102. Seb
SEB
“Don’t you dare think about letting me win just because you’ve leveled up.”
Across from him, her rich hair flowing down her back below her helmet, Adriana glared.
“Don’t be fucking insulting.”
The air between them crackled with invisible—well, not to him—energy. His heart had thrown its throttle, and it growled in anticipation. Magic thrummed through him, turning his skin hot and electric, itchy with the need to do, make, create, become.
Seb had never been so alive. After the suite had gone to bed the night before, he’d sat at his laptop and the essay for Oxford had poured out of him. He’d sent it to Chant at three in the morning and uploaded it with Chant’s edits to his application after lunch.
Everything was happening now, fate spiraling in tighter and tighter. He locked eyes with Adriana.
Five years they’d been circling each other, waiting for this moment.
He’d won the tournament the year before, but Adriana had been injured.
The year before that, they’d both lost in the semifinals.
Five years ago, they’d sat on the bluffs at M he was ready.
They fought like that, back and forth, the world silent around them except for the heavy punch of their breath and the hiss and slap of their foils, for a long time.
They scored touch after touch, staying just within each other’s reach, for five minutes, ten, an impossible length of time in a bout moving this fast, this hard.
His match with Danielson may have been the most important of his life, even if he hadn’t known it going in, but this—this was the one he’d been waiting for, the one he’d been wishing into existence his whole life.
Nothing—not an inch between them—was given freely.
All of it, each touch, each parry, was earned in sweat and preparation.
When Adriana broke the spell-seal by summoning Ascalon, shrieking after Seb with blinding light and blinding force, he knew exactly why she’d chosen it.
When he hit her with Goethe’s Prism*—an illusion in his weakest discipline, and one he never used in play, one that had taken him agonizing days and multiple attempts to prepare before transferring it to his foil—it was for exactly those reasons.
When, nearing the impossible ninety-minute mark that would signify a move to sudden-death play, Adriana broke Seb’s Orb against the sand with an attack that he’d had to bend backward to avoid taking to the face, the world went still and silent.
When their eyes met, between the shimmer of gold as Seb’s Orb dematerialized and Adriana’s transmuted itself into a leaf made of sparkling light, there was only happiness and a promise: this is not the last time. This is only the first time.
When he dropped his foil and tackled her around the waist, picking her up and spinning her wildly in a circle, her joy was volcanic.
The stands erupted.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)—another influential AEtheric polymath—who, among many other literary and scientific pursuits, published Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) with an AEtheric addendum in 1810.