Chapter 21 #2
Ching gestures me over. “Weldver Salt,” he says without preamble.
“Restorative. Packed into deep lacerations—seals torn skin as if the wound was never there.” He sets a mortar and pestle in front of me like a test. “Grind the matico leaves into a fine powder. And don’t waste any.
” His gaze flicks to the jar, then to my hands.
“It took me three months to get this after the supply line in Peru was hit.”
“Hit?” I repeat. “Attacked?”
“Rebels.” He says it like a nuisance, not a warning. “They took out the train tracks feeding the supply chain.” A shrug—dismissive, but his fingers are already measuring, already counting. “Shortages always make people anxious. Particularly when they lead to wounds that continue to bleed.”
I start grinding, slow and thorough, until the leaves surrender into green dust. Ching leans in just long enough to inspect, then gives a single nod.
“Good. Now fold in the moonsalt. Slowly.”
He pours sangre de grado—dragon’s blood resin—with maddening precision, drip by measured drip, until it threads through the salt like liquid starlight—beautiful and unnatural, the way a wound looks just before it closes.
“Now,” he says, pushing the bowl toward me. “Water. One thread. Not a wave.”
I swallow and lift my hand over the mixture.
Water answers. A fine filament rises from the air itself, drawn from the humidity hanging over the room, so thin it’s almost invisible. It touches the salt and the compound brightens, as if the moonsalt has remembered what it was made from.
Ching watches with hawklike focus. “Keep it moving,” he murmurs. “If it crystallizes too fast, it’ll burn when applied.”
My fingers tremble with the effort of being small and precise. A thread. Not a wave.
Outside, distant voices swell—shouts and laughter sliding through the window cracks, the campus building toward eruption.
“They’re going to tear the Caldera apart for seats,” Ching says dryly.
“Are you going?” I ask before I can stop myself.
His mouth quirks. “I’ve seen enough duels to last three lifetimes. But yes. I’ll be there.”
He tests the mixture between two fingers. It glitters faintly, cold light kissing his skin.
“Good.” He starts pouring the salt into small silver tins.
A sharp clang cuts through the air—the Caldera bell.
Not a polite chime. Not a school bell. An ancient strike of metal that vibrates straight through my bones.
My head snaps up. Ching’s gaze meets mine, and for a moment the sternness softens into something like understanding. His eyes narrow—assessing, not unkind.
He reaches past me, grabs my coat hanging on the back of my chair, and shoves it—and a small tin—into my arms. “Go,” he says briskly. “Before the good seats are gone and you spend the duel staring at the back of someone’s head.”
I huff a breathless laugh, grateful and terrified.
His voice drops as he nods at the tin. “Keep that with you. Spectacle has a habit of becoming consequence.”
My throat tightens. I nod and tuck the tin into my pocket.
The halls are chaos now—Whittaker pouring toward the Caldera like a river breaking its banks.
Students shoulder past each other, laughing, shouting bets, calling names.
A group of first-years are already breathless, faces flushed with the thrill of being allowed into something ancient and dangerous.
Outside, the air bites cold, snow starting to cling to the ground. The path down is a stampede. And in the distance, between bare trees, the stone colosseum plunges into the earth like a circular scar—ancient, blackened by time, waiting.
As I move with the crowd, the tin of Weldver Salt knocks against my thigh with every step. A small, cold reminder.
This isn’t just a show.
It never is.
I think of Noa.
And I start to run.
* * *
The Caldera is already packed, every seat and ledge filled with students and professors alike.
Excitement hangs in the air—dense and electric, so thick you can almost feel it.
At the rim, a video recorder stands at attention, its spear-and-sun emblem spinning.
Service magitech: technology powered or enhanced by magick—neutral in theory, never in practice.
The operating officer’s black uniform gives him away.
Another reminder that the Service is watching. Always.
I barely find a place to stand before a torrent of fire sweeps through the center of the arena. Noa—a shock of brown hair, that familiar stance, flame coiling around his arms like lassos of fire. My stomach drops.
His opponent stands with his back to me—the student from Vikhrostrum, tall and lean-muscled, his movements smooth and silent. There is something deliberate about him, the way he carries himself—calm, calculating, deadly. Like someone who doesn’t need words to command power.
Noa launches bolt after bolt of fire, but the Vikhrostrum delegate matches him without flinching.
