-Alexia-
The cheers in the Great Hall were still ringing in my ears, but they felt miles away, muffled as if I were underwater. While the students embraced and Shade reclaimed her dais, my skin was crawling. The wolf inside me wasn't celebrating; it was pacing a restless, jagged path behind my ribs, its hackles raised, its nose pressed metaphorically against the cracks in the school's ancient stone.
I looked at Alexia. She was pale, her silhouette small against the grandeur of the hall, leaning into the curve of my arm. Her strength was nearly spent, her magic a flickering candle in a hurricane, but her eyes weren't on the celebration. She was staring at the massive oak doors we had just burst through—the same doors that led to the dark, freezing night beyond.
"He's here," she whispered. Her voice was so low it was almost a breath, yet it cut through the noise of a hundred shouting students like a blade.
"Vane?" Finn asked, wiping a smear of soot from his forehead. He was grinning, his usual spark returning to his eyes. "Vane is in chains, Lex. We won. We actually did it."
"Not Vane," I said, my voice dropping an octave as the realization hit me like a physical blow. A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. "Vane was just the dog on the leash. The master has arrived."
As if the school itself were echoing my dread, the floor beneath us suddenly shuddered. It wasn't the warm, rhythmic thrum of Whisperwind's heart—the pulse I had grown to recognize as a comfort. It was a cold, violent jar, a tectonic plate snapping somewhere deep in the mountain's roots. The golden torches in the hall flickered, their flames turning a sickly, bruised purple for a split second before snapping back to gold.
The laughter in the room died instantly. Silence, heavy and suffocating, rushed in to fill the space.
Shade stood up from her seat, her face draining of color until she looked as ancient as the statues lining the walls. "The perimeter wards," she whispered, her hands gripping her rowan staff so hard the wood creaked. "He's hitting them with a sustained resonance. He's trying to shake the mountain down."
"He's hitting the ley lines directly," Jasper muttered, pulling a glowing brass compass from his pocket. The needle wasn't pointing north; it was spinning wildly, a blurred silver circle unable to find a true center in the magical chaos. "The atmospheric pressure is spiking. If he keeps this up, the stone itself will shatter."
"Everyone out of the Hall!" Shade's voice boomed, regaining its iron authority. "Professors, lead the younger years to the sub-basement vaults. They're lead-lined and grounded. Move! Do not stop for your belongings!"
The joy in the room vanished, replaced by a practiced, frantic discipline. We didn't follow the crowd toward the safety of the depths. We moved in the opposite direction, toward the main gates, our boots echoing against the stone like the drums of a funeral march.
As we stepped out into the courtyard, the night air felt like it was made of static electricity. The sky above Whisperwind was no longer black; it was a swirling, churning vortex of dark clouds, lit from below by the shimmering gold of the school's dome-like shield. Outside that shield, standing on the edge of the narrow cliffside path that served as the only entrance to the academy, was a single figure.
Gideon.
He didn't look like a villain from a storybook. He looked like an aristocrat of death. He was tall and gaunt, draped in robes of charcoal silk that seemed to absorb the light around him. He held a staff of black iron, topped with a crystal that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic violet light—a heartbeat of pure malice. Every time he struck the ground with the base of that staff, a shockwave of shadow slammed into our wards, sending ripples of violet fire across the sky like lightning trapped in a bottle.
"Alexia Carter!" Gideon's voice didn't come from the wind; it came from the ground beneath our feet, vibrating through our boots and into our teeth. "You have played with my toys and broken my puppets. But the Weaver's blood belongs to the craft, and the craft belongs to me. Open the gates, and perhaps I will leave the children alive."
"He's arrogant," Soren growled, drawing his claymore. The heavy steel hummed in his hands, reacting to the sheer volume of raw magic saturating the air. "He's standing right in the open. One good charge and I can end this."
"He's not standing in the open," Jasper warned, lifting his looking-glass to his eye and adjusting the lenses. "Look at the shadows under the trees, Soren. He didn't come alone."
I squinted, my wolf-sight sharpening as the moon dipped behind a cloud. Emerging from the forest were shapes that made my blood run cold. They weren't human. They were constructs—wraiths made of smoke, obsidian, and rusted armor, held together by the same dark, glowing threads Thorne had tried to use on Alexia. They moved with a jerky, unnatural precision, hundreds of them, encircling the school like a ring of teeth.
"He's been building an army in the dead zones," Finn breathed, his hands sparking with blue-white static. "Those things don't have hearts, Asher. You can't kill something that isn't alive."
"Then we break them," I said, my jaw setting.
Alexia stepped forward, the silver fox trotting at her heels. The creature's fur was standing straight up, sparks of white light jumping from its tail and ears. Despite her exhaustion, Alexia looked taller, her presence expanding to fill the courtyard.
"He wants the school because he thinks it's a battery," she said, her voice steadying us all. "He wants me because he thinks I'm a key. We need to show him that we're the lock. And the lock is staying shut."
"I'm not letting him touch you, Lex," I said, stepping to her side, my hand brushing against hers. "Not after everything we've been through."
"I know," she said, and for a second, a small, sad smile touched her lips. "But we can't stay behind the walls. If we let him keep hitting the wards with that staff, they'll shatter. The feedback will kill everyone in the vaults. We have to meet him at the threshold."
I looked at the others. The rivalry that had defined us—the jealousy, the secrets, the anger—it felt small now. Insignificant. "Jasper, Finn, Soren. Get the older students on the battlements. If those constructs move toward the walls, I want them pelted with every elemental spell this school has. Jasper, find the harmonic frequency of those wraiths. Finn, you're the artillery. Don't let them cluster."
"And you?" Soren asked, his eyes meeting mine with a newfound respect.
"I'm the shield," I said, the wolf inside me settling into a cold, lethal crouch. "I'm going out there with her."
The fox let out a high-pitched, resonant yip, and the school's golden dome flared in response, turning the courtyard as bright as noon. The gates of Whisperwind began to groan—the massive, iron-reinforced timber sliding upward not by force, but by invitation.
We were going out. To the edge of the world, to face the man who had haunted our history.
Gideon stopped striking the ground. He tilted his head, a thin, cruel smile spreading across his face as the gates rose and the five of us stepped out into the biting mountain wind.
"Finally," he whispered, the sound echoing in the silence of the valley. "The hunt begins."