Hell had come alive.
The shadows weren't shadows anymore—they were teeth, claws, a writhing mass of hunger snapping at the air like starved beasts. Ezra barely ducked in time. The chair shattered against the wall behind him, exploding into a storm of splinters, each one sharp enough to flay skin from bone. The room choked on the stench of burnt resonance and something deeper, fouler—the reek of unraveling sanity. The air itself pulsed, a heartbeat too slow, too heavy, like the world itself was dying around them.
From the cracked floorboards, something twisted upward—veins or roots or the fingers of the damned—wrapping around Asli's limbs with the merciless grip of a grave. His body convulsed, muscles locking, tendons straining as if the earth beneath him had opened its maw to drag him under. His scream was soundless, swallowed by the suffocating dark.
Octavia hit the ground like a discarded puppet. Her body folded wrong, limbs bent at angles that made the stomach turn. She didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just lay there, a broken thing, her stillness louder than any scream.
Then—Silas moved.
His steps were unhurried, deliberate, cutting through the chaos like a blade through smoke. He knelt beside Asli, his touch feather-light, cold as winter steel, a touch so delicate, so soft. There was no fear in him. No hesitation. Only the quiet, terrible certainty of a man who had done this before—who had done this a thousand times before.
The madness stilled. Just for a breath. Just long enough for Silas to lean in, his lips brushing Asli's ear, his words a whisper that slithered into the boy's skull like a curse. Silas leaned in, his breath barely a whisper against Asli's ear, his words soft, almost too soft for the madness that swirled around them. But it was enough. Enough to bring the boy's body into stillness, enough to dull the terror that had gripped him moments before. The violence, the frantic energy, the madness—everything seemed to retreat into the background, leaving only this fragile moment of quiet, of tranquility. Asli's body relaxed, the tremors fading, as if he were a bird, exhausted and broken, finally cradled by a hand that could not bear to kill.
"Shhh."
Silas didn't let go.
Across the ruin of the room, Rin staggered to her feet. Every breath was a battle, her ribs aching as if the air itself had turned to poison. She stumbled toward Octavia, who lay clawing at her own throat, her skin mottled with the ghostly imprints of fingers that weren't there. The bruises darkened like ink spilled under skin, a map of violence written in flesh.
Then—the door exploded inward.
Teachers poured in, their shouts sharp with panic, their faces pale with horror. The dormitory was a graveyard of shattered wood and torn pages, the remnants of a place that had once been safe.
Master Vaun's voice boomed like thunder.
"What in the gods' names happened here?"
His gaze locked onto Silas.
Silas, who still cradled Asli's slack form.
Silas, who smiled.
---
They knelt beneath the indifferent eye of the moon, arms raised like sinners begging for absolution. The wind howled through the courtyard, biting at their skin, but none of them shivered. The cold was nothing compared to the weight of what had happened.
Octavia had been carried away, her body too broken for penance. The rest of them remained, the silence between them thick as clotting blood.
Cassian was the first to speak.
"He's gone, right?"
Asli nodded.
Cassian groaned, pushing himself up with a wince. The others followed, slow and stiff, like corpses learning to move again. Only Ezra stayed kneeling, his hands clenched into fists.
Rin shot him a look. "You planning to pray all night?"
She shot a sideways glance at Ezra, her expression sharp, the weight of the moment lingering between them. Ezra met her gaze, his brow furrowing, as if the question itself had peeled back something he wasn't ready to confront. His mouth opened as if to reply, but the words caught in his throat, lost in the thick silence that pressed in around them. The night felt suffocating, every breath an effort, the air heavy with unsaid things—things they were all afraid to voice. The wind howled louder, the only thing in this world that seemed to have the power to break the stillness.
Ezra didn't answer. The wind screamed between them.
Cassian tilted his head back, staring at the void above. "Any plans after graduation?"
"That's years away,"Silas muttered, as if the future was a joke only he understood.
"No reason,"Cassian murmured. Then, softer: "Do you think they hear us? The gods?" His voice was quieter now, as if even the stars were beyond reach, as if the answers he sought were out of his grasp.
Her eyes flicked toward him briefly, unreadable, before drifting back up to the void above them, a silent emptiness stretching infinitely.
Rin's laugh was a dry, brittle thing. "Probably." Her gaze flicked to Asli. "They're listening. Even if they're dead. Why? Got something to say?"
Asli exhaled. "Yeah." A pause. "I hate this place."
The laughter that followed was ragged, half-hysterical, but it was real. For a moment, the night didn't feel so heavy.
For a moment, they almost believed they'd survive it.
Classes became a repeating occurrence
The same routine. The same hollow-eyed students shuffling through the motions, their voices dulled by the weight of the lessons . But Ezra found himself lingering—not with the others, not with his squad —but with Theodore.
Theodore, who talked too much and too loud, as if silence were a disease to be burned away. Theodore, who spun stories like a drunkard spinning lies, each one more outrageous than the last.
"I'm telling you, dear boy," he drawled, slinging an arm around Ezra's shoulders, his breath already thick with the cloying sweetness of stolen wine, "the fae make the best vintage this side of the Veil. One sip, and you'll forget your own godsdamned name."
Ezra didn't drink. But he listened.
Because Theodore's voice was a distraction—a bright, clattering shield against the things that lurked in the quiet. Against the way Silas watched him sometimes, like a butcher weighing a carcass. Against the way Rin's laughter had turned brittle, sharp enough to draw blood.
