From up here, I can see everything. The academy’s windows glow far below, the moonlit ocean stretches to the horizon, and the lower circles pulse with a faint orange warmth from today’s training.
I stop at the boundary.
One step. That’s all it takes to cross from “reckless but survivable” to “expelled and possibly dead.”
This is either the smartest idea I’ve ever had or the last mistake I’ll ever make. But if the Crown’s amplification can boost my heat sensing ability enough to scan the entire island at once...
I take a deep breath and step onto the stone.
My foot makes contact, and I’m blasted with a thermal echo so violent it whites out my vision. My hands fly to my temples, my knees hitting volcanic rock. The explosion is so bright and intense that it drowns out everything else.
Underneath the blast, seared into the center of it, are two heat signatures burned so deep and hot I’m amazed the rock didn’t melt entirely.
And one of them…
Oliver.
The warm, steady pattern that’s been a constant in my life since before I could walk. My brother. My friend. The one who always made everything okay.
The second signature is less familiar, but given that Professor Thaddeus is also missing, the logical deduction is that it’s his.
I scan for entry points, departure trails, or any indications of how they got up here or where they went afterward.
There’s nothing.
The blast scorched it all away. If there were fire travel blooms, they’re gone. If anyone walked up here or walked away,I’ll never know. The only signatures that survived are the two at the epicenter.
The temperature spike must have been enormous. Instantaneous.
Final.
The word surfaces unbidden, and I try to push it down. Because final isn’t a scientific term. Final can’t be measured or quantified or disproven with better data.
But this doesn’t feel like a departure or a transition.
It feels like an ending.
“No.” The word comes out broken, whipped away by the wind.
I push deeper, searching for detail I missed. A secondary trail, a continuation, or any evidence that Oliver walked away, that he’s on this island waiting to be found.
No matter how hard I push, there are only two thermal fingerprints blazing impossibly bright, surrounded by the echo of a heat blast so intense it erased everything else.
The analytical part of my brain keeps trying to form lists. Possible explanations.
One: unprecedented magical phenomenon requiring further study.
Two: deliberate signature erasure by unknown third party.
Three—
I can’t finish thinking about the third option, especially with the Crown’s amplification flooding through me, making everything too bright, too loud, and too much.
I don’t know how long I stay there. The sky shifts from black to deep blue to the first pale gray of approaching dawn, and I don’t move. I can’t move.
Because my brother came to the Crown last night, and he never left.
“Evie.”
