Part I: The Demon-Kin, The Half-Breed and the Guttersnipe

Threshold

The Tower’s archway was older than the city it protected, and twice as pitiless. Lavan Edor, eleven and already hunched against disappointment, paused beneath its span and exhaled a cloud of nervous breath. It barely made a dent in the Cuatrova chill, or the snicker of leyline energy that frothed along the Tower’s buttresses and flared, invisible but insistent, against the corners of his vision. He clutched his letter of admission so tightly the paper creased and tore at the edges. Behind him, the road he’d climbed wound back to the city gates.

Inside, the entry hall was an artery of cold stone and stale incense. Lavan hesitated, then took his first step into the unknown. He expected, hoped for, a greeting, a word of welcome, even the condescension of a bored porter. But no one materialized. There was only the faint echo of footsteps somewhere up the spiral stair, and the faint, unceasing buzz of the leyline that formed the Tower’s skeleton. He supposed it was because he was getting a late start. Most first-year students had been at the tower for a few weeks already, attending orientation, acclimating to the ever-changing halls of the Tower, making friends. He swallowed, he had never been great at acclimating, or making friends. But he supposed he couldn’t begrudge his parents. They had taken a whole week off of work, something they had never done before, so that they could spend family time together before he left.

He followed the corridor, flanked by portraits. A double row of them, stretching away down the hall, each a full-length painting of a Master Arcanist rendered in oils thick enough to survive three fires and a flood. Their eyes tracked his progress, some with disdain, others with a bored, predatory patience. 

A muffled burst of laughter drifted from an alcove up ahead, followed by a high, nasal voice: “Did you see the shoes on him? Like he just walked out of a factory.” A second voice, lower, responded: “He did. It’s in his file. Low Docks. They take anyone now, just to fill the quota.” The first voice again, with a sneer sharp enough to cut: “Next year they’ll be letting in dogs.”

A third, older voice, this one less cruel, but more final, shushed them. “He’s coming. Shut it.”

He kept walking, but the pressure of their stares followed. One of the boys made a faint dog-barking noise as Lavan passed, then snorted at his own wit.

Lavan felt the heat rise in his face, but he did not slow. Instead, he concentrated on the slip of paper in his hand, reading the scrawl. New Admits, Dormitory: Underbridge, First Year Advisor: Vinder. 

The corridor narrowed, then bent left into a short landing with a half-open door at the end. Lavan was so focused on the map in his hand that he didn’t notice the figure rounding the corner from the other direction until they collided. His admission letter crumpled, and he stumbled backward, breath knocked out of him.

The other party was a girl, about his age but nearly a head taller. Her skin was the color of storm clouds, her hair in a wild black ponytail, and a pair of polished silver bands glinted along her small, backward-swept horns. She wore the same ivory uniform as the others, but her boots were battered, the laces mismatched. She looked him up and down, her red eyes flicking from his scuffed shoes to his patched sleeve to the ruined paper in his fist. “Watch it, kid,” she said.

He found his voice. “Sorry. I’m—” He stopped, unwilling to offer his name if she didn’t first.

She didn’t offer hers either. Instead, she leaned close, voice pitched for his ears alone. “Ignore them,” she said, jerking her chin at the cluster of students peeking around the corner, “they’re afraid of you”

He blinked. “I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s what makes it worse,” she replied, then sidestepped him and stalked down the hall toward the dormitory.

The trailing laughter resumed at her passing, but it was thinner now, more uneasy.

He followed, half-hoping she would turn and say something else, half-hoping she would vanish and let him digest the embarrassment in peace. But when he entered the common room, she was waiting, seated cross-legged on a sagging leather couch. She nodded at the battered letter in his hand. “You a first year too?”

He nodded, still catching his breath.

She grinned. “Lucky us, Vinder is our advisor.”

He tried a joke. “I heard he makes you eat glass if you fail your first exam.”

She rolled her eyes, but the smile didn’t fade. “That’s just a rumor. I heard the glass is for special occasions. Usually, it’s just humiliation and extra drills.”

From behind them, the echo of shoes on stone announced the arrival of other students. A red-haired girl led, flanked by two other girls and a trio of boys. She pretended to notice the tiefling girl for the first time and fixed her with a thin-lipped smile. “Careful, demon-spawn. The city has leash laws.”

The tiefling’s eyes flashed. “And I see you’re in violation of the city’s curfew for idiots.”

A few of the younger students snorted, emboldened now that the cruelty was aimed elsewhere. The girl turned her attention to Lavan, summing him up with a single look. “You can always tell the charity cases,” she said, “by the way they look at the furniture.”

The tiefling intervened. “He’s smarter than you, you know. Probably smarter than all of you combined.”

The redhead arched a brow. “Is that so?”

The tiefling shrugged. “It would be hard not to be.”

The tension spiked, a brittle silence that snapped when the boys broke into nervous giggles. The girl, apparently bored with the standoff, flicked a dismissive glance at Lavan and the tiefling, then swept away with her entourage in tow. One of them, bolder than the others, hissed a parting “Nightvalley trash” at the tiefling, and they disappeared into a side passage.

The tiefling let out a slow breath, then glanced at Lavan. “You all right?”

He nodded. “It’s not the first time.”

She snorted, a sound somewhere between derision and camaraderie. “Of course it isn’t.”

He took the couch across from her, trying to smooth out the ruined letter with both hands. She watched him, head cocked to the side, as if inspecting a new species. “You’re from the Docks, right?”

He nodded again, then, seeing no harm in it, offered: “Lavan Edor. Lower Docks, I think I’m the only one from my block this year.”

She hesitated, then: “Ophelia Saloth. Nightvalley, but not for much longer, I hope.” She extended a hand, fingers smudged with graphite and something darker. He shook it, surprised by the strength of her grip.

The formalities dispensed, a hush settled over them, a quiet that was more companionable than awkward. Lavan, emboldened, asked: “You ever get used to it? The way people look at you?”

Ophelia shrugged. “Not really. But you learn to use it. Make them underestimate you, then prove them wrong.”

He considered this. “I don’t think I’m very good at that.”

“You’ll learn,” she said, voice almost gentle. “Or you won’t. And then you’ll leave, and none of this will matter.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching the leyline runes flicker in the hearth and an old Tower cat thread its way along the baseboards, ignoring both of them with expert disdain.

“In two days,” Ophelia said finally, “they’ll test us. I heard Vinder likes to split the new admits into groups. Put them in the ring and see who comes out standing.”

Lavan’s stomach churned. “Like, a duel?”

She grinned. “Not unless you want to get flattened. More like a puzzle. But if you mess up, it’s your whole class year watching.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

She stood, stretched, then gestured at the door. “You want to see the practice room? I know a shortcut.”

He hesitated, then followed. The Tower’s corridors twisted like the guts of a snake, and Lavan soon realized he’d have been hopelessly lost on his own. Ophelia moved with the surety of someone who had mapped every crevice, every shortcut, every place where the architecture betrayed its builders’ intent.

They passed more portraits, more banners. The further down they went, the less grand the decor, and the more it looked like the inside of an actual school; chalkboards, battered desks, doors hung slightly askew.

At a landing just above the sub-basement, they heard voices: the same girls from earlier, this time speaking low and urgent.

“He’s not normal,” one whispered. “Nobody scores that high on the entrance without a fix.”

“Maybe he bribed someone. Or maybe his family has dirt on the Council,” the other replied.

Ophelia pressed a finger to her lips, then beckoned Lavan into the shadow behind a statue of a weeping wizard. She waited until the voices faded, then whispered: “See? They’re already afraid of you. You don’t even have to try.”

He found this little comfort, but smiled anyway.

The practice room was a bare-walled chamber lined with shelves of battered spellbooks, staves, and more training dummies than he could count. Ophelia pushed open the door and swept a hand inside. “We have two days to practice before the test. Let’s show them why they should fear us.”

Lavan peered in. It smelled of sweat and ozone, the air thick with the residue of a thousand failed cantrips. “What if we mess up?” he asked, barely audible.

She shrugged. “Then we mess up. But we mess up together, right?”

He thought about this, then nodded.

They lingered there a moment, two outcasts in the belly of the Tower, breathing in the promise and threat of what came next.

When the bell sounded for curfew, they left together, tracing their steps back through the labyrinth of stone and shadow. Above them, the Master Arcanists watched from their gilded frames, judging, perhaps, but powerless to shape the future that Lavan Edor and Ophelia Saloth would forge.

As they parted at the dormitory door, Ophelia grinned, her horns catching the lamplight. “See you in the pit, Dockboy.”

He smiled, the first real one of the day. “See you in the pit, Demon-girl.”

And for the first time since arriving at the Tower, Lavan felt the leyline buzz not as a warning, but as a kind of music: a low, secret rhythm he and his new friend could learn to dance to.

No Need for an Honor Guard

In the Tower, lunch was less a meal than an armed truce. The student dining hall, a cross between cathedral and mess hall, was dominated by three runs of ancient wood tables. Overhead, the ceiling soared, ribbed in stone and laced with blue-glass windows. In theory, everyone sat where they pleased, but in practice, the social order mapped itself with a precision that rivaled the leyline grid beneath the city.

Ophelia and Lavan claimed a far corner, next to a window warped by age and salted with condensation. It was mostly private, and that was all that mattered.

Ophelia peeled her bread apart with careful hands, flicking glances at the tables near the center, where the sons and daughters of city officials clustered, laughing at jokes that never quite carried to the fringes. Lavan picked at his own food, salt cod and a slab of something pretending to be cheese, while pretending not to hear the low murmur from the adjacent table.

“You ever get used to the noise?” he asked, just above a whisper.

Ophelia shook her head, voice flat. “No. But you learn what to listen for.” She jerked her chin at a knot of older students holding court two tables over, their voices pitched to carry. “That’s the ‘Scholars’ Cohort. They’ve all got family in Council Seat, the Countis Nobelesse, or high up in the city’s bureaucracy. Most of them wouldn’t know a real spell if it bit them.”

Lavan followed her gaze. “You think they know we’re here?”

She grinned, feral. “They’re obsessed with us.”

For a few minutes, they ate in silence. Then, as if on cue, the volume in the room spiked, and a new topic carried across the hall.

“I’m just saying, if we let charity admits into the Tower, what’s the point of lineage? Our families invested centuries into this place,” said a boy in the center, his accent the precise blend of theater and law clerk. 

A girl, pale as a wax candle, chimed in. “There was a tiefling in my orientation group. She couldn’t even pronounce the runes.”

Ophelia’s hands tensed, knuckles tightening on the crust of her bread.

Lavan, seeing this, put a careful hand on her wrist. “They want you to react,” he said. “That’s the game.”

She stilled, then smiled, not with humor, but with a mean satisfaction. “They’re not worth the effort.” She flexed her fingers and the bread snapped clean in two. “This place isn’t as scary as Nightvalley. Half the Watch would shake you down just for walking on the wrong side of the street. I saw them let a human kid go for lifting a purse, then they dragged a tiefling girl to jail for picking up what he dropped.”

“Was she your friend?” Lavan asked.

Ophelia shrugged. “She was my neighbor. You learn to keep your head down.”

He nodded, then, after a long moment: “It’s not so different in the Docks. I was the only one in my school who could light a candle by thinking about it. The rest just… pushed. Or stole.”

She looked at him, surprised. “You from the Warehouse side?”

“Two streets over from the River. Most days, we’d watch the ferries and bet which one would crash first.”

Ophelia’s smile sharpened. “I was on the south side of Nightvalley, in the lower tenements. You ever hear about the fire at Butcher’s Row?”

“Was that…?” Lavan started, then stopped, embarrassed.

Ophelia leaned in, voice a whisper. “My brother started it. Well, technically. But the Watch blamed every tiefling on the block, so it didn’t matter.”

Lavan snorted, almost a laugh. “I once set my house on fire by accident, trying to impress a neighbor. Didn’t live it down for years.”

Ophelia’s eyes widened, then she grinned. “That’s impressive.”

Their shared chuckle was small but genuine, and for a moment, the rest of the hall faded.

“See,” she said, “we’re not so different.”

A clatter of trays interrupted, and the room’s attention swiveled to the entrance where three newcomers arrived. The girl at the front, short and half-elven, moved with a precision that looked learned rather than natural. Her white-blonde hair was braided in silver ribbons, and the way she surveyed the room made it clear she expected to be noticed. 

She was flanked by two girls of similar age, each trailing half a step behind in the casual, predatory formation of girls who’d spent their lives jockeying for position. Lavan recognized the look immediately: the careful upward tilt of the chin, the way one eyed the seating chart like it was a battlefield. The half-elf scanned the tables, assessed the lay of land, and, skipping the easy option of the Scholars' Cohort, angled directly for their table at the window.

Her companions hissed warnings in her ear. "That's the Nightvalley mutt," one said, not quite under her breath. "And the charity admit. Your father would—"

But the half-elf only smiled, slow and deliberate, and deposited her tray across from Ophelia and Lavan with a clatter. A hunk of bread rolled off and hit Ophelia's sleeve, scattering crumbs across the table.

Ophelia, for her part, didn’t flinch. She didn’t move at all, in fact, except to look up and meet the half-elf’s eyes with a blank directness. “You need something?” she asked.

The half-elf ignored the warning flares from her friends, who now hovered behind like a pair of inconvenient ghosts. She put her hands flat to the table and leaned forward, fingers splayed as if bracing for a physical challenge. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“Not even slightly,” Ophelia said, deadpan.

A flicker of something, relief, amusement, or maybe just exhaustion, registered in the half-elf’s eyes. She straightened, flicked a braid over her shoulder, and said, “Good.” She nodded before continuing, “I’m Isemay Misendris.”

Lavan blinked. He recognized the name, anyone in the city would. One of the Five Families, the most powerful houses in the Countis Nobelesse, with roots that went back to the early Arethian Empire. They were at the top of the food chain, the height of wealth and respect. So, what was one doing talking to them?

Ophelia eyed her for a long moment, as if weighing whether to challenge the premise or ignore it altogether. “You want something?” she asked again, voice flat but not quite hostile.

Isemay shrugged. “Honestly, I want to sit here without getting a lecture from the genealogy patrol or a treatise on what bloodlines are allowed to eat first. I came here to get away from them.” She nudged her tray until it was perfectly square with the edge of the table, then glanced up at the pair of girls behind her. “And you two can go, by the way. I don’t need an honor guard.”

The girls, exchanged a look and hovered for just a second longer, then slunk away, whispering furiously.

From the other table, the boy who’d been speaking earlier shot a look their way and snorted. “Isy, you slumming now? What is it, you think you’re too good for us?”

Isemay ignored him, turning instead to Ophelia and Lavan. “You know, half the Tower is people like him. The other half is people like us. But only one half runs the place.” She stabbed at her salad with a fork, punctuating the point.

Lavan risked a question. “And which half are you?”

She met his gaze without flinching. “I’m here because I love magic. I’m good at it, accepted based on merit and not,” she turned to shoot a glare at the boy, “because my parents bribed the Council to strongarm the Tower into accepting me.” She placed her napkin on her lap, her every move, refined, dainty even. “Technically, I’m a noble, like them, but I’d rather eat with people who say what they mean.”

Isemay looked at them, eyes brimming with expectation, and, just barely, a hint of fear that they, too, would reject her.

The boy at the next table bristled and tried again. “Careful, Isy, you’ll catch something.”

This time, Isemay turned and let her smile sharpen. “Yes, Falden. I might catch the ability to finish a sentence without whining.”

A few snickers ran down the line, and the boy scowled.

Ophelia looked at Isemay with new respect. “You do that often?”

“Only when they need it,” Isemay replied. “Or when I’m bored.”

Falden rose from the Scholars’ Cohort table, flanked by two other boys. His smile was all polished courtesy as he sauntered over. “Isy,” he drawled, drawing out the nickname like he owned it. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

Isemay didn’t flinch. “I’m sitting where I please.”

Falden leaned on the edge of the table, close enough that Lavan could smell the cloying perfume of his ink-stained cuffs. “Oh, you please to eat with charity admits and Nightvalley strays? Fascinating choice. Tell me, is it rebellion, or just a lapse in judgment?”

Ophelia’s eyes flashed. “Careful—”

But Falden cut her off with a smile sharp enough to draw blood. “I wasn’t talking to you, tiefling.”

He turned back to Isemay, voice dropping just enough for the surrounding tables to hush and listen. “Of course, I suppose it makes sense. You’re not really one of us, are you? Adopted into the Five Families, but not of them. Easy to forget your place when it was bought instead of bred.”

The words landed like a slap.

Lavan’s hand tightened on his fork, white-knuckled. Ophelia’s tail lashed against the bench.

But Isemay only smiled, though her fingers pressed too tightly to the edge of her tray. “Strange,” she said, her voice cool. “If I’m not really a noble, then why do you sound so desperate for me to sit at your table?”

Falden’s smirk faltered, just for a moment, before he forced a laugh. “Enjoy your meal, Misendris,” he said, spitting the name like a joke. He turned on his heel, retreating to the safety of his clique.

The hall buzzed back to life. But at their table, silence held , the kind that feels like the first breath after a storm. Lavan ate, feeling the tension in his shoulders slowly bleed away.

Isemay, seeing the change, leaned forward. “So. First test is tomorrow, right?”

Ophelia nodded. “Vinder’s practical. You know him?”

Isemay snorted. “He’s the only instructor who calls me ‘Miss Misendris’ with a straight face.”

The three sat, not quite friends but no longer strangers, as the hall emptied around them. By the time the last bell sounded and the stewards began clearing trays, the only conversation left was their own.

As they left together, Isemay paused in the entryway, turned, and said: “You want to study together? We can use my room. I have extra chairs.”

Lavan looked at Ophelia. She shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

They followed Isemay through the warren of corridors to the upper floor, where the rooms were small and spartan but at least private. For a long while, they said nothing, just sat with their books and the silence. It was enough.

Later, when the moon rose and the Tower’s shadow covered the city, Lavan would remember that afternoon as the first time he felt less alone. The second, he suspected, would come tomorrow.

Freedom in Exile

Isemay watched her new friends in the muted lamplight of her dorm room, and found herself grateful. There was a clarity in the transactional nature of Tower friendships; a precision to the way loyalties shifted, cooled, and retraced themselves with the schedule of each new assignment or test. Her old life, the endless rounds of debutante teas and whispers in the back corridors of the city’s High Court, had been a long lesson in the unreliability of affection. You could never quite tell who nursed a secret rivalry, who would betray you for an advantage, or whose smile concealed future blackmail. Here, among the misfits and discards, the lines of alliance were drawn in sharper ink: blood and class on one side, desperation and defiance on the other.

Isemay knew where she stood. She wore her family’s name like a velvet collar; it got her invited everywhere, but never let her forget who was holding the leash. Her parents denied it, swore up and down that just because she was adopted, it didn’t make her any less of a Misendris. But, despite all their wealth and power, they couldn’t make it true. Her ears slightly too pointed, her features just on the edge of human, but not close enough. It would never be close enough. Even here, she would always be the outlier, the only true difference was the honesty with which her companions wore their own exile.

Lavan was the easiest to read. He sat at her desk with the hunched, careful posture of someone for whom comfort was a learned behavior rather than a birthright. He touched nothing unless instructed, left no mark on her battered grammar texts, and took notes in a cramped, almost apologetic script. He was a study in invisibility, and Isemay recognized the strategy: it was the same one she’d used through years of Countis Nobelesse gatherings, a way of walking the knife edge between presence and erasure.

Ophelia was more complicated. The tiefling sprawled on the rug, boots kicked off and tail swishing in time to some internal metronome, but her ease was deliberate, a performance meant to cover the wary flickers of her eyes and the way her hands never quite unclenched from whatever they held.

The Tower’s hierarchy was old as the stones, and being a Misendris meant that every word, every gesture, every error of protocol or dress, would be catalogued and whispered about by someone’s mother before sunset. Being Isemay Misendris meant that those watching eyes would be delighted to see her fall. But Lavan and Ophelia, for all their chip-on-the-shoulder cynicism, didn’t seem to care who her parents were. If they did, it never surfaced in how they spoke to her, or how they looked at her in the hush before midnight, when the city went quiet and there was only the slow, communal ache of wanting to belong.

She almost envied them. Not the poverty, never that, but the freedom to define themselves without reference to a centuries-old ancestor’s opinion.

First Test

The training hall was a vault of marble and echo, three stories high and ringed with galleries where upperclassmen and the occasional instructor perched like crows on a fence. The first-year class, thirty strong, was arrayed on the floor in nervous trios, each group jostling for position along the painted arcs of the dueling rings. Leyline glyphs pulsed faintly beneath the stone, alive with pre-dawn energy. Lavan, Ophelia, and Isemay waited in their assigned spot, saying nothing. The air buzzed with the tension of held breath and adolescent anxiety.

At precisely eight, Professor Vinder entered. He was tall, hair dark and thinning, his robe cut in intimidating angles. The rumor was that Vinder had turned down three Councilor appointments to keep teaching at the Tower, and that he once ejected a student from a fifth-story window for “amateur theatrics.” The man seemed to vibrate with a kind of residual voltage, as if the Tower’s leyline grid was threaded through his marrow. He crossed to the dais at the end of the hall, banged a wand against the basalt podium, and the hum of conversation died.

“You are all here because you demonstrated a basic understanding of arcane magic, and resonance,” Vinder began, projecting his voice with a clipped precision. “Not with bloodline or coin, but with something deeper. The leylines do not care who your ancestors were. They do not care what your parents did or did not buy. They care only for connection.” He let the words hang, a pause that bordered on contempt, or perhaps on opportunity. “Today’s exercise is not a test. Not truly. It is an assessment. We will see what the Tower has to work with, and we will see what you are made of.”

He gestured, and began to pace the dais in a slow, deliberate arc. “When your name is called, find the station assigned to your group. Each will require not just brute force, but ingenuity. You will be watched, and you will be ranked. If you do not like your result, improve.”

“Falden. Perin. Brylte. Station One.” The boy from the Scholars’ Cohort smirked, tossed his hair with theatrical elegance, and led his team to a raised platform at the far end of the hall. “Lavan. Ophelia. Isemay. Station Five.”

They marched in formation, passing through the murmurs and the speculative glances. Isemay’s heart thudded in her throat until Ophelia elbowed her, and whispered, “Smile like you’re already winning.”

She tried. It didn’t fit her face, but she tried.

Station Five was a circle of inscribed bronze six feet across, ringed with insulator rods topped by cloudy glass bulbs. In the center, three battered golems stood at attention; one brass, one wood, one stone. Each bore a placard: “Harmony,” “Logic,” “Force.” The rules, printed in meticulous hand on a placard beside the ring, were simple and utterly opaque.

1. Each golem holds a key. The keys must be retrieved.

2. Use of destructive magic will disqualify your group.

3. The golems may not be touched directly.

4. All participants must contribute equally.

The upper galleries buzzed with anticipation. Students leaned over the railings, hungry for failure.

“Logic, Force, Harmony,” Isemay repeated under her breath, the syllables clockwork-neutral. She scanned the setup, searching for the trick. The golems themselves were basic constructs; animated by bound sigils, barely sentient, but often programmed for obedience and little else. Basic instructions would not move them unless they had been primed with the proper trigger word. There was a trap, Isemay knew, and another trap beyond the first, Tower tradition, as much as anything.

Lavan squinted at the placard, brow furrowed. “We can’t use force,” he said, “but one’s called Force.”

Ophelia’s tail flicked. “Maybe it’s a trick. What happens if we try to use Harmony on Force, or Logic on Harmony?”

“We’re supposed to all do something,” Isemay said, voice measured. She reached out, palm an inch from the bronze ring, and felt the static charge prickling along the edge. “Maybe we just start with one. Try the obvious, see what changes.”

Lavan went first, sidling up to the wooden golem labeled Logic. “Hello,” he said, as if greeting a surly neighbor. The wooden golem turned its head with clockwork precision. Its eyes glowed faintly green, its mouth opening like a stiff hinge.

“Do you have a key?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Lavan frowned. “May I have it?”

“No.”

The audience laughed. Lavan’s cheeks burned, but he pressed on, muttering equations under his breath as if the right words were a proof waiting to be solved. He tried again, phrasing, rephrasing, testing conditions. Each wrong question dimmed the lights in the bulbs overhead, a tally of impending failure.

If I can just find the perfect phrasing… there has to be one.

 “Careful, Dockboy. You’ll wear out the poor thing with all your stammering,” Falden called from his station, his partners chuckling. 

“Ignore them,” Ophelia snapped. 

He chewed at his lip, eyes flicking over the runes in the floor. His mind raced ahead: a cascade of possibilities, each collapsing under its own weight. Control was just out of reach.

“Lavan,” Isemay said gently. She touched his shoulder, steadying him. “Don’t overthink. What’s its name?”

“Do you have a name?” The construct’s wooden head turned, slow as an old clock, to face him and responded, “Yes.”

Ophelia blinked, then grinned at her companions. “This might be easier than we thought.” Lavan tried again. “What is your name?”

“Logic,” said the golem, the sound dry and exact. 

Lavan kept going. If the golem won’t give me the key, maybe it will at least show it to me. “Show me the key,” he commanded. 

It held out its hands, palms cupped, revealing a small bronze key nested in the center.

Isemay reached forward, but Lavan stopped her, shaking his head. “Rule three. We can’t touch them directly.”

Ophelia considered. “So what counts as direct?”

Lavan scanned the perimeter and spotted a set of tongs hanging on the wall nearby, presumably provided for just such a purpose.

The tongs, however, were fused to their bracket by a seething knot of leyline energy—a thick twist of blue-white filaments, barely visible except at the edges where they wavered like heat haze. The rules hadn’t said anything about that. Isemay reached for the handle, felt the static arc across her knuckles, and jerked away. “There’s a ward on it,” she said, voice low. “Maybe a puzzle in itself.”

Lavan squinted, drawing closer. “It’s a ley snarl,” he murmured, half to himself. “I’ve read about them, they can form when the power grid is overloaded.” He bit his lip, considering. “If you try to just pull it out, try to use magic to force it, the feedback could burn your hand off.”

Isemay grinned, delighted. “Good thing we’re not supposed to use destructive magic, then.”

Ophelia crouched beside the bracket, tracing her fingers along the invisible resistance like a harpist testing for a hidden string. “There’s a pulse to it. If we try to force it, the snarl tightens. But if we—”

“—match the frequency,” Lavan finished, his eyes lighting with sudden understanding.

Isemay set her jaw, then, without hesitation, placed her palm next to Ophelia’s on the stone. “We have to work together. One at a time, it’s too strong. But if we all…” She trailed off, unsure, but unwilling to back down.

Lavan, shaking just a little, placed his own hand on top of theirs. For a moment, nothing happened. The leyline tangle hummed, stubborn and faintly contemptuous. 

Lavan pressed harder, determined to make this work, and the snarl flared, angry. “Gentle, Lavan.” Isemay reminded, and he took a breath and focused on matching Isemay and Ophelia. 

Then, slowly, the blue-white filaments began to oscillate, first in uneven jerks, then in smoother, synchronized waves as each of the three adjusted their touch, their intent, their breath.

It took concentration, but eventually, they were able to find the knot at the center of the snarl, and carefully untied it. The snarl diffused with a satisfying snap, and the bracket released the tongs.

Lavan picked them up carefully and used them to pluck the wooden key from Logic’s hands. No alarm sounded, no curse ignited. The key was cool and heavier than it looked.

Logic’s eyes flickered once, then closed. Done.

“Let’s try Harmony next,” Isemay said, turning to Ophelia.

The tiefling squared her shoulders, stepped to the brass Harmony golem, and cleared her throat. “Harmony,” she intoned, “what is your function?”

The golem’s face, smoother than the others, softened as if recalling a pleasant memory. “To unite and amplify the efforts of many. To bring order from confusion,” it said. Then, without further prompting, it lifted both arms. In one hand it clutched a brass key, too tightly for the tongs to remove, in the other, a cluster of tuning forks bound with twine dangled towards the floor.

Ophelia, bent down and untied the tuning forks, careful not to make direct contact with the golem. She eyed the forks. “Maybe we have to find the right tone, create the right resonance.”

Ophelia picked out the middle fork, the one with a faint blue patina, and struck it gently against the rim of the brass golem’s foot. It rang a pure, thin note, high enough to shiver the air. In response, one of the glass bulbs atop the nearest insulator rod pulsed with blue light—first faint, then in a clear, steady rhythm. Isemay, watching, jotted the result in the margin of a small notebook with a graphite stub she had pulled from her pocket.

Next, Ophelia rapped the longest fork, a dull thing, and this time a greenish bulb winked awake across the circle. The third tuning fork, a squat, silvery wedge, elicited a red flash from the far side of the ring, and with it, a brief, spicy smell of ozone that tickled the nose.

Lavan’s eyes darted from bulb to bulb, following the pattern. “It’s a sequence,” he said. “They want to see if you can get all the bulbs to light in a particular order. Or maybe all at once.” He looked up, uncertain. “Should we try them together?”

Ophelia nodded, and they each took a tuning fork, spacing themselves around the ring. On her count, they struck. The sound wobbled, dissonant. The bulbs stuttered in jagged rhythm, and static jolted through the air. Lavan hissed, shaking his hand where the shock had landed.

“Wrong sequence,” he said.

“Or wrong system,” Ophelia snapped back. “They build these games to make us look like fools.”

 “Very harmonious! You sound like a dying cat orchestra,” Falden called from his ring. The gallery chuckled at her outburst, and Ophelia’s tail lashed the air. “Even if we get it right, tomorrow they’ll still call us gutter trash.”

“Then let’s not do it for them,” Isemay said firmly. “For us. Match my count. One, two, three.”

The first note, a nervous, thin blue, wobbled in the air, but the others layered in, brightening and deepening the tone. The bulbs responded instantly, the blue, green, and red orbs blinking in sequence, accelerating with each cycle until the whole ring pulsed like the heart of some neon beast. The harmony, they realized all at once, wasn’t just mechanical—it needed to be felt, not forced, and the tuning forks were only a scaffold.

As the resonance built, the Harmony golem’s face brightened with a placid, almost doting approval. “Well done,” it said, and placed the brass key on the placard next to the rules.

The audience applauded, some sincerely, some with mocking exaggeration. Ophelia raised her chin, refusing to acknowledge either.

“They clap because we danced their tune,” she muttered, her smile as sharp as broken glass.

The three turned at once to the stone Force golem. This one was different: its arms were folded as if in defiance, and its feet were planted deep into the metal grid of the ring. The air around it vibrated with a subtle, opposing pressure, like standing at the threshold of a thunderstorm. There was a placard at its feet, it read, in simple block text, “Force resists force.”

Ophelia squared up to the stone golem, arms folded across her chest as if to dare the thing to move. Its granite face was blank, unsmiling, broad as the prow of a warship. Where the other golems had given hints, this one offered only the inert certainty of mass.

Lavan, wary now, circled the perimeter of the ring, looking for seams or traps. “They said we can’t touch it,” he muttered, “but the others needed a tool.” There has to be a flaw. A loophole. Something to override.

“It’s a metaphor,” Isemay said, too softly for anyone but herself to hear. Her mind ticked through every logic puzzle her father had thrown at her over years of tedium. “The rules are a trap. It’s always the rules.”

She turned to Lavan and Ophelia, her own uncertainty momentarily overshadowed by a flash of defiance. “Force resists force. Which means it must yield to something else.” The phrase echoed in her mind, dredging up half-remembered lessons from her tutors. “What if we try… not to move it, but to redirect it?”

Lavan chewed his lip, eyes darting between golem, rule placard, and the brass ring. “If we push, it’ll just push back harder. If we pull, maybe the same. But—” He glanced up, suddenly animated. “What if we trick it? Apply a force, but angled, or indirect, or distributed?”

