Vanessa climbs. The Academy tracks her, every ward on the eastern face swinging upward, bolts of destabilized magic chasing her wingspan. She’s the biggest threat in the sky and the building knows it. Good. That’s the plan. She can take hits that would vaporize the rest of us.
“Now!”
Pepper doesn’t hesitate. She rises onto the dragon’s back like she was born there and throws both hands toward the Academy. Chaos magic doesn’t look like anything else. Not light, not shadow, not elemental. Disruption—reality stuttering, the way a screen glitches when you hit it wrong. My thorns recoil under my skin, every root-and-growth instinct flinching from something that unmakes patterns instead of building them. The wardsspasm then flicker. For one stuttering heartbeat, the eastern perimeter goes dark.
“Go, go, go!”
I kick off my boots on the dragon’s back. They tumble into open air. I don’t watch them fall.
Vanessa dives. The ground comes up fast, too fast, and I throw myself off her neck before she pulls up. Stupid. Reckless. Exactly what Graves trained me to do and exactly what my body does when there’s no time to be smart about it.
I hit Faerie soil barefoot.
The impact jars my knees and I roll, but the moment my skin touches the ground, Wild Court magic surges up through the contact like a drowning thing breaking the surface. It isn’t welcoming or is it gentle. It feels like getting snatched out of thin air, or the way you grab someone when you’ve been waiting too long and you’re not sure they’re actually real yet.
Orion appears at my left shoulder. Where he belongs. Guardian and queen sprinting toward a building that’s trying to kill everything within a hundred yards of its walls.
The ground bucks under my feet. A root the thickness of my thigh erupts from the soil and I hurdle it without breaking stride because stopping means dying and my body has always understood that math better than my brain. Orion vaults it behind me. His fire flares, a wall of heat at my back that incinerates something I hear but can’t see.
“Don’t look back,” he says.
I don’t look back.
Sabina’s arrows crack the air above us. One, two, three. Each one intercepting something I don’t have time to identify. A chunk of wall. A ward-bolt. What might have been a piece of a gargoyle. A fourth arrow sings past my ear close enough to disturb my hair and stone shatters behind me.
“You’re welcome!” she shouts from wherever she’s perched.
The eastern wall rises ahead of us. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.
A section grows. Just extends itself upward like a hand reaching for the sky, new stone layering on old, the building trying to seal itself shut against everything outside. Including us.
The wards come back online. Pepper bought us twenty seconds and I’ve burned fifteen.
Twenty yards. The wall is still growing. If it seals before we reach it?—
Above us, Vanessa screams. I want to look but I know her roars, and this one is a warning. One directed at the wall. She breathes fire onto it. The Academy reacts. Ward-fire swings skyward in a unified barrage that lights the twilight white.
Five seconds. Ten yards.
“Orion!” I reach for him without slowing. My hand finds his forearm, my nails digging into his flesh.
I slam my palm against the wall.
Nothing.
The building shudders under my hand. It’s trying. The stone buzzes under my palm like it’s trying to remember my name and can’t find it through the damage.
This was the first place to tell me I belonged. And it can’t find me through its own damage, which is—I press harder against the stone—nothing. That’s fine. I’m absolutely not going to cry on a wall during a combat op. That’s not something I’m doing.
“Ash!” Orion presses me flat against the wall, his body between me and the next shot. “Whatever you’re doing, do it faster.”
The Stone.
I dig into my pocket with fingers that have apparently decided this is a great moment to stop working properly, find the Stone by feel, and press it flat against the wall.
Everything goes quiet.
Not silent. Quiet. The way a room goes quiet when someone important walks in.