So he let Theodore ramble. About wine. About women. About the best way to charm a noble's daughter out of her jewels and into your bed.
"Same thing with this one," Theodore declared, brandishing a bottle like a trophy, its glass glinting amber in the low light. "Liquid sin, my friend. Liquid sin."
The words slipped out before Ezra could cage them: "Do the gods exist?"
The bottle froze halfway to Theodore's lips. The air between them thickened like cooling blood. Somewhere in the academy's bowels, a pipe groaned.
Theodore's answering smile didn't reach his eyes. "That," he said, pouring the wine with exaggerated care, "depends entirely on what you need them to be." The liquid swirled dark as old wounds in their cups. "Believe hard enough, and they'll answer. Doubt too much..." He took a slow sip, throat working. "Well. Haven't you noticed how quiet the heavens have been?"
Theodore leaned forward, his breath reeking of fermented pomegranates and something darker. "You don't even believe other creatures exist, do you boy?" His teeth gleamed too sharp in the candlelight. "Humans clinking their little cups, congratulating themselves for ruling a slaughterhouse." A laugh like breaking glass. "That arrogance carved your epitaph before you were born."
The drink turned to ash on Ezra's tongue. Outside, the wind carried whispers in no language taught at Blackspire. Theodore's shadow stretched unnaturally across the stone, antlered and wrong.
"Tell me," he purred, refilling Ezra's cup to overflowing, "when your scholars write of monsters, do they ever consider they're the ones being studied?"
The next morning's Strategy class might as well have been a funeral. The stale air clung to Ezra's uniform like a shroud as he took his seat between yawning classmates. Professor Vilnius - a withered husk of a woman who moved like a clockwork automaton nearing its final wind - tapped her cane against the stone floor with metronomic precision.
At seventy winters old, her spine remained ramrod straight, her gray hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin of her face into a permanent grimace. The maps of ancient battlefields she unfurled across the lectern might as well have been her own skin, parchment-thin and marked with the scars of countless campaigns.
"Frontal assaults," she croaked, her voice like dry leaves crushed underfoot, "are for fools and martyrs." The cane came down with a crack that jerked half the class from their stupor. "Which are you?"
Ezra watched dust motes dance in the thin shafts of sunlight piercing the classroom's high windows. Even the light here seemed tired, drained of its vitality by decades of dry lectures on flanking maneuvers and supply line logistics. The only color in the room came from the slowly spreading stain of ink where someone had overturned their well.
Somewhere between the Siege of Vorthain and the Threefold Retreat, Ezra's attention drifted to the window. A single black bird perched on the sill, its beady eyes watching the class with what might have been pity. Or hunger. It was difficult to tell.
Professor Vilnius's cane struck his desk. "Cadet," she said, the word carrying the weight of a death sentence. "Tell me why General Orlan lost the Battle of Twin Rivers."
The bird took flight. Ezra swallowed the taste of Theodore's wine still clinging to his memory. Somewhere in the academy's depths, a pipe groaned like a dying man.
The old woman's eyes gleamed with something sharper than disappointment. "Well?" she demanded, her shadow stretching long across the floorboards.
Outside, the wind whispered its secrets to the stones. Ezra opened his mouth.
"Because he brought a sword to a sorcery fight."
Rin's voice cut through the classroom like a whipcrack, her boots hitting the floor as she leaned forward. Rin's fingernail - lacquered the same inky black as her tightly braided hair - tapped the battle map precisely where two rivers twisted in impossible contortions.
Professor Vilnius's cane hovered mid-air. The entire front row of students instinctively recoiled.
Rin's smile showed too many teeth. "Orlan's troops outnumbered them three-to-one, but he forgot one thing." She tapped the battle diagram with a fingernail painted black as mourning crepe. "The Twin Rivers aren't rivers at all."
A collective inhale. The inkwell on Ezra's desk began trembling, sending ripples through the spilled ink that mirrored the twisting rivers on the map.
"That's—" the professor began.
"Blood channels," Rin interrupted, her voice dropping to a whisper that carried to the rafters. "Carved by sacrificial magic centuries before the battle. When the spring rains came..." She made a delicate slicing motion across her throat. Her accent that was barely noticeable before grew more pronounced , vowels sharpening overtaking the Arkanis tongue
The blackbird at the window let out a shriek that sounded disturbingly like laughter.
"Truth flows upwards" Rin murmured. The foreign words hung in the air like incense smoke. Her smile showed teeth. "Like corpses in a flood."
Professor Vilnius's aged hands trembled around her cane. "Cadet Zhao, we study military strategy, ….not folk superstitions "
"Then why does your map show the rivers flowing uphill?" Rin tilted her head, serpent-quick. "Unless the cartographer knew something your precious histories won't admit?"
Ah. Ezra studied Rin anew - the pale complexion that never tanned, the dark eyes that slanted slightly at the corners, the way she held herself like a blade sheathed in silk. District Five's smokey tea houses had buzzed with stories of the Xian - pale warriors who read omens in spilled blood, whose scholars wrote history in water and fire instead of ink.
Vilnius's lips pressed into a bloodless line. "Page forty-seven," she rasped. "The Massacre at Crowsfeast. Note how quickly inconvenient truths become... revised."
As Ezra turned the brittle pages, he caught Rin whispering to the blackbird - three syllables that made its feathers puff like a battle standard. Behind them, Silas's paint-stained fingers stilled above his parchment, his head cocked as if listening to voices only he could hear.