One moment the student is stepping back from a particularly vicious arc of fire, and the next he conjures something I thought impossible: two large snakes with the blackest scales slither forward, extinguishing the flames as they strike.
At first I think they are actual snakes—some sort of rare creature magick—but then I see how they shift with the light.
As they circle each other, something in the way Noa’s opponent moves tugs at me—a nagging sense of familiarity, sharp and insistent. His hair, a dark ash-brown. His stance. His silence. The hair on my neck rises as my unease deepens.
Noa presses forward, whips of fire lashing out, but I can see the sweat beading along his brow. He is working for every inch of ground—and that is new.
Suddenly, a tendril of black snaps around his ankle and yanks him down. In the same instant, the entire arena goes black. Not dim. Utterly, suffocatingly dark. As if someone has smothered the sun behind the mountain peaks.
It is then that I realize. They aren’t snakes. They aren’t ropes. They are shadows.
The Vikhrostrum student is a shadow Magick.
A chill rolls over me. I push forward, trying to get closer to the arena, weaving between panicked students and professors who whisper nervously as the darkness spreads.
When it lifts slightly, I catch a glimpse—Noa back on his feet, a ring of fire blazing around them both.
He drags the back of his hand across his mouth—rough and dismissive—and his eyes flick to the blood on his knuckles.
Something hardens in his expression.
That bright smear of red makes something hot and unsteady rise behind my ribs.
A muscle in Noa’s cheek twitches, and he turns and spits onto the ground before turning back to his opponent. In his hand, a sword of pure flame. A sharp inhale escapes me. That is new too.
He lunges, aiming a deadly strike—but the Vikhrostrum delegate sidesteps with eerie grace and simply snaps his fingers.
The darkness explodes.
Not just the arena this time—the entire Caldera falls into absolute black.
Gasps and cries ring out. A few students scream. The crowd shifts in confusion, voices rising in panic. The shadows press around me like a living thing.
And yet, when they brush against my skin, it feels… like a caress. It isn’t fear I feel. It’s memory. Like something I’ve always known—something I can almost speak to, the same way I speak to water. The shadows seem to hesitate, like they know me too.
Suddenly, I’m moving.
I surge forward through the dark, stumbling down steps, weaving past bodies I can’t see, only to collide—hard—into someone. Solid, familiar. My hands splay against their chest.
And it isn’t just someone.
“Gavrail,” I whisper.
Hands close around my wrists instantly—instinctive, firm—but he doesn’t push me away.
He doesn’t let go either. For a single breathless moment, neither of us move.
His chest rises and falls too fast beneath my palms. Shadow magick clings to my body and the air between us like smoke that doesn’t want to dissipate.
And in that flicker of twilight before the shadows recede, I see it—astonishment, raw and unmasked, written across his face like he’s seeing a ghost.
His mouth opens as if to speak, but voices shout from around us and a cool mask of practiced indifference slams into place. The controlled version of him returns just as the light does. He lets go like my touch burns.
The rest of the shadows fall away, leaving the arena and the Caldera bathed once again in the amber light of the setting sun. The screams die, swallowed by stunned silence.
Standing before me is a man who resembles the boy I once knew.
He’s taller now, broader in the shoulders, still with that wild, ash-brown hair, now damp with sweat.
His eyes—those impossible eyes—are still the color of a storm about to break, gray edged with silver, glinting like lightning caught in metal.
They currently look almost black as they stare at me.
He takes a step back, his face a perfect shield of infuriating, unreadable stillness. But beneath it, a ripple. Something dark. Deep. And utterly dangerous.
My skin prickles in the chilled evening breeze, breath catching like he’s pulled the oxygen from the air—and the space between us with it. He’s looking at me. Only me.
“No,” Gavrail says, harsh, firm. Almost as if to himself.
“Celeste.” His voice wraps around my name like a wound reopening.
He pauses, the sharp, clipped tone with just a hint of an accent dragging me back to sun-dappled woods, fields of wildflowers, and promises made in the shadows of a cool blue lake.
From the corner of my eye, I see Noa pushing toward us, fury carved into every inch of him. His eyes are ablaze, his jaw clenched tight, every step radiating raw anger. Rushing to protect me or to hurt Gavrail, I’m not sure.
“You can’t be here,” Gavrail says, the words come out low and grinding, like wheels dragging across stone, his eyes locked on mine. There is command in his tone, and something else. Something dark, fraying at the edges.