Ophelia’s tail flicked, the motion sharpening as she caught the direction. “Like levers?”

“Or like water,” Lavan replied, gesturing at the spot where the previous tuning fork had set off the blue light. “If you pour enough, the cup overflows, so the water moves around it.” He crouched, scanning the base of the golem for a gap or hinge, but found none. Still, the metaphor stuck.

Ophelia, restless now, prowled the ring’s edge. “We’re supposed to all do something,” she said, echoing Isemay’s earlier insight. “If you hit it straight, it resists, but if you…” She trailed off, then spun to the table of props at the edge of the station. Among the detritus—a ball of string, a metal rod, a battered candle—she selected the rod and the ball of string.

She handed the string to Lavan and kept the rod herself. “Tie a loop,” she said, “and throw it over the golem’s arm.” Lavan did so, fingers nimble from years of mending nets and lines in the Docks. Together, they worked the string behind the golem’s shoulders, the loop catching at the crook of the elbow. Ophelia grasped the iron rod like a lever and wedged it under the golem’s rigid arm, bracing herself against the floor for counterweight.

“All together,” Ophelia said, voice low. “Isemay, you guide the key. Lavan, keep tension on the string. I’ll lever it.”

Isemay saw the move for what it was; not a feat of strength, but a negotiation of vectors. If I falter, if they fall apart because of me, then it proves what they’ve always said, that I don’t belong here. I need to focus.  “Go,” she said.

Ophelia heaved up and back. The rod groaned against the pressure, but the golem’s arm rose, just a fraction. Lavan’s string held firm, redirecting the force from a direct contest into an arc that sent the golem’s hand outward, palm turned and open.

Isemay darted in with the tongs, snatching the stone key from the upturned palm before golem could reset itself. “Simple machines! It’s always the lever,” she exclaimed.

Ophelia grinned, triumphant. “And nobody broke the rules.”

Nothing happened for a heartbeat, and then the bulbs, cloudy and inert a moment before, suddenly blazed with golden light, one after another, until the whole ring glowed with the emboldened certainty of a sunrise. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, in a chorus of mechanical voices the three golems spoke in unison, “Station Five: Complete.” The words echoed across the hall.

All eyes swiveled to them: upperclassmen in the gallery, first-years at the other stations, even Professor Vinder, who paused mid-lecture to the group at Station Three. Falden looked up from where he and his team were struggling with their own trial, shocked and dismayed by their success. For a few seconds, the only noise was the faint ticking of the leyline grid cycling down from overdrive.

Lavan exhaled, dizzy with adrenaline, and looked to his teammates for confirmation that they’d really done it. Isemay, hand still clutching the tongs, watched as the assembled upperclassmen leaned forward in their gallery seats, the faintest undercurrent of curiosity (or was it respect?) rippling through the crowd.

Professor Vinder strode toward their station with long, unhurried steps. He stood at the edge of the ring and regarded the trio with a look that was not quite approval, but closer to intellectual curiosity, the way a chemist might regard a beaker that had just survived an unexpected explosion. He stopped, hands folded behind his back, and let the silence draw a circle around them.

“You finished,” he said, voice flat and clear, “seven minutes before the previous record.” He did not smile.

He produced a small chest from the folds of his robe, a conjurer’s flex, as if the wood had always existed in some potential state at his hip and was only now revealed to those worthy of seeing it. The chest, heavy and dark, bore three locks of different make: one brass, one wooden, one rough stone. He placed it on the podium and gave the three an expectant look.

Lavan, Isemay, and Ophelia approached the podium in cautious tandem, still uncertain if this was a reward or merely the next stage of the test. Each fit their hard-won key into its lock. The chest gave a shudder and a soft sigh, as if it had been holding its breath for years. The hinges unlatched.

Inside, nestled in a velvet tray, were three quills: one white as bone and feather-light, one a deep obsidian, and the third a warm, honeyed wood that gleamed in the lantern light. Each was fitted with a nib that caught the light like a sliver of sunrise. Isemay, unbidden, reached for the white quill; Lavan, after a brief hesitation, took the wooden one; Ophelia snatched up the black, twirling it between her fingers as if testing its balance for a coming duel.

“These are Bloodless Quills,” said Vinder. “They never run dry, and they are keyed to the first hand that holds them. They are also a metaphor, though most of you will spend years pretending otherwise.” His gaze lingered on each, the weight of tradition and expectation settling like an extra layer of fabric on their shoulders. Then, with a tilt of the head that might have been as close as he came to a smile, he said, “your station is done. You may leave early, if you prefer. Or you may watch your peers finish.”

Ophelia, always quickest, closed her hand around her quill and gave an exaggerated bow. “Thank you, sir.”

Across the training hall, a chain reaction of glances rippled along the other stations. Some of the faces, flickered with astonishment, open-mouthed, caught off guard by the speed with which the trio had dispatched the challenge. Others, mostly those who had already begun to stratify themselves by pedigree and rumor, looked on with a narrowing of the eyes, a measurement. The upperclassmen in the balconies, whose own early tests had been less than stellar, seemed to file away the performance for future reference: here were three new variables, and nothing was more dangerous in the Tower than a variable with motive.

It was Falden, perched at the head of his own group, who stared longest. His gaze raked over them in a cold, even sweep, then settled on Isemay with a glare that, had it been charged with even a trace of magic, might have knocked her off her feet.

Lavan looked at Ophelia, who looked at Isemay, and all three knew, without needing to say it, that they’d just won. They’d won, and in a way that made every eye in the Tower, for a single, crystalline moment, notice them.

***

Vinder remained where he was, hands clasped behind his back. Outwardly calm, but his mind replayed what he’d just seen.

He had read Lavan’s entrance papers himself , the boy’s aptitude scores almost obscene in their scale. Raw access to arcane currents that most journeymen would never touch without burning out. If the boy had been a born sorcerer he would have burnt down an entire neighborhood instead of just his house. It was enough to make the Council twitch, enough to make even the Tower tread cautiously.

And Pembroke had asked him, quietly, seriously, to keep an eye.

“Not because he’ll fail,” Pembroke had said, quill tapping against his ledger, “but because he’ll succeed too quickly. Power without restraint is dangerous.”

Now, watching Lavan’s pale hands clench, the knuckles white, Vinder saw the truth of it. The boy had leaned too heavily into every strike, not conserving, not measuring. Ophelia dragged him back into rhythm, and Isemay steadied the team’s defense.

Together, they had managed. Alone, Lavan might have burned himself hollow.

Vinder’s jaw tightened. The Tower was full of prodigies who mistook access for mastery. Too many of them had ended as footnotes in reports, remembered only for the mess they left behind.

He would not let that happen here.

With a flick of his fingers, he made a note on the slate at his side, not about their performance, which was satisfactory, but about the boy himself: Strong currents. Needs constraint. Watch closely.

Another group stumbled against their own golem, their firebolts glancing off clay hide. Vinder’s expression never changed. But his mind was still on the boy with the pale hands, and on Pembroke’s request.

Lavan Edor would need more than marks and lessons. He would need a leash, of the kind that looked like guidance.

And Vinder would provide it.

Our Own Rules

The first practical casting lesson was held in the Circlet: a round chamber whose domed ceiling was carved with a thousand miniature runes, each faintly glowing in the blue-tinged daylight that spilled through the oculus at its crown. The walls were lined with dark wood panels, scored by decades of chalk, and the floor sloped imperceptibly toward the center where the instructor’s desk, a mass of black walnut, stood on four clawed feet.

The instructor, a man whose hair matched the chalk for color and consistency, watched the new admits filter in and seat themselves along the curved benches. He did not speak until every student was in place, and when he did, his voice was low and dry as winter wind.

“Today, we begin with the basics,” he said, gesturing to the diagram he’d drawn on the slate. It was a tangle of circles and arrows that, to Lavan’s untrained eye, might have described the course of the moon or a poorly-planned invasion. “Energy transfer. Leyline resonance. The foundation of all higher magic.”

Ophelia leaned toward Lavan, whispering, “Translation: don’t blow up the furniture.”

He grinned, nerves prickling.

The instructor demonstrated the first cantrip with bored precision: a spark of white-blue light that leapt from his fingertip to the tip of a glass rod, illuminating it from within. “Observe the locus,” he said, voice sharpening. “The shape of your intention matters more than the power you bring to bear. Watch closely.”

He repeated the trick, slower this time, and the glass rod sang with energy, a high, crystalline tone that left a trace of ozone in the air.

“Now,” he said, “you try.”

A dozen rods, already laid out on the benches, were seized by eager hands. The students  from the favored tables in the dining hall formed the first, nervous attempts. Some fizzled, others sparked. A few, notably the red-headed girl from the first day, produced a clean, steady glow almost immediately. The instructor noted these with approving grunts.

Lavan’s rod felt slick and alien in his hand. He shaped his intention as the instructor had said, light, not force; focus, not effort. He aimed, braced, and willed the magic into being.

Nothing.

Ophelia’s rod hummed on the first try, a perfect imitation of the instructor’s demonstration. She covered her result with one hand, then glanced sideways at Lavan. “Relax,” she murmured. “Don’t try so hard. Pretend it’s already happening, and you’re just letting it show.”

He breathed out, let his shoulders drop, and tried again. The tip flickered, then died. Heat climbed his neck. He heard a snort from the bench behind, Falden, whose own rod burned bright and arrogant.

“You see, the trick is to have talent,” he said, not quite loud enough for the instructor to hear. “Some people are born with it. Some… aren’t.”

Isemay, on the other side of Lavan, worked on her own rod with methodical calm. She barely moved her hand; the light appeared with no fanfare, as if the glass itself had simply decided to glow. She received a perfunctory nod from the instructor, nothing more.

Lavan’s third try produced a faint spark, a firefly’s worth of light, gone before he could savor it. He clenched his jaw, resisting the urge to smash the glass against the desk.

The lesson continued, cycling through the class as the instructor critiqued posture, intent, focus. The human students who succeeded were praised in public, their rods passed around for inspection. Those who faltered, Lavan included, were given only a single word, “Again,” and left to struggle while the lesson moved on.

Ophelia passed her rod to Lavan under the table. “Try this one. It’s better balanced.”

He did. The difference was subtle, but real, a tiny shift in weight, a texture that fit his grip. He tried again, and the tip glowed, hesitant but real, for a full second. It faded, but the residue of success lingered.

Ophelia grinned. “See? Just needed the right tool.”

By the time the bell rang for end of lesson, most of the class had produced at least one viable spark. Lavan’s hands trembled from effort, but his rod, at last, shone with a ghostly blue light. He dared a glance at the instructor, who met his eyes with a brief, unreadable look.

Outside, the day was already breaking toward dusk. The trio walked together through the Tower’s walled garden, a patchwork of bare earth and dormant perennials surrounded by tall yew hedges. The air was cold and sweet, scrubbed clean of the dining hall’s stale conspiracies.

Ophelia broke the silence first. “Did you see the way he praised Falden for the same spell he ignored on Isemay?”

Lavan nodded. “He barely looked at me.”

Isemay shrugged, unconcerned. “He’s not the only one. There are rules for people like us. If we’re twice as good, we get half the credit.”

Lavan slowed his pace, letting the others walk ahead. “Does it get easier?” he asked, mostly to himself.

Ophelia turned back. “We just make our own rules. Study together. Share tricks. Cover each other’s backs. That’s how it works in Nightvalley.”

Isemay smiled, one of the first real ones Lavan had seen from her. “We could start tonight. I have a copy of the Master Pembroke’s first year syllabus. Unofficial, but accurate.”

Ophelia’s eyes gleamed. “You’re on.”

For a while, they just walked, savoring the quiet. Above, the Tower’s windows caught the last of the sun and threw it back in fractured blue shards. The city below looked softer, more distant, as if the real world were something that happened elsewhere.

They reached the old marble stair that spiraled up from the garden to the Tower’s central keep. At the top, silhouetted against the dusk, stood an invisible presence, unseen by all but the Master Arcanists. Their essence lingered with a whisper of lavender, their hair a silent storm of gold and indigo. They watched them, their smile hidden from view, and as they turned to leave, a subtle shimmer of faint starlight hovered in the air, unnoticed by all but the keenest eyes, before fading away.

The three stood in silence, the hum of the leylines vibrating up through their feet, the city’s night noises filtering in through the hedges, oblivious to the silent observer among them.

Finally, Lavan said, voice steady for once: “We can do this. If we stick together.”

Ophelia squeezed his arm, not quite a hug, but close enough. “We will.”

And for a moment, under the cold eye of the Tower and the indifferent stars, it was true.

Something Meaner

The Raulon dining room was a shrine to restraint. White marble walls, a chandelier dripping with crystal, and a table so long that Falden felt like a child even when seated at its center. The only warmth came from the candelabras, and even that light seemed measured, as though too much glow might invite disorder.

His father sat at the head, his jacket buttoned to the throat despite the heat. His mother, pale and distracted, toyed with her wine glass and asked nothing. The servants hovered, invisible except for the clink of dishes.

“So.” His father’s voice cut the silence like a blade. “How goes the Tower?”

Falden straightened in his chair, rehearsed answers at the ready. “Well. I’ve been keeping the riff-raff in their place. The charity admits don’t know the first thing about discipline. They barely deserve—”

His father waved a hand, dismissing the words as smoke. “I asked about you, Falden. Not about vermin.”

Heat rose in his cheeks. He reached for his glass, found it empty, set it down too hard. “I…my professors say my theory work is… passable.”

“Passable,” his father repeated, voice dry as parchment. He glanced at the steward, who set down a folded parchment at his elbow. “And yet here I have a report that Miss Misendris, that half-breed girl the Misendrises adopted, placed first in the trial.”

Falden’s fork froze halfway to his mouth. “That’s… exaggerated. She was with the charity admits. They cheated, no doubt.”

“Cheated?” His father’s voice sharpened. “Is that your excuse? That a girl who isn’t truly noble can outthink you in full view of the Tower?”

Falden’s throat tightened. He forced out a laugh. “She surrounds herself with trash. Everyone can see she’s slumming. It’s pathetic.”

His father leaned forward, candlelight turning his eyes into cold steel. “And yet she is in the Tower’s reports. Not you. If you cannot best her in the arena, then you must find another way to remind her of her station. Do you understand me?”

Falden nodded, heart thudding, though the words carved themselves deeper than he admitted aloud.

His mother finally spoke, her voice a brittle ornament. “Falden, eat your lamb before it gets cold.”

But the food might as well have been ash. Falden barely tasted it. His father’s words replayed in his head: find another way.

***

The dormitory lamps burned low, throwing long shadows across the common hall. Falden sat slouched in an armchair, his dinner jacket still smelling faintly of lamb and smoke, his jaw aching from grinding his teeth all the way back from his family estate.

Across the room, Isemay Misendris sat with the tiefling and the dock-rat. The three of them bent over a pile of texts, heads close, laughter threading through the candlelight. Falden’s stomach twisted.

First in the trial, his father’s voice echoed. And you? Passable.

Falden’s hands clenched on the armrests. She wasn’t even really a Misendris. She’d been plucked from nowhere, her pedigree a ledger entry instead of a bloodline, and yet here she was, looking every inch the noble while he drowned in humiliation.

He muttered under his breath, just for himself: “She thinks she belongs. She doesn’t.”

His father’s parting words sharpened like a blade in his chest: Find another way.

Maybe it was time to remind Isemay Misendris that she wasn’t untouchable. That sitting with gutter trash had consequences. 

Falden sat back, eyes fixed on her across the hall. She didn’t notice, too busy laughing with her new friends.

His jaw tightened. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he whispered.

Dogs that Bite Back

Late one afternoon, when the Tower’s corridors were mostly empty, Isemay, Lavan, and Ophelia took the long way to their dorms. Their path led them through a warren of arches and cloistered walks rarely used except by the cleaning staff or the truly lost. It was here, in the shadow of the old observatory, that they met the bullies.

Falden Raulon stood square in the corridor, as if he’d been waiting all day for precisely this moment. There was a studied precision in the way he arranged himself and his followers, shoulder to shoulder so that the narrow hallway seemed to shrink around them, the only avenues of escape backwards, or through. Those at his flanks were Brylte and Perin, both sons from lower noble houses with the sullen, heavy-lidded look of adolescents who’d found their true calling as muscle for hire. The girl, third in the wedge, kept her head ducked and her eyes darting between the walls and the floor, as if praying to be ignored even as she maintained her assigned position.

They had been lying in wait. The hallway itself did not belong to them, none of the Tower belonged to anyone, not in the way Falden seemed to believe, but he moved through it as if he had inherited the stonework and the very dust from generations of pure-blooded mages. He smiled as the three approached, a slow, theatrical unfurling of teeth, then took a deliberate half-step forward to block Isemay’s path. For a fleeting instant, Lavan considered forging ahead, maybe splitting the group, but Ophelia’s hand on his shoulder halted him. Steady.

“Well, if it isn’t the half breed and her demon-kin bitch,” Falden said, voice echoing off the tile.

Ophelia set her jaw, said nothing.

He turned to Lavan. “And you. Dockboy. Bet you’ve never even seen a spellbook that wasn’t patched with tape.”

Lavan’s fists balled, but he said nothing. If he let Falden draw him out now, he’d lose, and he knew it. Isemay, who had spent too many years decoding the nuances of every possible insult, stepped forward before the pause could open further.

“If you need something, Falden,” said Isemay, her voice so calm it bordered on boredom, “I suggest you say it fast and use small words. I have somewhere I’d rather be.”

He sneered. “What I need, Isy, is for you to remember your place. Your parents’ should have known better than to dirty the Misendris name with some half-blooded witch. Now look at you- strutting around like you belong, when all you’ve done is drag centuries of noble lineage through the mud. It makes all Five Families look bad.”

Isemay absorbed the insult, she had played this game with Falden Raulon for years. Because he was also a member of one of the Five Families, he had always been allowed to spew vitriol directly at her, instead of whispering it behind her back like all the others. She only ever told her parents about his bullying once, but after seeing how much it upset them, decided to handle it privately ever since.

The girl in Falden’s wedge was shuffling her feet, her eyes never leaving the hem of Isemay’s robes. She looked as if she’d been conscripted for this ritual, as if she’d rather be literally anywhere but at Falden’s side. Isemay made a note of it, a potential point of fracture for the future.

He turned his attention to Ophelia. “And you, gods, I’m surprised they even let you roam around loose. My father says that your kind is a nuisance at best, a threat to public safety at worst.”

Ophelia’s hand drifted toward her wand, thumb stroking the polished wood. Isemay caught the movement and, with a light touch, stilled her wrist. Not today, not yet.

Falden seemed to sense that he’d pressed a nerve. He smirked, satisfied, and made a show of brushing a non-existent fleck of lint from his sleeve. “You don’t belong here, Miss Saloth. None of you do. The Tower can’t save you. It just lets you humiliate yourselves in public before it gets rid of you. You think they respect you? They don’t. They just need bodies to fill their quotas. To make it look like anyone can get in. Even dogs.”

The word hung in the air, nastier for the way he spat it.

Brylt produced a length of rope from behind his back, coiling it around his fist with the slow certainty of someone who had practiced this moment. Perin produced a slim, black-handled wand, buzzing with pre-stocked arcane energy, illegal for students, but no one stopped to check that sort of thing outside of class. The hallway’s geometry conspired to make every sound bounce twice, so the snap of the wand against his palm was magnified, sharp.

Ophelia’s body went taut. Lavan felt her magic gather, a prickle in the air that raised the hairs on his arms, but Isemay shook her head once, don’t, not yet. Lavan, for his part, only now understood how little the Tower’s adult indifference protected them from anything. The instructors might patrol the halls, but not here, not in this hour. And not for them.

Falden pressed closer, the others following. “Dogs should be on leashes, Isy. You know what happens to dogs that bite the hand that feeds them?”

From the far end of the corridor, a new voice rang out: “Depends on the size of the dog, Falden.”

The bullies turned as one.

A small figure emerged from the shadow near the stairwell, her robe an indigo shade that marked her as a Master. Her blonde hair was cut short, her violet eyes shining with a gleam of anticipation.

Master Kerrowyn Lightfoot didn’t shout. She didn’t have to. “I hear we have a pack of purebreds causing trouble,” she said, strolling forward. “That’s funny, because from here it looks more like a litter of runts.”

Falden squared his shoulders, trying to impress his cronies. “I don’t see how this is your concern, Master Lightfoot.”

Kerrowyn’s smile sharpened. “That’s because you don’t see very well. Fortunately, your parents have more than enough money, so maybe you can get your eyes checked next time you’re home.”

The two boys with Falden tittered, unsure if they were supposed to laugh.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen,” Kerrowyn continued, her voice silk and steel. “You three are going to apologize, and then you’re going to run along before I decide to make you fetch every chalk stick in the Tower. Understand?”

Falden's lip curled into a sneer. "My father is on the Council. He'll hear about this." He looked her up and down, confidence returning. "Everyone knows what you really are, Lightfoot. A street thief playing dress-up in Master's robes. You don't have any real power over me."

Kerrowyn’s smile, razor-thin and bright as the edge of a knife, never softened as she took another step forward, her gnomish stature slight but her presence immense. Her tone, once playful, now shifted to a low, predatory purr. “Why don’t we test that theory. I think your father should hear about this behavior of yours too. Maybe it's time for a parent-teacher conference to discuss your poor grades and inconsistent attendance. Do you really want to take your chances with me?” Each word was measured and deliberate, wielded with the precision of someone who’d spent a lifetime learning the weight and leverage of threats.

Falden’s bravado wilted under the glare of her attention. For a heartbeat, he looked ready to snap back some clever retort, but the calculation behind his pale eyes was plain: he weighed the risk of defiance against the certainty of consequences. 

He tried to rally, straightening to his full height and glancing over at his two henchmen. Brylt, a brute with boulder-thick arms and the emotional intelligence of a wet sponge, shifted his gaze to the floor, suddenly interested in the patterns of ancient grout. Perin, a stick-thin boy, edged backward, his face already flushing with embarrassment. The girl, whom Falden had only recruited that morning, stared at the hem of her robes and shuffled her feet as though hoping to disappear entirely.

Kerrowyn, sensing the collective unease, pressed her advantage. “You know, Falden, I’m always happy to see students advocating for themselves. But perhaps you should consider channeling all that passion into your homework for once. I believe Professor Teralin is still waiting for your essay on elemental affinities. Or did you plan to plagiarize Lavan’s work again?”

The color drained from Falden’s face. “I did no such thing,” he sputtered, voice suddenly thin.

Kerrowyn’s eyebrows lifted. “It’s a very small world, Falden. I’d hate for someone to get expelled before the equinox games. Your house might not recover.” She paused just long enough for the implication to settle. “Or perhaps you’d like to explain yourself to the Headmaster? I’m on very good terms with Master Pembroke, you know.”

Silence stretched, punctured only by the distant clatter of brooms and the hum of leylines.

Falden’s mouth opened, then closed. He managed a stiff bow, spun on his heel, and stalked away, his henchmen in tow. The girl, who had never really looked comfortable, mumbled an apology and scurried after them.

Kerrowyn waited until the corridor was empty, then turned to the trio.

“You three all right?”

Ophelia grinned, breathless with relief. “Better now.”

Kerrowyn winked. “You have to nip these things early. Otherwise, the whole place goes feral. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

Isemay said, “Thank you, Master Lightfoot.”

Kerrowyn’s gaze softened. “Don’t thank me yet. They’ll be back. People like Falden always are. But next time, remember this: the Tower likes fighters, not favorites.”

She paused, letting that land. “You have a chance to change how this place works. Don’t waste it.”

With that, she turned and strode off, the echo of her footsteps erasing the last of the tension.

For a moment, the three of them stood in silence.

Then Ophelia snorted, shaking her head. “That was badass, almost worth the lecture.”

Lavan flexed his hands, adrenaline finally draining. “She’s right. We’re not here for them.”

Isemay touched their shoulders, the three of them forming a solid line. “We’re here for us.”

They left the corridor together, three abreast, unconcerned now with who might be watching. Outside, the sky was dark and the air cold, but the way forward felt clear.

And somewhere deep in the bones of the Tower, the leylines hummed with the promise of something new.

Kerrowyn, pausing at the end of the hall, listened to the aftermath echoing through the corridor: Ophelia’s sly laughter, the muffled thump of Lavan’s footsteps, the gold-threaded murmur of Isemay’s confidence rebounding off the stone. She leaned against a frost-cold window and watched the scene below. The city, hunched and gray, was just beginning to light its mage lamps against the early dusk.

She didn’t have much occasion to interact with first year students normally. This year she was teaching the Intro to Resonance class, one that was cycled from professor to professor due to its soul-numbing properties, and she had noticed the promise from each of them. She had also noticed Falden’s needling. 

In the quiet, Hallione’s presence sidled in, a pulse of static behind the eyes. “You favor them,” Halli said in the old tongue, a language Kerrowyn didn’t know but which lived, irritatingly, in every corner of her mind.

“They need favoring,” Kerrowyn replied, not bothering to subvocalize. “You saw the brutes.”

Halli’s voice was gentle, almost fond. “They remind me of you, once. Strong and scrappy and a little too ambitious,” Hallione continued. “You took your beatings. I expect them to do the same.”

“I’m not going to stand by and allow them to be tormented just so you can have some entertainment Halli,” Kerrowyn responded, her thoughts a soft rebuke. Most of the other professors would let it slide, either because they were too scared of Falden’s last name, or because they secretly agreed with him. She wouldn’t turn the other way.

The spirit’s laughter was a fizz in the blood, and then she was gone. Kerrowyn straightened her sleeves, set her features in their proper order, and drifted off toward the Masters’ Lounge. She allowed herself the hope that, come the next collision, the three would stand together without needing rescue.

Two floors down, in an unused side corridor, Falden slammed a fist into the stone wall, denting neither. Rage was his only talent, and it burned cold. He’d tasted humiliation, but he knew the flavor and would not spit it out. He remembered Lightfoot’s face, her absolute confidence, the way she had stared him down and made him feel small in front of everyone, and he nursed that memory like poison, letting it corrode the taste of humiliation until only bitterness remained. He made a little vow, right there in the dim, empty hall, that he would not forget, and he would not forgive.

He wiped his knuckles on his robe and spat, turning to survey his followers. “We’ll get them. Next time, we don’t let Lightfoot interfere.”

Perin said nothing, just nodded, eyes on the uneven stones. Brylt, for his part, barely noticed the tension, already bored, already waiting for the next meal. But Falden’s cold certainty, the idea that the world could be forced to fit his will if only he applied enough pressure, was as infectious as any magic in the Tower. It would not be the last time these three stood at a crossroads with Lavan, Ophelia, and Isemay.

Not by a long stretch.

“Remedial” Lessons

Master Tullups’s studio was a circular chamber, all glass and reflection, as if someone had installed a funhouse in the middle of a monastery. The walls were mirrored, throwing back the image of the room’s sole occupant, Ophelia Saloth, her skin the color of rainclouds, her hair in its customary high tail, and duplicating her a hundred times, each with a slightly different cast of expression. The ceiling hovered out of reach, dark and pocked with globes of softly glowing light. Even after a month of classes, the strangeness hadn’t faded; the studio always made her feel like she was standing on the surface of a bubble, a pinprick away from floating off the world.

Today, the bubble was hers alone. The other first-years had bolted as soon as the bell sounded, eager to be away from the relentless optimism of Master Tullups. The man was a perpetual motion machine: short, round-bellied, and crowned by a fringe of hair so wispy it was less a comb-over than a suggestion. He wore robes in violently clashing shades, today’s was a paisley of emerald and pumpkin, and his round spectacles perched at the end of a nose designed for comic effect.

But it was his smile that defined him. It could turn on a dime from fatherly warmth to the impish glee of someone about to set off fireworks indoors, and he seemed to take special delight in the “remedial” sessions he ran after class. Ophelia had quickly realized that “remedial” meant “you’re bored and smarter than the rest, so here’s something you might actually fail at.”

He met her gaze in the largest of the mirrored panels. “All right, Miss Saloth,” he said, hands clasped at his belly, “let’s try something ambitious, shall we?” He produced a slim wand and twirled it, the tip casting a circle of motes onto the wall.

Ophelia rolled her eyes. “I thought we were supposed to start small. Construct, then embellish.” The mantra was the first thing every illusions student learned.

Tullups’s eyes twinkled behind the glass. “And what fun is that? Besides, your grasp of fundamentals is…” He paused, groping for a word. “Excessive. Time for a leap.”

She grinned, unable to suppress the rush of pleasure. Her uncle had once told her that school was a contest of wills: the only thing that ever changed was the teacher’s list of favorite troublemakers. She aimed to be at the top.

Tullups gestured to the center of the studio, where the light from the globes fell in a perfect white circle. “Let’s begin,” he said. “Imagine an animal. Something delicate. Something in motion.”

A hundred versions of herself blinked back at her, but Ophelia ignored them. Instead, she closed her eyes and felt the leyline pulse, a current that ran just under the surface of the world, vibrating in her bones. She let the magic fill her, the same way she’d let music fill her head as a child: not with technique, but with rhythm and memory.

She hummed softly, a scrap of an old Nightvalley lullaby, barely audible. She found that melodies steadied her, gave the spell structure where her own thoughts might not. The resonance built in her chest and, at the right moment, she thrust her hand forward, fingers splayed.

A butterfly exploded into being above the circle: wings blue as the sky, then orange, then indigo, shifting with every flap. It was more than an image; it cast shadow, beat air, dusted the room with flecks of iridescence. The butterfly darted up, bounced off a globe, and glided around the mirrored room in perfect defiance of expectation.

Ophelia opened her eyes. The butterfly was still there, still perfect. She suppressed a grin.

Tullups clapped, loudly and without irony. “Very good, very good! Now, what if we give it a bit of… flare?”

She thought for a moment, then whistled, a quick, piercing trill. The butterfly responded, folding its wings and collapsing into a shower of blue sparks that drifted down, settling gently onto the floor.

The mirrors showed the effect from every angle, an infinite storm of light.

Tullups beamed. “Most students take months to reach that level of detail. Did you know that, Miss Saloth?”

Ophelia shrugged, her tail flicking with unconcealed pride. “It’s just light and movement. And the trick with the colors is mostly in the pitch, not the focus.”

“Precisely!” Tullups bounced on his heels, nearly dislodging his spectacles. “You intuitively understand what most cannot, illusion is less about shape, more about how the world chooses to believe in it. Do you see?”

She saw, but she didn’t have the language to explain it. The other students in her year were obsessed with diagrams, runic matrices, and the endless, fussy debate of magical theory. She’d always been more comfortable with trial and error, the stubborn repetition of practice until the effect stuck, or didn’t. If it didn’t, she tried something else.

“Let’s try another,” Tullups said. “Something living, but fierce. Imagine a hound. Full size, if you please.”

Ophelia paused only long enough to settle her nerves, then began a slow, pulsing hum—a different tune this time, one with a staccato rhythm and a minor key. Her fingers curled, then snapped outward. The air above the circle rippled, then split.

A massive red-furred dog unfolded in the light, teeth bared in a grin that matched Ophelia’s own. Its body seemed solid, though she knew it was only layers of shadow, compacted by will and memory. It stalked in a circle, each footfall perfectly echoed by its mirrored siblings on the walls.

Tullups whistled, impressed. “Most students get the outline, but you brought it all—the weight, the menace, even the tension in the muscles.” He tilted his head, watching the illusory hound as it sniffed the air. “You’ve seen one like this before, haven’t you?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The memory was old, sharp, and best left unexamined.

The hound faded, dispersing into a curl of black mist.

“Again, from the start,” Tullups said. “But this time, try to layer both illusions at once. Can you do that?”

Ophelia grinned, baring her small, sharp canines. “You’ll see,” she said, and went to work.

