The alarm hit at six in the morning and Hart was already awake because Hart was always awake now.
Three days of almost no sleep. His eyes burned when he blinked. The stiff shoulder had settled into something permanent, a dull pull every time he reached for anything above chest height. His palms were scabbed from the Oak's roots.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed lacing his boots when the siren cut through the building and his fingers stopped moving.
Not the morning bell. The siren. The one they tested once a semester and told students to ignore during tests. This wasn't a test because it was six AM and the test was always at noon on a Tuesday and today was Thursday.
Beast incursion.
Hart's boots were half-laced. He finished them with hands that moved faster than the rest of him was ready for and stood up and the room tilted for a second. Sleep debt. He grabbed the doorframe.
Sable's weight shifted in his shadow. He could feel her. Three days of the bond and he was already learning to read the feeling, the way you learn to read a new ache in your body. She was alert. Awake. Had probably been awake the whole time he was trying to sleep.
"Outer district," she said from his shadow. The voice came from the floor. From his feet. Still weird. Still not something he was used to.
"How do you know."
"I can feel them. Through the ground. Four. Maybe five. Bronze tier. Coming from the east where the wall is lowest."
Hart pulled his jacket on. The mud from last night's training was still on it. He hadn't washed it. Hadn't had time. Hadn't cared.
The hallway was chaos. Students pouring out of dorms in various states of dressed. Someone was yelling about assembly points.
A girl he didn't know was crying near the stairwell, not because she was scared probably but because the siren was loud and it was six AM and people cry when they're startled sometimes. That's just how it works.
Hart moved through them. Nobody noticed him moving. Three years of practice.
The outer district was a ten minute walk from the east wing. Hart did it in six because his legs were longer than they used to be and because something in his chest was pulling him forward. Not the crack from before. Something else. Sharper. Like his body knew what was coming before his brain caught up.
He came around the corner of the provision hall and saw it.
The wall. Graveston's eastern boundary. Three meters of packed stone that separated the town from the Greymarch. A section of it was broken. Not crumbled. Broken. Something had hit it hard enough to scatter stones across thirty meters of open ground and the gap was wide enough that three people could walk through side by side.
Two beasts were already through.
They looked wrong. Hart had seen pictures in textbooks and the pictures were clean, detailed, labeled with neat arrows pointing to anatomy. The real things were not clean.
Low to the ground. Fast. Four legs that bent at angles his brain kept trying to correct and failing. Dark fur matted with something wet. Eyes that reflected the early light in a way that made his stomach drop because eyes aren't supposed to catch light like that unless something behind them is burning.
Bronze tier. Maybe. He didn't have a way to measure except that Sable had said Bronze and Sable had been alive longer than the wall they'd just broken.
People were screaming somewhere to the left. A man in a shopkeeper's apron was running with a child under each arm. Militia members were forming a line thirty meters back from the breach, shields up, which was the correct response to a beast incursion if you were Iron tier and wanted to not die.
Hart was Iron tier. Hart should have been behind the shield line.
Hart was standing forty meters from two beasts with nothing visible between him and them except open ground and his own body.
"Warden." Sable's voice. From his shadow. Calm. Not asking permission. Just checking if he was ready.
He wasn't ready. Three nights of training under the Oak. Shadow Phase that fired when it wanted. Scraped palms. No sleep. He was the furthest thing from ready.
A third beast pushed through the gap in the wall.
"Yeah," Hart said.
Sable erupted from his shadow.
The shadow wolf materialized between Hart and the beasts and she was bigger than he remembered or maybe the morning light made her look bigger. Smoke-fur rippling. Eyes locked forward. She didn't look at him. Didn't need to.
She hit the first beast at full speed.
The sound was bad. Wet. Heavy. The kind of sound that tells you something broke inside something else. The beast went sideways into the remains of the wall and didn't get up right away.
The second beast turned toward Sable and the third one didn't. The third one came at Hart.
Fast. Lower to the ground than Sable. Wider mouth. He could see the teeth now, rows of them, and his brain did the thing it always does when it sees something that's about to kill him which is provide extremely unhelpful observations like those teeth are very yellow and is that blood or mud on its chin.
Shadow Phase fired.
He didn't choose it. His body stepped left and the world went sideways for half a second and the beast's jaws snapped shut where his chest had been. His shoulder phased. The teeth went through air that used to be him.
He came out the other side and his feet hit the ground wrong and he stumbled but didn't fall. Dizziness hit like a wave. His vision went grey at the edges.
The beast turned. Came again.
