Not to their magic.
Tothem.
Something snaps into place.
Not breaks. Not tears.Snaps—the way a dislocated joint snaps back into its socket. Violent. Sudden. Agonizing. And permanent. A connection slamming shut like a steel door, locking from the inside, fusing five points into a single circuit that didn't exist a second ago and now can't be undone.
I feel them.
Not their magic—them.Callum's iron control, the rigid architecture of a mind that's been building walls since childhood, the cold discipline that holds him together and the thing behind it that the walls are built to hide. Atlas's grief, enormous, oceanic, the grief of a boy who watched his mother die and never stopped falling into that moment, big as a storm and twice as self-destructive. Felix's loneliness, the vast bored emptiness of a person who has never been surprised and has been starving for it his entire life, chaos incarnate, charming andempty and oh so very afraid. And underneath all three, tangled up with my own terror—
Ren.
Fading. His presence in the bond is a flicker—a candle flame being swallowed by dark, his heartbeat barely there, his blood magic the faintest warmth in a space that's gone as cold as a sub zero winter.
He's dying. Ren is dying on the stone platform because the hunger pulled too much from him and his body can't—
The bond reacts.
I don't decide it. None of us decide it. The connection that just slammed into place does what connections do—it balances. The magic inside me, all of it, the doubled quadrupled overflow of four disciplines from four presidents and one exploded sphere, reverses. Pours back through the bond. Not randomly—directed.Toward the weakest point. Toward Ren.
Blood magic floods back into his body through the invisible channel between us—not mine, not his, something new, something the bond created, a shared current that carries the life force he lost back to where it belongs. I feel it leave me—a rush of warmth draining from my chest, pouring down and out and across the platform to the still body lying on the stone.
The magic releases.
Everything that's been building—the four disciplines, the hunger, the bond, the impossible pressure of a body holding more power than any body should—finds its exit. Not through the door. Through thebond.The energy discharges in a single, cataclysmic pulse that radiates outward from the five of us like a shockwave from a bomb.
Every window in the amphitheater shatters. The stone benches crack—long, jagged splits running through the granite. Theiron poles holding the fraternity banners twist and buckle. The shockwave hits the crowd and people go down—not hurt, just flattened, knocked off their feet by a wall of magical force that rolls over the amphitheater like a tide.
The light is blinding. Gold. Pure, burning gold—the color my sphere flashed once, the color from my dream, the color of something that existed before the four disciplines were separated and hasn't been seen since.
It lasts three seconds. Maybe four.
Then it's gone. The gold fades. The pressure drops. The air goes still.
I'm on my knees. I don't remember falling. The stone platform is cracked beneath me—fissures radiating outward from the point where I kneel, as if the stone itself couldn't hold what just passed through it.
Callum is on the ground to my left, on his back, breathing hard. His eyes are open, staring at the sky, and his face is doing something I've never seen—not the mask, not the blankness, not even the crack from the classroom. His face is open. Stunned. The face of a person feeling something for the first time and not knowing what to call it.
Atlas is on his knees to my right, still gripping my wrist. His hand has loosened—the magical weld broken—but he hasn't let go. His head is bowed, rain from the disturbed clouds dripping off his hair, and his breathing is ragged. Lightning flickers weakly around his free hand. Embers.
Felix is behind me. Sitting on the cracked stone, legs splayed, cards scattered around him in a wide circle. His hands are empty and still—first time I've ever seen them still when they're empty. His green eyes are wide and unfocused, seeing probabilitybranches that I suspect have just been rewritten from the ground up.
And Ren.
I find him through the bond before I find him with my eyes—a pulse, steady now, weak but steady, beating at the edge of my awareness like a distant drum. His body is still on the stone where he fell, ten feet away, but the blood has stopped flowing. The hemorrhage has stopped. His chest rises. Falls. Rises.
He's alive. Barely. But alive.
I feel his heartbeat inside my chest. Not through the blood magic—through the bond. A new channel, a permanent one, his pulse threaded through the fabric of my consciousness like a stitch that can't be pulled.
I feel all of them.
Four heartbeats that aren't mine, beating at the edges of my awareness. Callum's, slow and controlled even now. Atlas's, hammering. Felix's, erratic. Ren's, thready but there.
A rope around my ribs. A chain. A circuit.
Something permanent and violent and not chosen by any of us.