She began by humming both melodies, alternating the rhythms so that they braided together in her mind. She let the magic fill her lungs, then exhaled, focusing on the center of the circle. The butterfly reappeared first, but as it fluttered, the hound shimmered into being below it, jaws opening in a silent snarl.

She guided the butterfly in a lazy arc around the dog’s head. The dog snapped once, twice—missing each time. At the apex of the third leap, the butterfly dissolved into another rain of sparks. The dog caught a few motes in its mouth, then turned to smoke and vanished.

The mirrors filled the room with the echo of the scene, the effect dizzying.

Tullups rocked back on his heels, openly delighted. “Most impressive! I haven’t seen layering like that from a first-year in decades. Did you practice this beforehand?”

Ophelia shook her head. “I just… tried to remember what it looked like. What it felt like.”

He nodded, as if this was the only answer that mattered.

They spent the next half hour experimenting with more complex forms; birds that shattered into petals, a swarm of glowing moths that became a single, enormous cat, even a miniature likeness of Tullups himself that bowed and then tumbled into a pile of spinning coins. Ophelia never tired, never hesitated. The feedback loop of success, praise, and more challenge was irresistible.

At one point, she struggled with a particularly tricky transition, a hawk morphing into a snake. The first try, the wings collapsed too early and the spell fizzled. The second, the illusion twisted sideways, and the hawk’s beak briefly merged with the snake’s jaw in a grotesque snarl.

Tullups stopped her with a gentle hand. “You’re forcing it. Let it happen in time with your breath. Try humming just the transition, not both at once.”

Ophelia nodded, started again. This time, she hit the right sequence, and the change was smooth, seamless, almost beautiful.

She grinned, pleased. “That was… fun,” she admitted.

“It was brilliant,” Tullups replied, eyes shining with approval. “And more importantly, you learn from every mistake. That is rare. Very rare.”

He crossed through one of the mirrors, which disappeared, creating an open archway into his office. He went to his desk and rummaged through a stack of old ledgers and spellbooks, then produced a slim, leather-bound notebook. “Take this,” he said, offering it with both hands. “My own notes, from when I was your age. Full of mistakes, half of them embarrassing, but you might find something useful.”

She accepted the book, stunned. “Thank you, Master.”

Tullups shook his head. “I’m not your master, Miss Saloth. I am, however, your mentor—at least, if you will have me. I haven’t offered private instruction to a first-year in… well, longer than you’ve been alive.”

Ophelia blinked, then nodded, unable to summon a snarky reply.

“Good,” Tullups said. “We’ll meet here twice a week. If anyone gives you trouble, tell them I said so.”

With that, the lesson ended. Tullups swept out of the studio, leaving Ophelia alone with the mirrored versions of herself and the hush of falling dust.

She allowed herself a rare moment of pride. She stood in the center of the room, arms folded, tail curled in a satisfied arc, and gazed at the Ophelia in the mirror who looked the most like herself. For the first time in her life, the reflection stared back without accusation.

The sensation lasted only until she left the studio. In the corridor outside, two older students waited, third-years, by their purple trim. One wore his envy openly, the other masked hers behind a brittle smile.

“That was… impressive,” the girl said. “I heard Tullups doesn’t do private sessions for first-years.”

“Must be nice,” the boy added, his voice just shy of polite.

Ophelia’s instinct was to bristle, to bare her teeth and snarl, but she caught herself. Instead, she offered a thin, professional smile and walked past, her steps slow and deliberate.

The eyes followed her, burning holes in her back, but she found she did not mind.

She had earned the attention. She had earned the envy, too.

Back in her dorm, Ophelia thumbed open the leather-bound notebook. The first page was a disaster: scribbled words, crossed-out diagrams, even a coffee stain that had bled the ink into a smudge. But underneath, in a precise hand, Tullups had written:

The only real magic is the kind you make yourself.

She closed the book, smiling.

She hummed a tune, quiet and bright, and let herself believe it.

***

The training hall reeked of ozone. The last of the students filed out, their chatter echoing down the marble corridor, leaving Lavan alone at the dueling ring with the acrid smoke of his own failed spell hanging in the air.

Vinder’s footsteps clicked against the stone. “Edor,” he said, voice flat as a ledger. “You linger.”

Lavan swallowed. “I…I wanted to try it again.” He gestured toward the circle. The air still shimmered where his last attempt had cracked the binding glyph wide open, a wild surge that had sent two upperclassmen diving for cover.

Vinder studied the burn mark in the floor. “You have power. That much is obvious.” His gaze flicked to Lavan, sharp as a blade. “What you do not have is control. Do you know what happens to wizards who mistake raw force for mastery?”

Lavan shook his head, throat dry.

“They become stories,” Vinder said. “The kind told to frighten apprentices about why we keep fire wards on the dormitory doors. Power without constraint burns out the user first, and the rest of us second.”

Lavan’s face flushed. “I can get better.”

Vinder arched a brow. “Can, or will?”

“I will,” he said quickly, the words tumbling out before he lost his nerve.

For a moment, Vinder just looked at him, expression unreadable. Then he gave the barest nod. “Good. Then you’ll report here at dawn tomorrow. We will work on resonance binding until your hands cramp. You will not leave the circle until you can hold a charge steady for sixty heartbeats without bleeding it out like a ruptured pipe.”

It sounded like punishment. But under the weight of Vinder’s voice, Lavan caught the faintest thread of something else: opportunity.

“Yes, Professor,” he whispered.

Vinder turned, already striding toward the door. Over his shoulder, he added, “Remember this, Edor: the Tower has no use for prodigies who explode. Learn to restrain yourself, or you will not last the year.”

And then he was gone, leaving Lavan staring at the blackened rune in the floor, the echo of the word prodigy ringing in his ears.

***

The Tower’s upper corridors were hushed at night, lit by the faint blue glow of ward-lamps. Vinder strode with his usual steady pace, slate tucked under one arm. He rapped once at the door to Pembroke’s study and entered without waiting.

The room smelled of ink and dust. Pembroke was already at his desk, ledger open, spectacles sliding low on his nose. A single candle guttered in the draft.

“Well?” Pembroke asked, not looking up.

“They finished the first evocation test,” Vinder said, setting the slate down. “Together. Misendris held formation, Saloth adapted on instinct, Edor…” He hesitated. “Edor poured power through every strike as if the well could never run dry.”

Pembroke finally looked up, one brow arched. “As expected, then.”

Vinder inclined his head. “He shows no restraint. Not yet. Misendris and Saloth tethered him, else he would have collapsed.”

Pembroke tapped his quill against the margin of his ledger. “Mm. A leash in the form of friendship. That is promising. Though leashes fray.”

Vinder’s jaw tightened. “He has aptitude beyond anything I’ve seen in a novice. But if it is not tempered, it will consume him. He does not yet know the weight of what he carries.”

“And you?” Pembroke asked, voice mild.

“I’ll watch him,” Vinder said simply.

Pembroke leaned back in his chair, studying him with a thin smile. “I thought you might. You’re strict enough to scare him and patient enough to guide him. He’ll hate you for both. That’s good.”

Vinder gave no reply. His eyes flicked to the stacks of ledgers, the ink stains smudging Pembroke’s fingers. “You were right to ask me.”

“Of course I was.” Pembroke dipped his quill again, scratching neat lines into the ledger. “But don’t forget the other two. Misendris will learn the game of power and politics faster than her peers, and Saloth…” He allowed himself a faint smirk. “That one will throw herself at the world with fists and teeth until it breaks. Or until she does.”

Vinder folded his hands behind his back. “They’ll keep Edor standing, for now. But the time will come when his power exceeds what even they can anchor.”

Pembroke’s quill paused, then continued. “And that, my friend, is why we prepare them early.”

Vinder considered that, “I am going to encourage him to participate in the First-Evocation Competition, that should give us a good idea of his progress, and how capable he is of control without his friends.”

The candle flickered low, shadows lengthening across the cramped study. Vinder inclined his head once more, then left Pembroke to his ledgers. His footsteps echoed down the corridor, steady, measured, the same rhythm he meant to impress on Lavan Edor, before the boy’s raw power tore him apart.

The First-Year Evocation Competition

The air in the arena was charged, every seat in the old stone amphitheater filled with bodies vibrating in anticipation. Lavan Edor stood alone at the center, hemmed in by rings of incised arcana, sigils that glowed faintly under the chill blue light of the morning. Above, the sky was a hard, cloudless white, so bright that it rendered the torches around the rim almost ornamental. The crowd pressed close, a wall of uniforms and whisper, a thousand eyes set for disappointment or spectacle.

He ignored them, focused instead on the feel of the stone under his feet, the faint thrum of leyline that ran just below the skin of the world. Each line in the floor was a conduit, a diagram of potential violence. He understood these lines better than the lines of his own hands.

At the periphery of the circle, Master Arcanist Alistar Pembroke presided from a raised dais, his beard immaculate, his expression unreadable. He held a glass sphere in one hand, the prize for today’s contest, and his gaze flickered between Lavan and the sheaf of notes on the desk beside him.

All around the arena, students and faculty filled the tiers, voices rising and falling in lazy waves. The first-year Evocation Competition was a Tower tradition, but most treated it as a pageant, an excuse for the upper years to heckle and wager, for the Masters to scout new talent, for the rest to gorge on bread and sugar tea. Lavan had entered only because Vinder had told him to: “Might as well get it over with now, and you could use the practice. The others are nothing special, I promise.”

They weren’t. He had watched the earlier rounds. Most of the competitors conjured the usual: a spray of colored flame, a spinning globe of frost, a thunderclap that made the nearest glass vibrate. There was one human boy who managed to produce a respectable whip of lightning, but even that lasted only a moment before fizzling away.

His turn came last, by random draw or maybe just the Tower’s inclination toward the dramatic. When his name was announced, the applause was polite, some pockets of the crowd didn’t even bother, but as he stepped into the main circle, a hush descended.

He could feel the expectation, the weight of it, like a hand pressing him into the earth.

He knelt at the edge of the ring and pressed his palm to the stone, as Vinder had taught him: “Don’t just draw from yourself. That’s for amateurs and burnouts. You want the big stuff, you need to make the world do the work.”

He inhaled, deep and slow, letting the pulse of the leyline settle in his chest. He held the breath, let it build, then released it in a smooth exhalation, fingers arcing in the pattern he’d practiced a hundred times in the empty corridors of Underbridge Dormitory.

The spell came together in three distinct layers: first, a thin tracer of blue light, threading along the etched symbols; next, a corona of red heat, swelling outward in a low, predatory hum; and finally, at the apex, a clean white burst that shot upward, splitting the sky in two. The signature was familiar to anyone who’d studied the old texts, but Lavan added a twist. He directed the energy outward, away from himself, and shaped it as it went.

The result was a wall of fire, ten feet tall and arcing in a perfect semi-circle, bright enough to bleach the world for a full second before fading to ember and then to nothing. It was hot enough to burn the hair off anyone within reach, but Lavan was careful, he had anchored the spell with two fail-safes, and as soon as the display was complete, he snuffed it with a sharp downward chop of his hand.

The silence afterward was absolute. He stood, expecting the usual, maybe a derisive snort, maybe nothing at all, but then a single voice shouted “Yes!” from somewhere in the upper stands, and the rest followed, an avalanche of noise.

He didn’t let himself smile. Instead, he bowed stiffly to the dais, then to the judges’ table, and waited for the official call.

Pembroke stood, the glass sphere glinting in his hand. His eyes betrayed nothing, but the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth might have been a smile. “Mr. Edor,” he said, projecting so that even the back rows would hear, “has demonstrated not only proficiency, but an understanding of restraint and control. These are the qualities we value in an Arcanist of the Tower.”

He descended the dais, moving with a steady, deliberate pace, and handed Lavan the sphere. “This is yours,” he said. “May it remind you that mastery is not a measure of power, but of discipline.”

Lavan accepted the prize, fingers closing around the cool glass. He bowed again, this time less stiffly. The applause was louder now, and a few students even stood as he exited the circle.

As he made his way toward the exit, he caught sight of the usual suspects—Falden Raulon and his two shadows, lurking in the dark under the archway near the practice pits. Falden’s face was a study in controlled rage; his hands were balled into fists, knuckles white. Next to him, Brylte looked more confused than angry, while Perin watched with an expression that suggested he’d just bit into something sour.

Lavan met Falden’s glare and held it, unblinking, until the other boy looked away. It was a small victory, but he took it.

He walked out of the arena, the sphere tucked under his arm, and headed for the west stairwell where Ophelia and Isemay had promised to wait.

He found them at the top of the steps, Ophelia perched on the balustrade, tail swaying lazily, Isemay leaning against the wall with a stack of books balanced on her hip. They had watched from a distance, not wanting to draw attention, but as soon as he rounded the corner, they grinned.

“That was obscene,” Ophelia said, dropping from the rail. “I thought you were going to blow up the judges.”

Isemay nodded, her eyes glinting with approval. “You could have, if you’d wanted.”

Lavan shrugged, the old shyness asserting itself. “It was just a trick. Vinder showed me.”

Ophelia smacked him lightly on the arm. “Don’t play humble now. You melted the competition, literally. Look—” She pointed down the stairwell, where a thin line of scorched stone still smoked faintly.

He laughed, feeling the tension drain out of him.

Isemay reached over and touched the sphere. “Is that the award?”

Lavan nodded.

She considered it for a moment, then said, “You know, Falden will hate you more than ever.”

Ophelia grinned. “Let him. He can watch from the cheap seats for once.”

They stood together, the three of them, while below the Tower’s bell chimed the hour, and the city outside filled with the day’s noise. For a long moment, Lavan forgot the cold, the eyes, even the threat of Falden Raulon. All that mattered was the circle they made, unbreakable, for as long as they could hold it.

But as they turned to leave, Lavan glanced back over his shoulder and saw Falden still watching, still plotting, his face set in the certainty of someone who believed the world could not, should not, be changed by anyone but himself.

Lavan let him watch. He had earned the attention. He had earned the envy, too.

Original Work

Isemay took up an entire table in one of the library’s study rooms, originally meant to seat six. Every inch of the oak surface was buried beneath books, parchment, and splayed folios. A constellation of candles and enchanted lamplights, each calibrated for a specific color temperature, pushed back the windowless dark with a fevered, surgical clarity. In the center of this chaos, Isemay Misendris sat cross-legged in front of a tower of leather-bound ledgers, a splatter of ink running down her left palm, eyes fixed on the blank inch of parchment before her.

She’d spent the entire afternoon in a cycle that was, even by her standards, maniacal: inscribe, check, mutter a correction, erase, then do it all again, changing the angle of a single stroke or the thickness of a connecting line. The page before her was already on its forty-seventh iteration. The spell, her own invention, was a divinatory trick derived from the detect magic spell, designed to highlight hidden magical signatures in a room, an idea that had wormed into her brain and refused to be exorcised.

She uncapped her pen, weighed it in her hand, then, with surgical care, drew a complex sigil onto the paper. The lines looped back on themselves, doubled and tripled in places, until the whole resembled an intricate knot or the cross-section of a very determined root. She finished the last stroke and exhaled, slow and controlled.

“Here goes,” she whispered, and tapped the page with two fingers.

The air in the room trembled. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as if a hidden circuit had been closed, thin filaments of blue light rose from every enchanted object in the cell—her lamp, her stylus, even the old glass bead she’d kept since childhood. The strands arched and intertwined, mapping a web of energies that pulsed with their own secret logic.

Isemay sat back, stunned. The effect was... beautiful. Even as she cataloged the flaws—too bright, too slow, a slight drift to the left, she couldn’t help but grin.

She scrawled a quick note on a side page: adjust channeling array for latency. Then, with a sigh, she doused the sigil and began to erase, already plotting the next experiment.

She liked this part. The endless loop of problem and solution, the certainty that if she just tried one more time, the world would reveal its pattern. The other students in her year chased results, but Isemay chased understanding. She wanted to know why the sigil drifted, why the filaments mapped the way they did, why a spell designed for detection could also look, for a moment, like a web spun from blue fire.

The hours blurred together. She lost track of time, lost herself in the friction of ink and paper, in the soft buzz of the candles and the faint, ever-present itch of the leyline that ran under the Tower’s bones.

It was only when the clock in the corridor struck seven, and a sudden draft sent a tremor through her candleflames, that she registered another presence.

A shadow fell across the doorway. Isemay tensed, then looked up.

Master Arcanist Pembroke stood in the hall, hands tucked into the sleeves of his deep blue robe, his face set in an expression of measured amusement. “Most students,” he said, “prefer to enjoy their evenings at dinner, or in the commons. You seem to prefer the company of your own ideas.”

Isemay flushed, but met his gaze. “I do my best thinking after dark,” she said. “And there’s less competition for resources.”

He stepped closer, eyes flicking over the shambles of her workspace, then settling on the latest page of sigils. He studied it for a long moment, then nodded. “Original work, I assume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Show me.”

She did, repeating the spell, careful to modulate her gestures so the effect would hold steady. This time, the filaments arched perfectly, tracing the architecture of magic in the room with no visible drift.

Pembroke smiled, a tiny flex of lips, gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Most impressive, Miss Misendris. I look forward to seeing your thesis on original spellcraft.” He inclined his head, then swept out as silently as he’d arrived.

Isemay waited until the echo of his steps faded before she let herself smile, slow and real. It wasn’t pride, exactly, but something adjacent—an awareness that she’d made something new, that she had wrestled a piece of the world into shape and it had, however briefly, bent to her will.

She sat for a while, just watching the filaments trace their secret diagrams in the air, and for a moment she forgot the competition, the rumors, the sharp-eyed girls who watched her in the dining hall and whispered about her “mixed” blood.

For a moment, it was enough to simply be the only mind in the world working on a particular problem, and to know that the solution, when it came, would bear her name.

She blew out the candles, leaving only the residual blue light to paint the walls, and began again.

Notoriety

In the weeks that followed, the Tower became a crucible, melting away the old social orders and recasting them in sharper, stranger forms. The story of Lavan’s wall of fire spread through the student body faster than the usual grapevine of scandal and rumor; by breakfast the next day, even the kitchen staff knew to avoid setting candles too near the “firestarter from the Docks.”

A second story followed: that Ophelia had been seen, late at night, animating entire phantasms in the practice halls, illusions so real that a patrolling proctor had tried to break up a fight between two imaginary cats, and been clawed for her trouble. By the end of the term, the story had grown: Ophelia was now a “cat-witch,” and it was only a matter of time before she conjured a full pride to haunt the Tower’s basements.

Isemay, in her own way, became even more notorious. Her presentation in the Grand Lecture Hall, an original theorem on spell matrix optimization, left even the Arcanists silent for a moment, before the most senior among them declared, “This will be in the syllabus by next year.” Some said that she had transcribed the entire library from memory; others insisted she’d discovered a secret cache of forbidden texts and was slowly decoding them, one late night at a time.

In the library, students whispered about “the Troublesome Trio,” sometimes with grudging admiration, often with envy sharpened to hatred. They never used their names, preferring slurs or epithets. “The demon-girl, the half-breed, the guttersnipe.” Sometimes they’d swap the order, but never the venom.

And in every shadowed arch and hidden stair, Falden Raulon and his cronies watched. They trailed the trio at a distance, eyes peeled for any sign of weakness. Perin, the thin boy with nervous hands, cataloged every slight and snub, replaying them in the evenings over bread and cider. Brylte took notes of a different kind, mapping the trio’s movements and routines with the careful attention of a born tactician. Falden himself alternated between silent rage and loud, performative disdain, often clutching a crumpled copy of the competition results as if it were a personal insult.

Friendship Symbol

Isemay Misendris hated to lose. During the second semester, she enrolled in an advanced seminar on spellcraft, taught by an instructor who made no secret of his disdain for anyone not naturally born to the correct families. The class, allegedly focused on “theory and application of non-traditional magical charms,” was in practice a gauntlet of impossible tests, each designed to weed out the merely competent.

Ophelia and Lavan, uninvited and unwelcome, sometimes lingered outside the classroom door, listening to the lectures through the keyhole. “He’s going to break her,” Ophelia would mutter, equal parts anxiety and pride. “Not a chance,” Lavan would reply, but his nails bore crescent moons from how tightly he clenched his fists.

The instructor’s favorite topic was the ancient history of the Arethian wizards—their arrogance, their failures, their eventual collapse. He seemed to take personal delight in recounting the ways pride led to ruin. “Take careful note, Miss Misendris,” he would say, “lest you overreach and land the rest of us in the archives of infamy.”

Isemay took careful note. She kept every insult, every slight, tucked away like a flint in dry wool. But what she remembered most was the day the instructor assigned their final project.

“It must be original,” he intoned, pacing the length of the blackboard. “And it must be plausible. Anyone can copy a spell from a book. I want you to innovate. To create.”

She spent the next three days and nights hunched over her desk, fueled by nothing but bitter coffee and the need to prove him wrong. The assigned reading included references to half-formed magics—divinatory bonds, sigils of loyalty, even the mythical “circle of kin”—but no one had ever made them work in real life. She scoured the oldest texts, cross-referenced every failed experiment, and mapped the possible avenues of success until her eyes burned and her hands cramped.

On the fourth night, Ophelia found her asleep at her desk, her forehead pressed to a page covered in smeared ink and broken runes.

“You’ll make yourself sick,” Ophelia chided, shaking her gently.

Isemay jerked awake, heart racing. “I’m close,” she muttered. “So damn close.”

She started to explain, but her words ran away from her, tripping over themselves in the rush. “If I can stabilize the anchor, it should be possible to create a permanent connection. Not like a sending spell, more like a… a resonance that works even when you’re apart. But it’s never been done. Not by anyone credible.”

Ophelia grinned, proud. “You’re credible.”

Isemay flushed, then turned the book so Ophelia could see. “It’s called Friendship Symbol. I think… I think I can make it work. I just need—”

“Help?” Ophelia finished, gently.

They worked through the night. Ophelia brought snacks and a supply of low-grade healing potions for the inevitable paper cuts. Lavan joined them at dawn, bleary-eyed but eager, and between the three of them, they hammered out a plan.

The spell would require a personal token; a lock of hair, a drop of blood, a memory so vivid it could be rendered in words. They gathered their materials and set to work. Isemay led the ritual, her voice trembling at first but growing steadier with every syllable.

She marked each of their left forearms with a shimmering, golden ink: three stars arranged in a triangle, joined by a dotted line. The design was simple, but as the spell took hold, the lines glowed faintly, then settled into a shimmer just above the skin.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, a ripple of understanding passed between them. Not words, not thoughts exactly, but a sense of presence; Lavan’s nervous hope, Ophelia’s fierce pride, Isemay’s hard-won joy. The three looked at one another, and each felt the same strange certainty: they would never be truly alone again.

They tested the spell over the next week, sending silent encouragement during lessons, sharing small bursts of comfort when one of them faltered. In the dining hall, when the usual crowd began their ritual hazing, the gold triangle on Isemay’s arm pulsed with heat. Ophelia responded with a flash of defiance, and Lavan, feeling their combined resolve, stood a little taller.

The instructor, upon hearing of Isemay’s project, called her to the front of the class. “A parlor trick,” he declared, examining the sigil on her arm. “But well executed. I will note your innovation in the final report.”

She bowed her head, said thank you, and did not smile until she was out of the room.

That night, the three of them climbed to the Tower’s highest balcony. The city stretched below, a spiderweb of lights and distant voices. The air was cold, but the gold triangle on their arms kept them warm.

“We did it,” Lavan whispered.

“Yeah,” Ophelia agreed, voice quiet but unbreakable. “We did.”

Isemay closed her eyes, breathing in the magic and the night, and for once, let herself believe it was enough.

Sabotage

In the Tower, even the air carried a charge: some days it tingled with possibility, others it crawled with static. On this morning, the current ran caustic.

Ophelia Saloth discovered the first salvo at her desk in Master Tullups’s lecture room. She opened her spellbook expecting the heavy, comforting scent of ink and parchment, but found instead a ragged swamp of ruined pages. Every leaf was sodden, not with water, but with something slightly viscous, tinted red, as if the book had bled out overnight. Her careful notes, weeks of diagrams, corrections, private observations, had run into muddy illegibility, the words blurring like melting flesh. She thumbed through, hoping the damage was superficial, but the wetness soaked all the way through the binding. It sloughed off onto her hands, sticky and cold.

Across the classroom, a snicker echoed. She snapped her head up and caught them: Falden Raulon, flanked by Brylte and Perin, lounging by the window as if posing for a portrait of idiocy. His smile was nothing, a slight tilt of the mouth. Brylte’s laugh rumbled, and Perin wiped at his own nose, trying to appear unimpressed.

Ophelia’s face heated, but she made no sign. Instead, she closed the ruined book, wiped her fingers on her sleeve, and stood. Tullups was nowhere to be found; the old man was notoriously late for his own classes. Ophelia stalked across the floor, her boots sloshing on a thin film of sludge that trailed from her desk. Falden watched, not bothering to hide it.

When she passed, he whispered, “Careful. It stains.” The word hung in the air, loud as a curse.

She could have responded with violence, or a snarl, but she didn’t. She just looked at him, slow and deliberate, and let her own smile bloom, mean and wide. “It’ll wash off,” she said, “but I doubt the same can be said for your stench.”

Brylte’s face turned an admirable shade of pink. Falden just rolled his eyes, but the smile faltered a hair. Ophelia held the stare for a heartbeat longer, then left the room with her book tucked under her arm, the ruined notes dripping a trail down the corridor.

The second blow landed on Lavan Edor as he hurried through the East Wing, late for a lecture he’d been dreading. The corridor here was narrow, hemmed in by stone, and busy with the traffic of students changing classes. Lavan kept his head down, hands stuffed in his pockets, dodging elbows and stray wand tips with the ease of habit. He rounded the corner at the archive stairs, only to have the ground yanked out from under him by a sudden, invisible hook. His foot caught mid-stride; his arms flailed out, catching nothing but air.

He went down hard, knees scraping stone, elbows banged, chin clipped by the edge of a step. The stack of notebooks he’d cradled to his chest exploded across the hall, papers skittering like startled mice. A sharp, hot pain spread up his shin.

From the landing above, Falden and Perin peered down, faces alight with malicious delight. Brylte was nowhere to be seen; maybe running interference elsewhere. Perin made a show of hiding his wand, but Lavan caught the telltale twitch of runes cooling on its tip. Falden grinned down at him, then pantomimed a slow, exaggerated bow.

“Oops,” he called, voice echoing down the stairwell. “Mind your step, Dockboy.”

A few passersby snorted, some out of cruelty, others just relieved it wasn’t them. Lavan gathered his papers, face burning, and willed his hands to stop trembling. He could have thrown a spell back, a flash of heat or a jolt of force to knock Falden off balance, but the rules were clear: first-years who retaliated faced automatic discipline, regardless of provocation. He gritted his teeth and collected the scattered notes, fingers smarting, then limped off to his class with as much dignity as he could manage.

The third strike hit Isemay Misendris in the alchemy lab, a place of precision and measured control. She arrived early, as always, to find her worktable exactly as she’d left it: flasks arrayed, burners set, the day’s experiment, an ambitious attempt at a cold-fusion transmutative, already half-prepared. She glanced over the components, double-checking every weight and volume. Satisfied, she began to mix the reagents.

The first sign of sabotage was subtle: the blueglass pipette, which should have drawn up the greenish solution with a gentle hiss, instead sucked up a clear, odorless liquid. She frowned, checked the label: correct. She tried again, same result. 

When she added the powder to her beaker, it foamed violently, then erupted in a fizzing, acidic spill that hissed over the table and smoked in the air. The reaction was immediate and spectacular, drawing gasps from the cluster of students nearby.

She looked closer. The entire set of ingredients, from the carboy of distilled water to the tray of dried leaves, had been replaced with near-perfect duplicates. Near-perfect, except for the effect. 

Isemay’s hands darted to the neutralizer, dumping a fistful onto the mess. The foam settled, but the damage was done. Her entire assignment, ruined in one petty, surgical strike.

At the far side of the lab, Falden Raulon watched over the rim of a silver flask. His eyes flicked up, met hers, then dropped again to the work before him. A ghost of a smile played at his mouth.

Isemay did not give him the satisfaction of a reaction. She cleaned up the mess, reset her table, returned to the supply room for new ingredients and started again from scratch, every movement more precise than before. But inside, she catalogued the slight, filed it away with all the others. This was not a random act; it was a pattern, a campaign. She wondered, not for the first time, what price Falden was willing to pay for the luxury of cruelty.

* * *

They met in the alcove behind the lower stacks, where the air smelled of mold and forgotten books. Lavan limped in first, balancing an icepack on his knee. Ophelia arrived a minute later, her spellbook still oozing slow red drips into a torn rag. Isemay came last, her fingertips stained with residue of neutralizing powder.

They sat on the floor, backs to the wall, and for a while said nothing.

Ophelia broke the silence with a sharp laugh, loud enough to startle the dust from the shelves. “He’s just another entitled brat who can’t stand that we’re better than him.”

Lavan shook his head. “He’s got the professors wrapped around his finger. If we report him, we just get in more trouble.”

“That’s not always true,” Isemay countered, her voice low but edged. “Some of them hate him more than they hate us. They’re just better at hiding it.”

Ophelia picked at the cover of her ruined book. “You ever wonder if it’s worth it? All this? We could just stop fighting, let him win. Eventually he’ll get bored and move on to someone else.”

Lavan stared at the floor. “I’ve lived with bullies my whole life. If you give them an inch, they take the rest.”

Isemay traced a sigil into the stone with her thumb, then rubbed it out. “He’s building to something,” she said. “Today was just the warm-up. There’s a pattern to it. He’s setting us up for a bigger fall.”

Ophelia narrowed her eyes. “You think he’s planning a real attack?”

“Or framing us for one,” Isemay replied. “He doesn’t just want us humiliated. He wants us gone.”

Lavan considered this, then nodded. “What do we do?”

Isemay thought for a moment. “We document everything. Every trick, every insult. If he pushes it, we’ll have proof.”

They bent their heads together, plotting in whispers, the old camaraderie returning in the heat of adversity. Around them, the Tower hummed with its usual indifferent magic, but the leyline under the library felt different, tense, as if holding its breath.

They stayed until curfew, working out every angle, every possible attack. When they finally split for the night, Isemay paused at the end of the hall and turned back to the others. “Be careful,” she said. “This is the kind of thing that ends careers.”

Ophelia snorted. “Wouldn’t want to be stuck here forever.”

Lavan managed a weak smile. “We’re not going anywhere.”

For a moment, the three of them stood in the hush, their Friendship Symbols flickering in harmony. Then they went their separate ways, leaving the alcove empty save for the faint echo of their voices and the whiff of ozone from Ophelia’s ruined book.

The next day, the pranks continued. The Tower remembered every slight, but so did they. This was not a game anymore; it was war. 

Confrontation

One evening, in a disused common room that smelled of dust and lemon oil, the three of them gathered around a battered study table. Falden set the notice, now more crease than page, on the wood and stabbed a finger at the top line.

“They think they’re special,” he hissed, not bothering to keep his voice low. “The half-breed, the demon-spawn, and the gutter rat. Did you see the way Edor looked at me, after the contest? Like I was something you scrape off your boot.”

Brylte grunted, shifting his bulk so that the chair creaked. “You said it yourself, they’re good. If you want to beat them, you need to be smarter.”

Perin, who had spent the last hour tracing lines on the table with a bitten-down fingernail, leaned forward. “We could remind them. Show everyone what they really are. Nobody climbs that high without a ladder, right?”

Falden’s eyes narrowed. “What do you have in mind?”

Brylte tapped the map he’d drawn on a scrap of notebook paper, the paths and corridors rendered in thick, blocky lines. “They always take the back way from the practice pit to the library. Past the alchemy labs, where nobody goes after curfew.”