This time his body didn't phase. Shadow Phase was still on cooldown, whatever that meant, and the beast was two meters away and closing and Hart did the only thing he could think of which was drop.
He hit the ground flat. The beast went over him. Claws raked the back of his jacket and he heard fabric tear and something hot and thin drew a line across his shoulder blade. Not deep. Enough to notice.
Sable was there.
The shadow wolf caught the third beast mid-turn. Her jaw closed on its neck and she dragged it sideways with a force that cracked the flagstones under her feet. The beast thrashed. Sable held.
Hart was on the ground. Face in the dirt. The cut on his back was warm and his hands were flat on cold stone and the militia line was thirty meters behind him and someone was shouting his name. Not his name. Just "kid" actually. "Kid get back here."
He pushed himself up. Knees first. Then feet.
Sable released the third beast. It wasn't moving anymore. The second beast was circling her, low, cautious. Smart enough to be scared. The first one was back on its feet by the wall but limping.
Two left.
The Grid pulsed in Hart's peripheral vision.
[ADVISORY]
Essence Core: Destabilized.
Shadow Phase cooldown: 8 seconds remaining.
Recommend: Evade.
Eight seconds. He couldn't phase for eight more seconds. His back was bleeding. Sable was handling one beast. The other was between him and the wall.
The limping beast looked at him. Directly at him. With eyes that had fire behind them and a mouth that was opening.
Hart picked up a stone from the rubble. Fist-sized. Not a weapon. More like a suggestion of one.
The beast charged.
It was slower than the third one. The limp. Hart moved right and threw the stone at its face and the stone bounced off its skull with a sound like hitting a table with a book. Didn't slow it down much. Enough that when it lunged the jaws closed a half-meter short.
Shadow Phase fired.
Not from him. Through him. The beast lunged again and Hart's body went wrong again, that half-second of not-solid, and the claws passed through his arm like his arm was made of cold air. He stumbled out on the other side shaking and sick and his vision was tunneling.
Sable hit the limping beast from the left. She'd finished the second one. Hart hadn't seen it happen. There was a body on the ground behind her that wasn't moving and she was on the limper now and the fight was short.
Silence.
Not silence. Sounds. Shouting. The militia. Someone calling for a healer. A dog barking somewhere far away. But the beast sounds had stopped and the silence where those sounds had been was its own kind of loud.
Hart stood in the middle of it. Jacket torn. Back bleeding. His hands were shaking and his knees were doing something unreliable and there was dirt on his face and the Grid was pulsing with information he couldn't read because his eyes wouldn't focus.
Three beasts. Dead.
Sable stood over the last one. She turned her head and looked at Hart with those mercury eyes and didn't say anything. She didn't need to say anything. The look said enough.
Something moved behind him. Hart turned. Slow. Everything was slow now.
The militia line had broken. People were walking toward the breach. Toward the dead beasts. Toward him. A woman with a medic armband was coming his way. Two students from the academy were standing at the edge of the rubble staring at Sable like they'd never seen a beast before. Which was fair because most of them hadn't. Not up close. Not dead.
A man in militia gear stopped next to Hart. Looked at Sable. Looked at Hart.
"That's yours?" he said.
"Yeah." Hart's voice came out rough. Like he'd been chewing on gravel. "Shadow wolf. Found her in the Greymarch."
First time using the cover story out loud. The words tasted like the oatmeal from yesterday. Wrong but functional.
The man looked at Sable again. At the three dead beasts. At the eighteen-year-old kid with the torn jacket and the bloody back.
"Huh," the man said.
That was it. Huh. He walked past Hart toward the breach.
The Grid pulsed one more time. Faint. Almost missed it.
Shadow Phase (Tier I)
Status: Active
Activations this engagement: 2
Duration: 0.4 sec (unchanged)
Warden physical state: Compromised.
Recommend: Rest.
Hart wiped his face with the back of his hand. Blood and dirt. His right hand drifted. Found his left wrist. Pressed the tendon.
He didn't stop it this time. Let it land. Let the pressure sit there for three seconds.
Then he let go.
Sable dissolved back into his shadow. Quiet. Like she'd never been there. The militia was spreading out around the breach and the medic was heading for him and somewhere behind the wall the Greymarch was still there, still dark, still full of things that howled.
The howling hadn't stopped. If anything there was more of it now. Coming from further in. From deeper.
Like the three that came through the wall were the ones out front.
Not the big ones.
Hart looked at the gap in the wall. The dark beyond it.
The Grid flickered. New text. Small. At the bottom of the screen where he almost didn't see it.
[ADVISORY]
Greymarch activity: Escalating.
Projected breach window: 72 hours.