We had time to prepare and time to pretend we weren't afraid.
Then the night the thing came, there was no time left for anything but motion.
It began with the alarm—a slow, rolling bell that made the academy feel as if it had been yanked awake by its throat. I was still in my room. Seris and Lira had been there hours before, whispering about rotations and wards, thin lights dancing between them as they practiced grounding exercises with clinical focus. When the bell tolled, that practice fractured into something raw and immediate.
The courtyard filled in minutes. Lanterns that had felt festive and soft during the festival now snapped to warded brilliance. Teachers and upper-year wardens appeared like storm shadows at the edges of the light, robes flaring with discipline and worry. Councilors moved like carved statues through the crowd, issuing orders without panic—only purpose.
We met in the main hall, where Dareth stood with his hands clasped in front of him. The Constellation Web above still shimmered faintly from the old festival magic, threads catching the emergency wards in a net that smelled of ozone.
"We detected it approaching from the north," Dareth said without preamble. "Not a natural resonance. It's seeking the triad signature. It will arrive in approximately—" he glanced at a sigil nearby and finished quickly— "ten minutes."
Ten minutes to leave the hall and stand in a place where the entirety of the academy would see us. Ten minutes to be ready to do what we had been training for, with the weight of the Council and everyone's gaze lodged on our shoulders.
My mark burned hot.
Lira closed her eyes and drew breath as if trying to steady a skittish horse. Her hands were clasped at her ribs, knuckles white.
Seris cracked her jaw, then forced a grin that didn't reach her eyes. "So this is how our dramatic destiny chooses to arrive. Rude, but makes for a good story."
"Less quips now," Lira said quietly. "Focus."
We were routed to the east practice field—the same place where Lira had almost broken the other night. The ground was ringed with runes and wards the Council technicians had laid, lines glowing low and steady under stone. Teachers and several experienced wardens formed a perimeter, and the students watching were pushed back behind reinforced lantern-barricades.
The moon hung low and fat. The north horizon had a smear of odd lights, like the aurora had decided to disguise itself as something hungry. The air tasted metallic.
We walked in a triangle—me in the center, Lira at my right, Seris at my left—because that's how we'd become conditioned to approach everything that mattered. There was a rhythm to it now, a muscle memory: the way Seris held her staff like a promise she meant to keep, the steadiness in Lira's breathing, the small, conscious moderation in my steps.
"Remember," Dareth said, voice low but carrying over the courtyard's hush. "Do not force an integration. If the 'thing' tries to connect through you, channel it outward. Don't let it anchor. We will help with wards, but you must hold the center."
I swallowed. The words were practical, clinical, the kind of instructions someone gives you before sending you into a burning room.
"Understood," I said.
Ten minutes turned into five, then into two. The lights on the horizon shivered and condensed into forms.
They were not one shape. They were a chorus—shadows braided with coils of ancient light. The thing moved without joint. Where it shifted, the grass didn't lay flat. It rose, curling in patterns like calligraphy gone animate. The first wave of its presence washed through us like a tide of winter-heat—cold screaming into bone, then the reverse as some other frequency tried to sing.
Something in me recognized the pattern not by sight but by the memory of sensation: a resonance that remembered use, loss, and longing.
"Here," Seris whispered.
The first tendril reached the ward and halted, but not before it scraped a line through the runes and sang them into a humming note. The ward responded with a flare as if someone had plucked a taut string, and all the wardens braced.
It turned toward the center—toward us.
It tested the air like a predator testing scent.
My link jerked. Lira's heartbeat thundered from her chest through the connection—far faster than she'd let it be, reckless and jagged. Seris's pulse met it with a bright spark: anger, defiance, refusal.
The thing hesitated. Curious? Hungry? Recognizing?
It tried to speak in the only language it knew—resonance.
Not words. Not images. A pressure at the base of the skull that made me taste old iron and cold earth.
> [EXTERNAL SIGNAL]
[Attempt: integration via emotional anchor]
It reached for me.
I felt the pressure escalate—like hands trying to braid into the bond. The sensation was repulsive and enticing in equal measure. It was offering a completeness I'd never known, and a consumption I couldn't imagine surviving.
"Split it," Lira said, voice barely audible, threading purpose into her words. "Channel outward. Don't let it pull to the center."
Seris was already moving. She planted her staff into the ground and called in a line of flame that wrapped around the graded runes and braided with the warders' magic. The flames weren't meant to burn the creature; they were a mirror—a fiery reflection of resonance that aimed to confuse the thing's synaesthesia.
I closed my eyes and pictured three paths: not a single channel but a triad braid that could carry pressure away, divide it, and throw it back into the wild. I let the bond open, but not to invite the creature in. I let it flow in a controlled rotation—Lira's cool steadiness, Seris's bold flare, and my own crooked center acting like a millstone to grind the incoming surge.
It came like a storm.
I nearly lost my breath. The link tried to invert, to turn the braid into a net and catch us all. For a second I felt something claw at the place under my ribs where the mark sat, an ache that wanted to expand and swallow.
The System's warning cut through, clinical and bright.
> [PRIMARY CHANNEL: Arin Vale — receiving external feed]
[Overload risk: critical]
Panic pressed at the edges of my consciousness. I could hear not just the thing but the echo of it in the crowd: a dozen students exhaling as one, teachers shifting, and the Council murmuring in that tight, practiced way they did when they were afraid our story might ruin more than our careers.