Perin smiled, a thin and hungry expression. “It’s a choke point. Two ways in, no way out except straight through.”

Falden considered this, the knuckles of his right hand whitening as he squeezed them together. “If we’re going to do it, we do it right. No witnesses, no way for them to cry foul. We wait until after their next session, when they’re tired and not expecting trouble.”

Perin glanced around, nerves twitching. “And then?”

Falden’s voice dropped to a whisper, though no one else was in earshot. “Then we teach them what happens to people who don’t know their place.”

The room was silent for a beat, then Brylte grunted again, a sound of agreement.

The plan was set.

* * *

Elsewhere in the Tower, the trio carried on with their routines, oblivious to the trap being set. Lavan spent his evenings in the dueling pit, sparring with any upper-year brave enough to face him. He never won by force; instead, he transmuted the ground, shaped the fight, made it impossible for his opponents to stand their ground. Word spread quickly: to face Lavan Edor was to fight the Tower itself.

Ophelia’s illusions became legend. One evening, she filled the dining hall with the song of a ghostly string quartet, every note in perfect harmony, every violin bowing in time to the candlelight. A visiting instructor was so entranced she nearly missed her own lecture. The next morning, Ophelia found a bouquet of bluebells on her desk—no note, just the flowers, their petals luminous and cold.

Isemay, meanwhile, haunted the lecture halls and seminar rooms. Her latest obsession was a proof that, if correct, would make it possible to cast two spells at once without the usual risk of burn-out. She drilled herself and the others mercilessly, always seeking the flaw, the angle, the exception that could break the logic of the spell. When she thought she’d found it, she sent a draft to the faculty, and waited three days before receiving a single line in reply: See me after class. She did, and emerged an hour later with the praise of Master Lightfoot and a list of amendments as long as her arm.

All three of them knew they were making enemies as fast as they were making discoveries, but none of them cared. They had each other, and the work, and the ever-present possibility that tomorrow might be the day they changed the way magic worked, if only for themselves.

But the Tower had its own memory, and its own justice. The ghosts in the stones, the voices that whispered along the leyline, had seen it all before. They watched as the cycle repeated, as ambition drew the knife and envy sharpened it, as the old games played out under new names.

The corridor near the alchemy labs was always dim, lit by sputtering mage-lights that flickered more out of habit than necessity. Lavan, Ophelia, and Isemay walked it together, their voices low and easy. The air reeked of old saltpeter and spilled solvents, a background stench that blurred into familiarity. They moved single file at first, then fanned out as the corridor widened. Lavan and Ophelia argued over the finer points of containment spells; Isemay scribbled a note in the margin of a spellbook as she walked, half-listening, half-plotting her next experiment.

They turned a corner and found themselves face-to-face with Falden Raulon, backed by Brylte and Perin. The three of them blocked the hall, and the mage-lights behind them threw their shadows forward, warped and huge.

“Well, if it isn’t the Tower’s favorite pets,” Falden drawled, voice velvet-smooth and acid-laced. His uniform was perfect, pressed and trimmed in silver, the badge of his house gleaming on his collarbone.

Ophelia rolled her eyes, not breaking stride. “Move aside, Falden. We’re late for class.”

Falden smirked, letting the silence stretch. He stepped forward, the other two fanning to either side. “You’d think with all that power, you’d learn to respect your betters,” he said. “But I suppose some lessons never stick, do they? I heard you won Pembroke’s little trinket, Edor. Did you have to beg for it, like you begged to be let into the Tower?”

Lavan’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing.

Perin, twitchy and grinning, made a show of cracking his knuckles. “Or maybe you cheated,” he suggested. “That’s what they say, you know. That you three can’t win unless you rig the rules.”

Brylte was less interested in the words than the effect; he watched, head down, eyes peering from under his brow like a bull sizing up the matador.

Isemay shifted her grip on her book, stepping between Lavan and the two goons. She fixed Falden with a level stare. “We don’t want trouble.”

Falden bared his teeth in a smile that was all canines. “Of course not. But trouble seems to follow you everywhere, doesn’t it? I suppose that’s what happens when you let street filth into the Tower. Gutter rat, demon-girl, and half-breed—together, you almost make a whole person.”

Ophelia laughed, but the sound was jagged, more a warning than a joke. “Funny. Last I checked, it was your dad who paid to have your test scores adjusted.”

Brylte snorted, pleased at the dig, but Falden’s eyes narrowed. “Careful, tiefling. You wouldn’t want to say something you regret.”

Perin moved in closer, blocking Isemay’s escape on the right. “You know what happens to people who don’t know their place?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. “Don’t worry, we can remind you.”

The three bullies closed in, boxing the trio against the wall.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved.

Falden drew his wand, twirling it between his fingers with practiced menace. The point was aimed at Lavan, but his words were for all three. “This is your last warning. Get out of our way, or we’ll put you in your place.”

Isemay’s voice was cold, controlled. “You want a duel? Fine. But you’d better not miss.”

Falden sneered, but the moment he raised his wand, everything happened at once.

Lavan stamped his foot, channeling leyline energy through his body and into the ground. The stone beneath Falden and Brylte liquefied for a split second, turning slick as oil. Both boys lost their footing, sliding forward with a graceless thud.

At the same instant, Isemay flared her hands, tracing a sigil in the air. A translucent blue shield snapped into being, slicing the corridor in two and catching Perin’s first spell with a fizz of static.

Ophelia, already humming her melody, cast a phantasm that filled the hallway behind the bullies with a dozen advancing professors, each one more furious than the last. The illusions shouted, robes flapping, shoes pounding the flagstones.

Brylte, eyes wide, tried to get up, only to be kicked back down by the spectral foot of an illusory instructor. Perin panicked, flinging wild spells that ricocheted off Isemay’s barrier and scorched nothing but the walls.

Falden, face burning, scrambled to his feet and tried to muster a counterattack. “It’s not real!” he shrieked, but the momentary break in his composure was all Lavan needed.

Lavan advanced, planting himself in the center of the corridor, hands spread wide. “You’re done,” he said, voice low and even. “Go home.”

The trio held their ground. The professors’ chorus closed in, voices rising, until Brylte and Perin bolted, terror trumping loyalty. Falden stayed a heartbeat longer, glaring hate at Lavan, then turned and fled, his pride in shreds.

The spellwork faded, the corridor settling into its usual gray hush. Ophelia dropped the illusion, the professors dissolving in a fine mist. Isemay dropped her shield, letting the air cool. Lavan, breathing hard, leaned against the wall and grinned.

Isemay offered her hand, pulling him upright. “You okay?”

He nodded, then looked at Ophelia. “Nice touch with the professors.”

She shrugged, but her tail flicked with pleasure. “What can I say? I’m a crowd-pleaser.”

They stood for a moment in the empty corridor, the echo of their victory still humming in the stones.

“I guess that’s it,” Isemay said. “We’re officially the most hated students in the Tower.”

Lavan shrugged. “Maybe. But we’re also the best.”

Ophelia looked at them both, then started down the hall. “Come on. If we hurry, we won’t even be late.”

The three of them walked on, side by side, as the Tower watched and remembered.

Behind them, in the flicker of the dying mage-lights, the leyline buzzed, alive and hungry.

Proxy War

The chalk lines on Isemay’s slate glowed faintly, her spellwork steady if not perfect. She kept her back straight, ignoring the low laughter echoing from the other table.

Falden leaned across the aisle, voice pitched to carry. “Careful, Isy. Wouldn’t want the Misendrises embarrassed because their… ward can’t even draw a circle. Maybe if you sat with us again, instead of playing house with charity admits, you’d remember how real nobles behave.”

The room went silent. Lavan froze, the quill trembling in his hand. Ophelia’s tail lashed like a whip, sparks curling off her fingertips. Isemay forced her shoulders higher, though her knuckles whitened against the slate.

“Enough.”

Kerrowyn’s voice cracked like a whip. She strode down the aisle, robes trailing chalk dust, her eyes glittering with amusement turned razor-sharp.

“Mr. Falden,” she said, her tone almost pleasant. “If lineage were all it took to master resonance, we wouldn’t bother running these dreary exams. And judging from your last attempt at a binding glyph, I’d say nobility is a poor substitute for talent.”

A ripple of laughter spread through the class. Falden’s face burned crimson.

Kerrowyn stopped by Isemay’s desk, examining the chalk lines with a practiced eye. “Miss Misendris, your glyph is clean. A little tight in the curve, but clean. You need no one’s permission to sit where you like.”

She turned, addressing the room at large. “Let’s all be very clear: bloodlines may open doors, but they do not keep you from falling flat on your face once you step through them. What matters in this Tower is what you can do, not what your parents bribed their way into.”

Her gaze lingered on Falden just long enough for the meaning to sting.

Then she clapped her hands briskly. “Back to work. Unless, of course, some of you prefer careers in amateur theatrics?”

The students bent to their tasks. Isemay released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Lavan’s shoulders eased. Ophelia smirked, muttering under her breath, “Nice one.”

Falden sat stiffly, chalk poised useless above his slate, his jaw tight. He said nothing. But the look he cast across the aisle was venomous.

***

The Council chamber spat Kerrowyn out the way it always did, empty of patience, heavy with parchment. She stalked through the colonnaded hallway with a bundle of reports under her arm, muttering curses under her breath. Five years of this seat, five years of watching the Capitol’s noble houses dress selfishness in civic language. It was enough to rot the bones of a better wizard.

Her boots rang against marble, a clipped staccato. She wanted a quill, a blackboard, a chalk circle, anything that smelled of ink and discovery. Instead, she had votes and petitions.

“Master Lightfoot.”

The voice was velvet over steel. Lord Raulon stepped out of the shadow between pillars, flanked by two courtiers like ornamental dogs. Lord Thorne, stout and self-satisfied, and Lord Crestvale, thin as a quill, eager-eyed.

Kerrowyn slowed, but only slightly. “If this is another dispute about the fountain tax, I’m not interested.”

Raulon matched her pace, the other lords falling into step behind him. “This isn’t about fountains, Master. It’s about your treatment of my son.”

Kerrowyn rolled her eyes skyward. “Of course it is.”

Crestvale piped up quickly, anxious to please. “Falden the younger has such promise. A boy of that blood deserves cultivation, not… chastisement.”

Thorne added, “A seed grows best in sunlight, not under a gardener’s lash.”

Kerrowyn stopped abruptly. Thorne nearly stumbled into her. She turned to face them, cocking her head as though examining specimens that had failed to thrive. “Your metaphors are as limp as your arguments.”

Raulon’s nostrils flared, but his voice remained smooth. “You humiliated him. Publicly. You accused him of sabotage. You cut him down in front of his peers.”

“I observed his actions,” Kerrowyn said crisply. “I graded him on the work he turned in. If that humiliates him, perhaps the fault lies not in my standards but in his performance.”

Crestvale colored, but Raulon pressed on, tone dropping lower. “A father cannot stand idle while his son is made a spectacle.”

Kerrowyn leaned closer, the corner of her mouth curling. “And a teacher cannot stand idle while her student behaves like an ass with pocket money.”

Raulon’s composure cracked for a heartbeat, just a tic in the jaw, a flare of heat behind his eyes. “You forget your place, Master. Your Council term is not permanent. Eight years, I believe? Perhaps you should make friends instead of enemies while you have the chance.”

Kerrowyn barked a laugh that echoed off the marble. “My place is teaching students who deserve the Tower’s halls. Your son has the advantage of a name, but none of the discipline. If you want him to be more than a petty tormentor, stop greasing his failures with your influence.”

Lord Thorne coughed nervously. Crestvale’s gaze darted anywhere but Kerrowyn’s face.

She stepped closer, voice dropping to a conversational blade. “If you want him to learn discipline, tell him to stop cornering girls between benches. If you want him to learn magic, tell him to study. If you want him to learn courage, tell him to stand alone when he’s wrong. But do not come to me with two courtiers and call it concern. It’s as creative as a twelve-year-old shoving someone in a lunch line.”

“You speak with such certainty, Master Lightfoot. But then, nuance is a difficult thing to grasp when one’s background has been… shall we say, less than noble.”

 “Oh, I grasp it just fine, my lord. The nuance of a bully is the same whether he’s twelve years old or hiding his bald spot behind a toupe.”

A flush rose at Raulon’s collar. For a heartbeat the corridor held its breath.

Lord Raulon recovered his mask, smoothing the line of his sleeves. “Enjoy your tenure, Master Kerrowyn. It would be… unfortunate if it became difficult.”

He pivoted, sweeping past with the two minor lords in tow.

A draft caught the corridor just then, strange, sharp, and surgical. It darted under Falden’s carefully lacquered hair, puffing it up with a traitorous whuff that revealed bare scalp beneath. His pace stuttered.

Kerrowyn blinked innocently at the casements, tucking her wand against her side as though she hadn’t just drawn the tiniest flick of wind from its tip. “These buildings,” she said to no one in particular. “The ventilation is appalling. Someone ought to complain.”

Falden’s ears burned red. He didn’t look back.

Kerrowyn balanced the reports on her hip, her grin crooked and satisfied. “Creative as a twelve-year-old,” she muttered, and continued down the corridor.

***

Kerrowyn shouldered the door shut with her hip and let a fat stack of Council briefings slap onto the low table. Pages slid, fan-spread and accusatory.

“Gods damn that chamber,” she muttered, pacing a short track by the window. “Another hour of peacocks explaining why peacockery is a public service.”

Iliyria Sylren, the elven Commander of the Arcane Protection Services, and one of Kerrowyn’s oldest friends, was waiting, a small kettle and two cups on a tray in front of her. Steam curled like a ward in the air.

“Tea,” Iliyria said, setting a cup in front of Kerrowyn. “Before you start carving glyphs into the furniture.”

Kerrowyn fished a flask from her pocket and wiggled it. “I’ll adjust the dosage.”

Iliyria’s mouth twitched. “You may adulterate your tea as you like. I’ll keep mine as tea.”

They settled opposite. Kerrowyn poured, then, without breaking eye contact, tipped a neat ribbon from the flask into her cup. Iliyria cocked a brow but said nothing.

“Who was it this time?” Iliyria asked. “You have the kicked-hornet look.”

“Falden Raulon,” Kerrowyn said, flat as a gavel. “Senior. Lurking in a corridor with two house-poodles. Apparently my grading scale offends his family honor.”

Iliyria warmed her palms on the cup. “I only know the son through your… colorful updates. The dock boy you keep defending. The tiefling with the tongue. And the Misendris adoptee. Those three?” She tipped her head, causing a cascade of her silver hair to slip through the bun that half-heartedly restrained it. “You’ve told me they sit together.”

“They do,” Kerrowyn said. “And it eats him alive. The boy can’t bear that his barbs bounce off when there are three backs, not one. Today his father tried the same trick: crowd you, imply consequence, see if you flinch.”

“And you didn’t,” Iliyria said.

“I told him he was as creative as his son, shoving children in a lunch line and calling it strategy.” Kerrowyn took a long swallow, breathed out through her nose. “He did not care for the comparison.”

“Shocking,” Iliyria murmured.

Kerrowyn leaned forward, voice sharpening. “Listen, because you don’t know them beyond my rants. The girl, Misendris? Keeps her spine even when her hands shake. The tiefling, Saloth, bites first, asks if she should have later. The boy, Edor, brilliant, all raw edge, wants to fix everything so badly he’ll break it if I let him. They balance each other. That’s why it works. That’s why he hates them.”

Iliyria’s eyes narrowed, filing the names away like evidence. “And Falden Junior targets them as a unit.”

“As a sport,” Kerrowyn snapped. “He needles their soft spots. ‘Not a real noble’ for Misendris. ‘Charity case’ for Edor. ‘Miss Saloth’ in that oily voice that turns a title into a slur. When I slap him down, he slinks off and waits for an angle. Today, Father Falden tried his own.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not in words worth repeating,” Kerrowyn said. “Hints about my ‘temporary’ seat. A suggestion that my job would be easier if I cultivated his seedling instead of pruning it.”

Iliyria took a careful sip. “And then?”

Kerrowyn’s mouth curved. “Then a gust of wind discovered his hair has more faith than pins.”

Iliyria groaned, but laughter snuck out anyway. “Kerry.”

“Ily.”

“You cannot hex the coiffures of the peerage every time they annoy you.”

“It wasn’t a hex. It was a draft with aspirations.” Kerrowyn widened her eyes, pure innocence. “These buildings are a maze of vents. Tragic.”

Iliyria pinched the bridge of her nose, still smiling. “One day your pettiness will get you dragged into a rules committee.”

“Then I’ll bring a comb,” Kerrowyn said, and the two women’s laughter let some of the corridor’s grit slide off.

The steam between them thinned. Iliyria set her cup down with a tiny, decisive click. “All right. Past the hair. Tell me what you’re really worried about.”

Kerrowyn’s answer came without heat. “Escalation. The father encourages the boy’s cowardice by calling it pedigree. If the usual humiliations stop drawing blood, they’ll look for something that does. You know this dance.”

Iliyria’s face smoothed into something cool and professional. “I know it too well. Until tonight, I only knew their names from you. Edor, Saloth, Misendris. I will keep them in mind when I read reports.”

“Keep them in sight,” Kerrowyn said. “If Falden can’t score points in public, he’ll play in shadow. And he’ll think it clever.”

A beat. The kettle popped softly as a bubble found heat.

Iliyria nodded once. “I’ll watch.”

Kerrowyn tipped her flask again, the tiniest thread into the tea. “Thank you.”

They let the promise sit a moment. Then Iliyria deliberately shifted the tray, refilling her cup.

“Enough of lords with fragile scalps,” she said, tone lighter. “How goes your prodigy?”

Kerrowyn couldn’t stop the small, involuntary softening around her eyes. “Fast. Too fast. It’s only been three years since Alric shoved her through my door, but she’s a natural with theory. She picks up sigils like she’s remembering them. I’ve started inventing problems so she can learn the shape of failure without wearing it.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Iliyria said.

“It is,” Kerrowyn admitted. “And the best part of my week. She’ll outpace half the faculty if she doesn’t explode first.”

Iliyria hummed. “She reminds me of someone who once thought a few years on the Council would be a pleasant sabbatical.”

Kerrowyn snorted. “If I ever said that, I was drunk.”

“Ah, you do get to use that excuse often,” Iliyria said, lifting her tea. 

Kerrowyn clinked her cup to Iliyria’s. “You keep the tea sacred. I’ll commit heresies on my side of the tray.”

They drank. The room exhaled. Outside, the Capitol wind nosed at the casement and thought better of it.

Iliyria set her cup down. “Send me anything you write up on the boy. The father will try a subtler corridor next time.”

“He’ll try the same corridor with different wallpaper,” Kerrowyn said. “But I’ll send what I have.”

“And Kerry—” Iliyria’s voice gentled without going soft. “If the trio needs a friend beyond your classroom, say so sooner, not later.”

Kerrowyn held her gaze. “If it turns, I’ll call.”

“Good,” Iliyria said. “I’d rather be bored than late.”

Kerrowyn huffed a laugh. “You’ll never be bored with me assigned to Council.”

“That,” Iliyria said, standing to retrieve the kettle, “is the truest threat I’ve heard all day.”

They shared a last brief grin. Then the friendship folded itself away into the neatness of cups and paper, ready for the next corridor, the next council, the next gust with aspirations.

***

The lamps in Raulon Manor glowed with steady oil-fed light, but Lord Falden Raulon’s reflection in the gilt mirror looked anything but steady.

He dragged a comb through his hair for the fourth time, muttering. The draft had lifted it, a draft, in the Council’s marble corridors, revealing more scalp than he had permitted anyone to see in years. He smoothed, pinned, and smoothed again, but the image in his mind would not leave: Kerrowyn’s eyes glittering with mischief, her mouth curved in satisfaction, her wand angled just so.

A draft, indeed.

The fire snapped in the grate. He poured himself brandy, swallowing too quickly, the burn a reprimand.

The door opened, and his son entered. Falden Junior stood stiff-backed, eyes wary but hopeful, as if eager to prove himself in this sudden summons.

“Father,” he said carefully.

Lord Falden gestured to the hearth. “You’ve made yourself the subject of gossip. Again.”

His son flushed. “Lightfoot, she…she humiliates me. She calls me out in class, she grades unfairly, she—”

Lord Falden cut him off with a raised hand. “I know what she does. She did the same to me today, in front of my peers. Mocked me. Mocked us.” He set the brandy aside with a sharp clink. “She will not be moved by appeals or by reputation. She is a Tower witch who thinks herself untouchable.”

The boy’s fists clenched. “She is.”

“No,” Falden said, turning fully toward him. “She is not. She has pets. Three of them. The Misendris adoptee. The dock-rat. The tiefling. She thinks shielding them is proof of her strength. But it is weakness. And weakness can be exploited.”

Falden Junior’s breath came faster. “I… I’ve tried. They resist. They mock me in turn.”

“Then you haven’t tried enough.” Lord Falden’s voice cut like a blade. “If you cannot best them in class, you will destroy them outside of it. Socially. Scholastically. Practically. If the usual cruelties don’t suffice, find others. Use every resource available to you. Quietly.”

His son blinked. “Destroy them?”

“Yes.” Falden’s tone softened, almost indulgent. “Make them regret ever crossing a Raulon. Make Lightfoot feel it by proxy. Remind her, and everyone else, that our house is not so easily mocked.”

For a moment, silence. The fire hissed.

Then the boy nodded, the stiffness in his shoulders hardening into resolve. “Understood, Father.”

“Good.” Lord Falden turned back to the mirror, lifting the comb again, still unsatisfied with the way his hair lay. “Make it quiet. Make it clean. And make sure there are no drafts.”

Falden Junior left the room with the word destroy coiled inside him, mistaking it for permission, mistaking it for praise.

By the time he reached the manor steps, he’d translated it into a plan; nothing so crude as public brawls. Something efficient. Something that wouldn’t stain the family’s gloves.

Something that would make them disappear.

***

Lord Raulon lingered in his study long after his son had gone, brandy in hand, the fire hissing low in the grate.

“Destroy them.” He said the words again under his breath, testing them. Too harsh for a boy, perhaps, but the boy needed harshness. He was soft, still clinging to schoolyard grievances, still letting himself be rattled by Kerrowyn’s little barbs.

A Raulon could not afford softness.

Falden swirled the glass, watching amber whirlpool against crystal. When he had been twelve, his own father had told him worse. Crush them before they crush you, that had been the family rule. And he had survived, no, thrived, because of it. Was it so different now?

His son would fail if left to coddling. Better he learn the shape of cruelty young, before the Tower ate him alive. “Destroy them” had not meant ruin in the literal sense. It meant find their weaknesses, take control, remind the others whose name carried weight. The words had been a lesson, not an instruction.

Falden stared into the fire, jaw tight. Still… perhaps he’d pushed too far. A boy of twelve might not understand the difference between a maxim and an order.

But then, perhaps that was the point.

He finished the glass in a single swallow, set it down, and returned to the mirror. He smoothed his hair again, making sure it lay in obedient lines. He would not give Kerrowyn the satisfaction of knowing how deeply her little conjured draft had unsettled him.

Behind him, the fire popped, and in the sound he thought he heard laughter.

***

In his dorm at the Tower, Falden sat on the edge of the bed with his shoes still on, staring at the polished floorboards. His father’s words repeated in his head like a bell-strike.

Destroy them.

He mouthed the phrase, liking the taste of it, though he wasn’t sure yet what it meant. Destroy. He thought of Isemay’s too-straight back, of Edor’s muttering over chalk, of Saloth’s crooked grin when she called him names. They weren’t supposed to matter. They weren’t supposed to belong. And yet, when they sat together, the room bent toward them as though they were worth watching.

He hated that.

Falden climbed onto his desk chair, too small yet for the height, and leaned toward the mirror. He smoothed his hair carefully with both hands, remembering the laughter in the classroom when Master Lightfoot  had scolded him. His ears burned even now.

“Destroy them,” he whispered to the boy in the glass. “Quiet. Efficient.” The words sounded older than he was, like he was borrowing his father’s voice.

He imagined clever ways it might happen, like the stories he’d overheard when he pretended to be asleep by the parlor doors: crates loaded onto wagons, ships leaving in the night, names disappearing from ledgers. His father’s friends talked like that sometimes, in half-whispers he wasn’t supposed to catch.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Not fighting in corridors, not shouting matches that left him red-faced while the three of them smirked. No, something final. Something that would make them vanish, so no one could sit with them again.

Perin and Brylte found him in the common room the next day, slouched awkwardly in an oversized chair with his feet not reaching the floor. Cards scattered on the table between them, but Falden wasn’t playing. He was thinking.

“You’re quiet,” Brylte said. “Usually you’ve got a plan.”

“I do,” Falden said. He lowered his voice in imitation of his father. “Father says they have to be destroyed. Not just mocked. Destroyed.”

Perin laughed nervously, then stopped when Falden didn’t smile. “You’re serious?”

Falden nodded. “If he says it, then I can. And when it’s done, Lightfoot will know. They’ll all know.”

The two boys shifted, glancing at each other with unease, but Falden only sat straighter, parroting his father’s posture. For the first time, he felt older than twelve.

***

The dormitory courtyard was hushed in the gray before dawn, the only sound the drip of last night’s rain from the eaves. Perin and Brylte sat on the low wall, cloaks drawn tight against the chill, speaking low so the prefect wouldn’t hear.

Perin kicked at a loose stone. “You heard him again last night. Muttering it. Destroy them. Like it’s all he knows how to say anymore.”

Brylte hunched deeper into his cloak. “You’re making it bigger than it is. He’s just… talking big. Trying to sound like his father.”

Perin turned on him, voice sharp. “Sound like his father? He’s twelve, Brylte. Twelve. We were supposed to tease Edor for tripping on his robes, not—” He stopped himself, eyes darting around the courtyard. “Not talk about making people disappear.”

Brylte rubbed at his face. “You think I like it? But what do you want me to do? Tell him to stop? You saw his face last night. He believes it. He thinks it’s an order.”

Perin’s mouth twisted. “Because it was. His father told him to.”

“That’s even more reason to shut up and go along.” Brylte’s tone hardened. “You’ve been to Raulon Manor. You know how his family works. If Falden wants to prove himself, we’re safer at his side than across from him.”

Perin stared at the wet flagstones, jaw tight. “Safer, maybe. But saints, Brylte… if he goes through with it, we’ll be in it too. Do you want that on you?”

Brylte didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched, heavy with the drip-drip-drip of rain.

Finally, he said, “I want to graduate. I want to walk out of here with a family name still worth something. If following Falden is the price, then so be it.”

Perin’s hands clenched on the edge of the wall. He wanted to argue, but the words caught. Both boys knew the truth: walking away wasn’t really an option. Not in the Tower. Not with the Raulons.

From a high window, a faint voice drifted down, Falden himself, awake before curfew’s end, repeating the phrase again like a catechism. Destroy them.

Perin shivered, though the rain had stopped.

The Misendris Manor

The Misendris manor was built to impress, but it also did a credible job of intimidating. Its three wings wrapped around a central courtyard in a horseshoe of stained glass, pale stone, and banners so bright they might have been dyed with gold. In spring the garden was full of calculated color: hedges trimmed to within an inch of their lives, beds of blue irises arranged in perfectly symmetrical fans, and a marble fountain whose centerpiece, a rearing kelpie, looked ready to leap from the basin and gallop for the river.

Lavan tried not to stare. He’d spent enough time in the lower docks to know that you could always tell how rich a family was by how many windows they left without curtains. Here, every window was without curtains, and every one seemed to have someone peering through it as the carriage approached.

He tugged at his coat sleeves, which were three years out of date and starting to fray at the wrists. He hadn’t wanted to come, but Isemay had insisted, and Ophelia, never one to pass up a dare, had threatened to carry him bodily if he refused.

Ophelia stood at his side, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, tail flicking in what might have been agitation or barely restrained violence. She surveyed the entryway with a soldier’s eye, searching for traps or hidden exits.

At the door, Isemay hesitated, just for a second, then squared her shoulders and pushed the bell. The sound it made was soft, more musical than mechanical, and a moment later the doors swung open.

Lord and Lady Misendris stood in the foyer, as if they’d been waiting all day for this precise moment. Lord Misendris was tall, silver-haired, with a face lined in the way that comes from smiling more than frowning. Lady Misendris was smaller, but her presence filled the room, and her eyes, hazel, with a ring of blue, missed nothing.

“Isemay!” Lady Misendris said, arms outstretched. “And your friends. Wonderful.”

Isemay rushed forward, and for a moment was just a girl coming home, her cleverness and scholarship irrelevant. Then, with a sweep, Lady Misendris folded Ophelia into an embrace, as if Ophelia had been visiting for years. “So glad to finally meet you, dear,” she said. Ophelia, not prepared for the suddenness, stood rigid, then relaxed and even managed a tentative, awkward hug back.

Lord Misendris extended a hand to Lavan. “You must be Mr. Edor,” he said, shaking firmly. “We’ve heard a great deal about you. Most of it from Isemay herself.”

Lavan glanced at Isemay, who blushed but didn’t look away. “Thank you, sir,” he managed.

The entry hall was a riot of old artifacts and portraits, each more extravagant than the last. There were books in every niche, a string of softly glowing mage-lamps over the banister, and, in the center, a domed skylight that let in the pale spring sun.

“Please, come in,” Lady Misendris said. “We’re just about to have tea.”

The dining room was set for five, a spread of cakes, sugared fruits, and small savory pastries arrayed on tiered silver trays. The tea service was antique, the cups thin enough to see the shadow of your fingers through them. Lavan found his hands shaking, just a bit, as he tried not to spill.

Conversation began politely; how was the ride, what were the current Tower assignments, was the food at the refectory as terrible as Isemay had described? But as the first course cleared, Lady Misendris turned her attention to Ophelia.

“So, Miss Saloth,” she said. “We hear you’re a bit of a troublemaker.”

Ophelia grinned, showing the point of her canine tooth. “I try to live up to the stories.”

Lady Misendris laughed, genuine and loud. “Excellent. I always said the Tower needed more mischief.”

Isemay groaned, “Mother, please.”

But Lady Misendris only leaned closer. “Have you told your friends about the time you tried to conjure a puppy in the gardens, and instead filled the rose beds with toads?”

Isemay slumped, face in her hands. Lavan and Ophelia exchanged a look, delighted by the development.

“Oh, it gets better,” Lord Misendris said, eyes twinkling. “The toads turned out to be incredibly loud. The staff couldn’t catch them. They sang every night for a week.”

Ophelia laughed so hard she had to set her teacup down.

Isemay tried to rally, “Well, at least I didn’t turn all the vegetables in the Tower kitchens purple, like Ophelia did her first semester.”

“Only half,” Ophelia shot back. “The rest were blue. It was artistic.”

Lavan, who had been silent, found himself smiling despite the nerves. He watched the ease with which Isemay’s family welcomed her friends—the way they made Ophelia’s roughness and Lavan’s own awkwardness seem like assets rather than liabilities. It was a kind of hospitality he’d never really known, and it made something in his chest ache with both longing and relief.

When dinner rolled around, the menu grew grander. Soup with floating orbs of cheese, roasted vegetables seasoned with a dusting of gold, a main course that Lavan didn’t have a word for but tasted like every good memory he’d ever had. The conversation turned to gossip: which Houses were feuding, what the Capitol Council was plotting, whether the rumors about the new Watch Commander were true.

As dessert was served, honey cakes layered with cream, Lady Misendris addressed Isemay directly. “We’re so proud of you, Isy. And of your friends, too. We always hoped you’d find people who appreciated you for who you are, not just for your grades.”

Isemay stared at her cake. “Thank you,” she whispered, and in that moment Lavan could see, for the first time, how much the pressure of expectation weighed on her.

