirk died, his eyes darting between Asli and the writhing blackness.
The silence was a living thing, choking.
Then—
Silas's pencil snapped,breaking into two, his eyes wide as he watched the scene unfold with a mix of awe and fear. Rin's muscles corded, ready to spring. Even Cassian's ever-present smirk died, his eyes darting between Asli and the writhing blackness.
The room was silent, but there was an undeniable tension—a stillness so thick it felt like the walls were pressing in. It wasn't just the shadows anymore. It was the weight of the power radiating from Asli, an unseen force that bent the very atmosphere around them. Ezra could feel it, like something vast and terrible was awakening, something that no one, not even the most powerful, could control.
"Push me again," Asli murmured, "and see what happens."
Octavia's lips curled. "Or what? You'll cry to daddy?"
A heartbeat. Two.
Then—
"What can you do, Asli?" Her voice was saccharine and sharp as a scalpel. "Throw your little shadows? They're not even yours to command." She took a step closer, her smile widening. "You're a fraud. A weak, sniveling nothing propped up by a man who isn't even your blood."
The air turned to lead.
"He took you in out of pity. Just like everyone tolerates you now."Another step. "Tell me, does it keep you up at night? Knowing you're just a charity case?"
Asli didn't move.
But the darkness did.
It surged, black waves crashing against unseen shores, the room itself seeming to bendunder its weight.
Octavia laughed, low and ugly. "Did I strike a nerve?"
A breath.
Then—
"Don't." Asli's voice was shattered glass. "Speak." A pause. "Of him."
Asli moved. The shadows followed. No one could see them move, but the room shifted with them. The walls groaned, the floor cracking under the weight of his anger. He took one step forward, and in the next, he was across the room.
His hand was around Octavia's throat, lifting her clean off the ground. Her breath stuttered, eyes bulging—but she didn't fight. Her eyes widened in shock, but she didn't beg for mercy. She was too proud. Too defiant.
Her mouth opened, her words muffled by the pressure, but she couldn't speak. Couldn't even breathe. The shadows swirled tighter around her, and for a second, Ezra thought the air itself would choke them all.
She grinned.
"Pathetic," she choked out, the word barely audible. "Pathetic little monster."
It was the last straw.