I tightened my mental braid when I felt Lira falter—just a microsecond of doubt—and the thing seized it like a hand finding a rent in fabric. Cold raced through Lira; frost coaxed up the grass by her boots.
"Arin!" Seris barked. She diverted a line of resonance outward in a brilliant arc that scattered motes of the invader's light, but the thing absorbed some and altered other parts of its shape like someone changing a coat in the wind.
I couldn't let it latch on. If it did, the bond would become its pathway into us. It would know everything we remembered. It would learn how we tethered to each other and how we broke, and then it would use those cracks.
So I did the only thing I could imagine doing.
I opened myself wider—not in fear, but in offering—not to let it inside, but to let me be the buffer between the creature and my two anchors.
"Feel me," I thought into the connection, wordless. Feel what we are together. Feel that you cannot consume this without becoming something else first.
Lira's presence flared in response to that intentional sharing. Not arrogance. Not artifice. A raw, trembling courage that made my throat burn.
Seris forced a grin that was all teeth and grit. "Hold on, center-of-their-attention," she muttered, but I heard the steadiness under her voice like ballast.
We braided. We pushed. We pulled.
For a moment it felt like standing against a black ocean wall.
And then it broke.
Not in a single explosive note but in a collapsing of intent—the creature recoiled as if the very thing it sought to remember couldn't be grabbed at will. Its tendrils shrank, then withdrew, leaving echoes like heat shimmer on the ground. The wards flared, and the runes smoked, but they held.
We collapsed into each other after the recoil: Lira into my right shoulder, Seris into my left. Our hands found each other instinctively, three points pressed together like a living sigil.
My chest hurt. My lungs burned. The mark on my collarbone felt raw, throbbing as though someone had struck it.
We'd survived the first sweep.
But survival tastes different when you've been close enough to touch the teeth of something older.
Sirens—real, trained warden sirens—raised as the perimeter teams pushed outward to ensure the thing hadn't only scouted the wards but actually scarred the land. Councilors shouted orders about tracking patterns and fallout zones. Students who'd watched were ushered away, swaddled in adult reassurances and pale smiles.
Dareth came forward, eyes like flint under a tired brow.
"You held," he said. Not praise exactly. It was an observation. A ledger entry in how one keeps track of things that might destroy them.
"We held," Lira answered, voice low. She was still trembling. "We held together."
He nodded, slow. "This is not the end. It learned tonight." His gaze cut between us. "It will remember now where resonance lies."
"That's the point," Seris snapped. "We won't let it use what it remembers."
"No," Dareth said. "We will ensure you have more than this." His eyes lingered on me, then on Lira, then Seris. "Council will allocate guardians and reinforce perimeter wards. You will be permitted training windows beyond the usual hours. And you will be provided direct intervention support."
Relief washed through me, immediate and sharp. It would mean more scrutiny, more control—but it also meant we had allies who knew how to build walls stronger than a single hand.
"But," Dareth continued, and the but fell like a stone, "this likely means that whatever this thing is will escalate its approach. It will probe. You must prepare for the day it chooses a deeper test."
We left the field not as triumphant heroes but as survivors of a first test. The thing had come; we'd held; we'd learned. There would be scars, practical and otherwise.
We walked back in a line, shoulders touching when our steps slowed. People watched us—some with awe, some with the guarded stare of those who saw hope but feared what hope could become.
Seris broke the silence first, out of nowhere: "You did that, Arin. Opening yourself. That took guts." Her voice was small, the compliment unusual—like catching a flash of frank tenderness from someone who wore armor as habit.
"You did too," Lira said. "You directed. You didn't let it take advantage."
I felt something warm fold around my ribs—more than the marks, more than adrenaline. A current of gratitude passed through the bond, deeper than the training drills or the speeches or the Council's stern pronouncements.
Later, in the infirmary, with the minor cuts dressed and some of the embers of shock burnt down to manageable coals, the three of us sat on a narrow cot, shoulders pressed together.
Outside, the night still hummed with the remnants of the clash, and somewhere beyond the academy walls, wind picked up and carried old echoes.
The thing had remembered resonance; we had shown it we were no easy harvest. It would come back. It would try new keys. But for now, safe in the warmth of patched wounds and the worn fabric of our robes, we shared quiet and a certainty that felt less fragile than it had a week ago.
"We'll rebuild what it tries to break," Seris said, voice both wry and fierce.
"We will," Lira agreed.
I looked at them—at the two halves of my two anchors—and thought how wrong it had felt when part of me once craved to bear the burden alone. The world was not kinder for carrying everything by yourself. It was kinder, somehow, to be brave enough to share the cold.
When I laid my hand across both theirs—Lira's soft and Seris's callused—I felt the bond settle into a new rhythm. Not perfect. Not unbreakable. But tempered.
We'd faced the thing that remembered.
It had tasted us.
And it had, for now, withdrawn.
We were the same three people who'd stumbled into this life days before, but also not the same at all.
Outside, the Constellation Web shimmered and the academy's wards hummed a slow, cautious lullaby.
We would sleep in shifts that night—one of us awake, one watching, one mending—until the Council's reinforcements arrived.
And when the time came, we would make the thing remember something else as well: that resonance was not a thing to be harvested, but a song we would sing when we chose.