Afterwards, as they prepared to leave, Lord Misendris took Lavan aside. “She cares about you, you know. Both of you. Take care of her, will you?”

Lavan nodded, throat too tight for words.

At the door, Lady Misendris pressed small parcels of sugared fruits and wrapped pastries into each of their hands. “Come back soon,” she said, voice both command and promise.

They walked down the path to the gate, the sun dipping low over the river. Ophelia unwrapped her parcel and popped a candied plum into her mouth. “Not bad,” she said. “For a noble house.”

Lavan just smiled, holding his bundle close.

Isemay linked arms with them both. “See? That wasn’t so terrible.”

Ophelia grinned. “If all family dinners end in sugar, I’ll survive.”

They walked on, laughter echoing back toward the manor, and for the first time in a long time, all three felt, in their own ways, completely and utterly at home.

Monthly Ritual

The flat in Nightvalley was barely more than two rooms, but it always smelled of baking bread and burning lamp oil. Trigger was already waiting at the window, pressed so close to the glass his breath had fogged a circle bigger than his face.

When Ophelia knocked, he shot across the room, scattering a stack of schoolbooks and two pencils in his wake. “You’re early!” he shouted, and barreled into her with a hug that nearly knocked them both to the floor.

Ophelia grinned, ruffling his hair. He was a handswidth taller since she’d last seen him, and his horns, once short nubs, were now curved in a way that suggested either imminent adulthood or catastrophic headbutts in his near future.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re going to be taller than me soon.”

“Grew two inches last month,” Trigger boasted, then yanked her toward the kitchen table. “I need help with fractions. And my history report. And also, I think my teacher hates me.”

Ophelia glanced at the workbook. “Let’s see the damage.”

Trigger slumped in his chair, but perked up as Ophelia conjured a small, blue illusion of a dragon, which began to circle his head and breathe imaginary fire at the fractions on the page. “If you get one right,” she explained, “he eats the answer. If you get it wrong, he sets it on fire.”

Trigger laughed and got to work, tongue sticking out as he concentrated. Ophelia hovered, correcting when needed, sometimes letting the dragon incinerate a particularly stubborn mistake.

From the doorway, Uncle Staunch watched, leaning on his cane. He was a tiefling too, older and lined, one leg stiff from a warehouse accident that had never quite healed right. He had the look of a man who had seen too much and lost more, but whenever he saw Trigger laugh, he straightened, pride clear in the set of his jaw.

“Thanks for coming,” Staunch said. “You make his week, you know.”

Ophelia shrugged, but she couldn’t help but smile. “It’s mutual.”

After an hour, Trigger grew restless. “Can we go outside? I want to practice.”

Ophelia glanced at Staunch, who nodded. “Just don’t throw anything at the neighbors,” he warned. “Again.”

The alley behind the house was barely wide enough for two people, but Trigger had set up a battered target on the far wall—a ring of old bottles with a crude chalk bullseye in the center. He produced a set of small, homemade knives from his pocket, clearly proud.

“Ready?” he said.

“Always,” said Ophelia, stepping back.

He threw with surprising force, most of the blades sticking, a few bouncing off with a clang. Ophelia corrected his stance, showed him how to balance his weight, and within minutes, he was grouping the knives tighter.

“Why do I need to know this?” Trigger asked, panting. “I’m not going to be a soldier.”

Ophelia hesitated. “Just in case. The world’s not always safe.”

Trigger thought about this, then nodded. “I’m going to protect you, too, you know.”

Ophelia’s heart twisted, but she ruffled his hair again. “I’ll hold you to that.”

On his last throw, Trigger tripped and skinned his knee. He tried not to cry, but his face crumpled. Ophelia knelt, her usually sharp demeanor softening as she dabbed at the scrape with her sleeve.

“It’ll scar,” Trigger said, trying to sound tough.

“That’s how you know you’re learning,” Ophelia replied.

Back inside, Staunch handed Ophelia a cup of bitter tea. “He’ll be okay,” he said, voice low. “You’re doing right by him.”

Ophelia nodded. “I try.”

When it was time to leave, she pressed a few silver into Staunch’s hand, insisting he take it. “For school. Or books. Or food.”

He tried to argue, but she shook her head. “Just take care of him.”

“I will.”

At the door, Trigger clung to her, arms tight around her waist. “Will you come next month?”

“Every month,” she promised, smoothing the hair from his brow. “I’ll always come back.”

He let go, but only just.

Ophelia stepped out into the Nightvalley dusk, the glow of the city lighting her way, and for a moment she felt lighter than she had in years. She looked back once, saw Trigger waving from the window, and waved in return.

She’d come back. She always did.

Festival

By the time the Spring Festival arrived, the Tower’s undercurrent of menace had been temporarily drowned by the city’s appetite for spectacle. Fountain Square bloomed with riotous banners in every color, each building festooned with garlands or bright cloth. Vendors hawked spiced wine and pastry from carts, their shouts competing with the ceaseless crash of drums and the high, wild laughter of children let loose for the day.

On festival days, even the magic of the Tower felt muted, overpowered by the press of the crowd and the thick aromas of candied nuts, roast meats, and sharp, fermented plum.

Ophelia drifted through the crush with the swagger of someone born to street festivals, her tail curled in a loose, lazy arc behind her. She paused at a ring-toss stand, watched a human boy fumble three throws in a row, noticed how the game was rigged to make success  near impossible, then sidled up and dropped a copper for her own try. The vendor, a squint-eyed woman, watched her suspiciously as she lined up the ring, but said nothing.

Ophelia’s first two tosses clattered harmlessly off the peg. The third, however, she spun between her fingers, humming a soft, sly note under her breath. Just as she let go, she flicked her tail, barely, just a twitch, and the ring bent in the air, arcing cleanly onto the spike. The vendor’s jaw tensed.

Ophelia grinned. “Looks like I got one,” she said, voice honeyed with mock surprise.

The woman grunted, reluctant, and handed over a small stuffed crow with glass eyes and faux feathers.

Lavan, meanwhile, lingered at the edge of the crowd, hands jammed into his jacket pockets. He was uncomfortable in the press of people, more so with the distance to the Tower and its safety. But even he could not resist the lure of the festival for long. A small girl in a dress the color of lemon curd ran past him, nearly bowling him over. She skidded to a halt, then stared at him with wide eyes, unafraid.

He stooped, smiling, and asked, “Lose something?”

She nodded, then pointed at the ground: a single dull copper coin, flattened and stomped by a thousand shoes.

Lavan picked it up, dusted it off, and closed it in his hand. When he opened it, the coin had been transmuted, a trick of light and focus, into a tiny, perfect flower, its petals soft as smoke and tinted with the copper’s sheen. Then he reverted it back to its original form, only now it gleamed like it was freshly minted, and handed it to the girl. She gasped, clapped her hands, and ran off screaming delightedly into the crowd.

He watched her go, then looked up to find Isemay watching him from across the square, her arms folded, eyes amused.

“That was clever,” she said when he joined her, “you’d make a wonderful street magician.”

He shrugged, embarrassed. “You’re supposed to make it look effortless.”

“Hmm, I think I can do that too,” Isemay replied. She gestured toward a nearby table, where a shell game was being run by a man with the angular, predatory face of a born swindler. “Watch this.”

They drifted closer. The man was already in mid-patter: “Pick the cup, double your money.” He grinned, hands a blur.

Isemay waited until he’d fleeced three or four hopefuls, then stepped forward, her manner mild. “May I?” she asked, sliding a silver onto the table.

The man looked her up and down, eyes lingering on the Tower’s badge at her collar. “All in good fun,” he said, sweeping the cups with a flourish.

The game began. The marble flashed under the cups; left, right, center, left, then the shuffle. To Lavan, the hands were too quick to follow, but Isemay’s eyes never left the man’s face. When the shuffle ended, she pointed, quick and certain.

He lifted the cup: marble. She won.

He ran the game again, faster. She won again.

By the third round, the man’s smile had thinned to a line. “Double or nothing?” he challenged.

Isemay nodded.

This time, the cups blurred to near-invisibility. But when he stopped, she pointed without hesitation.

The man paused, then lifted the cup. No marble.

He smiled, relieved, but Isemay only shook her head. “That’s not the one I meant,” she said. “Check your sleeve.”

The man hesitated, then, almost against his will, turned over his right wrist. The marble fell out, bounced once on the wood, and rolled to a stop.

The small crowd erupted in laughter. The man, red-faced but a sport, pushed the doubled silver toward her. Isemay scooped it up, nodded to Lavan, and they slipped away.

“How did you—?” Lavan began.

She shrugged, but her face was pleased. “He told me where the marble was. Most people give themselves away if you look close enough.”

They walked the square together, picking through the festival’s chaos. Ophelia rejoined them, the stuffed crow now perched on her shoulder, one eye gouged and replaced with a bright blue bead she’d found in a gutter.

They lingered as dusk fell, watching the lanterns ignite in clusters across the square, the colored lights mixing with the fire of the jugglers.

It was in this moment, full, perfect, and unguarded, that a burst of drums signaled the start of the dance. The musicians, perched on a riser above the square, struck up a wild tune, and the festivalgoers responded en masse. Hands found hands; circles formed and spiraled outward, each new layer drawing in more bodies, more laughter.

Ophelia pulled Lavan into the first ring, spinning him so fast he lost his footing. Isemay followed, less certain, but soon the three of them were caught in the current, laughing and breathless. For a time, nothing existed but the rush and spin of the dance, the warm press of strangers, and the way the world could, just for an hour, feel safe.

Vanished

They left the square after dark, arm in arm, drifting through the side streets toward the Tower’s main gate.

It happened in the span of a single breath.

A shout, then a rough hand yanked Lavan backward into an alley. He twisted, tried to break free, but a net, weighted and thick, crashed over his shoulders, pinning his arms. Ophelia spun to help, only to have her legs swept from beneath her by a second, even heavier net. The weights were sewn with iron, real iron, not the ornamental stuff used in most city work, which sizzled against her skin, burning away any attempt to summon magic.

Isemay darted back, nearly free, but a third net, flung with perfect aim, caught her at the knees and tangled her in mid-stride. She hit the ground hard, the breath knocked out of her.

From the shadows, three men emerged: hulking, faces masked in rough cloth, eyes glinting in the torchlight. One leaned over Lavan, checking the knots. “This one’s the boy,” he muttered, voice guttural and strange.

Another bent over Ophelia, who snapped and spat, teeth bared. “Careful,” one said, “this one bites.”

“Good. Means they’ll pay more for her,” the first replied.

Isemay struggled, trying to crawl away, but the third man planted a boot on her back. “Hold still, miss,” he said. “We don’t want to hurt you. Just business.”

She froze, every muscle locked.

From somewhere behind, the lead man hissed, “These are the ones the boy pointed out. Magic users from the Tower. They’ll fetch a premium price.”

Ophelia, face twisted in fury, shrieked, “You bastard!” She bucked against the net, but the iron held. 

“Check them,” barked the leader.

The traffickers moved with grim efficiency. Hands rifled through pockets, tugged at belts, yanked away satchels. Their wands, foci, and charms were pulled free and tossed into a sack. One captor muttered an incantation, eyes flaring blue, detect magic. The glow swept over each child, lingering at the pins fastened to their robes: the small bronze Tower insignia every student wore.

“These,” the caster said, sneering. “Trackers.”

The leader snatched them off roughly, tossing them into the gutter. One clattered against stone; another skittered into a pile of refuse.

“Leave them. Better the Tower wastes time chasing shadows.”

Another kidnapper pulled a dart gun from his coat, the hiss of pressure filling the alley. One by one, the darts struck; Ophelia in the shoulder, Isemay in the thigh, Lavan just below the collarbone. The children’s protests faltered into slurred cries, their limbs heavy, their eyes clouding.

“Get them on the cart before it wears off,” the leader ordered.

As the traffickers heaved the three toward the waiting wagon, one glanced back into the alley. Something small had tumbled free in the scuffle, a stuffed crow, battered and half-stained with dirt.

“Trash,” the man muttered, leaving it beside the pins.

The wagon rolled away into the night, the alley left empty except for the glimmer of discarded bronze and the silent gaze of the stuffed crow.

***

The Tower’s bells tolled curfew, their notes rolling through the courtyards. Students trickled in from the festival, flushed with drink and laughter.

Falden slipped through the gates with the crowd, posture crisp, expression bored. He made sure to cross the threshold precisely on time, as though nothing about the night had been remarkable.

Inside the common hall, chatter buzzed. Someone whispered, “Where’s Misendris? Weren’t the three of them together?” Another voice: “Didn’t see them come back.” A nervous laugh. “Maybe they’re hiding out to dodge curfew.”

Falden poured himself water from the jug, hand steady. “If they’re breaking rules already, the Tower will eat them alive,” he said smoothly, loud enough for those nearby to hear.

Perin and Brylte, perched near the fire, exchanged a look over his shoulder. Neither spoke.

Falden caught it anyway, that flicker of unease. He turned toward them, smile knife-sharp. “What?”

Perin shifted, eyes darting. “Nothing. Just… you seem awfully calm about it.”

Falden let the silence stretch until Brylte dropped his gaze. He sipped his water, savoring the taste of victory, and said lightly, “Some people aren’t cut out for the Tower. Best to find that out early.”

He moved to the window, watching the festival fires dim in the distance. Beneath the hum of student laughter, he thought he could still hear the echo of his father’s words: Find another way.

For the first time that night, Falden allowed himself a smile. He had found it. And no one here would ever prove otherwise.

***

The Tower’s bells tolled curfew, their notes rolling through the city. Vinder marked each return at the gate like a scribe tallying accounts: fifty-seven. Not sixty.

“Edor. Misendris. Saloth.” He spoke the names flatly, a man noting errors in a ledger.

Late students were not unusual during the festival, but these three? They knew better. Vinder’s lips thinned. Discipline demanded consequence.

He drew a resonance thread from the gate ward, connecting to the tracking glyphs on the students’ uniform pins. The spell tugged faintly, like a hook snagging cloth, drawing him into the lantern-lit streets.

The festival still rumbled with laughter, ale, and song, but Vinder ignored it all, following the spell’s pull through crowded squares and down narrowing lanes. The tug faltered as he entered a side alley, then guttered out altogether.

The alley stank of spilled wine and festival smoke. Vinder’s boots splashed in a shallow gutter as he moved deeper, eyes scanning the cobbles. The crowd’s music was only a muffled echo here, too far away to drown the faint hum of magic.

He stopped. The air here stank of damp stone and ozone.

There.

Bronze gleamed against the stones. Three Tower pins lay scattered. Vinder crouched, jaw tightening, and touched one with his fingertip.

The rune etched into the back flared, the embedded tracking spell sputtering to life, and he cast locate person. He let it pull him outward, but the resonance cut off almost immediately, the line severed. Not a gradual fade. A wrench, clean and sharp, as though torn free.

The children hadn’t slipped away. They’d been stripped of their protections.

Vinder knelt, staff angled low. His fingertips hovered over the cobbles. Drag marks gouged the dirt, boots scuffing in panic, overlaid with heavier prints, moving fast. He found a lump of pitted iron: a weight from a hunter’s net, smeared with ash. Anti-magic iron. Sloppy weave. He turned it in his hand once before dropping it with disdain.

The smell of ozone sharpened at the alley’s far wall, metallic on his tongue. He brushed the brick with his palm and felt the telltale stutter of leyline energy. 

“They were taken,” he said aloud, voice flat. “Poorly executed. Sloppy.”

He pressed the spell again. Nothing. Their signatures were gone.

Vinder rose, staff humming faintly in his grip. His jaw set. Sloppy abductors leave trails. Sloppy abductors don’t get far.

Vinder’s hand closed around the pins, cold against his palm. His eyes flicked farther along the alley, and caught on something small, crushed into a corner. A stuffed crow.  A child’s toy, left behind in a struggle.

He stood slowly, the pins and crow heavy in his hand. His stomach hardened.

Drawing a breath, he shaped the sigil in the air and cast Sending.

 “Pembroke. It’s Edor, Misendris and Saloth. Found their pins in alley, tracking enchantments torn loose. Signs of abduction. I’m going to APS headquarters for support.”

The reply came clipped, dry, and immediate:

 “Understood. Bring pins. I’ll secure the students, prepare statements. Keep your temper, Vinder, we’ll need proof before Iliyria sends anyone to war.”

Vinder tucked the pins inside his cloak, the stuffed crow beneath his arm. Proof enough. He turned on his heel and strode toward APS headquarters, steps echoing with the promise of steel. This was no longer a matter of discipline. It was a matter of correction

***

The APS headquarters looked as though it had been assembled from three different buildings that had all lost an argument with gravity. Maps and ledgers cluttered the long table, half-buried under mugs and discarded gear. The smell of smoke and wet leather clung to the walls.

Mabel Ferros, an intimidatingly large woman, was arm-wrestling two rookies at once when the door banged open. Orlea Hillborn, a dwarven monk, was perched on the back of a chair, polishing her gauntlets. Berdreak Flatsunder, a dwarven cleric, muttered a prayer over a crate of medical supplies, his broad shoulders hunched like a mountain in repose. Jarren Saurivier, a young Tower Arcanist, fresh-faced and trying to look older than his years, sat at the edge of the map table, furiously scribbling notes no one would read.

Professor Vinder filled the doorway like a knife in a sheath, tall, immaculate, his staff gleaming in the dim light.

The room stilled, and he cut a path straight to the commander’s office.

Iliyria’s office was all edges but no order: a wide desk stacked high with papers, lamplight laying a lattice of gold across the floor. The room smelled faintly of black tea.

A soft knock. Before she could answer, the door opened with a measured economy.

“Professor Vinder.” Iliyria didn’t stand, but her attention sharpened as if she had. “You don’t keep my hours.”

“I keep the Tower’s,” Vinder said, stepping in. His robes were immaculate; his staff hummed like a muted tuning fork. He stopped exactly three paces from the desk. “Three students failed to return by curfew. Edor. Misendris. Saloth.”

Iliyria’s fingers stilled on the blotter. “Kerry’s trio.”

“If by ‘Kerry’ you mean Master Lightfoot, yes.” No flicker of impatience, only facts. “Gate wards confirm: no return. I traced resonance from the festival through the lower lanes. In an alley, I found drag marks, an iron net weight, anti-magic, pitted, and ozone residue consistent with rushed transit. Sloppy abductors, but organized. The signatures cut out there.”

“Which means a dampened transfer or suppression, not a simple snatch.” Iliyria was already standing, eyes gone knife-bright. “Raulon?”

“Senior or junior?” Vinder asked, cool.

“Both,” she said, moving to the wall map and pinning a brass marker on the warehouse district. “Lord Raulon pulled the usual hallway theater on Lightfoot over her ‘treatment’ of his son. The boy has been tightening the screws on those three all term. If the public humiliations stopped drawing blood…” She let the sentence hang.

Vinder did not blink. “They would escalate.”

“Mm.” She crossed to the hearth, poured herself a ribbon of tea that she did not drink. “We’ve heard murmurs about a ring working the festival nights; carts, quick holds, transfers before dawn. The Watch is still sharpening quills.” Her mouth thinned. “We won’t wait.”

Vinder inclined his head a millimeter. “I will retrieve them. I require a perimeter and post-capture containment.”

“You’ll have it.” Iliyria lifted a hand, shaping a small, precise sigil in the air. “Give me a heartbeat.”

The air crisped. A Sending sigil unfolded, a thin skein of light, no more decorative than a message tube.

“Kerry,” Iliyria said into the spell, voice pared to essentials, “Vinder’s in my office. Edor, Misendris, Saloth taken; iron nets, rushed transit, likely warehouse district. I’m dispatching a team and will keep you updated.”

The spell cinched and flew. A beat later, Kerrowyn’s voice came back, dry even through the magic: “He already reached Pembroke. Good. And Ily, watch the Raulons. If this smells like them, it probably is.”

Iliyria’s shoulders eased a fraction. She dispelled the sigil and looked back to Vinder. “Kerrowyn says Pembroke’s looped in. You’ll leave with Orlea, Berdreak, Mabel, and Jarren. APS on perimeter, you on extraction. Quietly.”

“Quick. Clean. Orderly,” Vinder said.

“Alive,” Iliyria added, meeting his gaze. “And if any of Raulon’s shadows are hanging off this, I want names.”

“I will bring you facts.” He turned to go, then paused. “Your authorization?”

Iliyria flicked two crisp writs from a drawer, sealed them with a press that hissed like a satisfied serpent, and handed them over. “Authority and indemnity, limited and immediate. Orlea will understand the margins.”

Vinder accepted the papers without looking at the seals. “They will be sufficient.”

At the door he hesitated, so slight that only someone used to courtrooms would have seen it. “ Kerrowyn asked you to watch the Raulons.”

“She did,” Iliyria said. “And I am.”

They walked together out into the bullpen, and every head swiveled toward them.

“Commander,” Berdreak said, bowing his head to Iliyria.

She returned the gesture with crisp efficiency. “Three Tower students failed to return from the festival. The wards register coercive resonance. The Watch will mire this in procedure. I won’t risk it. APS will assist.”

Orlea’s smile sharpened. “Finally, some fun. I was starting to think the festival might pass without a brawl.”

Mabel shoved the rookie’s arm to the table with a slam and grinned. “Storm’s been itching for a chance to stretch. You got your exits covered, boss.”

“Careful,” Orlea drawled. “You might scare the Professor. He looks like the sort who files complaints about the noise.”

Vinder’s gaze flicked to her, unreadable. “Noise is irrelevant. Efficiency is not. I require you to secure the perimeter while I go inside.”

Jarren blinked, startled. “Wait, just us? Shouldn’t we call the Watch? They’d have—”

“They’d have forms to fill and questions to ask,” Orlea cut in, smirking. “The Professor’s right. By the time the Watch even sharpens their quills, those kids’ll be on a boat south.”

Berdreak pushed himself up with a sigh, his holy symbol glinting in the lamplight. “Light willing, we’ll bring them home safely. I’ll go where Pelor’s light is needed.”

Mabel clapped Jarren on the shoulder hard enough to make him wince. “Come on, greenhorn. Time for your first proper scrap.”

Vinder ignored the banter. He stood motionless, only the faint hum of leyline resonance gathering around his staff. “Sloppy work left a trail,” he said evenly. “I will locate the students. Your role is to secure the perimeter and contain the traffickers until the Watch can be summoned.”

“Contain,” Mabel echoed with a smirk. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Quick, clean, and orderly,” Vinder replied, unblinking.

Orlea barked a laugh. “Quick and clean, maybe. Orderly? Not if I get there first.”

For the first time, Vinder’s mouth twitched, not a smile, but something colder, sharper. “Then I suggest you keep up.”

For a moment, Iliyria’s eyes flicked between them, the Tower’s precise scalpel and APS’s rough-edged hammer. She gave a short nod. “Then it’s settled. You have my leave. Bring them back.”

The room stirred to life: Orlea strapping on gauntlets, Berdreak murmuring another prayer, Mabel practically vibrating with anticipation. Jarren scrambled to copy notes into his field book, hands shaking.

Vinder adjusted his robes, voice level as ever. “We leave at once.”

Synchronicity

The world returned in stages: first, a bone-deep ache in Ophelia’s shoulders, then the cold grit of flagstone against her cheek, and finally, the insistent, tar-flavored stink of lantern oil. She opened her eyes to the flicker of light and shadow, the vague outline of metal bars, and the much clearer silhouette of Isemay curled beside her, wrists bound with coarse twine. Lavan was propped against the far corner, blinking blearily, his hair caked with dried blood at the temple. Her last memory was the sensation of a sharp prick at her neck, and then a slow drift into unconsciousness.

The cage was real. So were the bindings.

Beyond the bars, the warehouse sprawled in every direction: walls of ancient, mortared stone, crates stacked to the rafters, and the flicker of a half-dozen oil lamps scattered through the gloom. There was no sign of the city outside; no windows, no voices, just the echo of footsteps and the periodic grunt of men at work. Somewhere, far off, water lapped against wood.

The three of them were not alone. Nearly beyond sight of the cage, sitting on a set of empty crates, two of their captors conferred, their voices pitched low but urgent.

“—telling you, the Misendris girl alone is worth a fortune. Her old man could buy the whole Council twice over.”

The other spat into the sawdust. “You want to deal with the Nobelesse? Be my guest. I say we move ‘em downriver tonight, sell ‘em to that Aresford contact and be done with it. Less risk, faster coin.”

A third man, younger, paced the aisle between crates. His hands shook when he lit a fresh lantern, and he kept glancing back at the cage with a wary, superstitious look reserved for wild animals or bad luck.

Isemay rolled her head, whispered, “Everyone awake?”

Ophelia grunted. “Alive. But not loving it.”

Lavan sat up, scooting closer to the girls. “They know we’re from the Tower,” he said, voice hoarse. “No way this is a ransom job. They’d never risk it unless they thought we were disposable.”

Isemay nodded, trying to test her own bonds without drawing notice. “They’re not subtle. Which means they’re working fast, before anyone realizes we’re missing.”

Ophelia pressed her forehead against the bars, testing their give with her horns. Iron, old, pitted, but solid enough, and blocked any connection to the leylines. The lock was a brute, ancient as the cage itself. “Any ideas?”

A faint, hot pulse shimmered under her skin: the Friendship Symbol, just above the wrist, a triangle of three dots joined by a line of starlight. She focused, willing her thoughts outward. A tingle answered; the subtle return of two other minds, anxious but sharp.

Isemay’s idea first: Wait for a shift change, then Ophelia picks the lock.

Ophelia: Can’t pick with wrists tied. Need a distraction.

Lavan: I can make a noise. Draw them in, maybe get one close enough for you to grab.

Isemay: Or better, let them think we’re sick. They can’t sell us if we die.

Ophelia let the plan crystallize, then gave a nearly invisible nod.

A few minutes later, Lavan started to moan. At first, it was a low, convincing whimper, then, with every passing second, it built, crescendoing to a full-throated scream. He thrashed against his bonds, making the bars rattle with his knees.

One of the men, the youngest who had been pacing, jumped at the noise, wary. “What the hell is that?” he muttered. The oldest scowled. “One of ‘em’s awake. Go see if it needs a doctor.”

The kid approached, knuckles white around the butt of his truncheon.

As the boy unlocked the cage and poked his head in, Ophelia snapped her eyes open and hissed, “Help. He’s dying. I think it’s a seizure.” Lavan curled his tongue to make it look real, thrashing his feet in a mock spasm.

The boy hesitated. He’d clearly been coached to contact with prisoners, but the display was convincing enough to get him close. He knelt by Lavan, hands outstretched.

Isemay, whose own bonds were just loose enough to allow for motion, turned her head and whispered, “He needs air. Turn him over, fast.”

The boy did as told, letting go of the truncheon to brace Lavan by the shoulder. As soon as he leaned in, Ophelia snapped up and smashed her head, horns first, into his nose with a sickening crunch. He reeled, howling, and Lavan twisted his arms to catch the truncheon as it fell. In a single, fluid motion, Lavan rolled onto his side and swung the truncheon back, hitting the boy square in the kneecap. The captor dropped like a stone.

The whole thing lasted less than three seconds. The boy writhed on the ground, clutching his face, blood streaming down his lip.

“Now or never,” said Ophelia, gritting her teeth. She flexed her wrists against the twine, and with some Nightvalley ingenuity, dislocating one thumb, worked the cord over her left hand. The pain was hot and clean, and the sensation of blood flow returning made her dizzy.

She set to work untying the bindings on Isemay and Lavan, moving quickly, she had them free in less than a minute.

The commotion brought the other two men running. The oldest, seeing the boy down, drew a dagger and cursed. “Should’ve gagged them. Useless!”

He lunged into the cage, blade sweeping in a practiced arc. Ophelia ducked sideways, Nightvalley instincts kicking in, and grabbed his wrist as it passed her ear, twisting hard enough to make the man yelp. Isemay, thinking quick, and remembering her mother’s lessons in “self-defense for women of nobility”, grabbbed the truncheon, slamming it up between his legs. The man doubled over, nearly dropping the knife, before stumbling back out of the cage.

The second man, muscular, ugly, hung back, eyeing them with suspicion. “You said they were tied up!” he roared at his companion.

“Not for long,” Ophelia spat back.

The man reached for the iron latch on the cage and slammed it shut, then ran to fetch reinforcements. His footsteps echoed in the distance.

“Can you pick it?” Isemay whispered.

Ophelia knelt by the lock, squinting at the mechanism. She’d need a tool. Lavan, searching the downed boy’s pockets, found a slim pick, the kind used for opening crates. He tossed it over, and Ophelia set to work. The lock was stubborn, but so was she. Within a minute, there was a satisfying click, and the door swung open on rusty hinges.

They slipped into the warehouse proper, trying to stay low behind the stacks of crates. The place was even bigger than it seemed: rows upon rows of sealed boxes, most marked with the sigil of the Capitol’s merchant guild. Some were stamped with the colors of Aresford, Orafast and other city-states, others with names none of them recognized.

“There’s an office over there,” Lavan said, pointing to a glassed-in corner. “Maybe a way out?”

Ophelia shook her head. “Too obvious. We need to disappear, not just escape.”

A shout echoed from the far end: “They’re loose! Seal the doors!”

Panic spread through the building like fire. Dozens of boots hammered the stone floor. Shadows darted along the aisles, closing in from every side.

Isemay pressed her back to the crate, breathing hard. “If they catch us, we’re dead.”

Ophelia reached for the old, instinctive magic. “They want three kids? Let’s give them something to chase.”

She closed her eyes, drew a humming note deep from her chest, and sent it spinning into the gloom. Instantly, perfect duplicates of herself, Lavan, and Isemay shimmered into being, scattering through the maze in all directions. The illusions ran, screamed, even bled when struck. The traffickers lunged for them, nets and cudgels out, and were rewarded only with ghosts.

***

The warehouse squatted at the edge of the Lower Docks, lanterns guttering in its high windows. Vinder traced the resonance thread to the gate, staff angled like a scalpel. Behind him, the APS squad gathered in mismatched armor, smelling of sweat, steel, and storm.

Orlea spat on the cobbles. “All right, Professor. You cut your hole, we’ll handle anyone dumb enough to run.”

Berdreak, broad-shouldered and genial even in the dark, muttered a prayer to Pelor, his holy symbol glowing like a rising sun. “Light their path to mercy,” he intoned.

“Or to the grave,” Orlea corrected, rolling her shoulders.

Mabel cracked her knuckles, the faint smell of ozone rising from her skin. “Been itching for a fight all damn festival,” she grinned. “Storm’s ready.”

And then there was Jarren, glancing between the veterans like a child at the grown-ups’ table.

“Perimeter,” Vinder said curtly.

***

They picked their moment and made a break for the entrance, but found themselves facing a group of traffickers blocking the door.

None expected a fight. Isemay, remembering her spells, reached out and sent a blast of cold wind towards them, freezing the lead man in his tracks. Lavan used a sharp-edged board as a spear, jabbing at knees and shins with surprising ferocity, and used a simple spell to send a wave of frost over the ground, causing their pursuers to slip.

Ophelia, spent from the illusions, relied on old-fashioned violence: she punched, bit, and kicked with a fury she hadn’t known she possessed.

They fought with a synchronicity that blind-sided their attackers. Each of them could feel the others’ location, intentions, as though they were their own. Their Friendship Symbols glowed brightly in the dark. 

It worked. Lavan passed the board to Ophelia, who wielded it with vigor, and entered his comfort zone: fire. As he hurled firebolts at the men behind them, Isemay used thunderclap to knock the traffickers that approached from the sides off their feet, opening them up for an attack by Ophelia.

