This cynical, smirking, unreadable bastard dragged our souls back from the brink and deposited us somewhere safe.
Why?
The collective cringe that passes through the room would be amusing under different circumstances. Mortimer's dragon fire flares visible around his clenched fists before he wrestles it back under control. Zeke's frost spreads another inch across his fingers, the temperature around him dropping noticeably. Damien's crimson eyes narrow with suspicion that mirrors my own internal resistance.
And Cassius?—
His shadow tendrils have gone absolutely still.
Not the stillness of relaxation, but the stillness of a predator who has just identified a threat and is calculating exactly how to destroy it. The darkness around him seems todeepen, becoming something that drinks light rather than merely blocking it. His silver gaze locks onto Prince Yoshiro with intensity that would make lesser beings flee.
"Why?" Zeke's voice carries the particular edge of someone who has learned never to trust gifts that arrive without obvious price. "Why help us?"
Mortimer echoes the question in the same breath, their words overlapping in a harmony of suspicion: "Why would you do that?"
Prince Yoshiro's response is to giggle—actuallygiggle, like a child finding adults inexplicably dense—and skip behind Professor Eternalis with the casual confidence of someone entirely unconcerned by the hostile magic filling the room.
Skip.
He skipped.
Again.
What the actual fuck is wrong with this person?
Professor Eternalis doesn't acknowledge his movement, continuing her explanation as if having a mercurial prince using her as a shield is entirely normal behavior.
"Academy wise, you are her teammates," she says, her tone suggesting this should be obvious. "In order to conduct the final year in the academy, you would need to be together. Leaving one behind wouldn't be possible for Year Four rules, except for the only option that's accepted."
The sentence hangs in the air, incomplete and ominous.
We wait.
The chamber's bioluminescence pulses in rhythm with Gwenievere's monitored heartbeat, soft blue-white light washing across our frozen forms in waves that feel almost mocking. The magical energy threaded through the walls intensifies slightly, responding to the collective tension that saturates the room like blood in water.
It's Zeke who finally whispers what we're all thinking.
"Death."
The word falls into the silence with the weight of gravestones.
The only exception is death.
If Prince Yoshiro hadn't intervened, we would have been left behind—trapped in whatever liminal space the chalice's power created, separated from Gwenievere permanently.
Dead, for all practical purposes, if not in the technical sense.
For a moment, no one speaks.
The reality of how close we came to losing everything settles across the room like ash from a distant fire—suffocating, inescapable, carrying the particular taste of mortality that makes immortal beings uncomfortable.
Professor Eternalis allows the silence to stretch before continuing her explanation.
"As for the soul pulls," she says, "that was a triggered reaction from Prince Yoshiro."
"Iknewit," I huff, vindicated despite the circumstances. The bastard had something to do with all of this—I felt it in my bones from the moment I laid eyes on his impossible features.
Damien points an accusatory finger toward where Prince Yoshiro now peers around Professor Eternalis's shoulder with obvious amusement, those shifting eyes glittering with barely contained mirth.
