Then we clear the tree line.
The Academy is dying.
That’s the only way I know how to describe what I’m seeing.
The spires that used to twist in elegant impossible directions now jerk and stutter, stone grinding against stone in movements that look like seizures. Walls grow and collapse in the same breath. The courtyard is a mess of cracked earth and upheaved roots, as if the ground itself can’t decide what shape it’s supposed to hold.
Wards crackle across the surface in jagged arcs. Not targeted, not defensive. Just firing. Everywhere. At everything. A bolt of crystallized magic hits an oak on the perimeter and the tree explodes into splinters.
Students pour from every exit. Some run, some fly, some shift. All of them heading for the wilds with the specific panic of people fleeing something they can’t fight.
Because you can’t fight a building.
“The Balance,” I breathe, and no one hears me over the wind, which is fine because what’s surfacing isn’t the kind of thing you say out loud anyway.
Four thousand years ofwe must protect the Balancewas really just four thousand years ofwe must protect our share of it, and the difference only becomes obvious when you’re watching the result eat itself alive from the inside out.
The Seelie wards are gone. Amarantha torched her own court and took a third of the Academy’s operating system with it. The fortress that kept three courts in equilibrium for years just lost a leg, and everything held in check by that equilibrium is now slamming against the walls from the inside out.
The Academy can’t tell friend from foe. It’s fried.
“We can’t land!” I shout into the wind. “The wards will shred us on approach.”
“They’re already trying!” Pepper yells.
Vanessa rolls, actually rolls, and a bolt of ward-lightning scorches the air where her left wing was half a second ago. Sabina yelps. Orion does not, because Orion has left his body and is operating on autopilot. With a laugh that terrifies me and also turns me on a little.
It’s a weird place to be.
I scan the chaos below. Fourteen seconds between ward surges on the eastern wall. Eight on the western. The northern approach has the least coverage, which would be great, except the ground there is actively splitting open like Faerie is trying to swallow the whole building and start over.
So. Eastern wall it is.
“Vanessa!” I press my mouth against the scales between her shoulder blades because she won’t hear a damn thing if I scream into the wind. “East side. Bank wide. You’re going to draw every ward on this side of the building.”
A rumble rolls through her chest. Agreement. Or indigestion. With Vanessa it’s genuinely hard to tell.
“Pepper.” I grab my cousin’s arm. “When I tell you, hit the wards with everything you’ve got. Not breaking them. Scrambling them. Make the system hiccup.”
“That I can do.” Her eyes go full black for a second. Chaos magic pooling behind them like ink in water. “How long do you need?”
“Thirty seconds.”
“I’ll give you twenty. Take it or leave it.”
“Done.”
“Sabina!” I lean over the side. She tilts her face up, blonde braid whipping, bow drawn. “Cover our approach. Anything the building throws at us—debris, wards, I don’t care—you keep it off us.”
“I don’t miss, Ash.”
“I know you don’t.”
Vanessa drops Orion first. Not gently. He hits the ground in a roll and comes up moving, fire licking at his forearms.
The building responds—wards swinging toward him, recognizing something but unable to process it. Like a guard dog catching a scent it should know but can’t place through the smoke.
Then Sabina. She hits the earth lighter than Orion, nocks and fires before her feet are fully planted. The arrow takes a chunk of flying masonry out of the air six feet from Orion’s head. He doesn’t flinch. He probably didn’t even see it.