Lavan’s hands surged with power. He shoved a blast of raw force forward, too much, too uncontrolled. The air cracked like thunder, hurling the guard into a stack of barrels. The recoil scorched the ceiling beam above them. Lavan winced, clutching his burned hand, but his eyes burned bright. I can fix this. I can.

Another guard rose, blade already drawn. Ophelia darted in before he could shout, seizing his wrist and jamming her knee into his gut. She grabbed his dagger, fighting dirty, snarling, “Think I can’t? Think I won’t?” She slashed low, shallow but enough to drop him screaming. Her grin was feral, reckless, proud.

The third thug rounded on them, cudgel swinging. Isemay stepped into his path. Her pulse roared in her ears, but her voice came out steady. “With me.” She ducked under the swing and barked, “Lavan, left!”

He blasted clumsily at her call, and the force sent the thug staggering into Ophelia’s blade. Isemay grabbed a fallen cudgel, gripping it with the poise of someone trained for dueling halls, not alleys. She cracked it against the man’s wrist, precise and controlled, and the weapon clattered to the floor.

For a moment, the three of them stood victorious: breathing hard, but alive.

Then the warehouse erupted with shouts. More traffickers stormed in from the outer room, half a dozen, then more.

Lavan raised his hands again, power already sparking at his fingertips. His voice shook: “I can hold them—”

“No, you can’t,” Isemay snapped. She pulled them back toward the wall, her chin high even as fear tightened her throat. “Not all of them. Not yet.”

Ophelia bared her teeth, knife slick in her grip. “Then we take as many as we can before they drag us down.”

The traffickers surged. The trio braced, shoulder to shoulder, teeth clenched, knowing they couldn’t last.

That was when the storm broke outside.

***

The gates burst open under a thunderclap. Mabel strode through the splinters, laughter booming, warhammer alive with stormfire.

Orlea followed like a hammer, slamming one trafficker headfirst into a crate. “You boys picked the wrong kids to sell!”

Berdreak waded behind them, radiant light blazing from his holy symbol. “Lay down your arms and be spared!” 

Jarren slipped in their wake, cloak too clean, hands shaking as he fumbled a sigil. He threw it anyway, a blast of cold air froze the ground slick, sending three traffickers sprawling. His eyes went wide, half from success, half from terror.

“Nice trick, greenhorn!” Mabel roared, shoving one man’s face into the ice.

Orlea barked a laugh. “Looks like the Professor taught you something after all.”

Jarren flushed, muttering, “He’ll only tell me my stance was sloppy.”

The alleyways erupted with chaos: shouts, thunder, and the crack of fists on bone. APS held the exits like wolves baying at a cornered herd.

At the heart of the warehouse, the door splintered inward with a sound like a tuning fork breaking glass. 

The traffickers froze.

Professor Vinder stepped through the dust. His robes were immaculate, his staff glowing with a contained white light that pulsed like a heartbeat. His expression was unreadable.

“Gentlemen,” he said, voice clipped. “You have something of mine.”

The traffickers scrambled to attack the newcomer, but Vinder only tapped his staff against the floor once. The resonance rolled outward like an invisible wave. Weapons clattered from their hands as if repelled by unseen magnets. 

One tried to lunge. Vinder flicked his wrist, and the man slammed sideways into a wall, pinned by nothing but pressure. The second collapsed to his knees, clutching his head as the low, keening note of a resonance spell drilled into his skull.

“Sloppy,” he murmured, eyeing the scene. “Sloppy wards. Sloppy knots.” His eyes flicked to his students, already bloodied but standing. “Sloppy judgment,” he finished, as though grading an assignment. His lip curled in faint disdain.

Another thug lunged. Vinder tapped his staff once, and the man flew sideways, pinned to the wall by invisible force. Another raised a crossbow; Vinder flicked his wrist, and the bolt disintegrated mid-flight.

The trio staggered back against the wall, watching in stunned silence as their strictest teacher dismantled the traffickers with the dispassionate calm of a man erasing a blackboard. Lavan stared, wide-eyed, half in awe, half in terror. Ophelia bared her teeth in something like a grin. Isemay stood frozen, every inch of her posture taut.

By the time Mabel’s laughter and Orlea’s curses thundered in from the front, half the warehouse was on the floor. Lightning split the rafters, radiant light seared the shadows, and the rest of the traffickers broke and fled into the arms of APS.

Isemay swallowed hard, lowering the cudgel in her hand. Lavan’s arms shook from the spell he’d forced out. Ophelia grinned, feral and defiant despite her split lip.

***

The traffickers were bound and gagged, slumped in a line by the wall. Vinder stood in the wreck of the warehouse, staff grounded, watching as the trio were ushered to their feet.

“You three are late for curfew,” he said, voice sharp as ever.

Ophelia muttered something under her breath. Lavan swallowed hard. Isemay kept her chin high, though her wrists still bore red rope-marks.

Orlea leaned against the doorframe, wiping blood from her knuckles with a rag that was already stained. “That’s it? No ‘glad you’re alive’? No ‘we’ll keep you safe now’? Just a lecture about curfew?”

Vinder’s gaze slid to her, flat and cold. “They need discipline more than comfort. Comfort will not keep them alive next time.”

Orlea snorted. “And what, discipline will? You think the bastards who did this cared about the neatness of their chalk lines?”

Mabel snorted, crackling with leftover stormfire. “Storm says maybe they need both.”

Berdreak gave a weary sigh but nodded. “They’re alive. That’s what matters.”

For the first time, Vinder’s lips twitched, almost into a smile. “Nneatness of chalk lines is what will allow these three to break such chains themselves, when no one else is there to do it for them.”

Orlea blinked, then barked a laugh. “You’re a cold bastard, Professor. But maybe not wrong.” She shouldered past him toward the door. “Still, if you ever want them to trust you, maybe try sounding human once in a while.”

Vinder watched her go, silent. His students shifted uneasily, unsure if they had just witnessed a rebuke, a lesson, or both.

Jarren, pale but wide-eyed, just stared at Vinder like he was seeing the Tower in a new, terrifying light. He whispered, mostly to himself, “He’ll still say my stance was sloppy.”

***

When the dust settled, Ophelia, Lavan, and Isemay found themselves sitting on a crate together, bloodied but alive.

“Good work,” Isemay said, voice shaky.

Ophelia smiled, then winced at the bruise blooming on her jaw. “We did what we had to.”

Lavan wiped blood from his ear and tried to grin. “Let’s never do that again.”

They sat in silence, the Friendship Symbol on their wrists still hot and bright.

They had been hunted, beaten, and nearly sold, but together, they had survived.

Berdreak Flatsunder shouldered past the others, his broad frame blotting out the alley’s lantern glow. He knelt before the three children where they huddled together, eyes wide, clothes torn, blood dried on cheeks and sleeves.

“Easy now,” he rumbled, his voice steady as an anvil. “Pelor’s light is gentle tonight.”

He laid one calloused hand on Isemay’s temple, the other hovering above her bruised ribs. Warmth spread from his palms, golden light mending the deep bruising, closing the shallow cuts. She gasped softly, shoulders sagging as pain gave way to exhaustion.

“Nothing broken,” Berdreak muttered, half to himself, half to the others. He shifted to Ophelia, brushing back her tangled hair to reveal the split across her temple. She hissed as his fingers touched the edge, but the light knit the skin closed in a heartbeat.

“You’ll have a scar if you keep picking at it,” he warned, and Ophelia managed the faintest smirk.

Finally, he moved to Lavan. The boy’s hands were badly burned, his chest mottled with dark bruises. Berdreak laid his palm against the burns, eyes closing in concentration. Divine warmth poured into the wounds until the boy’s breathing eased.

“No hidden breaks. Just battered,” the cleric concluded, sitting back on his heels. “They’ll live. But they’ll need time.”

The children clung to one another as he stood.

***

Within the hour, the warehouse bustled with movement. APS officers worked by lanternlight, securing prisoners and taking statements. Orlea directed the sweep with clipped orders; Mabel leaned against her warhammer like it was a walking stick, watching the street; Jarren scrawled notes and muttered spells to preserve the evidence.

Then Iliyria arrived.

She strode into the warehouse with her cloak darkened by rain, her eyes taking in the scene with a commander’s sharpness. Beside her came Pembroke, ledger already in hand, and Kerrowyn, her mouth set in a tight line.

Iliyria’s gaze landed first on the children. Relief flickered across her face, quickly buried beneath iron composure. She knelt briefly, a hand brushing Isemay’s shoulder, then Ophelia’s, then Lavan’s. “You’re safe now. That’s what matters.”

She rose, turning to Vinder. “Get them back to the Tower.”

Vinder inclined his head once. “With Masters Pembroke and Lightfoot.”

“I’ll remain,” Iliyria continued, already signaling to Orlea. “APS will process the scene. I want every scrap of evidence catalogued before Raulon’s lawyers crawl out of their holes.”

Kerrowyn’s mouth quirked at that, though the humor didn’t reach her eyes.

Pembroke closed his ledger with a snap. “Come along, then. The Tower will want its prodigies patched and accounted for before dawn.”

The children were gathered gently; Isemay still stiff with pride, Ophelia leaning against Kerrowyn with stubborn defiance, Lavan quiet and pale between Vinder and Pembroke.

As Iliyria’s voice carried across the alley, crisp and commanding, Pembroke, Vinder, and Kerrowyn led the trio into the streets.

Rain slicked the cobbles as the group wound their way through the streets. Lanterns burned low, the festival’s laughter a distant memory behind them. The Tower’s spires loomed ahead, their ward-lights flickering faintly against the storm clouds.

Vinder led at the front, stride steady, shoulders squared like a shield. Pembroke trailed just behind, hood drawn up, quill scratching quick notes against the back of his ledger even as he walked. Kerrowyn took up the rear, her cloak wrapped close, one eye always on the alleys they passed.

Between them, the three children walked in silence, the hush broken only by the patter of rain.

At one point, Isemay stumbled, her breath still shallow from the lingering ache in her ribs. Vinder slowed instantly, adjusting his pace so she wouldn’t fall behind.

“Keep your chin up,” he said, voice quiet but firm. “You faced more than most grown mages ever will tonight, and you walked out. Remember that.”

Isemay’s lips pressed tight, but she lifted her head a fraction higher. She said nothing, yet her shoulders straightened, the words sinking in.

Lavan shook, but not from the cold, his eyes were fixed on the cobbles, jaw clenched. His bandaged fingers twitched with restless energy. Pembroke’s voice drifted from behind him, dry and sharp.

“You’re alive, boy. Which means you made the right mistakes. Any fool can get captured. It takes wit to still be breathing after.”

Lavan startled, glancing back. Pembroke’s face was unreadable in the lanternlight. “What I mean,” he added, quill tapping against the ledger, “is that you’ll learn. That’s what the Tower is for. Mistakes, lessons, and the chance to walk home at the end of it.”

Lavan’s throat tightened. He nodded once, clutching the satchel tighter.

Ophelia lagged at the rear, jaw set, defiance burning even through her exhaustion. Kerrowyn fell into step beside her.

“You fought like a hellion,” she said, her tone low and conspiratorial. “But next time, remember this: fists make noise, brains win wars. Use both.”

Ophelia’s grin cracked through her weariness. “I hurt them, though.”

Kerrowyn rested her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder. “And that’s a good start.”

***

Back in the warehouse, the APS runners continued their investigation. Jarren muttered an incantation, hands glowing faint blue as he coaxed the scattered Tower pins into a neat row on the cloth he spread out. “Tracking enchantments severed cleanly,” he reported. “Professionals knew exactly what they were cutting.”

Orlea crouched beside the pile of confiscated gear. “This wasn’t a random snatch. They knew who they were after.”

Mabel leaned against her greataxe, watching Iliyria with narrowed eyes. “You think Raulon?”

Iliyria’s jaw tightened. “I think he’s the only one stupid enough to order children taken during the Spring Festival, then sloppy enough to leave Tower pins behind.”

She crouched, picking up the stuffed crow Vinder had left for cataloguing. It was sodden, its feathers streaked with grime. She turned it over once in her hands, then set it back carefully on the cloth.

“They were meant to vanish,” she said, her voice low, hard. “Dragged out of the city, sold, buried. The pins were a taunt. Someone wanted us to know they’d been touched.”

Berdreak finished binding one of the surviving traffickers, hauling the man upright. “We’ll get names from these rats.”

“Not just names,” Iliyria said, rising. “Connections. Coin. Chains. I want every link in the line traced back to the hand that paid for it.”

She turned to Orlea. “Get them to headquarters. Interrogate until your voice gives out. Mabel, stay on the Watch, make sure no bribes buy a release. Jarren, secure the evidence. I’ll report to the Council before dawn.”

The three nodded, moving with grim efficiency.

“They’ll never forgive us if we fail,” she murmured, so low the storm nearly swallowed it.

She tapped one of the small mirror charms hanging from her bracelet, and it detached, growing in size and floating in front of her. She pressed the rune at the bottom and channeled the resonance for the mirror belonging to Lawmaster Orintha Runecoat. The mirror continued to reflect her own face for a moment, and then Orintha’s stern face appeared. It was jarring to see her without her grey hair pinned in its signature complicated braids, and even more so without the mantle of her office. “Sylren. It’s nearly midnight, this had better be worth my time.” 

Iliyria gave a brief summary of the night’s events, and Runecoat looked more and more awake as she explained. “Meet me in my office, bring the evidence. We need to move fast if we want this to stick,” there was a glint in the dwarven woman’s eyes, not quite excitement, but something more akin to anticipation. Iliyria nodded and cut the connection. 

Then she turned sharply on her heel, her cloak whipping behind her, and strode into the night to prepare her case.

Together

The Tower’s infirmary smelled of lavender oil and bitter herbs. Healers hurried back and forth, laying out bandages, filling basins, fetching salves. The air thrummed faintly with quiet spells of mending and pain-dulling.

The doors burst open, and Vinder strode in with his cloak dripping rain. Behind him came Pembroke, face like carved granite, and Kerrowyn, supporting Ophelia with an arm braced around her shoulders.

The children looked small in the wide, bright room. Isemay’s robe was torn at the sleeve, her cheek mottled with bruises. Lavan’s hands were raw and blistered, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. Ophelia leaned stubbornly on Kerrowyn, still trying to smirk though her temple was sticky with dried blood.

“On the cots, quickly,” a healer said, guiding them forward.

Vinder helped ease Lavan onto a bed, pressing a steadying hand to the boy’s shoulder as the healer began unwrapping the bandages Berdreak had applied. “You’ll rest here tonight,” he said firmly. “No arguments.”

Isemay sat upright the moment she was lowered onto her cot. “I’m fine,” she insisted. But when the healer’s spell brushed her ribs, her face tightened and she went pale.

“Fine,” Kerrowyn muttered, shaking her head. “Stubborn as a mule, just like her parents.”

Pembroke lingered near the door, already making sharp notes in his ledger. “They’ll want records,” he said dryly. “Condition on arrival, care given, recovery time. The Council will demand proof they were not mistreated here.”

“Let them demand,” Vinder said, sharper than he intended. He folded his arms, watching the healers work. “The truth is in their bruises.”

One of the healers hurried up, bowing nervously. “Masters, messages have been sent. Their families are on the way.”

Kerrowyn exhaled through her nose, rubbing her temple. “Wonderful. Just what this night needed. Angry parents.”

Vinder’s gaze flicked back to the three children. They huddled in their separate cots, each trying to look braver than they felt. Isemay’s lips pressed thin with pride, Ophelia glaring at her healer like the cut on her temple was an insult, Lavan quiet, staring at his hands.

“They survived,” Vinder said quietly.

Kerrowyn glanced at him, mouth quirking. “And you look like you aged twenty years making sure of it.”

Pembroke closed his ledger with a snap. “This is only the beginning. Tomorrow there will be testimony, trials, noble fury.”

***

The Lawmaster’s office was a fortress of parchment. Scrolls filled every shelf, stacked in uneasy towers across the desk, annotated in Orintha Runecoat’s precise, uncompromising hand. The magistrate herself sat at the far end, her heavy chain of office glinting under the lamplight. She looked up as Iliyria entered, silver hair damp from the storm, her cloak still bearing the marks of rain.

Iliyria dropped a small cloth bundle onto the desk. Three bronze Tower pins clinked against one another, followed by the limp, sodden stuffed crow. “Evidence from the alley where three first-years were taken.”

Orintha’s eyes sharpened. She did not touch the objects. “The pins’ tracking spells?”

“Severed deliberately. And the air reeked of iron and ozone; nets, glyphs, suppression work. This wasn’t street thugs snatching coinpurses. It was a trained operation.” Iliyria’s hands curled into fists at her sides. “We have testimony from Vinder and APS agents who pulled the children out. The traffickers were preparing to move them for transport.”

Orintha leaned back, folding her arms. Her expression didn’t change, but something in her shoulders eased, not relief, but grim vindication. “For years we’ve known they were moving bodies through the docks. Nobles’ purses funding it, names whispered but never proven. Every witness disappears, every ledger ‘misplaced.’” She tapped one nail against the desk. “And now the Raulons. You’re telling me you can trace this to their house?”

“Ledgers, contracts, intercepted correspondence,” Iliyria said crisply. “Enough to make denial impossible, if you move fast. Falden Senior purchased the iron nets. His son’s handwriting is on letters to the traffickers, naming the children.”

“We both know this will be uphill,” Orintha said, scanning the heap of reports. “Falden Senior will claim overzealous retainers. He’ll deny knowledge, call it an unfortunate misunderstanding. Half the Council will nod along to keep their own skins intact.”

“Then we make denial impossible,” Iliyria replied. She tapped one scroll, her voice clipped. “Vinder traced the abduction point. APS found iron-net weights at the scene, dock trade, bulk purchased by Raulon’s house. We have merchants’ ledgers, carters’ names. It ties his purse directly to traffickers.”

Orintha nodded, expression hardening. “That will bruise him. But bruises aren’t enough to break a man like Falden Raulon.”

Iliyria slid another parchment across the table, thinner, the ink newer, the hand unmistakably unpracticed. “Then break him with this. Correspondence recovered from the traffickers’ cache. His son’s hand. Junior was writing them instructions, meeting times, demands, even the names of the three he wanted ‘removed.’”

Orintha’s eyes flicked down, narrowing. She read a line aloud, her voice flat: “‘I want the tiefling gone first. The dock-rat will cry, and Misendris will follow.’” She set the parchment down as though it were poisoned. “Gods. He’s a child.”

“Twelve,” Iliyria confirmed, her tone cold. “But he didn’t invent it alone. A child doesn’t correspond with traffickers unless someone puts the quill in his hand. The father gave the order. The son carried it like scripture.”

Orintha’s jaw clenched. “This is more than bruises or contracts. This is direct conspiracy. With this, even his allies will scatter. They can shield him from whispers, not from his own child’s words in ink.”

“That’s why I brought it here,” Iliyria said. “We’ll argue that the boy’s letters prove intent, and the father’s financial trail proves means. Between the two, Falden cannot crawl free. Not even with all the cloaks in the chamber over him.”

The magistrate drew a slow breath, steadying herself. “It will be ugly. They’ll try to paint the child as misguided, or as acting alone. They may even accuse us of forging this.”

“Then make it airtight,” Iliyria said. “Witnesses, handwriting analysis, the chain of custody from APS. Leave them nothing to wriggle through. The Council might look away from bruises, Orintha. They can ignore frightened children. But they cannot ignore a boy’s own letters planning their abduction.”

Orintha nodded. “We’ll bury them in paper, and when the chamber rises, Falden will fall. Not by blade, but by his own blood’s hand.” At that, Orintha finally reached for the crow, lifting it with careful fingers. “A child’s toy left in the gutter,” she murmured. “Bruises on their faces. This is what will sway the chamber, not numbers in a ledger. Flesh and fear.”

Iliyria’s jaw tightened. “Then let’s give the chamber both. If the evidence isn’t enough, I’ll put the children before the Council myself.”

Orintha’s mouth curved, the faintest edge of respect in her grimness. “You always did prefer the blade over the shield.”

Iliyria leaned forward. “And you always did know how to wield paper like a sword. Between us, Orintha, he doesn’t walk free.”

The magistrate dipped her quill. “Then let us draft his ruin.”

***

Kerrowyn stood in the infirmary doorway, arms folded tight across her chest. Inside, Isemay sat stiff-backed on a cot, a blanket pulled around her shoulders. Lavan hunched over his knees, bruises shadowing his face. Ophelia paced like a caged thing, tail lashing with every step.

They were alive. Shaken, scarred, but alive.

“Raulon,” Iliyria said, appearing quietly at her side, handing over a folded report. “Not just the boy. His father. Vinder’s deductions, APS’s testimony, it all threads back to the manor.”

Kerrowyn opened the page, eyes raking over the lines. Iron nets. Drag marks. Paid men from the warehouse district. She exhaled through her nose, sharp.

“I told him,” she muttered. “I told him he was as creative as a twelve-year-old bully. Gods damn me, I even mussed his hair on the way out. And the bastard went and proved me right, used his twelve-year-old as a weapon.”

“You think a draft spell in a corridor did this?” Iliyria asked, voice low but cutting.

Kerrowyn’s mouth pulled thin. “I think I enjoyed it. And maybe he hated it enough to pass the venom down. He couldn’t touch me, so he went after them.” Her gaze flicked back into the room; the bruises, the trembling hands. “They took the punishment meant for me.”

Silence stretched between them.

At last Iliyria said, softer now: “He chose escalation, Kerry. Not you. Don’t hand him the satisfaction of carrying his guilt on top of your own temper.”

Kerrowyn’s eyes stayed fixed on her students. “Still feels like I drew the line for him to cross.”

For a moment her voice cracked, not loud, but enough. She covered it with a snort and shoved the report back into Iliyria’s hands. “Next time, I’ll find better words than wind.”

Iliyria placed the paper aside, touching Kerrowyn’s elbow briefly before moving past her into the room. Kerrowyn stayed where she was, back against the cold stone, the weight of her own cleverness sour in her throat.

Pembroke looked up from the children’s sleeping forms as Iliyria approached, another copy of the report in hand. He took it with a nod, and walked with her so they could talk in the hallway. Kerrowyn stayed behind, keeping a vigil over the quiet infirmary. 

“We found correspondence. Direct, with names, from Falden Jr. directing the traffickers to target Misendris, Saloth and Edor.” Iliyria began. Pembroke exhaled, “Gods, directly from the boy? He’s only twelve, how could he?” Iliyria shrugged, “I suppose only he can answer that. Orintha is ready to press forward with an indictment of Lord Raulon tonight. We don’t want to give him any time to bribe his way out. She will be here soon to speak with the families, I assume they are on their way?” 

Pembroke nodded, “Yes, they have been informed. It won’t be long. Before they get here, I want that boy out of this Tower and in custody.”

Iliyria considered for a moment, “There is certainly probable cause for him to be detained. I’ll call a Runner to collect him.” She paused, “Alistar, you might consider giving the three a chance to confront him. This might be their only chance.” Pembroke frowned, “I suppose we should explain what we know to them before their parents get here anyway. I want them to know we are taking this seriously.” 

He turned, “Let’s go to my office. We can tell the children the broad strokes of what’s happening, and I will summon Falden Jr. Perhaps we will get an admission from him if he is faced with the results of his actions.” Iliyria shook her head, “even if he confesses, it would likely be inadmissible." 

“It doesn’t need to hold up in court. I’m Headmaster here, and even without a confession, we have more than enough for expulsion. He won’t wear a Tower pin for a minute longer than he must.” Pembroke’s hands shook for a moment, the anger he had been suppressing coming to the surface, before he stilled them and turned towards the infirmary. 

***
The walls of Master Pembroke’s office loomed with more gravity than any cell. Even the furniture exuded a kind of authority: heavy, ancient, lacquered to a shine that reflected every flaw. Lavan, Ophelia, and Isemay sat side by side on a long bench. Across from them, Pembroke perched behind his desk, flanked by Iliyria Sylren and a Runner from the Arcane Protection Service. The APS Runners didn’t wear uniforms, but their badges gleamed from their hips, a silver and blue lotus flower.

The room was silent except for the tick of a brass clock and the soft scratch of Pembroke’s pen as he annotated a stack of parchment. When he finally looked up, his expression was grave but not unkind.

“Thank you for your patience,” he said. “We’re nearly ready to begin.”

Ophelia tried to match his composure, but her leg bounced with nerves. Lavan stared at his hands, still bruised and raw. Isemay kept her gaze fixed on the wood grain of the desk, memorizing every knot.

After a moment, Iliyria spoke up, “The evidence is clear. This was no common abduction. The operation was coordinated by interests much higher than street thugs.”

Pembroke steepled his fingers. “Lord Raulon’s network has been under suspicion for some time. Human trafficking, extortion, even assassination. None of it provable. Until now.”

Lavan looked up. “How did you know it was them?”

The runner, a man with an uncanny knack for silence, slid a thin folder across the desk. “We intercepted communications. Names, schedules, even magical proficiencies. All supplied by a source inside the Tower.” He paused, eyes unreadable. “Falden Raulon.”

Ophelia’s jaw went tight. “He sold us out?”

Iliyria nodded. “He orchestrated it. Identified each of you as ‘worth the risk.’ The words are his own.”

Isemay’s hands balled into fists on her lap. “And his father?”

“We are unsure if he was aware of Falden’s plan,” said Pembroke. “But there will be a reckoning. The Lawmaster is already petitioning the Council, and Commander Sylren has already dispatched Runners to arrest all of the known conspirators.”

A knock at the door. The APS Runner opened it, and in strode Falden Raulon. He wore the Tower’s formal uniform, collar starched, every button gleaming. He looked at the trio on the bench and smirked, a ghost of the old arrogance.

“Why am I here?” he said. “If it’s about the incident at the festival, I had nothing to do with—”

Pembroke held up a hand. “Sit.”

Falden sat, back straight, the very model of petulant defiance.

Iliyria opened a thick file and began to read: intercepted letters, transcribed conversations, payment ledgers. With each new piece of evidence, Falden’s confidence eroded a little more. Pembroke and Iliyria didn’t stop for questions, didn’t indulge his stammered denials. They presented a cold, unbreakable wall of fact.

When they reached the part about his meetings with the traffickers, Falden finally lost the thread. “Wait,” he stammered, “they weren’t supposed to hurt anyone! Just… make them disappear for a while. It’s a lesson, not a—”

Pembroke’s voice was arctic. “You conspired to have fellow students abducted. You put their lives at risk. You violated the most fundamental trust of this institution.”

He tried to recover, but every word dug him deeper. Ophelia watched, eyes narrowed, as Falden blanched beneath the weight of his own plotting. Lavan’s face remained blank, but inside, every muscle trembled with the urge to knock Falden’s teeth in. Isemay said nothing at all, but the stillness in her posture, the straight spine, the absolute absence of fear, spoke volumes.

Pembroke let the silence stretch. When he finally spoke, it was to the three on the bench. “You have the right to confront him,” he said, “if you wish.”

Ophelia was on her feet before the invitation had finished echoing. “I wish.”

Falden tried to sneer. “What, here to gloat? You’re as pathetic as—”

She cut him off. “No. I just want to see if you even understand what you did.” She leaned in, tail lashing. “You could have finished the job, you know. If the APS hadn’t shown up, we’d be dead. That’s not a lesson, that’s a sentence,” she said, every syllable precise. “You know that, right? And for what? A joke? So you could feel big for once in your life?”

For a moment, Falden’s eyes flickered, fear, or calculation, or both. Pembroke’s gaze stayed on him, unblinking.

Isemay stood next, her composure unshakable. She spoke with a sharp, crystalline calm: “You always said you hated that people like us were allowed here. Now you’ve proven it’s because we’re better than you. You lost, so you tried to cheat the table. That’s not ambition, Falden. That’s just being weak.”

Falden spat back, “You think you’re better than me? Half-breed trash. Without your name—”

“I’m not my name,” Isemay cut in. “I’m my work. That’s something you’ll never understand. In the end, all you’ll ever have is your name. You're nothing without it.” She turned away, her point made, and left Falden to stew in the sourness of his own defeat.

Lavan stood last. His knee throbbed where it hadn’t healed, and his voice trembled, but the tremor held a new clarity.

“You know what the worst part is, Falden?” he said. “It’s not the pain. It’s that you think this is how the world should work. Your world.” He took a breath. “You come from money, and all your life, you’ve been told you’re special. That people like us, dirt under your boots, are just obstacles. You never learned that power is supposed to mean something. You never bothered to learn what it’s like to be scared, really scared, until now.”

Falden’s mouth worked soundlessly. He’d expected insults, or threats, or the kind of performative vengeance he could parry or twist. He hadn’t expected this, Lavan’s steady, pitiless gaze, the moral clarity of someone who had never owned a thing in his life but refused to cede even a sliver of dignity. For all his Tower polish, Falden was not prepared for the naked contempt of the powerless.

“You’re wrong,” Falden tried to say, but the words came out small, already shrunken by the echo of his own failures. “You’re nothing. You’ll always be nothing. They’ll forget you the minute you leave this room.”

Lavan looked at him, and in that moment, he pitied Falden. He pitied the empty certainty, the brittle greed, the belief that nothing outside his own shadow could ever truly matter.

Pembroke closed the file. “Effective immediately, you are expelled from the Tower. You will be held pending further investigation by the Council.”

Falden lurched to his feet. “You can’t! My father—”

The APS runner grabbed him by the arm. “Your father will be informed,” he said. “He’ll be joining you shortly.”

For the first time, Falden looked afraid.

Falden was marched out of the office, leaving the door ajar and the room suddenly much quieter.

Pembroke exhaled, a deep, tired sound. He looked at the trio, not as children, but as equals.

“You saved yourselves,” he said. “And in so doing, you have spared others a similar fate. The Tower owes you a debt.”

Ophelia shrugged. “We did what we had to.”

Pembroke smiled, just a little. “That’s all any of us can do. Go, rest, your families will be here soon. If you have need of anything, anything at all, my door is open.”

They exited, still in shock from how quickly everything had happened. At the end of the hallway, Isemay paused and glanced back at the office door that was now shut.

“Is it really over?” she inquired.

Ophelia shrugged, “Who can say? But if anything else comes up, we know we can handle it.”

Lavan nodded, his fists tightening, “together,” he concluded.

Not Over

The infirmary was quiet, Lavan and Ophelia had managed to nod off, but Isemay was still awake, the night’s events looping in her mind. Kerrowyn entered, her small frame cutting a sharp silhouette in the lamplight. She closed the door behind her with deliberate care.

Isemay sat upright on the cot, blanket drawn tight around her shoulders. She didn’t rise, didn’t bow, didn’t speak.

Kerrowyn studied her a long moment, then crossed the room and perched on the stool beside her. “You should try to get some rest.”

Isemay’s jaw tightened, her hands curled in the blanket. “You told me merit was enough. That what mattered here was what we could do. But he still, he still won. He had me dragged like a criminal, and I…” She forced her voice steady. “I wasn’t strong enough to stop him.”

Kerrowyn’s gaze softened. “You were strong enough to survive him. That’s more important.”

Isemay shook her head. “That’s not what you said before. You made it sound like talent could protect me. Like skill was armor. But it isn’t. Not here.”

Kerrowyn sighed, leaning back. “Then let me amend my lesson. Merit is what matters in the long run,  in the Tower’s records, in history’s memory. But here, now, in the small hours? Power still cheats. Names still buy silence. Men like Falden Raulon and his son don’t care about talent, and they never will.”

Isemay swallowed hard, blinking fast. “Then what’s the point?”

Kerrowyn leaned forward, voice low but fierce. “The point, Miss Misendris, is that you don’t fight them alone. You have your wits, your magic, your allies. The friends you’ve chosen? They’ll hold the line with you. Together, you’re harder to break. That is how you win, even when the rules are stacked against you.”

Silence stretched. Isemay’s eyes shimmered, but she didn’t let the tears fall.

At last she whispered, “I’m still angry.”

“Good,” Kerrowyn said, standing. “Hold on to it. Anger makes a fine weapon, so long as you learn when to draw it.”

She turned at the door, her shadow long in the lamplight. “Don’t let Falden teach you the wrong lesson. You’re not less because he struck at you. You’re more, because you survived him. Besides, it's not over yet.”

Then she was gone, the latch clicking softly behind her.

***

Less than an hour later the double doors to the infirmary slammed open.

First through were Lord and Lady Misendris, cloaks still dripping from the storm. Lady Misendris’s eyes fixed on Isemay’s cot like a hawk sighting prey, her face blanching at the bruises on her daughter’s cheek. Lord Misendris strode in behind her, every step taut with anger.

“Isemay!” Lady Misendris swept to the bedside, brushing the girl’s hair back with trembling fingers. “Who dared lay a hand on you? Name them, and I will see their house in ashes.”

“Mother, I—” Isemay began, only for her father’s voice to thunder over hers.

“Who allowed this?” Lord Misendris’s gaze swept the healers, then landed on Vinder, Kerrowyn, and Pembroke. “This is the Tower’s doing. Negligence, incompetence. You swore to protect her.”

Kerrowyn’s mouth quirked. “And we did. You’re welcome.”

“Kerrowyn,” Pembroke said dryly, without looking up from his ledger.

The next arrivals pushed in before the argument could ignite: Lavan’s parents, smaller in presence but no less stricken. His mother, Mirra hurried to his cot, clutching his bandaged hands.

“My boy,” she whispered, eyes wet. “What did they do to you?”

Lavan stiffened, whispering, “I’m fine, Mother,” but his voice cracked. His father, Gaelon, hovered behind, wringing his cap, voice trembling.

“This… this is exactly what we feared. He isn’t safe here.”

“Not now,” Pembroke interrupted, voice flat. “Save your recriminations for when I’m recording them in triplicate.”

Finally came Staunch Saloth, broad shoulders filling the doorway, Trigger darting around his legs with wide eyes.

Trigger bolted for Ophelia’s cot, clutching her uninjured arm. “Did the bad guys hurt you?”

Ophelia leaned down, ruffling his hair, her grin crooked but sharp. “Yeah. But I hurt them right back.”

Trigger nodded solemnly. “Good.”

Staunch planted his hands on his hips, scowling at Kerrowyn. “This is why I said she should never have been here. Tower politics, noble grudges. You’re using them as pawns.”

Kerrowyn raised a brow. “If pawns bite, then your niece nearly took a knight’s head off tonight. She’ll be fine.”

“Enough.” Pembroke snapped his ledger shut. His voice, though quiet, cut the din. “Yes, they were hurt. Yes, they survived. Yes, there will be consequences; political, legal, personal. But tonight, what they need is rest. You may see that for yourself, or you may leave.”

Silence fell, broken only by the hiss of rain outside the tall windows.

The infirmary doors opened once more, and Iliyria entered. 

She took in the scene; the parents clustered at each bedside, the children exhausted but awake, Pembroke holding the room in uneasy stillness, and her jaw set.

The storm had arrived inside the Tower at last.

***

Isemay sat stiff-backed on her cot, jaw set despite the purple bruise spreading across her cheek. Lavan lay nearby with his hands swaddled in careful bandages, every twitch a flinch. Ophelia sprawled against her pillows, hair falling to cover the cut along her temple, her eyes restless, watching the door.

Through its crack, voices carried. Sharp, low, urgent.

Lady Misendris’s voice cut through like glass: “My daughter, dragged through alleys like contraband? No, Master Pembroke. You will not tell me to be calm. You will name who is behind this.”

Her husband’s voice followed, contained but trembling with fury. “The Council cannot permit such an affront. Tell us plainly.”

Pembroke’s reply was calm, clipped. “The trail leads to the Raulon family. Contracts for iron nets. Docks records. Traffickers carrying letters in a child’s hand, but paid by a father’s purse.”

Gasps, then murmurs.

Lavan’s father spoke next, worry tightening his voice. “The Raulons… If our children are set against them, what protection is there? Nobility can crush us, Master Pembroke.”

His wife added, softer: “They’ll find another way. It will be worse next time. You can’t expect the children to face them again. They’re not weapons.”

Uncle Staunch’s rough bark broke in. “Then we don’t face them. We let it lie. Pretend it never happened. Safer all around. Do you think the Tower, the Watch, even the Council can shield three children from a house likeRaulon? Best keep our heads down.”

Trigger’s voice was small but fierce: “No. They hurt my sister.”

Silence.

Then Lady Misendris’s reply, furious steel: “No. There will be consequences.”

And her husband, the hammer behind her: “Leave it to us. The children are not the ones to carry this. We are.”

Inside, the trio exchanged glances. Isemay’s lips pressed to a thin line. Lavan turned toward the wall, shoulders rigid. Ophelia narrowed her eyes, muttering under her breath, “Leave it to them, huh? Like hell.”

The door creaked open, and the parents filed back in.

Lady Misendris swept straight to Isemay, hands trembling as they touched her daughter’s face, as though confirming the bruise was real. “My brave girl,” she whispered, though her eyes still burned with rage. Lord Misendris stood beside her, hand firm on his daughter’s shoulder, his voice low and steady: “We are proud of you. And we will see this answered.”

Across the room, Lavan’s parents hovered over his cot, his mother smoothing his hair back with shaking hands, his father wringing his cap in his palms. 

“You’re too clever to be careless,” his father muttered. “What were you thinking, letting yourself be cornered like that? Do you know what could have happened? Do you know how close you came?”

Lavan pulled his hands back, flinching at both the salve and the words. “I know,” he said sharply. “I was there.”

His mother’s eyes filled with tears, “you shouldn’t have been in danger like this,” she whispered. “Not with families like that watching.” His father muttered, “We’ll find a way to keep you safe, son. We’ll… we’ll speak to the Masters.” But there was fear in their voices, fear of what it meant to stand against nobility. His mother fussed over Lavan’s bandaged palms, dabbing salve, whispering half-prayers under her breath.

At the far cot, Ophelia’s uncle Staunch loomed awkwardly at her bedside, his scarred arms crossed, his face unreadable. Trigger, small and wide-eyed, scrambled up onto the bed and pressed against his sister’s side. 

Ophelia pulled him close with one arm, her grin crooked and defiant despite the cut at her temple. Staunch leaned down to place a hand on her shoulder. “You scared ten years off me, girl. Next time, you stay out of alleys.”

“I’ll stay out when they stop dragging me into them,” Ophelia shot back, grinning.

Staunch sighed, sitting down heavily. “You think it’s funny, but it’s not. Nobles play games with knives, and now they’ve seen your blood. Safer to forget it happened.”

Ophelia’s grin turned sharp. “Not a chance.”

The room settled into uneasy quiet, three children bruised but unbroken, three sets of families divided between rage, fear, and caution, and the Tower’s walls closing around it all like stone that remembered.

***

Iliyria lingered at the far end of the infirmary corridor, half in shadow, her arms folded. The voices had carried easily: the Misendris’s fury, the Edors’ trembling worry, Staunch’s gruff pragmatism, Trigger’s small defiance. She hadn’t needed to press her ear to the door to understand the lines being drawn.

When the families finally swept past her, their faces stiff with exhaustion and rage, Iliyria inclined her head in the polite way expected of her station. They scarcely acknowledged her. Each had already retreated into their own arguments.

She stepped into the now-quiet room. The three children sat propped against their pillows, their bandages bright against skin still mottled with bruises. They tried not to look like they’d been listening.

“You heard,” Iliyria said, her voice calm, almost kind.

Isemay lifted her chin, the gesture so like her mother’s it ached. Lavan’s gaze slid away, shame and fury flickering behind it. Ophelia smirked with split lips, still trying to turn pain into defiance. Trigger had curled up against her side, already dozing.

Iliyria crossed to the window, looking out over the Tower courtyard where lamplight smudged against the rain-slick stones. She spoke without turning.

“Families are many things: proud, fearful, stubborn. But they are rarely united. And when the enemy is nobility with long reach, division is exactly what the Raulons are counting on.”

Her hand touched the sill, fingers tightening just once before she let go.

“You three will not ‘leave it to them.’ You will not be forgotten, or smothered into silence. As long as you are in my city, as long as you wear the Tower’s mantle, you will have protection.” She turned then, eyes sharp as cut glass. “Do you understand?”

The three nodded, hesitant but certain.

Iliyria inclined her head once, the decision settling like iron in her chest. The parents would rage, or cower, or try to smother this in silence. But she would not. If justice required political fire, she would strike the match herself.

She left the infirmary, the echo of her boots carrying the vow she would not speak aloud: The Raulons will not touch them again.

***

The Tower’s infirmary still smelled of alchemical smoke and burned rope. Isemay and Ophelia had drifted off, but Lavan lingered in the hall outside, slumped against the stone. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“Edor.”

The single word froze him. Vinder stood in the doorway, his robes immaculate as always, though a streak of soot traced one sleeve from the fight.

“You were there,” Lavan blurted, his voice ragged. “You saved them. I should have, I could have—”

“Enough.” Vinder’s tone cut like a knife. He stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “You think you could have outmatched hired men twice your size? That your guilt makes you noble?”

Lavan flinched. “If I were stronger—”

Vinder’s hand came down hard on the wall beside him. “We have spoken of this. Strength without control is nothing. You want to fix everything, bind every crack in the world with your power, but that is not mastery. That is desperation.”

Lavan stared at the floor, throat tight.

Vinder’s voice lowered, just slightly. “Restraint kept you alive tonight. Restraint kept Misendris and Saloth alive long enough for me to reach you. Remember that.”

“But if I’d acted sooner—”

“Then you might have killed them yourself, in your panic.”

Silence stretched, heavy as stone.

At last Vinder straightened. “You will learn to hold steady, even when every instinct screams at you to burn bright and break things.” His eyes glinted. “Because one day, Edor, you will face something worse than kidnappers in a hallway. And if you have not learned control by then, we will all pay the price.”

He turned and strode away, leaving Lavan shaking, not with fear this time, but with the aching need to prove Vinder wrong, or right, or both at once.

***

The Council Seat was silent before dawn, save for the scratch of Orintha Runecoat’s quill. She sat alone at the long oak desk, spectacles low on her nose, the lamplight painting her chain of office in gold. Outside the high windows, the city slept, rain tapering off into mist.

Her desk was a battlefield of parchment. Testimonies from Vinder, APS reports, intercepted letters in a child’s jagged hand, dock ledgers sealed with the Raulon crest. Each one pinned down by stone weights, each one a nail waiting to be hammered into place.

She dipped her quill, steady despite the ache in her wrist. Drafting the indictment was not just procedure, it was an exorcism. For years she had hunted this network, watching names slip through her fingers, witnesses vanish into the river, merchants change their stories under noble pressure. Every failure had carved itself into her memory like a ledger of ghosts.

And now, at last, she had more than whispers. She had bruises. She had burned nets. She had children’s testimony lined up like a wall no lord could knock over.

She paused, setting the quill aside. Her gaze drifted to the stuffed crow lying in the corner of her desk, sodden feathers stiff with dirt. It was a ridiculous thing to keep, let alone in the midst of legal parchment, but she could not bring herself to move it. It was the most damning piece of evidence she had: not for the chamber, but for herself. A reminder that she was not drafting strategy for a political duel, she was drafting justice for children dragged screaming into nets.

Her shoulders sagged, just for a moment. She allowed herself to whisper the thought that had haunted her for years: How many had I failed before this? How many vanished while I sharpened quills and waited for proof?

But she shoved the thought aside, spine straightening once more. Self-recrimination had no place here. This was her chance to carve something permanent into the record: that no one in the Countis Nobelesse was untouchable, even a member of the Five Families, and that the trafficking web had a spine that could be broken.

She pulled a fresh scroll toward her and began again, voice murmuring as she wrote, each word as much a vow as it was a legal charge.

“By the authority of the Council of the Capitol, and the oath of the Lawmaster sworn…”

Her quill scratched on. When the lamps guttered low, she relit them. When her eyes blurred, she forced them clear. She had waited five years for this night.

And she would not let it pass her by.

***

When the final parchment was signed. Orintha Runecoat held it aloft. The indictment had taken her years to reach, but tonight it was sealed in triplicate, the law’s teeth sharpened to bite.

A Watch Sergeant in steel half-plate stood at attention before her, helm tucked under one arm. 

Orintha slid the parchment into his hands with deliberate weight. “Execute this immediately. No warning. No delay. House Raulon will not be given time to burn records or scatter servants.”

The Sergeant glanced at the charge written in dark ink, eyes widening. “High treason. Conspiracy to traffic citizens. Direct conspiracy with known criminals.”

“Signed and sealed,” Orintha confirmed. “If the House howls, let them howl. By the time they find their voice, Raulon will already be in irons.”

***

The mansion’s shutters were still drawn, its lanterns snuffed, when the Watch came. A dozen boots on gravel, a dozen gauntlets clinking against halberds. They poured through the gate like floodwater, the rune-lit parchment raised high by the Sergeant at their head.

Servants scattered, shouting, their nightclothes flapping as they bolted through the gardens. A steward tried to bar the door, but the Sergeant thrust the warrant into his face. “By order of the Council! Lord Raulon Falden, present yourself!”

Upstairs, curtains twitched.

By the time Falden appeared in the great entry hall, hastily dressed in a silk robe, his hair still mussed from sleep, the Watch had already filled the space. He blinked, stunned, fury catching up slower than confusion.

“What is this?” he demanded, voice booming. “Some petty insult? You storm my house in the night like cutpurses?”

The Sergeant unrolled the parchment and read, voice steady: “Lord Raulon Falden, you are charged with conspiracy to traffic citizens, procurement of iron wards for unlawful restraint, and the attempted abduction of three Tower students. You are hereby stripped of privilege pending trial, and remanded into Watch custody.”

Falden’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut. “Tower brats? This is lunacy. My son—”

“Your son will be heard as well,” the Sergeant cut in, motioning to two Watchmen. Iron manacles clinked as they stepped forward.

Falden’s robe swished as he recoiled, color draining from his face. “You can’t. My House will—”

The Sergeant’s voice rose to fill the chamber: “The Council already has your contracts. Your ledgers. Your son’s hand in ink. This is not accusation, my lord. This is fact.”

When the irons closed around his wrists, Falden’s composure cracked. The nobles who had dined at his table would not see it, but the servants did: the flash of real fear beneath the arrogance.

The Watch marched him through the marble foyer, past the banners of his house, out into the gray half-light of dawn. The city still slept, but by morning, word would spread like fire through dry timber: Lord Falden Raulon had been dragged from his own manor in chains.

***

The Tower bells had only just tolled the sixth hour when Iliyria strode into the east solar, her cloak still damp from the mist outside. Orintha Runecoat was already there, bent over a stack of parchment.

“They have him,” Iliyria said without preamble, closing the door behind her. “The Watch dragged Raulon out before dawn. He didn’t even have his wig straight.”

Orintha gave the faintest curl of a smile, but her quill never stopped moving. “Good. The longer he’s free, the more time his allies would have to weave excuses. We strike before the chamber can grow comfortable with the idea of letting him slip away.”

Iliyria nodded.

Orintha’s eyes met Iliyria’s. “You’ve handed me what I’ve been chasing for half a decade. But understand this: the Council won’t go down easy. Raulon will buy allies with every coin he has left. They will smear the children if it means sparing his name.”

Iliyria paced, her boots sharp against the flagstones. “Speed is our ally, but also our risk. If the Countis Nobelesse see this as hasty, they’ll call it vengeance, not justice. We need at least a handful of them to break with Raulon’s bloc.”

Orintha nodded once, sliding a finished scroll into the growing stack. “House Misendris. Their anger is fresh, untempered. If we let them lead the charge in session, others will follow out of fear of looking soft.”

“And they have the weight to tip wavering houses,” Iliyria agreed. “A Lord and Lady from one of the Five Families's voices is louder than all the Tower’s Masters combined.” She paused, leaning over the table, lowering her voice. “But Misendris must be seen as seeking justice, not revenge. Too much fire, and Raulon will paint himself a victim.”

“That’s why we’ll move before he has time to polish his speechwriters,” Orintha said, her tone clipped as her quill. “We present the evidence tomorrow. Iron nets, dock ledgers, the boy’s own hand in ink. Then we bring the children forward. Bruises, scars, living proof.”

Silence fell for a moment. Outside, the city was only just beginning to stir, unaware that one of its grandest lords now sat in irons.

Iliyria straightened, resolve setting in her eyes. “Tomorrow. Before he can gather allies. Before he can turn this into a debate. The Council will be forced to look while the bruises are still fresh.”

Orintha finally set her quill down. She looked at Iliyria across the table. “We burn the venom out before it spreads.”

Iliyria nodded, her silver hair catching the weak dawn light through the windows. “I’ll brief Misendris myself. If we keep them on the front line, Raulon won’t have a chance to shift the narrative. His name will break before it bends.”

The magistrate pushed the stack of documents toward her with one gauntleted hand. “Then take these. The warrants, the ledgers, the letters. Put them in the hands of those that will shout louder than Raulon can.”

Iliyria gathered the parchment. “Done.”

The two women shared a look; no warmth, no triumph, just the recognition of a war finally tipping in their favor.

***

Iliyria made her way to the guest chamber provided for Lord and Lady Misendris. Despite the early hour, they were already awake. Or, more accurately, they hadn’t slept.

Lord and Lady Misendris stood together near the hearth, though their moods could not have been more different. Lady Misendris paced with sharp, restless strides, her silks whispering like drawn blades. Her husband stood with hands clasped behind his back, still as a statue, every word weighted.

“You’re early,” Lady Misendris said when Iliyria entered, though her eyes flicked to the bundle of scrolls under the elf’s arm with barely disguised hunger.

Iliyria inclined her head in greeting. “Not earlier than Raulon. He is in irons. The Watch took him before dawn.”

Lady Misendris’s eyes lit like a struck match. “Good.”

Lord Misendris’s jaw tightened. “If he is already in chains, why are we summoned so soon?”

“Because,” Iliyria said evenly, laying the scrolls on the table between them, “the longer he sits, the more time his allies have to weave excuses. You know as well as I do that half the Council would rather bury this than stain a noble name. The Lawmaster intends to bring the case to the floor tomorrow.”

Lady Misendris stopped pacing, her gaze snapping to her husband. “Tomorrow. Yes. Before he can gather friends, before he can make this about honor instead of crime.”

Lord Misendris’s voice was cooler. “The Council dislikes haste. They will call it opportunism.”

“They will call it what you tell them to call it,” Iliyria replied. She placed a single parchment in his hand. “Ledgers tying Raulon’s purse to traffickers. Warehouse leases. And here,” she laid a second before Lady Misendris, “letters in his son’s hand. Orders written like scripture. If you speak with one voice in session, others will follow. Break his circle before it can harden.”

Lady Misendris’s eyes scanned the letter, her mouth tightening. “He used children. Our children.”

“Then make him pay for it,” Iliyria said. Her voice was calm, but there was steel beneath it. “Take your fury to the chamber. Let no one call it vengeance, call it justice. The Tower will support you. The APS has sworn testimony. But the Misendris name will be the lever that tips the balance.”

Lord Misendris was silent for a long time, the weight of the parchment heavy in his hand. At last, he nodded once. “If tomorrow is the field, then tomorrow we fight.”

Lady Misendris looked back at Iliyria, eyes blazing. “He will not crawl free of this. Not while I breathe.”

“Good,” Iliyria said, gathering the rest of the scrolls. “Today, we prepare. And when the Council rises, Raulon will fall.”

Preparation

The fire had burned down to coals, the room lit in red and shadow. None of them moved for a long while, the silence holding them together more firmly than words.

Finally, Isemay spoke, her voice low but steady. “We cannot count on our families to agree. They will argue, or hide, or try to keep us silent. But we cannot be silent. Not anymore.”

Lavan rubbed at the edge of his bandages, eyes flicking from the fire to their faces. His throat worked once before he managed: “Then it has to be us. If something happens again, if they come back—” His voice cracked. “We can’t wait to be rescued.”

Ophelia leaned forward, eyes gleaming in the low light. “Good. Because I’m not waiting. I’d rather bleed fighting beside you than sit quiet while the Raulons laugh. If the world won’t protect us, then we protect each other.”

The words hung in the air.

Isemay extended her hand first, palm up. “Then we agree.”

For a moment, neither of the others moved. Then Lavan put his bandaged hand over hers, wincing at the sting but not pulling back. “We agree.”

Ophelia slapped her hand on top, rough and sure. “We agree.”

The three of them sat like that for a long breath, their hands stacked together over the glow of the fire. Their pact wasn’t sealed with parchment or law, but it felt heavier than any decree of the Council. Add symbol ref

Outside the windows, the Tower bells began their slow toll for curfew. Inside, three bruised children had redrawn the lines of who they could trust, and it was not their parents, nor their houses, nor even the Council.

It was each other.

***

The Tower’s meeting room was too small for so many tempers. The table, meant for contracts and quiet debate, groaned under the weight of scattered scrolls and the presence of too many chairs. Pembroke sat at its head, spectacles glinting in the lamplight, quill resting idle against his ledger. Beside him, Kerrowyn Lightfoot lounged in her chair with arms folded, sharp-eyed and restless. Iliyria Sylren occupied the seat nearest the door, her presence filling the space like a warded gate.

At the far side, Lawmaster Orintha Runecoat adjusted the chain of her office, every link etched with runes that glimmered faintly as if impatient for judgment.

The rest of the chamber was crowded with family. Lord and Lady Misendris sat ramrod-straight, their fury wrapped in silk. Gaelon and Mirra Edor twisted hands and shawls, visibly out of their depth but unwilling to yield their son. Staunch Saloth leaned against the wall like a soldier at ease, his jaw tight, his nephew Trigger perched on the bench beside him, eyes wide.

The three children sat together in a row: Isemay composed but pale, Lavan with his bandaged hands clasped tight, Ophelia restless as a coiled spring.

Runecoat began. “You must all understand this clearly. Tomorrow is not a trial as you imagine it. There will be no jury. No Watch tribunal. No peers weighing evidence behind closed doors.”

Mrs. Edor stiffened. “Then who decides?”

“The Council,” Orintha said, her voice clipped and cold. “Because Raulon is of the Five Families of the Countis Nobelesse, and because he sits as a Councilor, his case will be heard before the chamber itself. Nobles and magistrates, not common judges.”

Staunch barked a laugh without humor. “So he’ll be judged by the same men who share his wine. That’s not justice, that’s theatre.”

“Precedent,” Orintha corrected without flinching. “And it is why we must strike quickly. Before his allies weave excuses. Before they call this vengeance instead of proof.”

Mr. Edor wrung his cap. “If it’s nobles judging nobles, they’ll shield him. They always do.”

Lady Misendris cut in, her tone sharp as broken glass. “Not if they are forced to look at what they shield. They will not ignore the evidence, the letters written in his boy’s hand.”

Orintha inclined her head. “That is why testimony matters. Bruises and scars speak louder than contracts. The chamber cannot dismiss what stands breathing before them.”

Pembroke cleared his throat. “We need to decide what part, if any, the children will play in the upcoming proceedings.”

“None,” Lady Misendris said instantly, her voice sharp as cut glass. “They have suffered enough without being paraded before that chamber like fodder for political games.”

Her husband added, voice heavy, “The Council is no place for children. Let us fight this battle for them.”

Mrs. Edor wrung her shawl. “He’s eleven. How can he stand against lords four times his age and ten times his power? You can’t ask this of him.”

Staunch grunted. “It’s madness. Nobles eat their own in that hall. You’ll throw them to Raulon and watch him chew them up.”

Ophelia bristled, but Iliyria spoke first, her voice like a command across a battlefield. “It is because they are children that their words matter most. The Council can ignore ledgers. It can overlook testimonies from Watchmen. But it cannot ignore bruises, scars, and voices that still shake when they speak the truth. If you want Raulon undone, this is the blade that will cut deepest.”

Runecoat leaned forward. “I have chased this ring for years. Always, his allies cloak him. But the testimony of these three, uncoached, unfiltered, cannot be cloaked. It will strike where no parchment can.”

The parents erupted again: outrage, fear, refusal. Words collided in the air like swords.

And then Isemay rose.

Her voice was soft, but it cut through the din with perfect clarity. “Enough.”

The chamber stilled.

She lifted her chin, her poise echoing her mother’s but her words her own. “I will testify. I will stand before them. If Raulon believes he can buy silence, then let him see he cannot buy mine.”

Lady Misendris stared, shocked into silence.

Lavan stood too, his hands trembling but his jaw set. “Me too. He wrote our names. He made us targets. I want him to see that I’m still here, that he failed. If I stay quiet, he wins.”

Ophelia snorted, standing last, her grin crooked and fierce. “Damn right. He wanted us gone. We’re not gone. And if the Council doesn’t like hearing that, they can choke on it.”

Trigger gasped, delighted. Staunch muttered a curse under his breath but said nothing more.

Silence hung in the chamber, the children’s voices echoing louder than any parental objection.

Pembroke finally tapped his quill against the ledger, a faint smile tugging his lips. “Well. That settles it.”

Lady Misendris’s voice trembled with outrage. “You cannot—”

“They can,” Runecoat interrupted, her eyes sharp as steel. “And they will.”

Mrs. Edor’s voice trembled. “So you would put my son in front of them,  a child, while Raulon struts in robes and titles?”

Before Runecoat could reply, Iliyria stepped forward. Her voice was softer, but carried iron. “Not alone. They will not face that chamber as children abandoned. They will face it as witnesses, and they will not stand there unshielded. The Tower will stand behind them. I will stand behind them.”

Her eyes swept the parents, lingering on the Edors. “Your fear is not misplaced. But Raulon has always relied on fear to buy silence. If we let that silence hold, nothing changes. This way, he bleeds under his own name.”

Pembroke finally spoke. His tone was dry, but gentler than Runecoat’s steel or Iliyria’s command. “And let us not underestimate the chamber’s hunger for drama. Nobles love nothing more than a scandal that makes them look virtuous by condemning someone else. Raulon’s downfall will give them that in spades. Half of them will bristle, yes, but the other half will relish cutting him loose to polish their own reputations.”

He pushed his spectacles higher on his nose, studying the children. “Which is where you three come in. Speak plainly. Don’t gild it, don’t falter into theatrics. Just tell them what happened. They’ll twist every other piece of evidence. But three children with scars, telling the same story? Even the chamber can’t sneer that away.”

Silence fell. The families wavered between fear and pride. The children met each other’s eyes. Isemay lifted her chin, Lavan’s jaw clenched, Ophelia smirked with teeth.

Runecoat rested her arms on the table, voice like the toll of a bell. “The Council will judge Raulon. But it will hear you first. And that, more than any parchment, is what will break him.”

The families sat in uneasy silence, half broken by pride, half strangled by fear. But in the row of children, there was no hesitation. Their choice had been made.

The antechamber emptied slowly, like the air draining from a bellows. Parents were ushered out first, Lady Misendris still whispering warnings into her daughter’s ear, the Edors wringing their hands, Staunch muttering curses under his breath while Trigger clung to his sleeve. The rest filed out after them: Runecoat to sharpen her quills, Iliyria to marshal Runners, Pembroke with his ledger and Kerrowyn with her dry wit. The heavy oak door closed, leaving the three of them at last in silence.

For a moment, none of them spoke. The parchment stacks and high-backed chairs loomed around them like judges already waiting.

Isemay sat very straight, but her fingers twisted the hem of her robe. “No jury. Just the Council. Every sneer, every eye on us.”

Ophelia sprawled in her chair, legs stretched out, defiance curling her lips. “Good. Let them sneer. I’ll give them something to sneer at.”

Lavan stared at his bandaged hands, flexing them against the itch of half-healed burns. His voice was low, but edged with fire. “What if they don’t listen? What if we stand there and it changes nothing?”

“They’ll listen,” Isemay said, sharper than she meant. She softened, but did not back down. “They have to. If we don’t speak, Raulon wins without even lifting a finger.”

Ophelia leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “So we speak. We say the names, we show the bruises, we make them look at us. If they hate us for it, fine. At least they’ll remember we didn’t shut up.”

Lavan raised his head, meeting her eyes, then Isemay’s. He swallowed hard. “Together?”

“Together,” Isemay said firmly.

Ophelia slapped her palm down on the table, grin fierce. “Together.”

Lavan laid his bandaged hand over hers, wincing but not pulling back. Isemay placed hers on top, steady despite the tremor in her fingers. For a moment, their small stack of hands was the only solid thing in the room.

Silence stretched, broken only by the scratch of quills and muffled voices beyond the door.

Then Isemay whispered, almost to herself: “Let them be nobles. We’ll be witnesses.”

Ophelia smirked, showing teeth. “And that’ll be louder.”

Lavan’s grip tightened. “We’ll make it louder.”

And in the hush of the antechamber, their vow hung heavier than any scroll.

***

The Tower’s east antechamber had been repurposed into a courtroom staging ground: plain benches, pitchers of water, and a map of the Council chamber pinned to the wall. Outside, the echo of boots and voices reminded the three children that nobles and magistrates waited beyond the doors.

Isemay sat straight-backed on her bench, her hands folded in her lap like she was already on the stand. Lavan hunched at the table, twisting the strap of his satchel between his bandaged fingers. Ophelia sprawled against the wall with her arms crossed, glaring at the parchment in front of her as if she could burn it to ash with her eyes.

The three adults paced around them like generals before battle.

Orintha Runecoat set her quill aside and addressed them first, her voice clipped and exact.
“When you testify, you will speak only what you know. No embellishments. No suppositions. If you are asked a question you cannot answer, say so. The Council will try to twist your words, that is their sport. You must give them nothing to twist.”

Isemay nodded gravely, absorbing every word.

Pembroke leaned against the table, ledger under one arm, his expression half amused, half severe.

 “She’s right. They’ll bait you. Some will mock you for your birth, others for your age. Let them. It costs them their dignity, not yours. Speak plainly, and if you must falter, falter honestly. The Council hates honesty because it makes them look like liars.”

That coaxed a faint smile out of Lavan, though he quickly looked down again.

Iliyria crouched so she was level with them, her tone gentler, steadier. “You’ve already survived the worst of this. No Councilor’s questions will hurt more than nets and chains did. Remember that. You are not here as victims. You are here as witnesses. And witnesses carry more weight than any lord who tries to drown you in pomp.”

Ophelia snorted, folding her arms tighter. “So we tell them what they did. And they actually listen?”

Iliyria’s eyes softened, though her voice stayed steel-edged. “They will listen. Because we will make them.”

The children exchanged glances. Isemay drew herself straighter. Lavan nodded, nervously but firm. Ophelia cracked a grin that was more teeth than humor.

Runecoat handed each of them a cup of water. “You’ll be called one at a time. Remember: you are not alone. Every word you speak is part of a greater chain. Together, your testimony makes it unbreakable.”

Pembroke added, almost lazily: “And when they try to shake you, picture Lord Raulon’s face when he realizes he’s lost. That ought to help.”

Ophelia laughed at that, sharp and sudden. Isemay hid a smile behind her hand. Even Lavan managed a nervous chuckle.

Trial

The antechamber smelled of candlewax and old vellum. It was the kind of small room the Council used to let participants breathe for a moment before stepping into a place built to swallow them whole. Iliyria stood by the door, scrolls tucked under one arm. Kerrowyn picked at a seam of her sleeve, antsy energy in every toe-tap. Pembroke folded and refolded the same page in his ledger as if by the rhythm he could steady the world.

Iliyria did not bother with pleasantries. “They’ll try to turn this into theatre. They’ll call me eager. They’ll call Orintha petty. They’ll call the Misendrises loud. We need two things: clarity and timing.”

Kerrowyn snorted. “Timing, she says. Naturally. I’ll keep my timing to a minimum of projectile drafts.”

Pembroke’s smile was a thin, dry thing. “Keep the drafts metaphorical today, Kerrowyn. The chamber dislikes surprises that involve wind in noble hair.”

Iliyria set the stack of papers on a small table and spread them like a fan. “Orintha will open on the ledgers and leases. I will follow with the APS reports and the alley evidence. You” she looked at Kerrowyn, “you remind the gallery what happens when a child is stripped of safety. Not with pity, with consequence. Pembroke, you keep the legal scaffolding tight. Spell, witness, chain of custody. If we do this cleanly and fast, Raulon has no hour to hire a chorus.”

Pembroke tapped his quill twice. “We are not entrepreneurs of vengeance. We are architects of proof. Keep testimony tight. Teach the children to answer simply. Don’t let a single phrase be twisted into motive. Let the Councillors show their own faces.”

Kerrowyn folded her arms and grinned with something like affection. “So I’ll be blunt, Pembroke will be boring, and Ily will look like she’s arranging thunderclouds for dessert. Understood.”

Iliyria’s eyes softened for the ghost of a moment. “They’re counting on scandal to drown truth. We give them truth in a form they can’t swallow, documents, witnesses, living bruises. Keep them lined up. Move them in and out. When the children speak, we let them speak and do not help them with rhetoric. The Council hates that.”

Pembroke tucked the ledger under his arm. “Then we go in and do the job. No theatrics from us. The rest of the noise will come from houses trying to preserve face.”

Kerrowyn pushed to her feet, restless. “Good. I was saving my theatrics for later. Let’s ruin a noble’s morning.”

Iliyria answered only with a nod, eyes already moving toward the door. “Then we go. Keep your faces steady. For them.”

They left the antechamber together, a trio of different temperaments walking as if toward the hinge of the city’s conscience.

***

The Council chamber was a colossus of marble and echo. Ropes of carved stone rose to shadowed vaults, banners of ancient houses caught the shafts of light and turned them into color. The benches were already half-full; lords and magistrates settled like birds into roosts, opinions preformed and gloved hands folded. Rumors and wagers hummed through the air like a swarm.

The Watch procession came down the aisle, measured steps, halberds flashing. At its center, escorted by two officers, Lord Falden Raulon walked briskly, shackles gleamed at his wrists, a public punctuation to the charge.

A ripple went through the chamber. Some masks of civility slipped; whispered recalculations moved like wind. The Misendris’ rose from the gallery as they brought Raulon in. Lady Misendris’s eyes were a blade, Lord Misendris’s stance was carved from stone. They had not come to whisper.

Isemay, Lavan, and Ophelia were seated where the Tower had placed them, flanked by the Masters and APS officers, visible, steady, lined as witnesses, not victims. The stillness around them felt like a held breath.

Runecoat came forward to the dais with the slow confidence of a woman who had spent years shaping the law into a weapon. Her chain of office was heavy around her shoulders, each rune-etched plate a reminder of her oath: not to houses, not to bloodlines, but to law.

Across the circle, Lord Raulon waited. He was immaculate, silver-threaded robes cut to perfection, hands clasped behind him like a man posing for a portrait. His face was calm, almost bored, as though this were beneath him. His allies lounged nearby, their silence its own performance: This will pass. This will fade. This woman cannot touch us.

Runecoat had seen that look before. For five years, it had haunted every hearing, every inquiry she had raised, every attempt to prise open the trafficking ring. Always the same smug certainty: untouchable.

She placed her hand on the first scroll and addressed the chamber with a voice that carried without need of flourish. “The charges: conspiracy, abduction, collusion with known traffickers. By the authority of this Council, House Raulon stands accused.”

A chorus of motions rose, quick as birds, but Runecoat let them wash over her. 

Falden tilted his head, lips curving faintly. He did not even deny it outright. He didn’t think he needed to.

Good. She wanted him confident. 

“First,” she said, raising the dock ledgers, her voice carrying across the hall, “the purchase of iron-weighted nets. Bulk contracts, signed by Raulon retainers, sealed with the Raulon crest. The Council will hear witnesses testify to shipments unloaded at warehouses in the Docks District. Warehouses later discovered to contain wards keyed for holding spellcasters.”

Falden’s voice was smooth, practiced. “My house funds a hundred civic projects. Nets, anchors, iron weights for the warding of floodgates. To stretch those accounts into criminal use is a reach, Lawmaster Runecoat.”

He even bowed his head slightly, the courtesy of a man indulging a child’s fantasy.

Runecoat did not smile. “Then let us stretch further.” She unfurled the warehouse leases. “Signed by your steward. The warehouse where three Tower students were recovered. Within those walls: rope scorched by spellfire, chains shattered by Arcane Protection Service Runners. One of your men, already in Watch custody, has testified these were secured under your order.”

Raulon’s mask flickered. Just a hairline crack. “Overzealous servants. Acting without my knowledge. And they will be punished.”

Predictable. Always the steward, the servant, the faceless pawn. She had expected this. She let him settle back into composure, and then brought out the final scroll.

“Third: correspondence.”

The chamber stilled. The parchment was thin, the ink jagged, unmistakably the hand of a boy. She held it high, let the silence stretch before she read:

“I want the tiefling gone first. The dock-rat will cry, and Misendris will follow. Make it clean. Father says to do it quiet.”

Gasps rippled through the chamber like a wave hitting stone. Even the banners seemed to sway heavier.

Falden’s composure cracked. His chin lifted sharply, voice rising. “A child’s scribbling! You would condemn a house on the careless ink of a boy? Forged, undoubtedly. Or planted.”

Runecoat did not flinch. “We have handwriting analysis from Tower scribes. We have the traffickers’ testimony: the boy delivered instructions under his father’s name. And we have the bruises still on the children’s skin.”

She stepped closer, her voice cold iron. “A child does not conspire with traffickers unless someone places the quill in his hand. That quill, Lord Raulon, was yours.”

The chamber roared, half in outrage, half in fury. Raulon’s allies shouted protests, but the rest of the benches had shifted, murmurs now running against him instead of with him.

 Raulon’s face went through a dozen colors. He reached for a prepared line, indignation, feigned hurt, but the sight of his son’s handwriting pinned him like a coin on a board. That he had been hauled in bound amplified the effect; the theater of it was not something he’d built.

For the first time, Runecoat saw fear in his eyes.

 The vote to proceed to formal charges was not unanimous, but the momentum had shifted. 

***

The chamber’s hum had died; the sound of cloaks rustling became the new tempo. Iliyria sat straight as an arrow, eyes on Raulon. Runecoat cycled through the evidence and testimonies; APS Runners and Professor Vinder at the ready, the alley pins, the stuffed crow catalogued.

Falden’s allies made noises of outrage, prepared phrases about haste and miscreant underlings and the dangers of acting without decorum. But Orintha had prepared for that. She called witnesses, presented the sealed merchant testimony, and let the paper do what, for years, rumors and bribed mouths could not.

The session moved with the grim choreography of a wound being exposed. Each scrap of proof removed another brick from the wall of Raulon’s complacency. Where he had expected time and friends to bail him out, he found parchment and public gaze,  faster, sharper, less forgiving than coins sliding into hands.

At the edge of the dais, Isemay watched with a calm that made the chamberers uneasy. Lavan’s fingers curled on his bandages, jaw set. Ophelia met every glance with a tilt of her chin and a small, savage smile. They had chosen this. Now the city chose whether to listen.

Among the benches, the Countis Nobelesse shifted. The Misendrises rose as one when Runecoat moved toward the Tower’s witness list, Lady Misendris’s voice cold and clear as frost: “My daughter will speak truth. The names here are merited.” Her presence was not only fury but a signal: someone of weight would not let this be shushed.

Isemay walked to the circle with the deliberate pace her mother had drilled into her since childhood, spine straight, eyes forward. She bowed her head to the dais.

“My name is Isemay Misendris. I was among those taken from the Spring Festival.”

A Councilor leaned forward, voice oiled. “Lady Misendris, can you say with certainty who was responsible?”

Isemay clasped her hands in front of her, careful, calm. “I cannot name the men who seized us. But I know whose coin paid them. We were trapped in nets of iron. I have since learned those were purchased by the House Raulon. And when they struck, they spoke of ‘orders given from above.’ Not orders from traffickers. From nobility.”

Another voice sneered. “Childish conjecture. Do you think you know how houses manage their affairs?”

Isemay lifted her chin, unflinching. “I know how bruises bloom on skin. I know how iron burns when you try to breathe through it. And I know those men feared a name that was not their own.”

The chamber stirred, a rustle of robes, an uneasy shift of benches. Runecoat’s quill scratched steadily, noting every word.

Lavan’s steps were uneven, his hands shaking as he entered the circle, bandages stark white against the dark floor. He stood small in the echoing chamber, but when he began to speak, the tremor steadied.

“My name is Lavan Edor. I was taken with Isemay Misendris and Ophelia Saloth.”

A Councilor asked, sharply: “You are the dock-worker’s son, are you not? Perhaps you were mistaken about the intent of these men. Perhaps they were simply criminals with no higher master.”

Lavan’s voice cracked, then caught, and he forced it steady. “No. I heard them speak the instructions. They weren’t confused. They knew exactly who they were taking, and why.”

His hands clenched into fists. “I am not noble-born. But the Falden Raulon Jr. wrote our names on a page. His words made us targets. That is not rumor. That is fact. And I will not be silent about it.”

The chamber rippled, some Councilors shifted uncomfortably, others bristled at his boldness. Pembroke allowed himself the faintest smile, tapping his ledger against his arm.

Ophelia swaggered into the circle as if it were just another back alley. She had one hand on her hip, the other brushing her hair away from the cut on her temple. She didn’t bow.

“My name’s Ophelia Saloth. I was there. I saw the nets, I felt them burn, and I watched them try to drag us like sacks of grain.”

A Councilor snapped, scandalized: “Mind your tone, girl!”

Ophelia grinned, sharp and defiant. “My tone’s all I’ve got left after what the Raulons tried to do. Maybe you don’t like it, but it’s the truth. They thought they could make us vanish. They failed. And now I’m here to say it to your faces.”

The chamber erupted in murmurs, some angry, some grudgingly impressed.

Lady Misendris sat straighter in the gallery, pride burning through her fury. Staunch folded his arms, grinning faintly. Trigger wriggled in his seat, eyes wide.

Iliyria, watching from the side, allowed herself a small nod. Ophelia hadn’t just testified; she had fought.

When the three were led back out, whispers still rolled across the hall. Some called it insolence, others called it bravery. But none denied the impact.

Orintha’s voice cut through the din as she addressed the chamber: “Three children, from three households, with no reason to conspire. Their accounts are consistent. Their scars visible. Their testimony corroborated by evidence. Will the Council deny their voices as well?”

Lord Raulon shifted in his circle, for the first time looking smaller than the title on his shoulders.

Runecoat pressed forward, striking while the wound was open. “The evidence is before you: ship ledgers, warehouse leases, the procurement of anti-magic restraints, and the testimony of rescued children. This Council can ignore whispers. It can overlook rumors. But it cannot ignore the words of your son, in ink, naming the very children who were dragged through nets and chains.”

Her voice rose, carrying like a verdict already spoken: “You are not untouchable. Not in this hall. Not anymore.”

Raulon’s hands twitched behind his back. His mouth opened, but whatever words he had prepared drowned in the uproar.

Runecoat let the din build. Let the lords see the crack in his composure. Let them smell weakness. She had waited five years for this moment, and she would not waste it.

When at last the chamber settled, she set the letter gently on the table, as though laying down a blade. “The Council will deliberate. But history will remember this day: the day House Raulon stood accused not by rumor, not by rivals, but by proof. By law. By the words of its own blood. Whether you keep your seat, Lord Raulon, or whether you fall, the stain will not wash clean.”

She sat, quill in hand, already ready to write the verdict she had chased for years.

Iliyria’s eyes met Kerrowyn’s and Pembroke’s across the room. They shared no smile; they shared a look that held iron. The stage had been set, the first stones hewn. The rest of the day would be work,  tedious, political, necessary, but the hard truth was already in the hall: a lord had been arrested, and three children had already said his name in public.

***

The waiting chamber was small and dim, its only light a narrow window spilling pale sun across the stone floor. The three of them sat there together, away from the roar of the Council chamber, hearts still pounding from the weight of their words.

Isemay sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap, posture as rigid as ever. Lavan leaned against the wall, his bandaged hands flexing nervously. Ophelia sprawled across the bench with her boots up, staring at the ceiling as if daring it to cave in.

“Well,” Ophelia said finally, smirking despite the split on her lip, “I think I made a few of them choke on their own pomp. Worth it.”

“You shouldn’t have antagonized them,” Isemay said, though her tone was gentler than her words. “Your defiance may impress some, but it will only harden others against us.”

“Good,” Ophelia shot back. “If they hate me for telling the truth, then at least they’re listening. Better than pretending we don’t exist.”

Lavan shook his head. “They were listening. You could feel it, couldn’t you? Even the ones who looked disgusted, they couldn’t ignore it. Not after hearing the three of us, not with the bruises still on our faces.”

He hesitated, then added, voice low: “I was afraid I’d freeze. But I didn’t. I said it. I named them. And they couldn’t silence me.”

Isemay turned to him, her expression softening. “You were steady, Lavan. Braver than you think.”

He flushed, ducking his head.

Ophelia kicked her heel against the wall, grinning. “See? We did it. Not our parents, not the Council, not Sylren or Pembroke. Us. We told the story. They can argue all they want, but they can’t take that away.”

The three sat in silence for a moment, the noise of the chamber muffled through the thick doors.

Isemay straightened her shoulders. “Whatever the verdict, we’ve done our part. We’ve been heard. That matters.”

Lavan leaned forward, his voice steadier now. “It matters because we did it together.”

Ophelia smirked, leaning back against the wall. “Damn right.”

For the first time since the nets had fallen in the alley, the three of them breathed easier, not because they were safe, but because they had spoken.

***

The Council chamber emptied slowly, voices lingering like smoke. In one of the side rooms, the adults gathered: Iliyria, Pembroke, Kerrowyn, Orintha Runecoat, and family members whose faces were still flushed with anger.

Lady Misendris was the first to speak, pacing with her hands clenched. “My daughter should never have been made to stand before that chamber. Never! She is not their plaything.”

Lord Misendris, calmer, replied: “And yet she carried herself with more dignity than half of them. Her testimony struck deeper than any noble’s polished speech.”

Kerrowyn leaned against the wall, arms crossed, her mouth twisted in something between a smirk and a scowl. “Dignity, fire, stubbornness… they each played their part. I’d wager half the chamber will still be thinking of Ophelia’s grin when they close their eyes tonight.”

Pembroke tapped his quill idly against a ledger, his voice dry. “Yes. The girl scorched them with insolence, the boy with honesty, and the Misendris child with composure. A tidy trinity,  each one countering a different tactic the Council likes to use. They won’t admit it, but the effect was… unassailable.”

Runecoat adjusted the chain of her office, her face stern but satisfied. “It was more than unassailable. It was necessary. Three voices, uncoached, consistent, undeniable. Nobility will call it insolence, commoners will call it courage, but both camps will remember it. The Council cannot dismiss bruises and scars when they are named by the children who bear them.”

Lavan’s mother shifted uneasily. “But what if this puts them in greater danger? If the Raulons strike again—”

“They won’t,” Iliyria cut in, her voice like a blade. “Not while they breathe under the Tower’s wards. They’ve already seen what happens when they underestimate these children.”

Kerrowyn raised her brows. “That sounded suspiciously like a promise, Ily.”

“It is,” Iliyria said.

The room stilled, the weight of her certainty settling.

Pembroke finally closed his ledger, his smile thin but sharp. “Then it’s done. The children have given the Council what it cannot ignore. Now it falls to us to turn words into chains for Lord Falden Raulon.”

Orintha inclined her head. “Chains, or ruin. Either will suffice.”

Stay

The guest chamber they’d given the Misendris family was all polished wood and velvet cushions, but Isemay sat rigid on the edge of the divan, still in her Tower robes, the bruise on her cheek a fading badge. Lady Misendris paced in front of her, skirts swishing, every movement edged with restrained fury.

“You were magnificent today,” her mother said at last, voice taut. “Proud, poised. But it was too much to ask of you. The Tower put you at risk once, and now they’ve paraded you before the Council. Enough.” She stopped pacing and turned, eyes blazing. “You’re coming home.”

Isemay blinked. “Home?”

“Yes.” Lady Misendris’s chin lifted. “We will withdraw you from the Tower and hire the finest private tutors. You will not be dragged into their squabbles, their dangers, their games. No noble house will dare touch you under our roof.”

For a long moment, Isemay sat very still. Then she rose. Her voice was steady, clear, sharper than it had ever been at home.

“No.”

Her mother’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“I will not leave the Tower,” Isemay said, her hands clenched at her sides but her spine unbending. “I belong there. With my peers. With my… friends.” Her throat caught on the word, but she pressed forward. “You taught me to stand tall, Mother. Today I did. And I will not trade that for a gilded cage, no matter how fine the bars.”

Lady Misendris’s face hardened, but her daughter pressed on.

“You want to protect me? Then fight for me in the Council. But do not take me from the Tower. That is mine. I choose it.”

The silence stretched, heavy and taut. Finally, Lady Misendris exhaled, sharp as breaking glass. She looked at her daughter as if seeing her anew: no longer a child to be sheltered, but a young woman refusing the cage.

“You are stubborn,” she said softly, almost unwillingly. “Stubborn in a way that will break you one day.”

Isemay lifted her chin. “Or make me unbreakable.”

Lady Misendris studied her for a long moment, then crossed the distance between them and wrapped her into her arms, tears streaming down her face. “I’m so proud of you.” Isemay stood for a moment in the embrace, and then, finally, let herself fall apart. 

***

The Saloth home was all clutter and warmth, a fire crackling despite the spring air, armor and tools stacked in careless heaps by the door. Ophelia sat cross-legged on the hearth rug, absently tugging at the bandage on her temple while Trigger leaned against her shoulder, clutching a toy sword he refused to put down.

Uncle Staunch sat at the table, polishing his gauntlets, the scrape of cloth against steel loud in the small room. Finally he said, gruff as ever:

“You should quit the Tower.”

Ophelia barked a laugh. “Oh, that’s rich.”

“I’m serious,” Staunch growled. “Nobles don’t fight fair. You’ve already seen what they’ll do. Stay here, learn a trade, keep your head down. The Tower isn’t worth dying over.”

Ophelia smirked, leaning back on her hands. “You think I’d be safer here? In Nightvalley alleys, with gangs sniffing around every corner? At least at the Tower I’ve got friends, and magic. And maybe a few Masters who’d fry a Raulon if they tried it again.”

Trigger piped up, eyes wide. “Yeah! She zapped them back, Uncle. I bet she made them cry.”

Ophelia grinned, ruffling her brother’s hair. “Damn right I did.”

Staunch muttered under his breath, rubbing harder at the steel. “Cocky little thing. You’ll get yourself hurt worse one day.”

“Maybe,” Ophelia shot back, grin sharp as glass. “But I’d rather get hurt fighting than sit safe and useless while the Faldens laugh.”

For a moment, Staunch didn’t reply. Then he set the gauntlet down with a thud and met her eyes. “You sound like your father.”

Ophelia’s grin faltered, just for a breath, then came back brighter, almost daring him to say more. “Good.”

Trigger clutched her arm tighter, beaming with pride. “My sister’s a knight.”

Ophelia laughed and hugged him close, letting the fire’s warmth soak into the bruises she refused to hide. She would not run. Not from the Tower, not from nobility, not from anyone.

***

The Edor household smelled of ink and damp stone, the hearth long gone cold. Lavan sat at the kitchen table, his bandaged hands resting on the wood. His mother fussed over them, rewrapping a corner of the linen that didn’t need it, while his father stood by the window, twisting his cap in his hands.

“You shouldn’t go back,” his father said at last, voice low but firm. “The Tower’s not safe for you. Not when noble children can order nets and gangs with the flick of a quill.”

His mother’s voice trembled. “We could teach you here. Find a tutor, keep you away from their politics. You’re clever enough to learn without them. At least then we’d know you’re safe.”

Lavan’s throat tightened. “But the Tower—” He hesitated, glancing at his hands. He remembered Isemay’s defiance, Ophelia’s grin, the way they had stood shoulder to shoulder before the Council. He wanted to say the Tower is where I belong.

But the words lodged.

His father pressed on. “You nearly died, boy. Do you understand that? Bruises fade, burns scar, but you could have vanished. Gone forever. The Raulon’s won’t stop. And we can’t protect you if you stay there.”

Lavan looked down at his palms, at the raw burns beneath the bandages. His voice came out thin. “Maybe you’re right.”

His mother cupped his cheek, relief softening her fear. “Then stay. Please. Let us keep you safe.”

He nodded, though the word “safe” rang hollow. Inside, shame curdled with resentment. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to be weak. But he couldn’t bring himself to defy them, not like Isemay or Ophelia could.

As his parents drew him close, fussing and clinging, Lavan stared at the ink-stained floorboards and thought: If I can’t be strong now, I’ll find a way. I’ll never be helpless again.

***

The small receiving room in the Tower was plain compared to the gilded spaces the Misendrises preferred, but it was neat, warm, and quiet, chosen deliberately by Pembroke for Lavan’s parents.

Mr. Edor sat stiffly on the edge of a chair, twisting his cap in his hands, while Mrs. Edor kept fussing with the fold of her shawl, as if smoothing cloth could ease her nerves.

Pembroke entered with his ledger under one arm, spectacles perched low on his nose. He inclined his head politely before taking the chair opposite them. “Thank you for coming. I wanted us to speak plainly, before decisions are made in haste.”

Mrs. Edor’s eyes were red. “He’s not even twelve. And already he’s been dragged off by traffickers like some coinpurse from the docks. We don’t know if we can bear sending him back into danger.”

Mr. Edor nodded, voice rough. “We’re not nobles. We don’t have the power to shield him from families like that. What happens when they try again? What happens when the Tower isn’t fast enough?”

Pembroke folded his hands over the ledger. His voice was measured, calm, with just a trace of gentleness. “Your fears are not unfounded. But the Tower does not abandon its own. The APS stood for him. Masters stood for him. And he did not break.”

He let that sink in before continuing. “You should know, your son does not wish to leave. He told me himself that he loves it here. Loves the learning. Loves the challenge. He belongs in these halls.”

Mrs. Edor’s lips trembled. “But what if it’s too much for him? He’s clever, yes, but cleverness is not the same as safety.”

“Safety,” Pembroke said quietly, “is rarely guaranteed. But growth? That we can promise. Lavan has promise unlike many I have seen. Great talent, raw and fierce. Left unshaped, it will eat at him, but here, with us, it can be guided. Controlled. Given purpose.”

Mr. Edor stared at the floorboards. “You’re saying he needs the Tower more than the Tower needs him.”

“I’m saying,” Pembroke replied, leaning forward slightly, “that he will shine brighter here than anywhere else. And you want him to have a future. A future he cannot find hiding at home.”

Mrs. Edor clutched her shawl tighter, then gave a small nod, her eyes wet.

Pembroke closed his ledger softly. “I cannot predict every storm. But I will tell you this: if tragedy ever falls upon your family, the Tower will not let him fall. He will have a place here. He will be protected.”

Neither parent spoke, but their silence was heavy, weighted with both dread and relief.

Pembroke adjusted his spectacles and offered, almost gently: “Let him stay. Give him this chance. I think you’ll find he’ll make you proud.”

Resolution

The Tower’s east solar smelled of tea and old parchment, the window lattices open to let in the spring wind. It had been weeks since the trial began, weeks of testimony, weeks of political maneuvering. Now the verdict had finally come down, and the three Masters sat together at last, their burdens set on the table between them like another pot of tea.

Iliyria poured her cup with steady hands. “It’s done. Stripped of his title, prison sentence moderate but binding. Falden Senior is no longer Lord Raulon.”

Kerrowyn snorted, kicking her boots up onto the low bench. “Moderate. That’s Council for you. Gods forbid we upset the order too much. Still, a prison cot suits him better than that chair ever did.”

Pembroke leaned back, folding his arms. “Moderate was the compromise. The Misendrises pushing so hard for conviction made it possible at all. Half the noble bloc broke ranks to follow them. Without that, he’d have walked out polished and smug.”

Kerrowyn’s mouth twisted. “Lady Misendris on the witness stand was the only thing that shut them up. I’ve never seen her so furious. Can’t say I blame her, her daughter nearly carted off like stolen grain.”

Iliyria stirred her tea. “Her fury made allies she’s never had before. When she and her husband threw their weight behind the prosecution, Falden’s circle cracked. That’s what tipped the balance.”

Pembroke tapped the rim of his cup, dry. “And then there was Vinder, Berdreak, Mabel, Jarren, Orlea. Their testimony made it more than politics. It made it undeniable.”

Kerrowyn’s eyes softened for a rare moment. “And the children.”

The silence stretched. They all remembered it, Isemay standing straighter than she felt, Ophelia biting her tongue bloody to keep her composure, Lavan sweating through the weight of Vinder’s questions but never breaking. Their bruises had already faded, but their voices had been steady enough to echo through the chamber.

“Braver than half the Council,” Iliyria said quietly.

“Braver than most,” Pembroke agreed.

Kerrowyn drained half her cup in one swallow. “So Falden Senior rots in a cell. The boy’s packed off to a reformatory. And the grand title of Lord Raulon goes to a cousin named Tybalt, some gray little man who’s never caused anyone trouble because no one ever noticed him. Neat little bow, isn’t it?”

“Neat enough to keep the nobility satisfied,” Iliyria said. “Tybalt’s name restores the line without restoring the stain. They’ll call it stability.”

“And the boy?” Kerrowyn pressed.

Iliyria set down her cup, meeting her eyes. “The reformatory will be hard. But it’s better than a prison. He’s twelve. The law doesn’t treat him as a man yet.”

Kerrowyn’s voice dropped low. “He acted like one when he wrote those letters.”

Pembroke cut in, tone level. “He acted like a mirror. His father put the venom in him. At least now there’s a chance someone else might teach him better.”

Kerrowyn scoffed, though her gaze softened again. “That’s a lot of faith for a boy who ordered nets.”

“Not faith,” Pembroke said simply. “Just the truth of what we are: products of who shapes us. If Falden had been in your class longer, Kerrowyn, perhaps those letters would have looked different.”

Kerrowyn gave a humorless laugh, then rubbed at her brow. “Don’t go flattering me, Pembroke. I’ve got enough guilt already.”

Iliyria leaned back, folding her arms. “Guilt doesn’t serve them now. Protection does. We’ve cut down the father. The boy is out of play. The trio remains in the Tower, and they’re safer for it. That’s the shape of victory in the Council’s language.”

“Victory,” Kerrowyn echoed, bitter and thoughtful.

Pembroke raised his cup in a toast. “Ugly, imperfect, and fragile though it may be.”

The three cups clinked softly in the lamplight, the sound too quiet for triumph but too steady for defeat.

***

The Tower library was nearly empty, its great lamps dimmed to a golden hush. Isemay sat at one of the long oak tables, posture straight, a book open but unread before her. Lavan paced between the stacks, muttering equations that broke apart into nonsense, starting and stopping with frustrated hands. Ophelia sprawled across the tabletop, boots kicked up on the bench, staring at the ceiling.

“They stripped him of his title,” Isemay said at last, breaking the silence. “Falden Senior. Prison sentence, moderate though it is. It’s done.”

Ophelia snorted, sharp and low. “Done? He gets a soft cot and three meals. His brat gets a reformatory where they’ll polish his manners and send him back out dressed like nobility. That’s not done. That’s them tidying up their mess and calling it justice.”

Lavan stopped pacing, fists balled. “She’s not wrong. The Council calls it victory, but it’s only balance. Equations to keep their names in order. The bruises weren’t theirs, so they’re satisfied.” He slammed his hand against the shelf, wincing as the bandages tugged against still-healing burns. “I should have stopped it. I should have—”

“You couldn’t have stopped it,” Isemay cut in sharply, though her tone gentled after. “None of us could have. Not alone.”

Ophelia rolled onto her side, watching her with narrowed eyes. “So what? We’re supposed to feel grateful? Bow to Runecoat, Sylren, the Watch, the Masters because they tidied up for us?”

“We are supposed to survive,” Isemay replied, her voice steel wrapped in calm. “And survival requires patience.” She closed the book with a quiet thud, finally looking at them both. “One day, we’ll have the power to shape the outcome, not just endure it. Until then, we endure.”

The words settled heavy.

Lavan sat down at last, pressing his bandaged hands flat against the table. “I don’t want to endure. I want to fix it. All of it. If the law isn’t enough, then I’ll find something that is.” His eyes burned, dangerous with promise.

Ophelia’s lip curled into a half-smile, half-snarl. “Fine. You fix it. I’ll break it. Between us, maybe we’ll get somewhere.”

Isemay drew a breath, steady, and poured tea from the small pot a librarian had left behind. She handed the cups to each of them, her hands not trembling, though her voice was soft. “Then we start by drinking this, by living through tonight. Tomorrow we endure. After that, we decide.”

The three of them sat in the dim, cups in hand, the verdict still echoing in their bones.

Lines Redrawn

Within a week, the story was everywhere: Lord Raulon, once untouchable, was stripped of his title and hauled off to Black Tower Prison. Witnesses claimed to have seen him dragged from his home in irons, shouting that his name would never die. Lawmaster Orintha Runecoat, a woman of legendary resolve, was quoted in the broadsheets: “We will dismantle this network, brick by bloody brick.”

In the Tower, the reaction was less dramatic but no less profound. Where once Isemay, Ophelia, and Lavan had navigated the margins, dodging jeers, enduring slights, they now moved through the halls with a new kind of gravity. After all, the three had brought down an entire trafficking ring as first-years. Some students averted their eyes in awe or shame; others, newly emboldened, approached with hesitant respect. At first, the attention was uncomfortable, but soon it turned practical.

The first time it happened, Ophelia was in the practice pit, working on an illusion of a howling wolf, when a girl from the Scholars’ Cohort sidled up and asked, “Can you show me how you do that?” She did, and before the week was out, three more had joined her impromptu lessons.

For Lavan, the change was quieter. Instead of being tripped or mocked in the halls, he was sought out for his notes or asked to join study groups that had previously barred his name. He still preferred the old alcove in the library, but now it was rarely empty; there was always someone waiting to work on spellwork or compare theory.

Isemay noticed it at meals. The tables that had once closed ranks against her now shifted to make space. People asked questions, listened when she answered, even offered to share food. She found herself explaining leyline calculus or magical resonance to groups who, only a month before, would have dismissed her out of hand.

The three of them met on the Tower’s highest balcony, especially at sunset. It became a ritual: stand shoulder to shoulder, watch the city lights come on, say nothing if that’s what the day required.

One evening, as the sun dipped below the spires, Ophelia broke the silence.

“You think it’ll last?” she asked, voice low.

Lavan leaned forward, elbows on the cool stone. “The world never changes all at once. But maybe for us, it already has.”

Isemay smiled, just a hint of mischief. “We could always make sure it does.”

Ophelia snorted. “Ambitious. I like it.”

She reached into her jacket, produced a battered stuffed crow, and held it up between them. “A toast,” she declared, grin sharpening. “To us.”

Lavan and Isemay each took the crow in turn, then held it aloft, letting the last of the sunset catch on its one glass eye.

“To The Troublesome Trio,” Lavan said, quiet but certain.

Isemay laughed, light and unburdened. “To whatever comes next.”

They stood together, the city far below, the sky wide and possible above.